The world goes watercolor when you fall.

Aquamarine shimmer, it’s like looking through the liquor bottles lining your mother’s counters when she gets sloppy drunk with her boyfriends, crying before she laughs, or the giant bubbles you make around your body with your old kiddie pool, a bottle of Dawn, and a hula-hoop. Inside the bubble, everything is translucent and duo chrome, the way you imagine it would feel to live inside a rainbow or under the sea.

You feel right this way, the way you never do in gym class when your body refuses to take the plunge from the diving board no matter how loud the teacher screams, later in the locker room when girls shed their clothes like skins, pass coconut body wash to rinse chlorine from their bodies as they gossip. They ignore you, scholarship girl, poor written all over, even when you are wearing nothing at all.

You always feel the same old shame and shy. You gulp down your want—to be these girls or to kiss them you cannot tell—like a gasping fish. You try to become as invisible as a jellyfish, the kind that disappears, hides desire. 

Want is something to fear, you learn from your mother, too poor to fill her belly except for cheap beer and cigarettes so that living is swimming through the sea of scream and smoke in the dark trailer. 

You learn to hold your breath—in the lonely house, around the beautiful girls at school that fascinate and frighten. You learn how to live half dead. 

Sometimes you practice saving someone, though never yourself. When your mother’s boyfriend shouts over The Little Mermaid on TV, his palm across her ass like the sound of slapping water, and you can’t tell if she is ecstatic or afraid, you pretend his dealer calls and he peels out of the driveway in his rusted truck, leaving ruts in the dirt that you fill with your mother’s beer when she passes out on the couch. When she falls asleep in the bathtub, her breasts and empty cans bob like the dead when you find her, using all your strength to hoist her from the sea, her arms flailing like an octopus, leaving you half drowned and afraid. In the dark, when you are so lonely you feel trapped, like water is rising all around, you think of the girls at school, talk to them in your head like one day you might be friends.

You aren’t swimmers, you and your mother, the people you come from. No one has money for a water bill, much less a pool. The girls at the fancy school where you bus each day have pools, but there is no water for miles where you live, your hometown a bellybutton in the middle of a desert. There’s gravel where a lawn should be, a water restriction so you can’t water flowers or wash cars, the whole town covered in dust as if to say, “We exist to carry the filth of another.”

This is why you watch Ariel on repeat, her tiny waist tucked into her tailfin. When she trades her voice for legs, for a chance at a prince, you understand yours is desire in reverse—you would trade your legs for a chance to say what it is you keep silent, for a chance to sink into the sea, smell the salt and brine of a dozen mermaids, slinking with them, unbothered, through the waves.

When at last the rich girls acknowledge you exist, invite you to a pool party, you are speechless as a really or a why curled silent questions in a shell. They never talk to you at school, won’t drink from the fountain after you, pass around a ChapStick to share, everyone’s lips stained red as a kiss except yours, pale as two eels. You never get invited to parties where they pass around cheap vodka, everyone swimming on the dance floor, later in the sheets. 

You don’t own a bathing suit, so you wear old shorts and a sports bra you hardly fill. Ariel has a better figure, you know, her curves memorized in your mind. The pool is pink like Florida, like palm trees, like the pearlescent inside of clams split fleshy and wide, like Brittany’s glossed lips, or Kimberly’s nipples when her triangle top slips. 

“Don’t get too used to this,” your mother says when she drops you off in front of the sprawling house. She glares at the dash, muttering about the cost of gas. “Someone better spot you cash for the ride home.” 

“I don’t want to get my hair wet,” you say, speaking a half-truth as easy as holding your desirous breath when the girls spread sunscreen across your stomach and thighs, when they say, “Close your eyes” and take your hands to lead you to the water’s edge.

“Show me where it’s shallow,” you say, through the smell of daiquiri on their hands, the ones over your eyes. “Here,” they whisper, siren song, hands wrapped around your neck, the small of your back. Someone gives you a towel because yours is tatted, ratted from wiping oil when one of your mother’s boyfriends fixed up his truck while she scuttled somewhere better and wetter at the bottom of her bottle.

You step from the ledge expecting solid ground. Finally you feel as though your feet are beneath you because now you are wanted. But you fall, sink, all around the nothingness of water. Down, drown you go. When you claw at the water like your mother on lonely nights looking for love, you only sink deeper. You open your mouth like a help or a please or a save me and a dozen bubbles escape to burst at the surface.

From beneath the water, all thrash and gnash, you see their legs glinting golden in the sun. Sirens from their safety, watching as you sink.

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Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, which The Atlantic says, “Exemplifies a nuanced approach to life with mental illness” and The Paris Review describes as “The wakeup call we need.” She is also the author of the essay collection Halfway from Home, winner of a Nautilus Book Award for lyric prose, the craft text Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice, the flash collection Abbreviate, and three poetry chapbooks. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Nerve to Write, a magazine for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers, and an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University.