Siren Sisters

by Dana Langer

  “Yes,” Lily says. “How could we forget? You tell that story, like, every day.”

  I slide my hand over the now-healed elbow, which still hurts sometimes when it’s cold out or about to rain. “I really miss it.”

  “Well, I don’t see how. Every time I turn around you’re upside down or doing cartwheels.”

  “I found her hanging in the coat closet last week,” Lula reports. “She’s like a bat.”

  “That’s not the same. I don’t understand why. I mean, don’t you sometimes just want to be normal?”

  They all exchange glances and then Lily sighs dramatically. “Whatever. You’re just jealous because you can’t do it yet. You can’t sing like we can.”

  “Oh, come on,” Lara says. “You don’t have to be so mean about it. She’s still just a child.”

  “I’m not a child!” As I say the words, I’m aware of how childish I sound. Well, too late. I climb out of bed and stomp into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I turn on the tap, but I can still hear them talking about me over the rush of water. They want me to grow up. They’re tired of me being “so sensitive and immature,” always whining about being tired or cold or having to quit gymnastics.

  The first time I said I felt sad about a ship we’d wrecked, Lily just rolled her eyes. “You don’t get it, Lolly.”

  “So explain it to me.”

  “Don’t be a loser.”

  “I’m not a loser. I just feel bad.”

  “Well, that pretty much makes you a loser.”

  There was a time when Lily and I were like mirrors of each other. We were both born during freak snowstorms in September, only one year apart, and people always thought we were twins. Sometimes, we’d pretend it was true. We’d dress alike and sleep in the same bed and speak to each other in a language that no one else could understand.

  But Lily started having problems after our mom died, and she had to meet with a lot of doctors and take a lot of tests. Anyway, it turned out she’s actually some sort of genius, and they decided to move her up to ninth grade. She got to become a siren, a waitress, and a high school student all in the same year, and now it’s like she’s determined to prove she’s worthy of all that maturity, which seems to involve being really mean all the time and acting like she barely knows me.

  I wait a few minutes until I’m sure they’ve gone, and then I braid my hair, splash water on my face, and head downstairs. I pull a ripped wool sweater on over the leggings and T-shirt I slept in the night before, and I shove my feet into an old pair of rain boots that are too big for me. Our closets are all in tangles, and it’s impossible to tell who anything belongs to. I think this sweater was my mom’s. I think the boots are Lily’s.

  Lily is already in the truck, and leaning on the horn.

  Lula puts on a denim jacket and pulls her long hair free from the collar. She grabs an armload of textbooks and rushes out the door.

  Lara is still pouring her coffee into a thermos. She gives me a quick, worried smile as she reaches for her keys. “Your hair’s starting to change.” She tugs on my braid.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that it’s starting to get lighter, you know, like ours.”

  “Does it look really weird?”

  “Well, we can always bleach it for you, but it might be better just to let it grow in naturally. It’s sort of a pretty color.”

  “I liked it the way it was.”

  Lily leans on the horn again, and Lara gives me another crooked smile. “All set?”

  I nod and sling my schoolbag, a slouchy, multicolored tote bag I found in the attic last summer, over my shoulder. “All set.”

  On my way out the door, I catch sight of my reflection in the hall mirror. The glass is all smoky and warped, but still, I can see it. My hair is mostly dark, the way it’s always been, but the platinum is creeping in from the ends. It’s a bright, bleached, electric-looking shade, and I can begin to see her then, my full siren self. She’s just a little taller than I am now, and she has hair the color of lightning.

  Chapter

  2

  Their song, though irresistibly sweet, was no less sad . . .

  —Walter Copland Perry

  We all attend Sunrise County Public Schools, which is a conglomeration of five regional schools, and Lara drives us there, smushed like sardines, in Dad’s old pickup truck. The truck always smells like smoke and peppermint and isn’t meant to have more than three passengers, so I sit half on Lula’s lap. My sisters are all in high school now, but I just started middle school, so they have to drop me off first. On our way, Lily turns on the radio, and they all start singing along. They harmonize with each other so well, it’s like they share a brain. I just sit there and look out the window.

