fish out of water

"Take me to the hospital," Matt says, and I jerk my head around to stare at him in disbelief, peering into those clear brown eyes, at that straight, almost regal nose. The sooty curls clustered on his head are endearing, even if he finds them a hassle in the mornings, and his shoulders are broad from his competitive swimming days back in high school. With handsome looks like that, it's hard to believe he can never be mine for good.

"Why?" I ask. He takes my hand, and I take the moment instead to admire the sight. His skin, tanned into a smooth, golden brown, intertwined with my pale, pale skin.

He shrugs, sleepy, languid. "Well, it's your life. It's a part of you. You've seen my school, my home. I'm just curious, Diane, please."

I bite my lip. He's right, of course. We are in a clearing nested behind the university buildings, me sitting against a tree and him lying down with his head on my lap, and this place is like a breath of fresh air after a near drowning, oxygen rolling, pushing, bursting in grateful lungs. There are no park benches or fancy armchairs here, and so we are seated on the grass, dew dampening the back of my skirt. I straighten the ruffled fabric against my leg with my free hand, and lean back against brittle bark that will inevitably lodge in bits into the wool threads of my cardigan. "Are you sick or something, and just not telling me?" I tease, instead of giving a straight answer.

Matt smiles up at me, a lightning smile. "Oh, yeah, that's definitely it."

"What's your illness?" I ask, nudging him.

"Oh, you know," he says, affecting a nonchalant tone, even as amusement flickers at the corner of his lips. "It's a rather complicated one."

"Is it?" I ask. "My daddy is a surgeon, I'm sure I'll know it."

"It has to do with the heart," he says slowly. Sunlight spills into his face when he shifts, angling his body toward mine, and the sun sets his face alight. His eyes are gorgeous.

"Cardiac arrest?" I guess.

My ridiculous guess makes him laugh. "You're, uh, getting closer?"

"You look healthy to me," I say, disapprovingly. "Are you just leading me on here?"

"No, no, it's a real sickness," he insists.

I have no more jokes. "Tell me," I say finally.

He sits up with a flourish, stressing eye contact with me, brown to hazel. Then he clasps my hand to his chest, lifting his chin into the air, and proclaims, "Diane Harrington, I am lovesick for you."

I burst out laughing, laughing. As always, ever since the beginning, Matt is the only one who can make me laugh so hard that tears collect in my eyes, blurring my vision so Matt is reduced to a watery mess of brown and white and blue, blue shirt. That won't do, so I wipe them away the best I can with the back of my hand and fix him with a wavering stare. "That sounds very serious, Matt O' Brien. We'll have to check that out right away."

When I mime cutting his shirt open and slicing open his chest, he only laughs, a response to mine. "That tickles."

"Aren't you worried I'll make a mistake and end your life during open-heart surgery rather than my tickling you?" I ask him, fingers pausing like waiting water striders on the surface of his torso.

"You are the daughter of a surgeon. Your father owns the Harrington Medical Corporations. Of course you'll have picked something up," Matt says, matter-of-fact.

"I don't even like the hospital," I say with a forced shrug. It's true. Despite it being the birthplace of all five of my sisters and me, the hospital is where my family died. The entire building, a network of white, winding walls and thousands of lingering souls, knows who I am, who I was. It knows the bracelet I never remove from my wrist is not rightfully mine, despite all the paperwork and the promises.

"Diane—it's a part of you," Matt says earnestly. "And I want to know you."

I avoid his hopeful, hopeful eyes. We both know the risk, don't we? The youngest of the Harrington daughters, flirting the days away with a nobody, a teenage boy pursing a fine arts degree at the local community college when she is set to inherit a fortune from her recently deceased grandmother. All of it is old money, high class, aristocratic money, and Matt O' Brien will never touch a penny of it. "I don't think—we can't. It's not safe."

He frowns. "Diane—"

"Not today," I say, cutting him off. "Not today."

It's getting late, orange sunset fire catching in his curly hair. Whenever I look at Matt, I wish I were not blonde, but he insists he adores my own sweeping curls, that he adores the elaborate dresses and skirts that fill my wardrobe after five girls of the same fashion, that he adores me even though I look nothing like the minxes at his school. I stroke my hand through the tangle of brown locks, caressing his cheek, his sharp jaw, and then pick myself up from the ground. He is still slumped against the tree when I turn to peer at him.

