I follow her drippy red pointer down to the water line, past the fence where my lifeguard jurisdiction at the club technically ends. There’s a limp body lying in the sand, surrounded by at least a dozen screaming and frantically waving people. Not a single one of them looks like an LA County lifeguard who’s supposed to respond to any emergency on the public beach. Kavya left on her lunch break ten minutes ago, or else I’m sure she would have barreled down there to finally save a life for the first time ever instead of staring at sunburned pool nappers.

But without her, without any other lifeguard in sight, that just leaves me.

     Crest—ugh—Ross     

The first thing I notice are the sounds. They are nothing like the noises in the dreams Elder Break planted in our minds with their gift of Clarity. Those moments filled with the scents, sounds, sights of human life were meant to prepare us for the sensory overload when we made it on land. But everything here is so much louder. Dogs barking, children yelling, car horns carrying down the sand from the . . . what’s that word again? Oh, street. It’s worse than the incessant chatter of Pacifican dolphins. They will not. Shut. Up.

Eventually I catch a familiar sound through the chaos of humanity. It’s the surf. My heart rate slows; the pounding in my head goes down. I breathe in the familiar salt smell of the ocean. “Everything is going to be fine,” I whisper. “You got this.”

Then come the screams.

“Somebody call 911!”

“Can you see his chest move?”

Someone shakes my shoulder. “Is he dead? He’s got to be dead!”

Blue below, do they have to start with their human shit so quickly? He? Elder Crab warned us about this, about humans’ obsession with gender and how labels and rules mean so much to them when it comes to the body. Under the sea, we’re mer, we’re all they/them, and we don’t have this strange obsession with sex organs since we don’t have any. Speaking of which, there is definitely an unfamiliar appendage in between my new legs. This is weird. Not entirely unpleasant. But not a bay full of baby belugas either.

I snap my eyes open to finally get a look at my transformed body, and holy mackerel, why is the sky so bright? “Ah!” I throw my hands over my eyes. “Could somebody turn that down? And the screaming while we’re at it?” We never have this much sunlight down in the Blue. I mean, sure, merfolk have the ability to come up to the surface and see what’s going on, but we hardly do. We’re not stupid. One of us comes up and goes, “Hey, I wonder what the humans are up to” and bam! We’re caught in a tuna net and ground up to eat. No, thanks.