  We pass the library, the elementary school, and the village green. And then we pass the new graveyard and I hold my breath.

  The new graveyard is located in the center of town, near the town hall and the Presbyterian church. It’s surrounded by a wrought iron fence and full of trimmed hedges and big gleaming tombstones. It is a very nice cemetery. Still, we prefer the old graveyard.

  The old graveyard is set back in the forest on a hill, and most of the gravestones are crumbling and half-broken, irregular and misshapen like a set of crooked teeth. Our mother, especially, thought it was beautiful. “All those poor exiled souls,” she used to say. “The witches and wanderers. Unwelcome, even in death.” She’d take us there and play her guitar sometimes, and we’d lie in the grass and my sisters would sing, and we’d eat the wild strawberries that grew up between the gaps in the stone wall. Since she died, though, we haven’t been back there at all.

  We pull up outside the main entrance of the school, and Lula tilts the rearview mirror to apply her lipstick. I swing the passenger door open wide, and Lara passes me my bag. “Do you have everything?”

  “I think so. My stomach sort of hurts.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “I wish I was going with you guys.”

  Lula grabs my hand. “Make a fist!” I do, and she uses her lipstick to draw a bright pink heart on the top of my hand.

  “What are you doing?”

  “So you can keep us with you all the time,” she says. “So you won’t be afraid.”

  I slide down from the truck and wave to them.

  “Have a good day!”

  They beep the horn a few times to say goodbye, and then they pull away.

  Without my sisters around, I always feel a lot smaller. Or maybe it’s just that the world seems a lot bigger. I shoulder my bag and climb the front steps, and then I push open the heavy double doors and hurry inside. I’m definitely late.

  After the bell rings, the main hallway at school transforms into the loneliest place in the world. It’s like being on Mars. All of the classroom doors are already shut, and a sea of checkerboard floor stretches before me. It’s so quiet that I can hear the fluorescent lights buzzing, and the ticking of the clock on the wall. 8:20. It’s only the fourth week of school and I’ve already been late seven times.

  I hurry past the big corkboard that announces important events, including the upcoming folk festival and sailing tryouts, and that features a picture of the school’s mascot, the Lobster, beneath the school’s slogan: SUNRISE MIDDLE SCHOOL—EXPLORING NEW DEPTHS!

  Each spring, Sunrise Middle School hosts its annual Lobsterfest fund-raiser, and all of the eighth graders dress up in bright red lobster suits and serve people corn on the cob. You’d think at Lobsterfest people would notice that a red lobster is a cooked lobster and realize it shouldn’t be smiling or serving anybody corn, but if they do, they don’t seem to mind. As our dad always says, reality isn’t nearly as important in this town as tradition.

  I hook a right at the water fountain, and I try to run in Lily’s too-big rubber boots without making too much noise or tripping over my bag. Still, just as I’m about to reach the doorway of my classroom, the boots get the better of me, and the bag swings forward arou
nd my waist and the weight of it drags me right over onto the floor. I fall hard on my elbow. Pain shoots through my arm, and all I want to do is curl up and hide in the supply closet for the rest of the day. But that’s not a thing you can attempt around here more than once. In fact, as I found out last week, you can get in a lot of trouble if you do.

  First period is history, and Ms. Cross is already standing at the blackboard. She’s got our textbook, The American Vision, Volume One: New England, propped open in one hand and yellow chalk dust all over her pants. As usual, her pants are tucked into waterproof boots, like she’s ready to go duck hunting at a moment’s notice, and everybody’s scrambling to keep up with the notes. She doesn’t even say anything about me being late; she just takes off her owl glasses and gives me her disappointed look. Then she pops the glasses back on her face and picks up her chalk. “All right! Where were we, scholars?”

