by Alex Flinn
10
The next day, Warner came to pick me up for school as usual. Except I knew it wasn’t usual at all. It was pouring, the kind of driving Miami rain that hits you like a bus. A wet bus. I ran to Warner’s car before he could get out. I started talking.
“Hey, some weather, huh? It was pounding on the roof all night and keeping me awake. There was a lot of lightning too. Finally, I just got up and read.” I was babbling, trying to prevent the inevitable. “It even woke Mother up, and usually she sleeps like the dead. She’s worried the pool will overflow and the house will get flooded. She doesn’t know how to drain it. Daddy always did that.”
I stopped, remembering. Then I forced myself to go on.
“But I think it will stop raining before that, don’t you?”
Even though I’d asked a question, I didn’t stop talking long enough for Warner to answer. I felt like, if I just kept talking until we got to school, he wouldn’t tell me about Lisette. He wouldn’t break up with me.
“So,” I continued. “I really like that book we’re reading in language arts, The Book Thief. I read ahead, it’s so good. I really love how the narrator is Death. It sort of gives a new perspective, I think. I mean…”
I was out of breath, and I had to stop talking, just for a second. In that instant that I stopped, Warner said, “Emma, I have to talk to you.”
No. No, please. I can’t lose this too. “We are talking. We’re talking about The Book Thief. What do you think about it?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t started it, okay?”
“You haven’t? But what if there’s a quiz? I could tell you—”
“No! Emma, stop. We can’t. I need to talk to you about something else. About us. Emma, we need to, it’s not working out. We have to break up.”
“What?” I tried to look surprised. I was surprised even though I’d known before. It was surprising, wasn’t it? Lisette wanted him, but only to spite me. Yet I’d thought Warner was different.
“You’re not the person I thought you were, Emma, the sweet girl I thought I was in love with.”
“What? I know you’ve been seeing Lisette behind my back. Now you’re making this about me? Like it’s something I did?”
“How can it not be about you, Emma, when I know how mean you’ve been to Lisette?”
“How mean I’ve been?” The rain drummed against the window with the force of a jackhammer, and soon, I’d be out in it, floundering against the tide.
“She told me what you and your mother did, kicking her out of her room, treating her like a servant.”
“I didn’t do those things.” But I didn’t stop them either.
“Please. You didn’t treat Lisette like a sister even before her father died. That’s why you never told me about her, didn’t introduce us.”
“I didn’t introduce you because I knew exactly what would happen if I did—and it’s happening. She hates me.”
“Can you blame her?”
“Yes. I wanted to be friends, to be sisters, but she … she…” I stared out the mottled windows. It didn’t matter what I said or thought. The only truth was Lisette’s. “She takes everything that’s mine, everything I care about. Now, she’s taking you.”
“She said you were jealous of her. Lisette said—”
“Lisette said! Lisette said!” I was a different person now. Warner was right. I wasn’t the sweet girl he’d fallen in love with. I was a witch. A harpy. A wicked stepsister from the fairy tale. The fairy tales always portrayed the stepsisters as being more pathetic and awkward than actually evil. I was pathetic to have thought I had a chance with Warner, have a chance, even, of anyone believing me. I was awkward. And now, I wanted to be mean.
“Honestly, Warner, do you think she’d be interested in you if it wasn’t just to spite me?”
He stared at me as if I’d grown claws and raked them across his face.
I kept scratching. “You think you’re her type, Warner? You think she goes for nerdy red-haired newspaper staffers who tell boring stories about their parents’ divorce? She’s had half the football team. You don’t even meet her height requirements. She actually said your neck looked like a pencil once.”
I could see by his face that I’d hurt him. I was glad. I was so sick of people falling for Lisette’s crap. I thought Warner was different, but I guessed when it came down to it, people wanted to believe that Lisette was good. I’d wanted to believe it too.
I was sobbing, but still I screamed. “I know what she’s like. You’ll find out. I give it a week!”
