ince she, the coral, and the water were bonded by the breath, she worried the surface was still no place for girls like her.

It always sounded like a mourning song. Maybe they lost something too, she thought.

“Girls like we,” they paused, lightly grazing the coral blooms budding on their brow, “always had to live ’pon the edges. Alone.”

But for girls like her, the sea was their backdoor. Girls growing soft with gills, pores, and polyps, just as they had grown otherwise. That little pill — that little piece of care — was one of the keys to their survival. Breath had been found underwater. As above, so below. Changing in the ways they needed to. And the sea — so choked with plastic — she changed too. Toxic microbeads. Hormonal plankton. Water in transition. Everything it held, changed. She knew what it was like to suffocate, both her and the sea. And so, she breathed what she could once the air began to thin. Oxygen depleted, estrogen on tap. A different kind of breath for a different kind of life for a different kind of girl. They were one inside each other, she and her — the sea and her. She and all the girls who made it through. A plural her of infinite pleasure. Everything wet was her.

And when Dorian came, the water stepped into her.

A mold of some nameless little white boy with a basin on his head. The same child cast in concrete and painted enamel-white to live in every single yard on the island. She could see his pristine whiteness didn’t last. He was encased in the blades of sea fans and an ooze of pink coral. Sea stars nested in his basin. Not a bird in sight. Just shoals of fish floating around, indifferent to this child’s drowning.

All of her panicked for a second, trying to catch her breath too fast through every living pore. Which body was she in now? She patted herself down. No moth-eaten shirt. No denim shorts. Just rubbery brown skin oozing with curls and coral.

Once, a supermarket. Now, a ruin brained in coral. Elliptical stars bloomed throughout the darkness. A colony of hungry mouths to feed … She never wanted to be that — a colony. She wanted a family, sure, but not whatever this was. Rooted and bound to your species. Repeating and repeating an ideal body. An ideal mind. Not allowed to have your own thoughts. Never able to see further than the horizons of the colony.

Any soreness would be softened by her second eyelids.