THE CREATURE FROM LAGOONA HIGH
By Andrew Melzer and Larissa Zageris
Everyone at Lagoona High loved Layla Turner. Jessie couldn’t understand it, aside from the obvious reason that Layla was pretty and mean. And she smoked clove cigarettes like a bandit.
Once, Layla did let Jessie try a clove. Jessie had wanted to make a cool friend, and Layla had wanted to laugh her ass off watching Jessie gasp for air.
“Can’t handle your smoke, skank?” Layla cackled and spat candy-sweet spit onto Jessie’s shoes.
Jessie tried to wash the taste out of her mouth with a regular cigarette she had stolen from her friend Max. The end result cured her of her smoking habit before it started. It definitely cured her of her desire to befriend Layla. She would forever associate the smell of cigarettes with the acid joy of Layla’s laughter, which, Jessie thought, was strangely vibrant for someone who never seemed to like anything or anyone.
Still. Loving Layla was a Lagoona High religion. There was something about that remote, cruel manner that made people hot.
And maybe that wouldn’t have really gotten so under her skin, Jessie thought, if some people you really trusted, really cared about, didn’t fall for the whole too-cool-for-school, too-mean-to-dream act so hook, line and sinker.
“She’s brave, man. She does what she wants, when she wants.” Max Reed was watching Layla smirk and roll her eyes at some of the yearbook girls cheesing about layouts at the next table.
“Like when she banged Danny Vanderplow on the wrestling mats during Daily Health & Fitness?” Jessie raised her eyebrows, and jabbed at her garden salad.
She didn’t know when their daily lunchtime conversation had become a Max monologue on the thoughts and movements of Layla Turner. They used to talk about songs they wanted to write, shows they would play with their band, when they finally got it together and learned to play instruments. Hell, they used to talk about anything other than Layla Friggin’ Turner.
Max was staring so hard at Layla, Jessie thought his contacts were going to dry out.
“She knew Vanderplow would go apeshit and ship Danny off to that weird military school on the site of the old sanitorium.”
“Some guys have all the luck,” Max laughed, and a knot at the base of Jessie’s brain untied itself. Max’s laugh always felt like home.
She took in the lightly muscled line of his neck, and followed it as it slipped into the slope of his shoulder, and the slightly freckled skin above the top button of his red flannel shirt. She knew Max could be stupid. So stupid. But he was her Max, and-
“I’m going to ask her to The Swamp Meet on Saturday,” Max said suddenly.
The Swamp Meet was one of the few things kids actually looked forward to in this bog-town. It was mostly just an excuse for the boys to show off their fan boats and the girls to underage drink until they thought the fan boats were impressive.
“Everyone is going to the Swamp Meet on Saturday.” Jessie spat.
“Yeah,” Max said, in a faraway way. “But I want her to go with me.”
He got up, raked his hand through his hair and Jessie’s heart, and disappeared into the blare of first bell.
#
That night Jessie dreamt of being alone with Max. They had dream-driven out past the real-life football fields and the Target, along the marshy outlands of the last ring of fully developed subdivisions, cresting the hill with the mad scientist’s house on one side and the old-sanitorium-new-military-school on the other, before dipping deep into the swamp.
Then the dream really got rolling. Max’s hands in her hair, them in the bed of his truck. Stars and moonlight, his breath in her ear, his hands on her waist. “We’re sinking,” she said to him, but it came out in a whisper. “We’re sinking,” she repeated, because she could feel the truck getting sucked into the mud. Max ignored her or just didn’t hear her, and kissed her harder.
At first she liked it. Until Max’s mouth started stealing the breath from hers, leeching her of her lifeforce. She pushed him off, and screamed soundlessly when she saw that the Max she had been kissing was now Layla, fully equipped with an oozing, sucking, tentacle-thing mouth straight out of H.R. Giger’s wet dreams.
“SSSSSsssssssssssskaaaaaaaaaaaaaank!” The impossible mouth hissed, and for a second, Jessie thought she saw Max tied up in Swamp Layla’s vine-like vocal chords, trapped inside her shimmering prison.
Jessie woke up wondering if Max had had the same dream.
