Suzanne Beecher

Dear Reader,

I think it's a conspiracy, but when I told my daughter about it the other day, she insisted I was way over-thinking things. In fact she hinted some concern about my mental stability. But I don't think it's just a coincidence that when my two-year cell phone contract ended, and I turned down the phone company's offer to extend it, that now my cell phone doesn't work right anymore.

Coincidence--I think not! It's a conspiracy. Because the exact same thing happened the last time I refused to renew my contract.

"Why renew when I can simply go month-to-month?" I told the man at the cell phone company. "The service isn't going to cost me any less if I renew and sign on the dotted line." And that's when the salesman threw in a free phone, extra minutes, a tutor to explain how to use all those apps on my phone that I haven't known how to use for the last two years, a lesson in text-messaging (my daughter would be thrilled) and he even offered to send someone over to give me a foot rub to sweeten the deal. Believe me, it was tempting, but nevertheless I still said no.

And thirty minutes later my phone started acting up. Coincidence or conspiracy?

No question in my mind, my cell number has been put on "the list." The bring-her-to-her-knees list, so they mess with her service. Dead air in the middle of my conversations, 'Service Unavailable' flashing on my screen, and somehow they even loosened a screw inside of my phone, so now whenever I'm talking I have to keep my hand real still, or the rattling screw noise competes with my conversation. They know exactly what they're doing, 'Give that Beecher woman crummy service, force her to come in and buy a new phone, and then we'll get her--she'll have to renew her contract.'

Coincidence or conspiracy? It's not a question any longer, I finally have proof. So the next time my daughter calls I'm giving her an update on her mother's "imaginary" phone problems. Line-by-line, I'll read her my list of the strange things that have suddenly gone wrong with my phone, and my sanity will be vindicated. That'll show her!

On second thought, in reviewing my list, maybe I'd better leave out the part about how the phone company somehow got inside of my phone and loosened that screw, because my daughter might think it's not the phone that has a...

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@firstlookbookclub.com

P. S. This week we're giving away 10 copies of the book The Jellyfish Problem: A Novel by Tessa Yang. Click here to enter for your chance to win. 

There was something in the water. There was always something in the water in my mother's bedtime stories: a slimy-skinned 'kappa' springing onto land with its life force wobbling in the bowl on its head, a 'ningyo' mermaid heralding storms and disasters, a shape- shifting 'kawauso' luring unsuspecting humans to the water's edge. This menagerie of knowable misfits had felt like the most incredible gift to a misfit girl from a landlocked town. Dad always worried Mom would give me nightmares, but she never did. In my favorite story, though, the monster was never truly known. It was whispers and glimpses of lights on the water, rumors of drowned sailors traded secondhand. I think that was why I demanded to hear this tale over and over, my fascination born more of frustration than awe. I craved a neat epilogue with a clear moral, where you understood everything that had happened and why. But that was never the kind of story it was going to be. "Long ago," began Mom, in the hoarse whisper she used when trying to sound spooky, "there lived an aging widow whose son had been lost to the sea . . ."

What was loss to me at that age? A misplaced toy? A pet-store goldfish found floating belly-up in the bowl? I remember feeling baffled by the grief-stricken widow as I lay there tucked under my ladybug comforter, trying to understand why she did what she did. Why get in the water against all warnings and common wisdom? Why take your chances with the beast?

I know the answers now.

This isn't the book we set out to write together, but I still think you would've loved it.

PART ONE

A JELLYFISH PROBLEM

'Jellyfish' is a misnomer. Fish are cold-blooded vertebrates that respire through gills. Jellyfish are bloodless invertebrates that exchange gases directly through their skin. The spinelessness of jellies—their apparent frailness—has led to the word's slang meaning: a weakling or a doormat. A person devoid of a backbone.

We hope this book will prove jellyfish to be anything but weaklings. As we'll show in the coming chapters, you don't need a backbone to inspire awe, to elicit fear, to change the world.

* * *

There are certain people from your past whom you never expect to resurface. Nadia was one of mine. We'd had a short-lived, in-tense friendship near the end of college before graduating and heading down our separate paths. Though I thought of her often in the intervening decade—thought of, in particular, the night we'd spent together on the roof of the science building, stars above, Nadia's head heavy on my chest—I hadn't tried to reach out. Why would I? She'd made it clear that whatever existed between us was over, graduation the perfect excuse to sever a connection that had always meant more to me than to her.

I couldn't think of a single reason for her to be calling me from an unfamiliar number at half past five in the morning on a Tuesday in May after eleven years of silence, but that was what happened.

"Hi! Is this Josie?"

I knew it was her immediately because Nadia was the only person who'd ever called me by that name. I had been Jo and Josephine and 'Jo-Ness' spit to sound like 'Jonas' by a high school softball coach disgusted by my tendency to daydream in the outfield—'snap out of it, Jo-Ness!'—and in the scuba diving class I took to get certified at sixteen, I was even briefly known as Nessie, as in the lake monster, due to having an air consumption rate so low I was presumed to be partially aquatic.

