We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Repeat After Me by Jessica Warman, a new YA paranormal fantasy romance publishing with Entangled: Teen on September 3rd.
In retrospect, I probably should have passed on the ceviche.
It was already a weird Friday. My class is stuck on this bizarre remote island for our senior trip, I’m pretty sure Mr. D (“call me Max”) is hiding something from us, my ex-best friend turned biggest tormentor keeps stealing my candy, and tonight’s plan to finally ”do the deed” with my boyfriend is not going exactly as planned.
I mean, ceviche is delicious, don’t get me wrong. But a dish made from a supposedly immortal octopus should really come with a warning label…
Emma
Friday
I ran into Gus while I was walking back from the beach alone. “Emily!” he greeted me. There’s something about my name that confuses the hell out of old people.
“It’s Emma.”
“Oh, I’m sorry—so close! You must forgive me. I’m elderly, you see.” I almost said something like, Yes, I can clearly fucking see that, but I was polite and just nodded. “Emma, I’ve been looking for you. Today is your lucky day. Do you have some time to spare? I have something very, very special to show you.”
I looked at him warily. “Why me?”
He gave me an even smile. “Because you, my dear, look like you could use a treat!”
I watch a lot of Netflix, and I love true crime. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you never, ever let a stranger take you to a secondary location. Gus isn’t a stranger per se, but he’s definitely got a significant creep factor. I told him I was busy looking for my boyfriend, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Auggie will find you! Please, follow me. Greta is waiting for me. She has something very special to show you. She asked for you specifically…”
Even if he was telling the truth, I still didn’t want to go. Why would Greta want to see me? This is how so many girls and women get kidnapped or assaulted, or worse: we don’t want to be rude, but social conditioning is hard to overcome. I followed him. It’s not like I thought he was actually going to hurt me. (And he obviously didn’t.) But still—what a weirdo.
The back of Gus’s left hand is covered with tattoos of tentacles that wrap all the way around his fingers. Each of his three middle fingers has two tentacles, one on either side of the digit, so there are an anatomically correct eight in total. They wind like inky ribbons up the length of his arm. The rest of the tattoo is hidden by his shirt. Greta has the same tattoo on her left hand. (See what I mean? Weird.)
Spoiler alert: I’m glad I went; it was kind of the coolest weird thing I’ve ever seen.
I followed Gus to the big yellow building where all the aquariums are set up. There’s a big red door on the far end of the room that I’d figured must lead to a closet or something. Boy, was I wrong. It leads to another huge room. Instead of rows and rows of tanks cluttered with oysters, there is one huge tank in the middle of the room. The tank itself is the size of a small room: it’s at least eight feet tall and ten feet wide. It’s a gigantic tank that houses a big, beautiful, terrifying, adorable octopus. Her name is Sibyl.
I’ve never seen an octopus up close before today. I didn’t know anything about them. Unless Gus and Greta were both messing with me—which isn’t out of the question—what I learned today has left me profoundly changed.
First of all, they might literally be aliens. Their DNA is so different from the DNA of every other living creature on the planet that scientists aren’t sure what the hell is up. And octopuses (octopi?) are really, really, really smart.
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Repeat After Me
Examples: (I watched all of this with my own eyes, or I wouldn’t have believed it.)
- They can change color and appearance depending on their surroundings. Gus dropped a crab into the tank for Sibyl to eat. Sibyl moved to a bottom corner of the aquarium and curled herself up beside a rock and then CAMOUFLAGED HERSELF TO LOOK LIKE THE ROCK to lure the crab into a false sense of safety. She caught and ate it right away. Poor little crab never stood a chance. I guess that’s nature for ya.
- They can solve puzzles and use tools! Greta showed me a cube that looked like one of those toys for babies where each side has a different-shaped hole—a star, a circle, etc.—and the goal is to insert the correct shape into the correct hole. Sibyl inserted each piece correctly with almost no hesitation. She is way smarter than any baby I’ve ever seen.