#
Max had spent the night making out, but it wasn’t with Jessie and it wasn’t in a dream. He had found Layla after school, keying staff cars in the parking lot. Once she had worked through four or five second-hand mid-range sedans, Max broke in with a half-scared, half turned-on laugh.
“Hey,” he said. ‘What are you doing?”
“Making my mark,” she answered, in a low voice she knew would make him sway a little.
Max steadied himself. “Well, don’t make it on my car.”
She actually smiled. Who knew moon-eyed Max had a little fire in him. “C’mere,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
“What?” Max asked, his voice hitching.
“This,” she said, and pulled him into a kiss he would write songs about until the day he died. The only thing that pulled him back to earth was the sound of a text “swooping” off to a recipient.
“What...was...that?” he asked.
“Just a little video text to Jessie. She wouldn’t stop staring at me during lunch,” Layla laughed. “Now she has something better to look at.”
If Max could feel anything other than lust and confusion, he might have. Instead, he leaned in for more. Layla brushed him off, and dragged her key along a nearby car as she made her grand exit.
#
The next morning, Layla sat in the front office, pulling the threads from her frayed sweatshirt sleeve. She was waiting to have “a talk” with Principal Lumbar for the third time this month. Her teachers thought sending her to the principal's office was some form of punishment, but she’d rather hang out in the office then listen to some menopausal skank prattle about Romeo and Juliet or the Pythagorean theorem or whatever bullshit they thought she should know.
Layla was confident she already knew what she needed to know. About everything.
“I already know what I need to know, skank,” was something she told her step-mother Carol last week, after Carol caught Layla drinking her margarita mix straight from the comically large bottle. Carol had tried to tell her the mix was non-alcoholic. The idiot.
Still, being sent to Principal Lumbar for the third time this month wasn’t going to be good. Layla was probably facing some serious detention for keying a couple raggedy-ass faculty Buicks. Looking over at the vacant office bathroom, Layla sneered at the privacy these worker bees allowed themselves and planned to fake a massive period to delay her punishment.
They’d likely try to hit her with a Saturday In-School for the car shit, and she didn’t want to miss the Swamp Meet.
The Swamp Meet was a yearly party down on a hidden marsh the cops didn’t patrol. Layla thought the swamp events were lame. Mostly it was hicks showing off how uncultured they were, but there would be booze.
Layla knew Max Reed had been dying to ask her to the Swamp Meet. Max was smart, kept his body tight, did regular volunteer shifts at the old folks’ home and was loved by all. But to Layla, he was just a kind-of good-looking representation of everything this loser town respected.
He was just so obvious.
“The principal will see you in a moment.” Mrs. Batshee, the frumpy office drone, announced.
Layla belched in response, and was a little horrified when the room became overpowered with the stench of tuna. “But all I ate for breakfast was cheese curls,” Layla whispered to herself as she was blindsided by the most stunning creature to ever grace Lagoona High.
She must have missed him come in to use the restroom he was currently leaving. He had a real swimmer’s body. Broad shouldered, six feet tall, and wrapped in a tattered letterman jacket that looked like he found it at the bottom of a lake.
He oozed a confidence that left a thin green trail over everything he touched.
One side glance from his beady red eyes and a flare of the delicate gills on his emerald green neck, and Layla thought she might melt.
“You must be Alex Phibian, the new transfer student,” Mrs. Batshee droned, without missing a beat. “Take these forms and fill them out for your New Student ID.”
Alex Phibian took a pen from Mrs. Batshee, and the vacant chair next to Layla. As he sat, dripping iridescent green slime through the plastic slats of the seat. His musk overwhelmed Layla. He smelled like the dumpster behind Long John Silver. But he also smelled like adventure.
He leaned forward to focus on the clipboard Mrs. Batshee had handed him, and the pen slipped out of his clawed green hand. Layla dove to save it before it hit the floor, and handed it back to him in a way that she thought might scream “I am worthy of love”. But Alex was just as fast as her. Layla’s hand ended up closing over his outstretched, webbed fingers and the two of them grasped each other in a way that seemed to electrify the room.
