Toothy quietly munched on the last of his classmates, a delicious teenaged grouper named Bloop, as Professor Darkcloud swirled his tentacles through the last of some ink to demonstrate the basic principle of diffusion.
“So you see, even though when it was condensed in a small space my ink was enough to hide me completely, because the ocean has so much more water than ink, when the ink is no longer condensed in a small space and is instead diffused across the water, I am once again visible. Now who can tell me…” Professor Darkcloud twirled around in confusion.
“Toothy, where did all you classmates go?” he asked suspiciously, catching sight of a few rainbow fish scales glittering on the tip of one of Toothy’s razor-sharp canines.
Toothy gulped, incidentally swallowing the last bit of Bloop as he tried to come up with an explanation that would not get him permanently banned from every school in the ocean.
“Umm, well, you see Professor, when Stripey couldn’t see you, she forgot she was supposed to be paying attention to the ink cloud to watch diffusion. So she, well, she realized that the many rows of teeth in my mouth was a valid area of scientific inquiry and so, um, well, she inquired. I didn’t want to be rude, after all, Principal Arthropod was very clear that rudeness would get me expelled, so I opened up so Stripey could study my teeth. She, well, she swam in and called everyone else after her. Then Bubbles swam too close to my tongue and his fins were ticklish so I closed my mouth to scratch. And now, well, they’re all exploring my stomach Sir. I’m sure they’ll come out eventually.” Toothy finished with a rush, gazing hopefully at Professor Darkcloud, hoping he’d sounded confusing. After all, Stripey did regularly forget what they were learning about and try to get the rest of the class to join her in new topics. And Bubbles had tickled on the way down his gullet. It was plausible.
Professor Darkcloud did not lose his inquisitorial expression as he asked “If Stripey forgot she was supposed to be watching a demonstration of diffusion, how did she remember she was supposed to be studying science?”
Toothy hung his head, realizing one of the obvious flaws in his story. When Stripey came up with a new topic, it was new, and never seemed to be related in any way to what a class had been learning before. If it was science class, suddenly she’d be talking about the best ways to store algae for later consumption. If it was reading class, she would start talking about how to blow the biggest bubbles. When her brain forgot a subject, it forgot it.
“You’ve been warned Toothy. You were warned when you started that the only reason you were being allowed in school at all was to see if education could make a shark a productive member of the ocean’s society, rather than a menacing bully. You knew you only had 3 chances to get it right. You used your first chance beating everyone to the finish line in swimming class and turned around so they would all swim into your mouth. You used your second chance when you decided to make sushi of your classmates in cooking class instead of the seaweed parfait you were supposed to be preparing. You’re done. But we need to make sure everyone knows it.”
With that, Professor Darkcloud swam up to Toothy’s side and just behind Toothy’s gill, Toothy felt a paralyzing pain. And it kept going. He tried to wiggle his caudal fin to get moving, not sure if he wanted to get away or eat Professor Darkcloud more, but his caudal fin just hung there. The only movement he made was his teeth grinding together, and that wasn’t even something he was trying to do, it was just happening.
A few minutes later Toothy could move again. His side burned terribly and neither Professor Darkcloud nor a telltale ink cloud were anywhere in sight. All he wanted was to get to the nearest kelp field to wrap the long, flowing leaves around himself and get some relief. He took off northward, trying to remember the magnetic signature of the kelp field he thought lay in that direction.
After a few days staying hidden in the kelp field, Toothy was starting to feel a bit less stung. And he’d hatched a plan. He’d originally decided to ask to join the school system near Australia since they tended to be the most open to trying new things, and he knew the idea of a great white shark in school was not normal. But a different school system wouldn’t know about his issues in the Australia school system and would accept an explanation that he was a transfer student and they were the school system on his new migration route. Especially the system off the coast of China near Hong Kong- they didn’t like to communicate with the other schools, as they believed their education system was superior and so anyone coming to them would have to start learning again from the beginning. They didn’t NOT accept transfer credits, ever. So, they would have no need to find out what he’d done in the Australian school system. And as a bonus, since most great white sharks didn’t swim near Hong Kong if they had other options, the Hong Kong schools would be less likely to know about his potential predatory instincts toward his classmates. Having thought through all this, he set off at once.
