The Opposite of Here by Tara Altebrando

Author:Tara Altebrando
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

We board a small bus, and it lurches through a congested downtown area. Slick high-end stores like Fendi and Cartier look out of place on the ground floors of chipping pastel buildings. Overstuffed gift shops spit T-shirts and key chains onto the sidewalks. We pick up speed outside town, past a blur of small houses, then go over a bridge toward shining crystal resorts, like giant Magic Rocks.

We check in as day visitors in the resort’s main lobby—where a massive tank of coral and fish rises up from the ground. With bracelets now on our wrists, we head through a set of doors with nose-to-nose dolphins etched into glass. The pool area is flowering bushes and winding pathways and pools you could use to teach a preschooler shapes—round, square, diamond, oval, rectangle.

We grab towels and find chairs, apply sunscreen and kick off shoes.

We splay ourselves over squeaky tubes and take a few trips around a lazy river, which is totally my speed but would be more my speed without the bridge where you potentially have a bucket of water dumped on you. Each time I pass under it, I tense but get lucky.

We swim half-hearted laps in a pool with a waterfall that makes it almost too loud to talk. We don’t bother trying.

We take a long walk through a cool, wet tunnel of aquarium tanks. A sea turtle sails into view and seems to study me. I’m in that human aquarium Paul and I joked about; the plaque reads: Female American Teenager. Often moody and discontented. DO NOT FEED.

Lexi and Nora brave some of the more terrifying slides—one of them a sixty-foot drop at a near ninety-degree angle. I have to close my eyes, even as I am trying to take a video of Lexi’s first plummet. My stomach leaves my body for a second, in sympathy.

I’m still a secret service agent, scanning the crowd for him—no, them—but with slightly less focus and urgency; like I’m off duty.

After lunch at a restaurant inside a cave by the pools, my parents spring their big trap of a birthday present: a dolphin encounter.

They tell my friends I’ve been asking to do it since I was little, but I think they have me confused with someone else. Also, how do they not know that dolphin encounters aren’t even supposed to be a thing anymore? That most resorts are shutting them down.

The dolphin is named Delphine; her skin looks and feels too tight, too fleshy, and her calls sound strained, painful. No one else seems bothered; maybe I have an earache.

I smile through it and my parents snap photos. If they had any idea how much and how often I fake things for their benefit, their hearts would break.

I think about pithy things I’ll say to Ray; maybe I’ll lie and say I never turned up for hot tubbing anyway.

I catch myself in a daydream about Michael and try to shut it down, but then I just go with it.

I wouldn’t dare share my confused emotions with my friends; no one’s interested.

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