Indecisively, Gwen stood in her underwear. Lasiandra called back a simple reminder, “It’s just us girls.”
Slipping out of the last of her garments, Gwen waded into the water and left all of her clothes where they would be waiting and dry when she reemerged from the water.
The lagoon was pleasantly warm. She wouldn’t have imagined it would be such a mellow, sweet temperature. “Come swim with me!” Lasiandra gaily called.
Gwen swam sloppily out to the deeper waters that Lasiandra was retreating to. Her feet no longer touched the sandy bottom of the lagoon, and she chased after the mermaid. Gwen kept her face out of the water, trying to remain oriented and follow Lasiandra as she drew Gwen farther and farther out.
Before Gwen could get any closer, Lasiandra dipped down under the waters, seamlessly falling out of view and into the blue mystery of the lagoon.
Gwen gasped and watched for her, her heart beating a little quicker with every second that Lasiandra remained out of sight. She jerked her head in every direction, but Lasiandra was certainly underwater. Gwen couldn’t bring herself to duck her head under. There was one thing she knew she needed, and that was air. The idea of submerging herself did not sit well with Gwen.
A shadow darted by, and Gwen saw the watery silhouette of Lasiandra so near to her she should have been able to touch the mermaid, but she stayed under. Treading water and half-hoping to lightly kick the mermaid, Gwen watched the dark form circle her several times. Why wasn’t she surfacing? What was she doing under the water?
A hand touched her leg. Reflexively, Gwen yelped, even though she knew it couldn’t be anything beside the mermaid who had sworn not to hurt her. The hand was gone as quickly as it had appeared. It was almost as if Lasiandra had accidentally brushed against her, but it happened again. Gwen felt a hand slip over her knee just a second before the quick mermaid was behind her. Fingers brushed across her bottom, and a tail caressed her bare feet in a single sweeping motion.
She gasped deeper though and rigidly stopped moving altogether as she felt a hand on her inner thigh. The hand did not leave her thigh until another hand was already placed just below her belly button.
Gwen panicked at this intimate examination of her body, quickly paddling backward to get away from the mermaid. Lasiandra surfaced. “Is something wrong?”
Gwen studied the innocent look on the mermaid’s face. Lasiandra seemed confused by Gwen up close. “No,” she lied. “Nothing’s wrong. I was just wondering when you were going to come up again.”
Lasiandra and Gwen treaded water for a brief, silent, and unendurably uncomfortable moment. “Are all landmaids like you?”
“More or less,” Gwen answered. It occurred to her that this was probably the first time Lasiandra had ever really seen a girl. Unclothed before her, Gwen was putting a different sort of anatomy on display for her. Did mermaids wonder why people covered their legs? Mermaids never covered their tails.
Gwen tried not to let this sudden realization become an awkward thought. Lasiandra stared at her, unremittingly interested in the shape and form of her body, and yet it didn’t feel inappropriate, only unusual. There was nothing sexual in Lasiandra’s expression, and for all Gwen knew, Neverland was a place completely devoid of all sense of sexuality. What business would mermaids have knowing the details of what Gwen had learned so long ago in middle school health class? This realization raised questions for Gwen, though, too.
“Lasiandra, where do mermaids come from?”
The mermaid flicked back her blonde hair, glittering with drops of water, and retied the rubbery kelp strings of her halter top. “Falling stars. When they fall on land, they burn out, but when they fall in water, they sink slowly and solidify for several days. They break open when they hit the ocean floor… but if it’s far enough down, they’ll have a chance to hatch before they crash to the bottom. These are the eggs mermaids are born of.” Lasiandra explained it with graceful ease while staring at the sky. She rocketed her eyes back to Gwen. “Why? Where do people come from?”
Obviously, Lasiandra had no understanding of sexuality, something which seemed radically foreign to Gwen’s mind since she had received the sex talk nearly five years ago. Gwen didn’t know if it would have been a good idea or bad idea to explain the mechanics of human origins, but Gwen did know that she was not going to be the one to broach the subject with Lasiandra. “Hospitals,” she answered. “They’re big buildings where sick people go to get better and couples go to get babies.”