  The thing about Ms. Cross is that her ancestors were witnesses for the prosecution during a famous witch trial in Maine and she’s never really gotten over it. She teaches history now with this sort of supernatural determination, as if it were her destiny, as if every time she tells the story to another group of kids, she’s getting closer somehow to setting things right and erasing the stain on her family’s history.

  Emma Bishop, my mortal enemy, already has her hand up, and she’s waving it around, desperate to be called on.

  “Yes, Miss Bishop?”

  “We were discussing Judge Bishop’s ruling in the trial of Hannah Martin.”

  Unlike Ms. Cross, Emma harbors no remorse whatsoever about her own family’s ruthlessness during the witch trials. In fact, ruthlessness is a trait that she, newly appointed captain of our middle school’s gymnastics team, seems to share with her infamous ancestor.

  “Yes. Now, look.” Ms. Cross taps her chalk against a map of Maine. “The thing to remember when we talk about witches is always this issue of who gets labeled a witch and why. You see, sometimes labels tell us less about the person being labeled and more about the culture that assigns them a label in the first place.”

  Last week, in preparation for the Salt and Stars Folk Festival, we skipped ahead in The American Vision, all the way to chapter 35, to a section called “Multiculturalism: Folklore and Rituals Around the World.” Ms. Cross told us to pay special attention to the similarities between the rituals we found there because they prove that “some questions are universal and essential to the human experience.” My favorite was the Japanese Obon festival, when family members light lanterns and float them on the water to guide the spirits of the dead and help them find their way home. Ms. Cross even had us make our own paper lanterns and place them around the classroom so we could see what they looked like.

  I heard some parents complained about that unit, but I thought it was the best we’d ever done.

  The worst was chapter 1, “New Beginnings,” which was about colonists coming over from England seeking religious freedom and a better life. I swear, we couldn’t get through one single paragraph without Emma announcing which prominent colonial figures she was related to.

  “I have a very historical family,” she told us.

  “I mean, who doesn’t?” I muttered.

  But I knew what she meant. She meant she has the kind of family that gets written about in a textbook.

  I kept thinking we’d eventually get to something on my own ancestors, but the further we read in chapter one, the bleaker it looked. In the end, all we got was one small sidebar titled “Native Americans,” which might as well have been titled “Magical Tree Sprites” for all the useful information it provided. I mean, I’ve never met my mother’s family, but I do know that they are members of the Penobscot Nation and that they currently live on a reservation outside Old Town, not too far from Starbridge Cove. Also, I’m pretty sure their ancestors didn’t just magically appear in the forest when the colonists arrived. Like, I’m sure they had their own things going on, just like the colonists did. Things they worried about, and things they loved, and things they were building, and things that scared them. We just never read about that in school.

  Right now we’re up to chapter 3: “Witchcraft Comes to New England.”

  “Now, let’s return to the deposition of Samuel Peach. You will find his original testimony, in Colonial English, reprinted in your textbook on page eighty-two. For now, to expedite our discussion, I will read you an abridged version.” Ms. Cross pushes her glasses farther up the bridge of her nose and begins to read: “ ‘Sworn May the eleventh: 1692:The deponent saw Hannah Martin come in at the window. She was in her hood and scarf and the same dress that she was in before at meeting the same day. Being come in she drew up his body and lay upon him about an hour and half in all which time this deponent could not stir nor speak, but feeling himself beginning to be loosened or lightened he put out his hand among the clothes and took hold of her hand and brought it up to his mouth and bit three of the fingers (as he judge) to the breaking of the bones.’ ”I

  “Now.” She looks up. “Who believes this testimony? Anyone?”

  “Judge Bishop did.”

  “That’s right.” She takes a step closer and her glasses slide a little down her nose.

  “But what about you, Miss Salt? Do you believe Samuel Peach found Hannah Martin in his bedroom that night and broke three of her fingers, bit right through them, because she cast a spell on him that he was trying to escape?”

  “No.” I pull my braid back over my shoulder and start twining my hair around my finger. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Well, I should think not. And what made her so vulnerable, to him and to the town’s hysteria?”

