Purrmaids #6

by Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen

  Ms. Harbor ducked behind her desk to grab something. “I’m going to give each group two bags. Use the green ones to collect anything for recycling. Use the red ones for trash.”

  “What do we take to prove we found things that we can’t move?” Adrianna asked.

  “You take notes!” Ms. Harbor exclaimed. “Come back tomorrow and describe what you found. Your notes will be all the proof I need.”

  When the school bell rang, Ms. Harbor purred, “The best thing you can do tonight is learn to pay attention to all the things around you.”

  “We can do that, right?” Shelly said.

  Coral nodded. “As long as the three of us work together,” she said, “I think we’ll be just fine.”

  “Fine?” Angel said. “No, together we’ll be paw-some!”

  The purrmaids giggled and headed off to Coral’s house. They swam to her kitchen for a snack. “We need to decide where to go for the scavenger hunt,” Coral said.

  “Can we eat first?” Shelly asked.

  “I’m glad you girls are hungry,” Papa said. He held out a tray of food.

  “Sea cucumber sushi!” Coral shouted. “My favorite!”

  “And shrimp salad!” Shelly added. “I love shrimp salad.”

  “And I love all of it!” Angel laughed.

  The girls began to eat. Papa asked, “How was sea school today? Did you do anything fin-teresting?”

  Coral’s mouth was full so she mumbled, “Mm-hmm.” She swallowed her mouthful and said, “Our homework is a scavenger hunt.”

  “That sounds fun!” Papa said. “What will you be hunting for?”

  “I’ll show you the instructions,” Coral said. She opened her bag to find the sheet. But she’d been in such a hurry to pack up that the paper had gotten stuffed somewhere—and now she couldn’t find it! “It should be here.” She pawed through the bag. “What if I lost it?”

  “It has to be in there,” Shelly said. “I watched you put it away.”

  “Just dump out your bag,” Angel suggested. “That’s what I’d do.”

  Coral never liked making a mess. But she wanted to find the scavenger-hunt instructions quickly. So she spilled her bag out onto the kitchen table.

  “Here it is!” Angel cried, holding up the sheet.

  Coral reached for something else instead—her letter from that morning. “I forgot about this,” she said.

  “What is it?” Shelly asked.

  “It’s snail mail,” Coral said. “For me.”

  “That’s so exciting!” Angel exclaimed. “I’ve never gotten snail mail addressed to me.”

  “Me neither,” Shelly added.

  Coral looked at the envelope. Her name was written clearly on the front. She turned it around to see who sent it.

  Sirena Cheval

  Seadragon Bay

  “It’s from Sirena!” Coral squealed. She held the envelope out for her friends to see.

  “Sirena?” Angel asked. “From Siren Island?”

  “It does say Seadragon Bay,” Shelly said. “It must be her.”

  “We were just talking about her today,” Coral said. “I wonder why she wrote to me.”

  “Read it!” Shelly and Angel said together.

  Dear Coral,

  My family and I are camping in Ponyfish Grotto on the edge of Tortoiseshell Reef this week. I know that is close to Kittentail Cove. I thought maybe you could visit me there.

  Love,

  Sirena

  P.S. I sent the same invitation to Angel and Shelly. I hope they can come, too!

  “I would love to see Sirena again!” Shelly said. Angel nodded.

  Coral frowned. “I want to see her again, too,” she said. “But when we went to Tortoiseshell Reef, we got lost.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Angel replied. “But you could also say that the last time we went to Tortoiseshell Reef, we found a shipwreck, sunken treasure, and a new friend!”

  Coral sighed. Angel was right. That trip really was paw-some. But it was also a little scary! “What about our homework?” Coral asked. “We need to do our scavenger hunt. We might not have enough time to finish that and go see Sirena.”

  Shelly scowled. “Our homework does come first,” she said.

  Angel crossed her paws and tapped her tail on the ground. Suddenly, she exclaimed, “I have a great idea! We can head toward Tortoiseshell Reef to see Sirena. On the way, we can look for the things in the scavenger hunt.”