- They have personalities! Sibyl is a fancy girl who enjoys the finer things in life. Gus put a bracelet into a mason jar, sealed the lid, and dropped it into the aquarium. Sibyl opened the jar and then PUT THE FREAKING BRACELET ON ONE OF HER TENTACLES AND HELD IT UP TO HER FACE LIKE SHE WAS ADMIRING HOW PRETTY SHE LOOKED.
Sibyl is as big as a healthy middle schooler. She has translucent red skin and bright white suction cups. There are hundreds of them in row upon row on her underside. They wiggle and contract like open, hungry mouths, seeking. She reminded me of a sentient portobello mushroom.
Gus asked me if I wanted to touch her. If I’m being honest? I sort of didn’t want to. But by then I’d been hanging out for more than an hour, learning all kinds of cool octopus facts and generally having my mind blown, and I didn’t want to offend Sibyl. So I climbed up the ladder beside the tank and stuck my arm in the water. Almost right away, Sibyl drifted toward me and wrapped a single tentacle around my index finger.
She did it so gently—like she could tell I was nervous. Her suction cups felt like a thousand tickly little kisses. I was so enthralled by the feeling of her touch—I know it will seem hard to believe, but I could feel it throughout my entire body. It was like there was a gentle current of electricity running through me.
I blinked slowly, and for an instant while my eyes were fully closed I thought I saw the source code of the universe blooming like fireworks in the endless space within our shared mind. I might have been a passive observer for a fraction of a second or a thousand years. There was something maternal about her touch. I didn’t want to let go, not ever.
I stayed like that, my arm hanging over the edge of the tank while Sibyl explored my finger and hand, until my arm started to go tingly and lose feeling. Before I had a chance to ask Gus or Greta how to free myself without disturbing Sibyl, it was like she heard my thoughts somehow. She released each suction cup individually, one after the next, and each time, I felt a deliberate release, an internal sigh of yearning (come back, Sibyl!) combined with the bittersweet understanding that our time together couldn’t last forever.
Once each suction cup was free, she gave my hand and forearm a gentle caress with the smooth edge of her tentacle and drifted away.
I was still bathing in the afterglow of the experience, barely aware of my surroundings. Then Gus climbed up the ladder, stuck his hand in the tank, and took hold of Sibyl near the top of a single tentacle, his arm gripping where it met the webbed ruching of flesh connecting her head and tentacles. She didn’t try to get away from him. She floated serenely as he tugged and tightened his grip—more roughly than I would have liked—trusting him. My body was still bursting from her touch. It was like a veil had been draped over my consciousness, only to be ripped away when Gus reached into his back pocket with his free hand, pulled out a pair of gardening shears, and chopped off the better part of Sibyl’s tentacle.
What had been like a beautiful dream turned into a Black Mirror episode in an instant. I learned that octopus blood is blue. The water bloomed an inky shade of aqua. Sibyl shrank into a corner, her body blending itself with the surrounding rocks. She seemed to disappear. In my panic, I thought I heard her screaming, but it was me.
I staggered backward and into Greta’s arms. She was ready for me. She was laughing, which terrified me more than I thought was possible. Everything had been so beautiful and now it was ugly. Never go with a stranger to a second location.
In the midst of my freak-out, Gus dismounted wordlessly from the ladder and disappeared with the severed tentacle. A trail of blue blood made a staccato half-moon from the aquarium to the doorway. Greta couldn’t stop giggling while she reassured me everything was okay. She was not very convincing. I was shaking and crying, and she was giggling. A little tip on crisis management that I picked up from AP Psych 101: laughing at somebody when they’re crying is, generally speaking, a dick move.
“You’re worried about Sibyl,” Greta observed.
“He cut her arm off! Of course I’m worried!”
“Don’t be. An octopus’s severed limb will regenerate. Besides, Sibyl is immortal.” It didn’t occur to me at the moment to point out the implausibility of the latter claim. I heard “regenerate” and remembered learning about the very real ability of some animals to regrow severed limbs. For a quick minute, I felt better (oh, Sibyl is only temporarily maimed, she’ll regenerate). Then I felt ridiculous (the maiming is not an exclusively cosmetic problem! She’s been tortured!).