  “She . . . well, she lived by herself, and she didn’t have any family in the village. Also, she wasn’t born there or in England. She was from Barbados.”

  “And what about the trial? What exactly did Judge Bishop have to say about the whole thing?”

  I glance up. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, did you finish reading the chapter? On what are you basing your information, Miss Salt?”

  Emma turns around in her seat. “Maybe she’s a witch.”

  Ms. Cross keeps her eyes on me. “Miss Salt, take out your book. And for goodness’ sake, take out something to write with! How do you people ever expect to learn anything if you don’t have the proper materials? This is middle school.”

  I take another deep breath and open my bag. As a siren-in-training, I’m always losing things and running late, so I use the same bag for everything. Inside, I have the usual school stuff: binders, folders, a collection of pink pens, crumpled papers, tissues, a travel mug, vanilla hand cream, cherry ChapStick, watermelon gum, hair bands, and gym shoes. But then I also have my siren stuff, things we’ve scavenged from shipwrecks for the Sea Witch: buttons, and sea glass, and antique jewelry. Plus a few stolen library books to read if I get bored during algebra. When I finally locate my copy of The American Vision, the entire thing is coffee stained and ripped apart.

  Ms. Cross has completely abandoned the board and is now standing directly in front of me, staring in horror. “Miss Salt,” she says, “that bag is bigger than you are. How do you ever find anything?”

  “Yeah,” Emma agrees. “And her American Vision is a total disaster.”

  “That’s quite enough, Miss Bishop,” Ms. Cross shushes her. “You keep your eyes on your own American Vision. Now, Miss Salt, I’m going to need to see you after school.” She pops the glasses back on. “And for goodness’ sake, don’t be late!”

  “Okay.” I pull the rubber band from my braid and let my hair fall in front of my face.

  The bell sounds then, and class is over. That bell is another thing I hate about middle school. First of all, it’s extremely alarming. You’d think there was a major bank robbery in progress every time it goes off, which is exactly eight times per day. Also, when it rings, everybody stops what they’re doing and starts shoving books and binders back in their bags, no matter what�
�s going on. Even if the teacher is telling you something important.

  “Students!” Ms. Cross holds up her hands. “Wait until I dismiss you, please.” But it’s useless. That bell is more powerful than any teacher, and the teachers sort of know it.

  We all pour out into the hallway and stream along to our next class. For me, second period is gym, and I dread it. It’s not the physical activity that I mind; it’s the ten minutes we have to spend changing into sneakers and shorts. The thing about our type of sirens is that in addition to our silvery hair, we all have these gross green scales on the bottom of our feet. As we get older, our scales get brighter and thicker, and then they extend out in a spiral pattern and wrap all the way up our ankles. According to my research, the scales are supposed to make it easier for us to climb and navigate the slippery rocks of the northern New England coastline. They do not, however, make it easier to navigate a middle school locker room.

  I think my scales are basically the most embarrassing thing in the world, and I spend a significant amount of time planning my outfits to conceal them. Of course, my sisters wear their scales proudly. They tell everyone they’re some kind of artsy tattoo, and everybody believes it and admires them. Up at the high school, girls are painting snakeskin patterns on their ankles and gluing green glitter on top of their feet. But I’m not nearly brave enough to try that myself. I stick to kneesocks.

  The locker room is all concrete cinder blocks and steel lockers, with wire mesh over the windows and clocks. It’s sort of like a jail cell, except the air is thick with the scent of artificial fruit from everybody’s body lotion. I always change in the corner with all the girls who have stuff to hide, like if they’re not wearing a bra yet or they don’t use deodorant or shave their legs.

  Today, instead of a real gym class, we’re having a dress rehearsal for the festival. The whole school is going to be marching in the parade and participating in an interpretive dance choreographed by our own Coach Bouchard. Each grade has a different theme, and although he probably wouldn’t admit it, I’m fairly certain that Coach Bouchard assigned us all parts based on our personalities and physical characteristics. The seventh-grade theme is “Sea Mammals and Shellfish.” I am playing the role of a snail.