Her family lived on my cousins’ street, but she was already gone by the time they moved in.
She was an ordinary kid named Abby Mahoney, a sandy-haired, freckle-faced girl-that is, if she looked anything like her twin brother, who was my age. She didn’t start out as a mythical creature. In my imagination, she became mythic: The Saltwater Twin.
She wore a necklace of coral, swam seal-like through shimmering clouds of fish, and slept in an underwater cave with a nightlight of luminescent plankton. Her hair grew into delicate ropes of seaweed her skin turned opalescent like the inside of a shell. I imagined she floated like a bright October leaf, unhurried, lazily seesawing in the current until at last she came to rest on the ocean floor. I pictured her below the waves where the water was gentle.
We have lingered in the chambers of the seaīy sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