"Diane," Matt says, "Let me take you home tonight." His truck is parked on the outskirts of the school, beyond the trees, this I know.

"You should go ahead first. I can get picked up, but your aunt and uncle will be waiting for you," I say.

He looks disgruntled, unfolding the tangle of his limbs and clambering into a standing position. "They can wait a while longer."

I stretch onto the tips of my toes to reach when I kiss the corner of his lips, his lips. When we are sitting or he is lying down, it is easy to forget how tall he is; standing upright, he cuts a dominating figure, but his easy, charming smile keeps him from becoming intimidating. "Go," I say gently. "I'll see you soon."

We always leave the clearing in different directions. It's fine if the press, the world, the elite know me as slightly off, slightly different than the other Harrington girls, but dragging an innocent into the deep sea is too much. I have to protect him. It's my fault he's here in my world, that I want him to be mine so badly. When Matt turns to exit the placid circle of trees, long legs spanning over rocks scattered along the edges of the halo, I watch him go and try to remind myself it won't be the last time I see his back. Because, to see him leave again means he'll have to come back first, and I've seen my share of leavings. The ones leaving the clearing are much easier than the ones leaving the hospital.

"Diane," he calls softly, and I see he has stopped at the foot of a grand oak tree and turned around. Lichen hangs over his head like strands and clumps of kelp rather than fungus.

"Yes?" I answer.

A gasp for air, then, "See you tomorrow." Like a promise, a prediction.

I smile to myself and repeat his words, waiting for his lithe form to disappear out of sight, into the night shadows, before I call for the driver—Stephan never asks questions, which is more than I can say for Missus, the head maid. Being my caretaker, as she was for all of my elder sisters, means she can chastise and punish me more easily than my own father. Which she does, seeing as my daddy is drowning himself in operation and operation to follow my mother to her grave.

I did not take Matt to the hospital because that is the place my mother died, giving birth to me.

* * *

That night, when I have changed into one of my more modest nightgowns and knotted my hair on the top of my head, a sloppy halo of light, my eldest sister strides into my room without knocking. I look up from my book. "What is it?"

Charlotte prompts sits at the foot of my bed and draws her knees up to her chin, her slight figure fitting neatly into itself, like a jigsaw, a puzzle. She wiggles her toes at me. "The pedicures we got yesterday look wonderful," she comments. "Isn't the bright pink I chose so pretty with the French tips?"

"Of course," I say. I wanted white nails with tiny, tasteful polka dots, or maybe a modest lavender or cream, but it was not my turn to select nail colors according to our tacit cycle. Nor was it Charlotte's turn, but as the oldest of six girls, she always gets her way—and now my toenails are garish and I cannot wait for next Wednesday night. It'll be Penelope's turn, and I know my fourth sister is generally more reasonable. It is Treena, the second, who I ought to be worried about. The last time she picked, we had walked around with sequins and lace crusting our toenails for a week; even submerging my feet in the bathtub would not free my toes of leftover glue, only serving to prune my feet like sea sponges.

"Did you know," Charlotte says suddenly, "that Lucette found herself a boy?"

I glance up at her, startled. "A boy?" Lucette is the fifth daughter, older than me by just barely two year, 20 to my 18.

"Yes, one of the von Kruks," Charlotte says with a satisfied smirk.

"The youngest?" I ask. Usually, the gossip Char picks up is not of interest to me, but Miles von Kruk has been chasing Lucette since we met at our grandmothers' tea, five years ago.

"Not Miles—Charles!" Charlotte says, her voice pitching with excitement. "And better yet, she says she's considering him!"

"Lucette? Really?" I say incredulously. Lucette is a lot of things—brave, beautiful, outspoken—but a compatible match for conservative and proper Charles von Kruk, she is not. I wonder what she thinks of him.

"Yes—Missus will be thrilled. She hasn't been so happy since Anabelle was approached by Davis Archer," Charlotte gushes.

Anabelle, my third sister, meek and graceful. Davis is a good match. "What about you and Jacques?" I ask Charlotte. "Or Treena and Austin?"