“But she’s in pain!”
“I don’t think so.”
“How the hell do you know? It’s not like we can ask her! And what about blood loss? What if she bleeds to death?”
“I already told you, Sibyl can’t die. She’s immortal,” Greta repeated. She smiled a serene smile. What would have been a sweet and innocent expression five minutes earlier was suddenly unnerving.
“Um. You know that immortal means ‘to live forever,’ right?”
“I do.”
“So what you mean is that Sibyl will live for a long time.”
“No.” That smile again. I started getting a reeeealll culty vibe. The father/daughter octopus tattoos were already weird; now they were downright the-power-of-Sibyl-compels-you weird. “What I mean, Emma, is that Sibyl is immortal.”
So at this point I was no longer enjoying myself at all. In the span of an afternoon, I’d befriended and grown to love an octopus (Do you want to be my mother, Sibyl? Maybe you could adopt me?) only to watch her get maimed with zero warning. Now I was being gaslit by the maimer’s daughter. Immortal my ass. Obviously, I assumed Greta was messing with me. Actually, that isn’t true: I hoped Greta was messing with me.
There is no such thing as an immortal octopus.
And yet, as I stood there with Greta, we both turned to look into the tank. The threads of blue blood, which had been so pronounced just a moment earlier, had dissipated. The water was tinged a slight blue, but there was no obvious bleeding wound that I could see. My gaze met Sibyl’s black, unblinking eyes through the thick glass and hazy water. Her eyes peered into my soul. As her tentacles rummaged through my memories, I heard her voice in my mind saying: Remember your miracle. And I thought of the poop moth.
My eyes were still locked with Sibyl’s when Gus came prancing through the doorway. He was light on his toes, and there was a glee to his step that reminded me of Rumpelstiltskin. He held a small plastic bowl pinned between his arm and his body. “I have something very special here, Emily,” he said, “something very, very special…”
“My name is Emma.”
“I’m so sorry about that. Excuse me. Emma.” But he didn’t actually seem sorry at all.
Greta’s hand was on my arm again. I didn’t want her to touch me, but it seemed rude to push her away. I can’t emphasize this enough: the whole thing was incredibly disorienting. More often than not, I was half convinced I was dreaming, like maybe it was one of those dreams that feels incredibly realistic.
Yeah, that’s what it was. A dream. It must have been.
“Dad, let me do this,” Greta said. She looked at me. She was not giggling anymore, but I could tell she wanted to. Like she was only being serious for my benefit, and this was all more or less a big game to her.
“I have a serious question to ask you, Emma. I want you to really think about it before you answer me, okay?”
Just a bad dream. But Sibyl’s touch felt so real…and I felt so awake…
“Do you want to live forever?” Greta asked me. Just like that! Like it was a perfectly normal question!
“Sure!” I said. I didn’t think it through at all. Because A, I was dreaming. And B, what are the chances of two miracles in a lifetime?
“Then you should eat this,” she said. She took the bowl from Gus and handed it to me. It took a minute for me to realize that what I was seeing could even be considered food.
“What is it?”
“It’s ceviche,” Greta said. But it didn’t look like any ceviche I’d ever had. I peered closer into the bowl. Then I gasped. You probably know where this is going, but I can assure you, I was not prepared for the reveal. It was ceviche, all right. It was Sibyl ceviche. Fleshy discs of pink and white looking robust and alive.
I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming. Yet I knew, deep down, it was no dream. I felt like I was in a fairy tale because this was certainly not real food; real non-fairy-tale food does not glisten, nor does it originate from an immortal octopus.
There is no such thing as an immortal octopus. I know. And yet…
“See, look at her. She’s fine.” Greta was pointing at Sibyl. And okay, I know this is impossible, I know nobody will believe me, but I looked and saw the octopus floating in her tank. All eight of her legs were fully intact, all grown to more or less equal lengths. I counted them three times. Then I took a bite of the ceviche. It was the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted.
Excerpted from Repeat After Me, copyright © 2024 by Jessica Warman.
