Breathe and Count Back from Ten

“The way our neighbors slip Peru into every and any conversation with us, pronouncing it PAY-ru, like it’s a bouncy animal we owe money to, you’d think we’re the exotic attraction here instead of the springs down the road filled with mermaids.”

Verónica’s family experiences both subtle and overt forms of discrimination, bias, and stereotyping due to being from another country. She often feels as though others see her Peruvian ancestry as a novelty rather than a part of her family’s identity and compares the feeling of being dehumanized to being on display at the mermaid tourist attraction that exists in her city.

“I felt out of place all of a sudden, all right angles and stiffness. I wished I could be underwater, where a simple twirl made all the hardness of the earth disappear.”

Because Verónica feels at home and at ease in the water, she identifies strongly with mermaid culture. In the water, she feels weightless, she can move in different ways, and she isn’t held down by the pain of walking.

“In the water, chlorine tastes like peace and movement becomes freedom.”

In this mixture of simile and metaphor, Verónica expresses how important swimming is to her. Because it brings her peace and freedom, the water is the only place where she feels unencumbered by her physical body and in control of her movement.

“Subconsciously you’re always measuring comparing, asking, am I doing enough to justify what they gave up to come here? You carry all their dreams into your future which is somehow also theirs, wrapped up in their past and present. You fear making mistakes. You dread coming up short of their expectations. And you can think of nothing worse than disappointing them.”

As the daughter of immigrant parents, Verónica feels obligated live up to their expectations and ensure that their sacrifices weren’t all for nothing. She describes how her life and her choices are shaped by this history; achieving Personal and Sexual Autonomy is much more difficult because any mistake might be construed as a lack of appreciation or respect for her parents’ sacrifices.

“No one calls a flower chueca as it bends its way toward the sky.”

Verónica wonders why the way she walks and the way her body is shaped are considered crooked while so many other things in nature are allowed to be flawed, uniquely shaped, or bent in strange ways. She contrasts her own experiences of ableism with the acceptance of a flower with a curved stem.

“Maybe I’ll show him my favorite places and we’ll swim until out fingertips turns soft as clay. Until we melt into each other, waiting for the sun to make us solid again.”

In this metaphor, Verónica compares the effects of swimming for long periods of time to the way water softens clay. She and Alex are in the midst of a budding love story, and this is a unique spin on the cliché of melting into one another during intense love.

“I brush my hands through my hair and squeeze my scalp, the crown of my head. Thoughts of lies and dead tissue and the dry, lifeless bones swirl through my mind.”

When Verónica learns her parents didn’t tell her that her bone was necrotic (the tissue is dying), she feels betrayed. That betrayal, along with her fear and anxiety, buoys the “lies and dead tissue” and “dry, lifeless bones” until they “swirl.” This visual imagery signals that her parents’ lie is just as upsetting as the necrosis itself.

“I stare up at the splotchy sky and imagine my femur shriveling up like a beached starfish. This afternoon I looked necrosis up on my phone and learned that it becomes arthritis. My aging bone. Freckled like the limestone beneath the mermaids’ springs. All its holes, piercing in all its light.”

Verónica uses simile to compare the necrosis in her femur to a starfish that is unable to make its way back to the ocean and is drying out on land. It is a gradual process that could take years or could happen more quickly. Her “aging bone” is like the limestone beneath Florida springs, which is made up of the calcified remains of dead organisms that sank to the bottom of an ancient shallow ocean. Her bone is like the limestone that allows for the springs and caves of the mermaid attraction and is part of the bond she feels with the mermaid springs.

“You’d think, for a hip that’s ready to pop out of its socket, it’d be more flexible. But that would make too much sense.”

Verónica points to the irony of her condition, noting that it seems like something that would increase flexibility, but instead the opposite happens. While the novel doesn’t rely heavily on humor, Verónica’s sarcasm and dark humor occasionally come through as a coping mechanism.

“But violate? In Spanish, violar is a word I learned young, a word that Mami said meant the worst thing a man can do to a woman after we heard it on the news. In English, there’s this whole range, and I don’t know where that night falls within it. So I haven’t wanted to use that word. I wish I could not even go near it. It’s always spoken with the implication that people just let things happen to them.”

“Violar” is a Spanish word meaning “violated.” After Verónica’s parents found her in the hot tub with Jeremy, they began treating her as though she was violated—in other words, forever changed and tainted. Verónica dislikes the word because she doesn’t want to be defined by that event because it implies that she was a passive victim in what happened to her.

“Her words echo in my mind. I can’t believe they’re for me. Tight. Controlled. Beautiful. Natural.

Lines.

Legs.

Mine.”

When Lila tells Verónica that her leg lines were perfect, Verónica can hardly believe what she’s hearing. Her entire life she’s understood that her flawed legs define her, and now Lila says the exact opposite. Lila’s words validate Verónica’s experience, and the ability to use her legs in a beautiful way is a large part of what draws Verónica to mermaiding. Lila’s words are also the catalyst in a series of internal changes that Verónica experiences in relation to her attitude toward her disability.

“One day they’ll take the dying bone I’ve always lived with and replace it with a ghost of itself, a foreign object my body’s meant to welcome as its own. What if it doesn’t? What if the new joint doesn’t fit in any better than the old? What if I have to relearn to walk in it? What if its rhythm is one I can’t recognize, a language I can’t even speak? What if replacement doesn’t fix displacement, and this is how I was always meant to be?”