Headteacher Yu poked his eyes up through the sand and flexed his barbed tail as he studied Toothy closely, including the scars of the jellyfish stings that stretched between Toothy’s gills and his second dorsal fin on his port side. She didn’t need their pattern reading “Danger: failed out of school for eating classmates” to tell her not to admit Toothy. Headteacher Yu was unfortunately familiar with great white sharks and the devastation they caused the local population when they visited the South China Sea. And she knew that this devastation would be yet another set back in her schools task of making the neighborhood safe for young, native fish families to lay their eggs and thrive. Another shark? An apex predator shark at that? Ridiculous. They were already dealing with that choking red tides, the plastic bottles that the little ones just could not be taught to not play in, and the huge boats with their dragging nets catching up everything and only throwing back the plastic trash and a few dying, unwanted fish. But the thought of the dragging nets gave Headteacher Yu an idea. She burrowed down further in the sand to contemplate, twitching her tail barb toward Toothy in warning when he moved closer to her.
After a long silence where Headteacher Yu’s black and white spotted skin blended into the rocks and sand so well that Toothy only knew she was still there because she kept flicking her tail at him, Toothy finally heard her say, “Well, young visitor, I think the idea of an exchange student could be useful to us. However, we simply cannot admit any sea life that cannot do the basic tasks of reading, writing, and arithmetic. And those Australian schools are notoriously bad at teaching them, so it’s no use asking your so-called professors down there if you learned them. Therefore, an entrance exam it must be. Here is your first task: if to get to a harbor you swim 6 klicks north, then turn 90 degrees and swim 8 klicks east, how many klicks would you need to swim in a straight line to get back to your starting point?”
Toothy thought it through. Envisioning the route in his mind, Toothy saw the beautiful triangle shape coming together. He had always liked triangles- they were a lot like his teeth. So despite Headteacher Yu’s aspersions on the Australian schools system’s education system, Toothy was very familiar with the 3-4-5 triangle and promptly answered “10 klicks, ma’am.”
“Well young visitor, perhaps the Australian school system rubbed off on more than just your skin. Very good. Now, your next task is to swim t the hypotenuse of that triangle, which will take you near enough to Victoria Harbor to see the names of the fishing boats. You will need to surface, read the names of the first three trawlers that you see, then return here and tell them to me. That is your reading test. Off with you now.” Headteacher Yu waived her tail barb in the general direction of Victoria Harbor and off Toothy went. He could read trawler names, he couldn’t believe how easy it would be to get into the South China Sea school system.
Headteacher Yu breathed a sigh of relief watching him swim away. She didn’t expect to see him back, but just in case, she detailed a young barrelfish named Longeyes to follow him from a distance, warning Longeyes to stay far behind. She wanted Longeyes to come back and report, after all. Unlike Toothy, Longeyes was a useful student and if he grew up well, more barrelfish pods would come back to the South China Sea.
Longeyes was excited to be trusted with the task by Headteacher Yu until he heard his destination. His sister had gotten too close to the fishing trawlers near Victoria Harbor and never come home. Mama said the trawlers were even able to get deep sea fish like him. She had been very clear about exactly how close to the Harbor he could get. But she’d also told him to mind Headteacher Yu. So he followed. At a distance. And he was just close enough to see Toothy get caught up in one of the large nets stretched between two trawlers. And to grab his classmate Tina to keep her from swimming straight into the net too. That Tuna was always following him. He turned around to report in to Headteacher Yu, dragging Tina along with him.
Toothy couldn’t believe the strength of this current. Or the direction. Currents went side to side, not up and down. He’d barely surfaced and read the trawler names- luckily he was right between two of them, the “Fishery’s Flight” and the “Tanker, Trawler, Tonnage”. But when he dove down again to find some more he couldn’t move anywhere but up. And all the other fish around him were going the same direction. Except when they were getting closer to him. He didn’t dare eat them- it might get back to Headteacher Yu.
Then suddenly he was going down. Fast. And all the water disappeared. He stopped abruptly on his back. It hurt. And then it didn’t.
When he was right-side up again, he was confused. The ocean was somehow a lot smaller. He could barely swim a meter in any direction without banging his nose against something. And the light. He shut his eyes, but couldn’t block it out. Sighing, he opened them again. In front of him but on the other side of the barrier was a grayish cylinder with a yellowish flicker underneath that he’d never seen before. A collection of what looked like long, silvery teeth that were razor-sharp on only one side floated to the side of the cylinder. And the strangest fish he’d ever see was reaching a pectoral fin over the cylinder while his two long, skinny pelvic fins kept him in place. It’s other pectoral fin held something with writing on it that it kept glancing at. It was too hot in the room.
The strange fish turned the writing thing toward Toothy. Toothy figured maybe it would count for his reading for Headteacher Yu, so he tried to make out the words.
What he read told him he wasn’t going to make it back to Professor Yu:
“Shark Fin Soup, a delicacy.”
