This would be an endurance event, she realized, akin to camping out in an aquarium.

* * *

That first day, she started working with Junior, speaking with him, trying to teach him language. She pretended she was talking to a child.

—Junior, want to catch? Catch the ball. Play catch?

Catch was his favorite game. As soon as he heard the word, he’d pull his head out of the water, flippers spread, whistling with excitement, preparing like an outfielder to jump in any direction. By this point he could bop the ball right into her hands, and at times when he wanted attention, he would hit her in the back with the ball.

He already knew how to mimic the number of sounds she made, but the sounds he made tended to be clicks or whistles. Now, using his love of catch, she would try to teach him to speak only humanoid.

She said—Talk. Ball. B-allll.

She rewarded him for any noise that could be a vowel or consonant. Unfortunately, he didn’t learn as quickly as Kat. He continued to make clicks and whistles and then to slap his tail in frustration when she didn’t throw the ball to him. He didn’t seem to understand she was asking for something different. Perhaps, a young male, he didn’t have a love of school, preferring to move fast and play.

Another difficulty was her hearing. For the first few hours in the homearium, she tried wearing her hearing glasses, but she worried about the circuits getting wet and shorting out. She wrapped the hearing aid part of her glasses with plastic and taped the seams shut tightly, but what she heard then most clearly was the crinkling of the plastic, everything else muffled.

And even with her glasses wrapped up this tightly, they still were not completely safe. Wanting attention, Junior would sometimes splash her from the side or squirt water at her from his mouth, catching her off guard. And when she tripped over him, she’d jerk her head up and stiff-arm the bottom of the pool, doing all she could to keep her head and glasses above the surface. New glasses would probably take a month to be made, and they would cost several weeks of her salary.

So halfway through that first day, she gave up, taking off the glasses and putting them away on a shelf in the dry room. She’d have to live without them in the homearium, returning to being mostly deaf while she lived here. And interfering here, with her very limited hearing, was the constant background noise of splashing water and the echoes off the walls.

This made the language lessons with Junior more difficult. With him, she couldn’t lipread, or even know when he was making noise, since the sounds were formed somewhere deep inside, exiting from his blowhole with little to no visible movement.

However, she simply decided she’d have high standards. Without her glasses, Junior had to enunciate very loudly and clearly to get a reward, enunciating the way she wished all humans did. And luckily vowels were easier for him to pronounce and for her to hear.