Lasiandra’s ears pricked up. “Couples? Why would it take two to fetch something as small as a baby?”
Gwen swore within her mind, realizing she’d given away more than she intended to. “People tend to go together. It’s exciting.” She tried to shrug it off as if there was nothing more to say.
Lasiandra’s mind seemed removed from the conversation, as if she were trying to decode what Gwen was saying and draw a more concrete truth out of it. The mermaid asked no more questions though. “Come swim with me. I have such wonderful things to show you, Gwen.”
“I don’t think I can keep up.”
Lasiandra swam closer to her and turned around. “Hold onto me. Ride on my back, and I will take you to the most fantastic places you’ve ever imagined could rest underwater.”
“I can’t breathe underwater like you can,” Gwen reminded her.
Gwen felt Lasiandra’s webbed fin brush against the bottoms of her feet as they both treaded water so near to each other. “I know that, silly girl, but here.” Lasiandra’s soft hand took Gwen’s and put it on her shoulder. “Just squeeze my shoulder when you need to come up for another breath and we’ll surface.”
Lasiandra’s shoulder was slick and cool, but there was nothing inherently inhuman about it. Gwen put her other hand on Lasiandra’s other shoulder. She pulled herself close to her, pressing her body against the mermaid’s bare back. Bracing herself with her knees, she bent her legs and held on as tightly as she could. Gwen tried not to let the position bother her any more than it bothered Lasiandra. She had never been so close to someone while naked, but Lasiandra didn’t even have a perception of what sexuality was. Consequently, she mistook Gwen’s shy nervousness for a fear of betrayal, not a discomfort with intimacy.
“I won’t hurt you,” she repeated. “I swear by the sky and the stars and all that they speak. You do believe me… don’t you?”
“Yes,” Gwen answered, a little apprehensively.
“Good.” Lasiandra flexed her tail, making sure she still had her full range of motion even with Gwen piggybacking on her. “I think honesty is the most important thing, don’t you?”
“It is important.”
“It’s the most important. Without it, how can you trust? How can you love?”
The fear had run its course through Gwen and left her mind clear. She thought about everything that Old Willow and Peter had told her while in Neverland. Mermaids couldn’t lie, and they knew the future through the unhatched stars and planets within the night sky. Knowing all this, a question occurred to Gwen. “Am I going to regret this?”
Lasiandra did not answer before she dove underwater, swimming away with Gwen on her back.
Gwen had grabbed a massive, startled breath before she was plunged underwater with Lasiandra. At first, she scrunched her eyes shut, but after a moment’s time underwater, she realized how silly it was to blind herself to whatever Lasiandra was swimming by.
The water was astonishingly clear. Gwen could not see so far ahead, but Lasiandra shot through the water with a baffling swiftness, bringing Gwen to the shadowy landmarks she saw in the distance. Gwen never would have guessed how deep the waters were within the lagoon. She had assumed it was akin to any other cove or bay, but it seemed it was infinitely deeper. From the bottoms of its unseeable depths, a massive, totally submerged mountain erupted up from the sea floor. Staggering upward, peaking only feet below the surface, Gwen tried to comprehend its size as Lasiandra swam around it. The scraggly surface of the d
ark mountain made it look volcanic—dangerous, but dormant.
As they came nearer to it, Lasiandra reached out and tickled starfish and anemones, putting them all into wiggling flux. A rainbow of sea life vivaciously launched into motion, baffling Gwen as she shot by it. Squeezing Lasiandra’s shoulder, she felt their direction immediately shift as they began bolting for the surface. Exploding out of the water, Lasiandra then swam on the very surface, allowing Gwen to push herself up into the air and breathe as much as she needed to before pressing herself back down against Lasiandra and taking off again.
They left the lagoon. Lasiandra swam out toward the open ocean, and Gwen felt the warm ocean current cutting against her bare body. There was so much freedom in the feeling. Gwen just wanted to bury herself in the water and never surface again.