"Jacques and I are fine," Charlotte sniffs, but I notice her worrying at the flamboyant gem of her engagement ring Jacques presented to her a few months ago, a nervous tick. "I think Treena and Austin are at a rocky stage right now, but Penelope seems happy. Daniel Smithson is smart and kind, and he comes from a good family."

"Treena is always in a rocky phase," I say, and though Char doesn't say it, I know she agrees. She rarely says it.

"What about you, Diane?" Charlotte demands, inevitable, inevitable. She reaches out and puts a hand on my arm, and I focus on the glaring pink of her nails instead of her probing gaze. "Do you have anyone in mind? You'll be old enough, soon."

"Char, you're 25. Treena is 24 and even Lucette is 20," I point out.

She rolls her eyes at me. "It hasn't been that long since I was 18, little sister. I'm sure you've got your eye on someone. Maybe Jonathan Decato, or Benjamin Carlton? They're such gentlemen, perfect age gap older than you, and so very handsome," Charlotte says, coaxing. As if one sentence can pull me, make me fall for these faceless names with a single line.

Matt is so very handsome, too, I think to myself. He is older, 20 years old pursing an actual college education, and he opens doors for me and pulls out my seats at the dingy Italian restaurant and insists on draping his jacket around my shoulders with I start to shiver at night. But that is not what I tell my sister. I tell Charlotte, "They both sound like nice boys. I'll keep an eye out for them, next time we have a party."

***

"Let's go stargazing tonight," Matt says. "I know a place where it's like the skies have left their back doors unlocked and wide open, and we can sneak in."

"What kind of analogy is that?" I ask. We are on the telephone—he, his cell phone; me, the hospital lobby phone. The receptionist has already left for the evening; she is a prim, skinny woman named Laura with strong prescription glasses and a perpetual frown Charlotte blames on her envy of us—us, the Harrington girls. Everyone is jealous of us, Char says. As one of the richest families in the country, both from age-old fortunes and my father's ceaseless work in the medical fields. Harrington Medical Corporations have moved out of hospital care and operations, and into medicine research and pharmaceutical development. More often than not, my father spends his nights at the hospital.

"I can't," I say to Matt, dreading the words the way someone dreads diving into the deep end. "There's a social tonight and I have to be there."

"But Diane, wouldn't you rather search for constellations instead of spending time making empty conversation with all those stuffy people?" he begs. "I'll take you to the hill in my truck at sundown, you won't have to worry about a thing."

"I'll have to be at the Decato's," I say reluctantly. His plan sounds perfect. It sounds perfect, a prince coming to sweep me off my feet. But he is no prince, no frog with puckered lips, no misunderstood pirate. "Matt, the press will be there tonight."

I hear him growl out a cuss word, frustration, disappointment. "That's what happened last time," he says bitterly.

"I know, with the von Kruks. I'm sorry," I say. What else is there to say? "I'm sorry," I repeat, once more for luck, as if luck will get him to forgive me.

"Damn, Diane. You know I hate it when you do that, stop apologizing," Matt sighs. "We can always go again some other night, okay?"

"Yes, please," I say hopefully. "I'd like that, a lot."

"Make sure the rich boys don't get to you," he says, more stern and less mocking than I'd expect. "You're mine."

Yes, I am his. But he is not mine, and that makes all the difference. I am about to reply when Missus gestures at me—she thinks I can calling Char, or maybe Lucette; I forgot who was my excuse today. I pull the phone from my ear, muffling the sounds of the speaker with a hand. "What?"

Missus scowls impatiently at me. "Diane, it is time to purchase your father's dinner. Did you not say you'd be responsible?"

I sigh and nod in acknowledgement, then hold up two fingers—two more minutes, please, two minutes she gives up grudgingly. "I have to go," I say into the receiver. "I'm taking a trip down to the grocery store."

"Ah, my break is almost over, too," Matt says. "We're studying the Romantics now, so I thought we'd do something special tonight. That's all."

"You're incredible," I laugh.

"Anything for you," he says, and those words are long worn out by lovers but sound fresh and endearingly charming from his lips, his lips. I can hear that easy grin in his voice, that strike of lightning illuminating his halved face. "I can't see you when you pass the school, though. This class is on the other side of campus."

"I'll think of you," I promise. Just as I am about to hang up, ushered on by Missus's hushed reminder, Matt speaks again.

