The whole week, he’d watched her reading on the beach from the same faded paperback, The Old Man and the Sea. He’d watched her turn the pages with the slow aggression of the terrifically bored. She was going to be a senior that fall. He knew she’d signed up for three honors classes; he’d once stood an aisle over at a grocery store and listened through the cereal as she talked about it with her father. He knew how much she dreaded calculus.
Ander didn’t go to school. He studied the girl. The Seedbearers made him do it, stalk her. By now, he was an expert.
She loved pecans and clear nights when she could see the stars. She had horrible posture at the dinner table, but when she ran, she seemed to fly. She plucked her eyebrows with bejeweled tweezers; she dressed up in her mother’s old Cleopatra costume every year for Halloween. She doused all her food with Tabasco, ran a mile in under six minutes, played her grandfather’s Gibson guitar with no skill but plenty of soul. She painted polka dots on her fingernails and her bedroom walls. She dreamed of leaving the bayou for a big city like Dallas or Memphis, playing songs at open mikes in darkened clubs. She loved her mother with a fierce, unbreakable passion that Ander envied and struggled to understand. She wore tank tops in winter, sweatshirts to the beach, feared heights yet adored roller coasters, and planned on never getting married. She didn’t cry. When she laughed, she closed her eyes.
He knew everything about her. He would ace any exam on her complexities. He had been watching her since the leap day she was born. All of the Seedbearers had. He had been watching her since before he or she could speak. They had never spoken.
She was his life.
He had to kill her.
The girl and her mother had their windows rolled down. The Seedbearers wouldn’t like that. He was certain one of his uncles had been charged with jamming their windows while mother and daughter played gin rummy at a blue-awninged café.
But Ander had once seen the girl’s mother shove a stick in the voltage regulator of a car with a dead battery and start it up again. He’d seen the girl change a tire at the side of the road in hundred-degree weather and barely break a sweat. They could do things, these women. More reason to kill her, his uncles would say, shepherding him always toward defending his Seedbearer line. But nothing Ander saw in the girl frightened him; everything deepened his fascination.
Tan forearms dangled out both car windows as they passed mile marker two. Like mother, like daughter—wrists twisting in time to something on the radio that Ander wished he could hear.
He wondered how the salt would smell on her skin. The idea of being close enough to breathe her in gripped him in a wave of dizzy pleasure that crested into nausea.
One thing was certain: he would never have her.
He sank to his knees on the bench. The boat rocked under his weight, shattering the reflection of the rising moon. Then it rocked again, harder, signaling a disturbance somewhere in the water.
The wave was building.
All he had to do was watch. His family had made that very clear. The wave would strike; the car would flow with it over the bridge like a blossom spilling over a fountain’s rim. They would be swept to the depths of the sea. That was all.
When his family had schemed in their shabby Key West vacation rental with the “garden view” of a weedy alley, no one had spoken of subsequent waves that would wash mother and daughter into nonexistence. No one mentioned how slowly a corpse decomposed in cold water. But Ander had been having nightmares all week about the girl’s body’s afterlife.
His family said that after the wave it would be over and Ander could begin a normal life. Wasn’t that what he said he wanted?
He simply had to ensure that the car stayed under the sea long enough for the girl to die. If by some chance—here the uncles began to bicker—mother and daughter somehow freed themselves and rose to the surface, then Ander would have to—