'Josie' belonged to Nadia because she claimed it, and I let her. My shoulders screamed out in pain as I straightened from my desk, where I'd fallen asleep over my laptop. The screen had gone black, sparing me the separate agony of confronting the pages of my book manuscript—'The Modern Medusa: A Jellyfish Primer' by Josephine Ness and Aldo Antunes'—'still covered in unresolved comments: mine, and Aldo's.

As I cleared the gravel from my throat and blinked away the last clinging dregs of sleep, the familiar contours of my office at Seaheart swam into focus. The white wall bearing my framed diplomas and Ocean Conservancy calendar, still open to January's image of spawning corals. The broken filing cabinet whose top drawer rolled determinedly open unless sealed with a piece of masking tape. The desk plastered with a quilt of sticky notes, the oldest so old they'd lost their stick and fluttered around each time I patted down the area seeking whatever item I'd lost track of.

It wasn't always like this. Aldo used to scold me for being a neat freak. Then he died and my world tipped into an entropy I couldn't control. Power cords snaked out of nowhere to trip me. Just-washed mugs reappeared in front of me, silty with the cold sediment of coffee I didn't remember drinking. The voice of an old friend slipped through a cracked-open door, beckoning me into the corridor of our shared past.

"Nadia? Nadia Markov?" I said. "Is that really you?"

It was pleasant spending the next several minutes catching up, filling in with broad strokes our lives since undergrad. Nadia had taught English overseas for a few years, gotten her master's in education, bounced around various districts looking for the right fit, and was now teaching in a one-room schoolhouse on a remote island off the coast of Maine. I told her I worked as the research coordinator at a small aquarium, brazenly perched at the waterless edge of Joshua Tree. 'Small' sounded specialized and cozy, which Seaheart was. 'Small' didn't necessarily scream short-staffed and broke, which Seaheart also was.

"Oh my god, you're on the West Coast? What time is it there?" cried Nadia. "I'm so sorry, Josie, I thought you were still in the Northeast . . . I was trying to catch you before work."

I reassured her it was okay without adding that I was already at work, because I hadn't left work, because I'd effectively moved into work, converting my bottom desk drawer into an overnight kit complete with a spare set of clothing, deodorant, toothbrush, and a mini tube of travel toothpaste. What had begun as a contingency plan for those late nights when the hour-plus commute back to my apartment in Riverside didn't seem worth it had fast evolved into the new norm. It was all hands on deck for those of us who'd survived the latest round of layoffs. And I slept better on my office's rock-hard love seat than in my own bed. The guilty dreams didn't follow me here.

By now I was in the staff room, trying to wrest a mug from the dish rack without causing an avalanche. The aquarium's cleaner had quit last year, and Elijah Pinsky, Seaheart's director and general curator, refused to replace her, insisting the staff could learn to clean up after ourselves. I felt newly attuned to my untidy surroundings when I compared them to where I imagined Nadia was calling from. I put her in an airy beach house with sea-green walls, gauzy pastel curtains, and handwoven baskets full of beautiful rocks. Her fridge door displayed magnets from her travels, each one pinning a photograph of an adoring friend.

I successfully rescued a mug, then turned in a helpless circle looking for the coffeepot. 

"Are you still into jellyfish?" Nadia asked me. Was I still into jellyfish?

I had an October deadline for the jellyfish book Aldo and I had been writing for three years, which I was helplessly stalled on now that I had to finish it alone. I saw jellyfish everywhere: in the slow- motion shimmy of a plastic bag being shaken open, in the swirl of water around the bathtub drain, in spiderwebs and raindrops, in the scoop of light floating inside a contact lens. Jellyfish were my first thought on waking and my last thought before falling asleep, and their graceful, translucent bodies undulated through the dreams that fell between. Not one but two women had dumped me on the grounds that I liked jellyfish more than I liked people.

I confirmed for Nadia that I was still into jellyfish.

"That's awesome. Because if I'm being honest, that's why I called you. We're having a bit of a jellyfish problem on the island— actually, we're having a really 'big' jellyfish problem."

"You mean like a bloom?" I hadn't read anything about a high-density jellyfish swarm in New England, though it wasn't impos-sible that one had turned up there. Across the planet, blooms were on the rise. Theories as to why varied depending upon whom you asked. Aldo was a proponent of the wax-and-wane theory: jellyfish numbers oscillating as part of a natural cycle, with expected peaks and valleys over time. I countered that climate change created ecological vacuums where jellyfish could thrive like never before. We had butted heads on the subject so often, it nearly derailed our book.

"It's probably easiest if I show you," said Nadia. "Hang on, sending it now."

(continued on Tuesday)

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