  “Come on, Coral,” Shelly said.

  “It’ll be an exciting adventure!” Angel said.

  Coral gulped. Angel always loved an adventure. Shelly did, too—as long as it wasn’t too messy. Coral would be fine keeping things a little boring. That was safer—and it didn’t involve breaking any rules. “Can’t we find something a little less exciting?” she asked. “And a little less adventurous?”

  Angel rolled her eyes. “Oh, Coral,” she said. “Don’t be such a scaredy cat!”

  “I’m not scared!” Coral replied. “It’s just that…I don’t even know where Ponyfish Grotto is. Do you?” When her friends shook their heads, she asked, “Then how will we find Sirena?”

  “Who’s Sirena?” Papa asked. “Is she the friend you met at the Kittentail Cove Science Center?”

  Coral nodded. She told her parents all about Sirena after their visit to the Science Center. The only thing she had left out was that Sirena was a mermicorn.

  Sirena said that mermicorns liked to stay out of sight. Staying hidden was how they kept themselves safe. That’s why Coral, Shelly, and Angel had decided not to tell anyone in Kittentail Cove how to find Sirena or the mermicorn town of Seadragon Bay. They wanted the mermicorns to decide whether or not they wanted to meet any other purrmaids.

  “Sirena lives far away, but her family is camping in Ponyfish Grotto this week,” Shelly said. “We were trying to decide whether to go see them.”

  “We can even get our homework done on our way there,” Angel said.

  “But we don’t know where Ponyfish Grotto is,” Coral said. “So I don’t know if we should go.”

  “I can tell you how to get there,” Papa said. “I used to go camping in Tortoiseshell Reef when I was your age. On the edge of the reef, the rocks and coral form a deep tunnel. If you swim through the tunnel, you’ll find a geyser. My friends and I used to swim into the geyser and get flipped through the water.”

  “We’ve been there!” Coral exclaimed.

  “And we let the geyser spin us all around, too!” Angel added. “At least, I did.”

  “Fin-tastic!” Papa said. “Then you know how to get to Ponyfish Grotto.”

  Coral scratched her head. A grotto was a type of cave. “I definitely remember the tunnel,” she said. “But I don’t remember a cave anywhere nearby.”

  “That’s because there isn’t a cave,” Papa said. “Ponyfish Grotto got its name long ago, before I was born. Maybe it was a real grotto once. But unless there’s a secret entrance, now it’s just what we call the giant rocks around the tunnel.”

  “So we know exactly how to get there,” Shelly said. “We don’t have to worry about getting lost.”

  “Please, Coral,” Angel begged. “You know we can find Ponyfish Grotto and get our homework done, as long as we work together.”

  Coral bit her lip. She couldn’t let her best friends down. “Do we have the recycling bag and the trash bag?” she asked.

  “Yes!” Angel replied. She tossed the red bag over her shoulder and gave the green one to Coral.

  “And the instruction sheet?” Coral asked.

  Shelly held the page up. “Got it!” she cried. “And I have a notebook for writing things down.”

  “Let’s go, then,” Coral said. “We’ve got a lot to do!”

&
nbsp; “Have a paw-some time, girls,” Papa purred, waving goodbye.

  The purrmaids hurried to the South Canary Current. It carried them from the entrance of Kittentail Cove straight to Tortoiseshell Reef. When the girls arrived, they stopped for a moment to gaze all around. They were surrounded by elkhorns and sea fans, schools of fish and herds of sea horses.

  But today, Coral didn’t just see the natural beauty of the reef. She started to notice other things.

  There was a plastic bag floating in the water like a cloud. There were two metal cans tucked under reef rocks. There were plastic straws tangled in patches of sea grass. Almost everywhere she looked, Coral saw something that didn’t belong in the ocean.

  “It’s just like the schoolyard,” Shelly purred. “There’s so much stuff I never paid attention to before.”

  “The reef is so beautiful,” Angel said. “I guess it’s easy to ignore the things that aren’t so purr-ty.”