Like the cherry bomb she stuck in Principal Lumbar’s mailbox last Halloween, Layla was blown asunder. She and Alex met face-to-face. His beautiful chartreuse skin, his lipless smile shot through with razor sharp fangs, the decorative fan elements where his ears might be--she was lost in his beauty.
Say something, Layla thought, but the words wouldn’t come. You have to say something. Anything! She lost any capacity to say anything at all when she caught herself reflected in Alex’s eyes. He blinked when blinked slowly, left to right.
“LAYLA TURNER. MY OFFICE. NOW!” Principal Lumbar’s bark shattered the magic.
Layla handed Alex his goo-covered pen. And her heart.
#
They were serving fish sticks for lunch in the cafeteria later that day, but Max knew they didn’t account for the stench of alewives coming from the new kid making out with Layla Turner in the middle of the goddam cafeteria like there was no tomorrow.
“Jesus,” Max stabbed his plastic fork into a heap of fish sticks. “Come up for air, already.”
“He doesn’t need to,” Jessie said, staring blankly at her own pile of fish sticks. “He has gills.” Jessie simmered. Even a freaking gilled creature was crazy about freaking Layla!
She could still barely register the events of the morning. Waking up to video proof of your true love tongue-kissing the most nasty, vacuous girl in school will do a lot to undo your sense of self. At least for a couple hours.
Max didn’t notice. He was too wrapped up in his own sinking heartbreak.
“She said no,” he spat out, finally. “She said she wouldn’t go with me to the Swamp Meet.”
“Did she.” Jessie pressed her fork into her fish sticks in a brutal visual metaphor for her feelings that was lost on Max.
“Yeah,” Max half-said, half-sobbed. “She said she was already going with Amp.”
“Amp?”
“Yeah. Amp.” Max said, his voice dripping acid.
“Why do they call him that?” Jessie asked.
“Because,” Max jerked his head towards Alex “Amp” Phibian, who was taking a break from sucking face with Layla to literally eat a can of Amp energy drink in two bites.
“Oh,” Jessie said, blank again.
“Yeah,” Max responded, his heart breaking.
Amp ate another can of Amp. Layla shuddered with delight. “You’re so different,” she sighed, and kissed him again.
Amp screeched in response and scurried up a nearby wall.
“What do you think he’s saying?” Jessie asked Max.
“Something perfect,” Max was full-sobbing now.
“Hey, Max?” she asked, and handed him a napkin to dry his eyes. “I have an idea.”
“Yeah?” Max sniffed.
“Want to go with me to the Swamp Meet?”
Max’s shoulders slumped. “Sure,” he said.
Amp ate another can of Amp.
#
The Swamp Meet was always something Jessie and Max thought about trying to play. “We could be the house band,” one of them would say, lounging on the other’s bed, still not knowing how to play guitar but daydreaming of a future where they could and would always be part of each other’s world.
In reality, in the Right Now, there was no band at the Swamp Meet. The only soundtrack to the night was the hum of fan boats and the low roar of unsupervised, uninterrupted, underage drinking.
Here and there, angry whoops from the human boys and eerie screeches from Amp pierced the thick sheet of humidity that hung over the swamp like a spectre. Cries in the dark.
Max watched Layla nervously smoke a clove as Amp geared up his fan boat.
“Layla,” he said, as wretchedly as he felt.
Layla shot him a haunted look. “What, Max?”
“I love you.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But I love Amp.”
“I know,” he said. Because he did. “But-”
“Can you win my heart if you win a fan boat drag race, you spineless chicken bitch?” she asked, giving chalkboard-scraping voice to Max’s deepest desire. Her eyebrow was arched to lethal levels, even for her. Max’s heart sunk.
“Well-”
“Why the fuck not?” Layla asked, and lit another clove. Amp wasn’t watching her just now. He was too focused on the churning water. “Whoever wins is my boyfriend for life.”
Max didn’t know whether to cry or kiss her.
#
Jessie watched as Max geared up his fan boat for the big fan boat drag race. “Let me do it,” she said. “Let me race for you. Your head isn’t clear. It’s all full of...love and bullshit.”
Max sighed. Jessie wasn’t wrong. But still. ”It won’t prove anything if you race for me,” he said.