Here, the repetition of “What if…?” emphasizes Verónica’s confusion and panic as she comes to terms with the idea of having a hip replacement. Although her hip dysplasia has caused her problems throughout her life, she’ll need to process and adjust to its absence. She doesn’t trust her body to accept the replacement, and she doesn’t trust herself to adapt to the change.

“If it weren’t for me bending the truth a little, I’d have no life that’s mine, no mistakes to claim as my own to learn from, just commandments we’re expected to follow without question, rules that teach me nothing about myself at all.”

For Verónica at age 17, developing Personal and Sexual Autonomy is essential to growing up healthily, to finding herself, and to having the confidence needed to thrive in the world. She has convinced herself that the only way to achieve such autonomy is by lying to her parents, though she eventually comes to realize that being honest is far better.

“Maybe everyone’s just scarred.”

In this pun, Verónica comments on how everyone is not only scared but also scarred in the metaphorical sense. While Verónica wears her scars visibly, others’ scars are hidden, like Alex’s depression. Verónica and Alex both have challenges in their lives that they must cope with or overcome.

“Maybe the ‘magic’ isn’t just about believing in mermaids; it’s about believing people like me don’t exist. Like maybe admitting I’ve needed crutches dispels the myths we want to believe about people. That we’re not perfect. That our bodies have needs. That this doesn’t make us any less real. Any less human.”

Verónica has always loved mermaids and the surrounding fantasy, but she questions whether fantasy is healthy when she realizes that people fantasize her own disability away. Verónica learns to accept her disability and the needs of her body and recognizes that her imperfections don’t make her less human. Verónica seeks validation that she is both imperfect and real.

“I’m Mermaid Verónica. I came from the land of Sea Stars, where particles of centuries-old stars fell from the sky into the ocean, calcifying into caves, into holey limestone that created the foundation of Florida and birthed a daughter in its image.”

Verónica writes her mermaid origin story inspired by conversations she had with Alex about the origins of calcium, the earth, and people, and by Geoff’s chosen nickname for her. The idea of a connection to the most distant past inspires her, and the thought of ancient stars helping to create life today gives her hope in her own future. Verónica also feels deeply connected to the land she lives on and to the water that surrounds it.

“My words. My movements. My voice. I’ll have to own all of it.”

In this inner dialogue, Verónica realizes that her mermaid showcase is entirely her own creation and responsibility. As someone who is aspiring toward Personal and Sexual Autonomy, Verónica’s ability to express herself this way and to direct and create something from nothing is life-changing.

“I start to feel distant from everything but us. From the voices that tell me it’s wrong to want this. From the voice that didn’t listen when I said no. From my fears that say this body is too flawed to be desirable. They’re all here, but they start to fade, or maybe it’s my voice that is finally the loudest.”

Being with Alex is an entirely new experience for Verónica. For the first time, she feels desirable but safe, accepted, and wanted. She has also been asserting herself in her own life more, and the resulting Personal and Sexual Autonomy that she feels means that she can finally listen to her own wants instead of someone else’s.

“It has sparkles of blue in it, dark as night, and neon pink glimmers that turn green when the light hits it, all engulfed by the most beautiful shade of purple I’ve ever seen. It reminds me of the inside of a purple potato, how when you cut into it, it reveals a bright magenta that seems to defy nature.”

Presenting her mermaid tail is a significant moment in Verónica’s mermaiding journey. She describes its beauty in detail as though it takes up the entire room. The visual imagery of “sparkles” and “glimmers” signify the fantasy of being a mermaid while the vibrant colors—blue, neon pink, purple, and magenta—represent the reality, clarity, and vitality mermaiding offers Verónica.

“I try to curl into myself. Grey clouds chase us as we pull away from Mermaid Cove, growing darker with each passing mile.”

The storm on the day of Verónica’s showcase symbolizes the rising tension between her and her parents, and between her and Mermaid Cove itself. She starts to feel separated from both and accepted by neither.

“I run my hands over the mini sequined pillow wedged between us. The colors flip between blue and green with my touch. I’ve been going back and forth like this all day, trying to figure out what my future at Mermaid Cove holds.”

In this excerpt, Verónica compares her indecision to a sequin pillow and the two colors it presents based on which way the sequins are pushed.

“No more hiding, no more pretending to blend in. Just a girl in an imperfect body, refusing to swim any further in shame. Telling the stories of her ancestors on new shores and in a new home. Telling legends of her own.”

For her entire life, Verónica has tried to hide her scars and her pain, as well as the severity of her condition. Ever since becoming a mermaid, discovering her own capabilities, and doing something truly for herself, she has learned to accept who she is, flaws and all, and to express herself through an art form. She draws on a metaphor of water and swimming to illustrate the connection between her experiences as a mermaid and her growth.

“My mind goes blank. For all the pages of words I’ve written and rewritten, this one hasn’t entered my dictionary.”

Verónica hears that she gets to choose the course of her treatment and is stunned because she has never experienced this level of Personal and Sexual Autonomy. She is told to determine her own level of “fine” and trusted to know her own body and what it needs. She has been alert to Words and Their Meanings throughout her adolescence, but she has never considered what being okay might look like for her.