Through the rain, I could barely make out the school. The car was still moving, but I pushed the door open and jumped out into the rush of rain and darkness, out of the comfort of Warner’s car, Warner’s love, away from the one place I’d felt warm and wanted, out into the cold wet. I slammed the door, ignoring Warner calling my name. There was no Emma. I wanted to be cold and wet and nameless. The rain pounded me like a hundred fists. I let it. I wished it were a tidal wave, a tsunami, a hurricane that would destroy everything and carry me away, away to a place where Lisette and Warner, Mother and Daddy didn’t exist, had never existed. A place where I didn’t exist.
Kendra Speaks: The Story of a Mermaid Who Should Have Left Well Enough Alone
KENDRA SPEAKS
So now she’s done it. Well, really, a lot of its. She’s wrecked Emma’s relationship with her father, which is now irreparable, a fact which causes my dear girl to cry herself to sleep. Not only that, but she’s stolen her boyfriend, a boy who isn’t even cool or good-looking enough for someone like Lisette to even want. No, she’s done it out of pure spite.
I so do not like this girl.
Emma is miserable, and I want to help her. Still, it’s better to be miserable than, well, even more miserable, and that’s the kind of thing that can happen when magical experiments backfire. You sometimes reach a point where you wish you’d left well enough alone.
That’s what happened in the story of Doria, a little mermaid.
By the twentieth century, there were few countries in which I was welcome. And by “few,” I mean none. Oh, I was tolerated in the United States, for they have the greatest patience with freaks and oddities (yes, there were those certain incidents in Salem, 1692, but I was not to be found there). While some Europeans claimed to embrace the spiritualism movement, they were still apt to cry “Witch!” if they could not establish contact with their particular dead relation or, more to the point, find out the location of any buried money. Whatever I am, I am not a huckster. So I stayed in America mostly, and when I grew bored of that, I took to the high seas.
Perhaps you have heard of the ships on which I have sojourned. The Tayleur was one of the first. Later came the Lusitania, the Morro Castle, and the Andrea Doria. Yes, I had bad luck in my choice of vessels, but don’t suppose for a minute that I was behind these great ships’ demise. It was pure coincidence. But the most famous ship on which I stayed was the RMS Titanic.
Heard of that one, have you? Then you know there were those who predicted that this “unsinkable” ship would indeed sink. I was one of them, in fact. But people tended to ignore me, and I was rather interested in getting a look at the quarters before they became too waterlogged, and at all the famous passengers before … well, ditto. Besides, I had made the mistake of journeying to Ireland for Christmas of 1911, and by April 11, 1912, I was being chased out over the small matter of a Brownie revolt (Brownies, if you don’t know, are little Irish fairies, not merely little American Girl Scouts, and they can be quite cantankerous). So the Titanic’s docking in Queenstown before making its historic and ill-fated journey across the ocean was fortuitous. I disguised myself as a young stewardess named Bessie Livingston, whom I tricked into debarking in Ireland for a day at the pubs (lucky girl—though she did not consider herself so when she learned that the ship had left without her!) and took her place. Everything was going quite, er, swimmingly until the evening of April 14. But, perhaps I will take you back
a bit further and introduce you to my friend Doria (no relation to the aforementioned ship—the name Doria means “from the sea,” and you will soon see that this is appropriate here). She can tell the story with greater knowledge.
I’ll let you hear it while I think on Emma and Lisette.
The Story of a Mermaid Who Should Have Left Well Enough Alone
There are those who believe there is nothing under the sea but sand and shells and endless darkness. But that is not true. Under the sea, there are flowers in colors seen nowhere else, and what’s more, the flowers can speak. We merfolk live in castles with many-hued fish swimming in and out of every window, and the greatest of these castles is that of the Sea King. Its walls are built of coral with a roof formed by shells that open and close to let in the merfolk who are invited.