"Diane—Diane, would it really be so bad if we just…took our relationship out into the open? I'm sick of being the secret, the skeleton hidden in the closet. I want to show you off to the world."

I blush, almost, heart pounding like the ocean waves against my seashore ribcage. "Matt, you know we can't. Not when I'm like this." Like this, surrounded by money-laden bluebloods, matching off for heirs and expansions and never marrying for love. Any sane member of high class society would not dare to introduce—to attempt to, rather—a man with no bloodline or inheritance or significance. These seas are not for him to navigate.

Matt releases an angry sigh. "I—I know. I should've have even said it."

The obvious dejection in his voice makes me feel worse. "Matt, I'm so sorry." Why do I insist on staying with him when it hurts him so? Selfish, selfish.

"No, no. I have to hang up now, class is starting again. Bye, Diane, love you," he says, stringing the words together into a muddled rush.

I whisper, "I love you, too," to the dial tone and hang up to go buy the dinner my father often forgets he needs. The hospital is a clinical, professional place like him, and the white of the walls is blinding, sharp, almost cruel—a place that makes me feel as if I have intruded, and the entire building longs to eject me out of a window, splat. I jump at every opportunity to leave, even when servants are available to make the trip down to the corner store. Stephan is always ready to serve, of course, but I do not like inconveniencing him the same way my father refuses for him to return to our mansion home for the chef to fix something up, a speedy three-course, one-person meal that will most likely go uneaten for another surgery. I am beginning to wonder whether my father survives solely on his work.

Missus only allows me to leave if I have brought or finished my tutoring work. My home tutor is a strict man, but not dull, so being homeschooled could be much worse—but I long for a crowded classroom, full of people I am not directly related to, sitting and taking notes off of a whiteboard, the way Matt describes it. The hospital is located on the same road of a fitness center, a small university, a charity, and a corner shop boasting fresh produce and ready-made meals. The food is overpriced but money is never a problem for my family, so instead the difficulty arises when I must choose what to purchase instead. Today, I browse the aisles to finally dwell on a packaged sandwich and sliced apples, adding a cookie in as an afterthought on the chance my father may have a sweet tooth today. The cashier is a sleepy-eyed woman with her dark hair pulled back into a stiff bun, who accepts my crisp bill without comment and needs to count the change out loud. I like her.

At the local university, a no-name place with a startlingly low population of students unable to afford the better colleges they were accepted to, afternoon classes are still in session, and I know Matt is busy in one of them. The atmosphere of relaxation and comradeship, however, still lulls in the halls of the school, curling tendrils around afternoon and evening lectures, labs, and study sessions. Brick wall borders the school but chokes to allow a large, black gate, and I hesitate at the edge, staring out at the dormant campus. How many times had I paused in this one spot? How many times had that one boy caught my eye in passing, caught it and held it and smiled that brilliant lightning smile—it seemed too good to be true that we were like this, held in a farce of a relationship but a relationship nonetheless, and he belonged as much as he could to me, to me, rather than that flirty ginger that clung to his bicep with sickly green nails. As Treena always said, green required a certain skin tone to pull off, and that was not the right skin tone.

I force myself to move on, move past the school where Matt is enveloped in Romantics that he will later scatter lines of literature from into our conversations, and I will love them all. Romantics. We are the romantics.

***

Matt persuaded me to go on a date this afternoon, a week or two since I refused to go stargazing with him, even when I have another party that every night. When I smile pleasantly and gently turn down the offered flutes of champagne, it's because I want to keep the taste of our shared blue raspberry slushy and Matt, ordinary, extraordinary Matthew O' Brien, on my tongue. He promised me no one from "my crowd" would see us at the local carnival, and I agreed because I knew he was right. I agreed because of all those times I had passed the brightly lit tents in the summer, squished into a sleek car valued for its name rather than quality, beside a chattering Charlotte and a silent Penelope, so silent. When I nod, just interested enough at the conversations swirling around me, I feel like a rebel, cradling this secret on the tip of my tongue where Matt's did not trespass but rather was invited in.

I make small talk and I laugh quietly and I tilt my head to the side in interest when people talk to me, even if it is Benjamin Carlton and he knows nothing about conversational skills. Still, he is Austin's brother, and Austin is Treena's fiancé, and this is where Treena will fight to assert her power someday. And, beneath Austin's calm smile, there is a strength even Treena will not be able to test to explosion. For them, only name and money are compatible.