“But you’re a shit racer,” she laughed, heartlessly. “You’re better company. You’re not even a strong swimmer. You can barely doggy paddle..”
“I know,” Max said sadly.
“You know what I wish, Max?” Jessie steadied her slightly drunk self by putting her hand on Max’s shoulder.
“What do you wish, Jessie?” Max asked.
“I wish that I had been The Boy, sometimes.”
Max thought about it. “Yeah,” was all he could say.
“I just feel like I wouldn’t have wasted it.” For one sheer moment, Jessie could feel Max wondering what it would be like to kiss her. But Jessie was done with all that.
“Jessie-” Max said, and a shot rang out in the dark.
“It’s TIME!” some hick kid hollered. “It’s mutherfekkin’ time!”
Amp pierced the night with a midnight screech, and Layla actually laughed. It made Jessie’s skin scrawl.
“Let the fan boat drag race begin, y’all!” the hick kid cried, and the swamp exploded in battle whoops.
Amp screeched again, and ate another can of Amp.
Max almost flooded his engine.
“Let’s ride, Fish Stick!” he screamed over the roar.
No one heard him, but the water churned black.
#
While the boys fan boat drag raced, Jessie had a waking dream. She dreamt that none of this had to happen. She dreamt that Max knew a good thing when he had it, and a heartless thing when it had him. She dreamt of them kissing in the back of his pickup truck, and the flat bottom of his fan boat. She thought of his body in all the ways it should be thought of, in all the ways Layla didn’t think about it. With all the fervor Layla probably reserved for thinking about casually ruining other people’s lives with incredibly focused acts of cruelty and pettiness.
But it didn’t matter how much Jessie thought about Max, or how deeply she felt for him. He still crashed his fan boat into a cluster of sunken rocks.
He still died; his beautiful, tight little body split like rotting fruit on a sharp outcropping of hell in the Savannah swamp.
And while Jessie cried and Layla cheered, Amp the Fish-Man bent to the broken body of Max the Human Boy, and slit his own fishy forearm with one of his claws. He dripped his fish-goop into Max’s mouth, and into his wounds.
There, broken on the rocks, Max’s body began to fuse and heal.
The boy glowed green and the fish-man shimmered. Together, they shared a bond of healing and impossible hope.
Amp pulled Max into his arms, and lifted the boy’s weakened body onto his own fan boat.
“Ew,” Layla said, and then Amp’s boat crashed, too.
The fish-man and human boy were lost in a screech, a scream, and a spray of swamp foam.
#
Max woke up in Jessie’s arms, under a weeping willow.
“I thought you were a goner,” Jessie laughed, but there was no humor in it. Only relief.
“So did I,” Max wheezed, and noticed the beauty he had almost always been immune to when it came to Jessie. “So did I,” he repeated, and struggled for breath. “Where’s...Amp?” he managed.
“I’m not sure,” Jessie answered honestly. “After he saved you, it seemed like he just sort of...sunk into the swamp again. Layla didn’t seem too bothered by it.”
Layla glared at them briefly from further up the shore.
Jessie pushed a slimy lock of hair out of Max’s eyes. “I think she was annoyed he saved you. She said it was ‘typical of a hero skank.’”
Jessie laughed. But her laughter was cut short by Max coughing up a giant egg sac.
“NO!” she screamed, as the egg sac swelled and released hundreds of tiny new gill-men; mini-Amps swimming out and over Max’s dead skin and into the great world beyond.
“Noooooo!” She screamed again. Almost in answer, Amp screeched, and dripped a fresh batch of his green bodily fluids into Max’s broken mouth. Max spasmed in a come-to, just as the last of Amp’s hatchlings fled his mouth.
Together, Amp and his Amplings screeched into the moonlight, before sinking deep into the bowels of the swamp.
“BUT LIKE, NO!” Layla screamed, her beautiful face sharpened by moonlight, ragged with bitter disappointment.
Jessie didn’t have the energy to laugh. She didn’t have the energy to feel. Instead, she reached out and touched Max’s chest, knowing he was safe, alive, healed.
“See you at school on Monday,” she said.
And then she left the swamp.