Surely you have heard of merfolk, mermen and mermaids, people with tails or fish with human torsos, depending on how you look at it. They seemed perfectly normal to me, for I was one. In fact, I was the daughter of the Sea King just mentioned. I lived in that beautiful castle with my father, grandmother, and my sisters.
And yet, it was my fondest wish to swim close to the shore in order to see what there was to see.
Oh, I had seen people before, men mostly. My sisters and I loved to lie on the rocks and icebergs, admire our tails (which were quite beautiful, green and blue and decorated with oyster shells) and sing our songs to the ships going by, that men might appreciate our fine voices. Sometimes, the sailors would look for us and then their ships crashed into the rocks and sank. Usually, the men died. My sister Mariel said it couldn’t be helped. Still, I felt terrible and tried not to sing when any human could hear.
But I was a mermaid. Mermaids sang. So I comforted myself that the dead men’s bodies would be food for all sea creatures. It was scant consolation, though, for I knew they would have families missing them, families who would wait and wonder, perhaps forever.
Once, I saw a man cast adrift. He was grabbed onto the ship’s mast and hung from it for many hours, long after his companions had perished. Then, he slid down to the water and tried to paddle toward shore. I wished I could help him, but I was then only thirteen, and contact between humans and mermaids was strictly forbidden. So I could only watch as he struggled and floundered in the darkening sea. Eventually, he became tired and stopped paddling. All the while, he repeated the same words, “Help me, Lord, help me.” But finally, even this became too difficult, and he was silent.
I thought him dead, and I swam closer. Our eyes met. He saw me. I froze and then started to swim away.
His weak voice called me back.
“Wait! Are you an angel?” He asked it in a voice so slight I at first thought it was only the rolling of the waves or the cries of the birds who were already pecking at his shipmates’ eyes.
I could not answer.
He said, “Please, angel, take my hand. Pray with me at the hour of my death.”
He would die, I knew, so there was no harm in obeying him. No one would know. I swam closer and reached out my hand. I did not know what an angel was, but if it comforted him to believe me one, I saw no harm.
My hands’ touch seemed to renew his sapped strength. He started saying words, many words I could not understand. In the end, he said, “Dear Lord, save my soul.”
He looked toward the red sky with an expression of great peace upon his face.
And then, he let go of my hand and sank beneath the churning waves.
I felt sad, as I always felt when I saw the sailors die. Yet I was less sad than usual, for this young man seemed ready to go.
The wreck was below me, and I swam around in it, looking at the interesting human objects. Yet I did not pillage from it. We never did. “A mermaid takes nothing without giving something in return,” my father had told me, and as I had nothing to give, I took nothing.
During the days the followed, I could not stop thinking about the word: angel. I did not know what that meant, but I felt it was good. So I determined to ask my grandmother about it.
I lived with my sisters, my father, and my grandmother. My mother was killed when I was just a child, by a fisherman’s net. She managed to escape it, but by the time she did, her heart was too weak. She died and turned to seafoam, as all merfolk do when we die. I saw it happen. First, she was there. Then, only her shape, outlined in rainbow bubbles. Then, the bubbles dissipated, and she was gone. For weeks after, I thought I saw her eye, the color of mother-of-pearl, her ear like an abalone shell. But soon, I had to admit she was no more.
Still, my grandmother was like a mother to me, so that night, over a dinner of lobster, I asked her my question.
“Grandmother, what is an angel?”
Surprise arched one gray eyebrow, and I feared I had said the wrong thing. “Doria, wherever did you hear such a word?”
Now I knew I had said the wrong thing. My sister Marina frowned at me. Clearly, angel was a word no thirteen-year-old mermaid should know.
“Answer me,” my grandmother said. “You have not been consorting with humans, have you? If the humans find out that we are real, they may steal us, make us a display, or worse—execute us for the crime of singing to the sailors.”
“I may have mentioned the word, Grandmother,” my sister Sirena said quickly. “I believe I may have heard it when I was ashore.”
Clever Sirena! All merfolk were allowed to visit the shore, very discreetly, when they were fifteen. Sirena had just had that birthday.