That night, as I am getting ready for bed, Charlotte and Treena storm into my room, Treena slamming the door closed behind her. The bang makes me drop my toothbrush into the sink before I can even bring it to my mouth, and I stare at the smear of toothpaste on the porcelain sink, a blemish, before I lift my eyes to my angry sister's face.

"Diane!" Treena shouts, tossing her arms into the air; beside her, Charlotte grasps her elbow and pulls the left one back down, but Treena wrenches free. "Don't try to stop me this time, Char, you know she's an idiot as much as I do!"

I back farther into the bathroom, awash in the white fluorescent lights, and the backs of my right calf collides with the shower stall when I try to step back from Treena, who has stepped directly into my bubble of personal space. "Treena—"

"Don't you Treena me," she hisses, and thrusts her cell phone in front of my eyes. The screen is small, too small for me to understand what she is showing me at first, but suddenly the letters fall into place in front of my eyes: [SCANDAL] DIANE HARRINGTON SPOTTED WITH UNKNOWN BOY AT LOCAL CARNIVAL. A grainy, dim picture follows the headline, but even I can see it is enough to show that is the type of embrace that ruins reputations. I can see the carnival lights in the back, surrounding our shadowy silhouettes with a brilliant, surreal glow, and the image jerks me back a few hours when Matt tugged on my hand towards a hot dog vendor and whispered, "Tonight is ours."

Charlotte steps forward when I don't say a word. "Diane Priscilla," she says softly, slipping into my middle name the way Missus does, the way I'd imagine our mother to, and her disappointment, her disbelief, her thinly veiled revulsion, singes my terror. A woman made a mother an entire generation too soon, boiling lava to my sparking and flaming second sister who still has not moved her cell phone from my face. "You know better," Char says. "You knew better."

"I know," I whisper, but Treena drowns me out.

"Sure, she knew better, but obviously that didn't stop her from doing it!" she shouts, her voice shrill and breaking on the word 'stop.'

I want to say it's not my fault, but it is. I want to say I couldn't help it, but I could have. I should have. "I'm sorry," I say instead. Always apologizing.

"Like that does anything! Do you think I'm happy with Austin? Do you think this is what I want for myself, for my future family? Diane, you can't just go and break whatever rule you want just because a boy tells you he likes you! He likes your money!" Treena bursts out, and angry tears blur her mascara, her eyeliner, and rip down her face. She throws her cell phone at my bed, where it hits the headboard with a bang awfully loud in the silence following her tirade.

"Matt's not like that," I snap defensively. "He's not that shallow!"

"Any boy who wants a Harrington is here for the money, hon, that's just how it is," Treena says, her tone biting. She stomps out of the room, and I flinch at the second slam of the door. It is silent, and I look to Charlotte, whose eyes are still filled with that horrible mixture of shame and incredulity, of miles and miles of distance. She cannot understand.

"Matt," she says. His name hangs in the air between us, hovering, waiting. Waiting to be addressed like the mistake it is, rather than the boy with the lightning smile.

"Matt," I repeat, and that is not the answer she wants.

Charlotte sighs loudly and fixes her gaze on mine, serious. "Diane, you have two choices. You, or him. We could definitely file charges against him, pin the entire scandal on him, and save you. You'll walk away clean, I promise."

"Or what?" I ask. When she doesn't answer, I demand again, "Charlotte, or what!?"

She shrugs, shrugs like she knows I won't choose it; when I stare at her expectantly, however, it spurs her into words. "Or," Charlotte says flatly, "you could confirm that this, indeed, is what you were doing. Instead of framing him as a greedy man taking advantage of you and trying to leech your money, you could shoulder the blame. Say it was you, say you initiated it."

It's me, or him. "And then?"

"Diane, that's social suicide! The von Kruks, the Decatos, the entire circle would never want someone dirtied by the common like you. You can't possibly choose that?" she asks incredulously.

I know she believes that I'll choose her former choice, the first possible path—for her, the only path. I know she believes I love being a Harrington girl, but I don't. I miss my mother and my father in their respective graves, I am sick of conversations as empty as abandoned seashell homes, and I can't be selfish forever. Matt is not happy with me, not happy enough.

I know what I will choose.