  “At least this makes it easier to finish our homework,” Coral said. “Are you ready to start?”

  The girls nodded. Angel took out the instructions. “We need to find two things to reuse, two things to recycle, two things to remove, and one thing to discover,” she said.

  “We have to find one other thing, too,” Coral said. “A mermicorn!”

  Angel and Shelly laughed. “You’re right, Coral,” Angel said.

  “Let’s not waste any more time,” Shelly said.

  Coral nodded. “Let’s dive in to this assignment!”

  “What do you want to collect first?” Coral asked her friends.

  “Well, I’d like to find Sirena,” Angel said. “But we have to get to the other side of Tortoiseshell Reef to reach Ponyfish Grotto.”

  “We might as well find the things on the scavenger-hunt list on the way,” Shelly said.

  Coral purred, “We should definitely remove all the dangerous garbage we see. Things like fishing nets could cause so much harm. We don’t want to leave them behind. So maybe we should start with that?”

  “Coral is right,” Angel said. “I’m starting by removing these.” She floated down to the ocean floor and scooped up some bottle caps. But then she shrieked, “EEEEEEEK!”

  “What’s wrong?” Shelly asked. She and Coral rushed to Angel’s side.

  “I don’t think all of these are garbage,” Angel said. She showed the bottle caps to the other girls. Little crab legs were poking out of them!

  “You found hermit crabs!” Coral exclaimed.

  Angel said, “I’m going to leave these little guys here.”

  “Let’s write this down as a reusable thing,” Shelly suggested.

  “Good idea,” Coral said.

  While Angel gently put the crabs back in the sand, Coral looked all around. A sea turtle swam toward a huge sea fan. Coral recognized it from their last trip to the reef. She knew they had to swim that way to reach the reef’s edge. But this time, she saw something else. There was a plastic six-pack ring wrapped around the sea fan’s fronds.

  Coral swam to the sea fan. “Look over here,” she said. She pulled the plastic off.

  “Is that a six-pack ring?” Shelly asked.

  “It is,” Coral replied. She sliced the rings open with her claw. “I’m removing this garbage right away.”

  “Speaking of garbage,” Shelly said, “how about these?” She picked up a pawful of plastic straws. “There are a lot of straws stuck in the sea grass. Animals could eat them by mistake.”

  Angel held the red trash bag open. “Toss them in here,” she said.

  The girls searched for more straws in the sea-grass beds. Coral picked up a bunch and then looked for Angel and the trash bag. That’s when she saw the plastic bag from before. It was still floating through the water. It looked like a jellyfish in the sunlight.

  Maybe that’s why the sea turtle snapped the bag up in its jaws!

  “Shelly! Angel!” Coral shouted. “Come quickly!” She pointed to the turtle. “We have to help!”

  Coral raced toward the sea turtle. But the turtle didn’t want to be caught! He clenched the plastic bag tightly and swam off.

  Most of the time, sea turtles moved very slowly. When they wanted to, though, they could swim as fast as dolphins! It was hard for the quickest purrmaids to keep up with a sea turtle at full speed. Coral knew that, and she knew she wasn’t the fastest purrmaid in the ocean. But with the turtle in danger, she wasn’t giving up!

  Luckily, Coral wasn’t alone. Angel and Shelly were there to help. Angel swam toward the turtle from the left. Shelly swam from the right. The turtle zigged one way and then zagged another. He was so busy trying to keep away from Shelly and Angel that he didn’t notice Coral—until she pulled the plastic bag out of his mouth! “Got it!” she exclaimed.

  The turtle didn’t look happy to lose his snack. But Coral had a plan. She scooped up a sea cucumber from the sand. She held the plastic bag behind her back with one paw and offered the turtle the sea cucumber with the other. “Come on, Mr. Turtle,” she purred. “Sea cucumbers taste better than plastic bags, I purr-omise.”

  The turtle sniffed at the sea cucumber. He took one small bite and then another. Soon, he snapped up the whole thing and swam away.