“But,” she continued, “I don’t know what it means. Do you know, Grandmother?”
Thus mollified, my grandmother nodded her blue-haired head and said, “Indeed. An angel, or a Daughter of the Air, is the embodiment of a human’s immortal soul.”
Soul? Now I was more confused than ever.
She must have seen it in my look, for she said, “Humans, when they die, do not turn to foam as we do. While their body turns to dust or fish food, there is a separate part of them called a soul. It contains their heart and their mind, their ‘spirit,’ they say, and while their body may die, the soul lives forever.”
“Forever!” No wonder, then, that the sailor was unafraid of sinking below the sea.
“And angels,” my grandmother continued, “are believed by some to be souls that have grown wings, kindhearted souls who watch over the living. They wear beautiful dresses and golden crowns on their heads, and they have long, beautiful golden hair…”
“Like me?” I fingered my own golden locks.
“Indeed,” my grandmother said. “And blue eyes like yours too.”
“And … and would they help the living…?” I remembered the sailor’s words: “… at the hour of my death.”
My grandmother, who was very wise, nodded. “Some believe these Daughters of the Air bring the soul to heaven, a kingdom in the sky.”
A kingdom in the sky! From that day on, whenever I saw a shipwreck, I made it my aim to find the dying sailors and act as an angel, holding their hands and comforting them as they died. Even as I watched them thrash and suffer, freeze and drown, even as I imagined the despair of the human women and children who would wait for them on shore, I envied them. These men, the lowliest as well as the highest, had a soul, an “immortal soul,” as my grandmother had said, which meant they would live forever, simply because they were human. I imagined the kingdom in the sky as being much like our kingdom beneath the water. But where our kingdom was composed of coral and the shells of dead sea creatures, theirs would be made of clouds. Where ours was all darkness, theirs would be bathed in light.
I wanted to go there. More than that, I wanted to live forever and be an angel, a Daughter of the Air.
When I told my sisters this, they laughed. “That is nonsense,” Mariel said. “We mermaids are the most beautiful creatures in the sea, which takes up more than half the earth’s surface. Their world is a land of bad smells and rocky places!”
“A place where the sun blazes and the night air freezes the water,” agre
ed Marina. “Far better to be a mermaid, even for our short time.”
I pretended to agree with them, but secretly, I longed to see the beauty of the shore.
Finally, finally my fifteenth birthday came. On that day, I swam with my sisters as close to shore as I could. Then they left me to make the rest of the way myself.
“Will you not come with me?” I asked Marina and Sirena, Mariel, Damarion, and Meredith.
“We have seen it once,” said Meredith. “That is enough.” And they waved their good-byes.
At first, I was scared to proceed without them. But soon, curiosity took hold, and I swam closer.
Nearer the shore, I saw many things, tiny boats with little white sails that that bobbed merrily atop the waves. People waded in, strangely dressed in such billowing clothes that, at first, I believed they were angels. But on closer view, I saw that they had neither crowns nor wings and, in fact, were very much alive. No. This must be how female humans looked. They shrieked in fear when the smallest wave hit them, then collapsed in giggles.
I dared not swim too near, lest they see me. I dove under the water and swam far away, pausing sometimes to glance at the fisherman and the tidy, tiny houses that lined the seaside.
Finally, I found what I sought. It was the building that most resembled our mansions beneath the waves. Like our homes, it was constructed of coral and rock and stood much taller than the other buildings, its spires reaching into the clouds. Unlike our homes, the openings in the side were filled with multicolored jewels, and these jewels formed pictures.
And one of those pictures—I was certain of it—was an angel. She was a beautiful woman clad in white. Her wings of gold were silhouetted against the bright blue sky. The light glinted off her, and she sparkled.
I floated, staring, for the longest time, until a voice interrupted my reverie.
“Hey, would you looka that, Mama?”
“What, dear?” another voice said.
“Over by the rocks. It’s a mermaid!”