  “Coral!” Shelly exclaimed. “You saved him!”

  Coral smiled. “You don’t get to be a sea turtle superhero every day,” she said. “But I couldn’t have done it without the two of you.”

  “We do make a purr-fect team,” Shelly said.

  “You even found something else to remove from the reef,” Angel said.

  “That makes three—and we only needed two!” Shelly said.

  “I’m glad we cleaned it up, though,” Coral said.

  The other girls nodded, and Coral pointed toward Ponyfish Grotto. “Let’s keep going,” she said. “Maybe we can save someone else today!”

  The purrmaids swam through more of Tortoiseshell Reef. Like before, they saw many things that weren’t supposed to be in the ocean. Shelly found metal soda cans and threw them into the green recycling bag. Angel spied some glass bottles and tossed those in, too. “These can be reused as sea glass,” Angel said. “But they could be recycled, too.”

  “We found everything on the scavenger-hunt list, but we haven’t discovered anything,” Shelly said.

  “Let’s keep looking,” Coral said. She swung the green bag onto her shoulder. It was really full—and really heavy. She struggled to pull it and keep up with Shelly and Angel.

  Angel noticed that Coral was falling behind. “Let’s trade,” she said. “That bag is too heavy for someone your size.”

  Angel held out the red bag. But Coral didn’t take it. I hate being the smallest one, she thought. “I’ll be fine,” Coral said. She tried to keep swimming. But after a minute, she had to let the bag go. She sighed. “Maybe I am too little to carry this.” She stared down at her tail. “I’m too little for everything.”

  Angel patted her friend’s shoulder. “We think you’re paw-some just the way you are,” she said.

  Shelly added, “There’s nothing wrong with letting your friends help.”

  Coral shrugged and took the red bag. Even though it was lighter, she swam just a little bit slower.

  Soon, the girls were close to the edge of the reef. They saw the giant rocks that Papa said marked Ponyfish Grotto. Coral always thought the rocks were a little scary—there were so many gaps and cracks that could be hiding an octopus or an eel. But today, they looked scarier than usual. Something was blocking the sunlight, and there were more shadows than ever. “It’s so dark,” Coral said.

  Shelly pointed to the ocean above the rocks. “The kelp has grown a lot since the last time we were here.”

  “The fronds reach almost to the surface,” Coral said. “And they’re all tangled up. Only a few beams of sunligh
t can shine down through the kelp.”

  The girls looked for their mermicorn friend. “Do you see Sirena?” Angel asked.

  Shelly and Coral shook their heads. “She said she’d be here with her family,” Shelly said. “I guess that means we should find a herd of mermicorns.”

  “I have a question,” Angel said. “If mermicorns come to Tortoiseshell Reef to go camping, then why haven’t other purrmaids seen them before?”

  Coral scratched her head. “I don’t think Sirena will just be swimming out in the open,” she said. “Remember, she said mermicorns like to keep to the shadows.”

  “You’re right,” Shelly said.

  “And,” Coral continued, “this scavenger hunt has shown us that there are a lot of things in the ocean that you never see—unless you go looking for them.”

  Angel nodded. “So purrmaids have never seen mermicorns in Tortoiseshell Reef because they’ve never looked for them,” she said.

  “Well, we’re looking,” Shelly said. “So I hope we find her soon!”

  “The only thing left for our homework is something to discover,” Angel said. “Maybe Sirena can be our discovery—if she’s okay with us telling Kittentail Cove about mermicorns.”

  Coral shrugged. “It’s her decision.”

  “Of course!” Angel said. “Let’s find her and ask.”

  Coral looked all around. She didn’t see any horns or hooves. She didn’t see any rainbow tails or flowing manes. But she did see the rock-and-coral tunnel. It was mermicorn-sized—and very shadowy. “Maybe we should check there for Sirena first,” she said, pointing. “It looks like it might be a good place to hide.”

  The purrmaids floated closer to the entrance of the tunnel. They peeked inside. “It’s longer than I remember,” Angel whispered. “Darker, too.”