They swam, exploring the totality of the sea’s majesty, weaving in and out of brilliant schools of fish and past creatures so impossible in appearance that Gwen didn’t know if they were a product of Neverland or merely the foreign depths of the ocean. An octopus scrambled by, a great, green stone of a turtle crossed their path, and a terrifying, grey creature dashed in and out of sight before Gwen could determine whether it was a shark. Any time Gwen was about to run out of breath, she only needed to squeeze Lasiandra’s shoulder to bring her back to the breaking point between the sea and sky. There was nothing but the surface to divide the one infinite canvass from the other, and nothing else to interrupt their spanning beauty.
Eventually, Lasiandra swam back to the lagoon. Gwen did not know how long they had been gone, only that it had seemed far too long and not nearly long enough. She brought Gwen right up to a low rock so that she could climb out of the water and begin drying on the sun-warmed stone. Gwen wrung out her long hair, but she could do nothing more to expedite the process of drying off. The warm breeze and glow of the sun did their work fast enough on their own, and Lasiandra and Gwen talked in the meantime. Lasiandra still had questions.
“What are boys like?” she asked, flipping casually beside the rock Gwen was spread out on.
“Well, you know Peter,” Gwen replied.
“But they can’t all be like him. I mean the kind you find where you come from.”
“Oh, they’re not so different.” She stared up at the clouds that were slowly drifting in from the ocean. Flat on her back, Gwen bore her body up to the sky and mused on Lasiandra’s question.
“But they must be interesting, at least some of them. Aren’t there any you care for?”
“Well, there’s one,” Gwen answered, folding her hands over her bare stomach. A smile eased onto her lips.
“What’s his name?”
Gwen hadn’t given him much thought since she landed in Neverland. Suddenly, homecoming dances, parties, and math classes seemed like the most trivial of events. “Jay,” she answered.
“That’s a letter, not a name.”
“It’s his name,” she assured her. “Jay Hoek.”
“Tell me more.”
Gwen’s giddiness was rediscovered within herself as soon as she said his name out loud. She was happy to tell Lasiandra. “He’s a year older than me, but I’m in his algebra class because I skipped a year in math. We pass notes in class, but I don’t know… He’s really handsome. He’s got this dark hair, but bright blue eyes… eyes almost like yours. He’s on the football team, but he’s not, like, a huge guy. He’s just a really cool boy who’s funny and knows all these bad jokes. He hasn’t been seeing anyone since he broke up with his girlfriend last spring, but the homecoming dance is happening after next week and I'm sure he'll ask someone.”
Gwen was suddenly aware, not just of how much she missed Jay, but of how much she missed having Claire and Katie to talk to about teenage girl things. She wouldn’t have even minded if Jay asked swim-team Jenny to the homecoming dance, so long as Claire and Katie would be there for Gwen to gossip with about it. Fortunately, everything would be back to normal by tomorrow. Gwen would go home and restore her grip on reality. There was too much she loved about it to leave it behind, and the potential that it housed seemed even more limitless than the miracles of Neverland.
“Do you love him?” Lasiandra asked.
Gwen smiled at the sky. For all the times that she had talked with Claire about Michael and Jay, “love” had never come up. It was a crush. Wasn’t that the appropriate term to use for teenage romances and young, fluttering hearts? Things were more poetic out here, beyond the reach of reason and prudence. She didn’t answer Lasiandra, but she did realize the answer. I think I do love him, Gwen thought, still beaming at the sky.
Lasiandra spoke then, striving to sound nonchalant and betraying herself with her own casual tone. “Mermaids can grant wishes, you know.”
Gwen turned her head and saw Lasiandra playing with her hair, disengaged in an attempt to feign disinvestment. “Really?”
“Mmhm. Your heart’s desire. We can call your deepest dreams down from the stars they fly to.”
“So I could just ask you for anything?” Gwen asked, her idle curiosity quickly taking on a life of its own.
“That’s not quite how it works.” Lasiandra stroked the surface of the water with her hands, as if treading water humanly. “In fact, you couldn’t tell me what it was. You’d just have to ask me to fetch it from the stars—whatever you want most in the world.”
“And just like that, you could give me whatever I truly wanted?”
“Well,” Lasiandra admitted, “I couldn’t just give it to you… but if you were willing to return the favor, and fetch me my heart’s desire, well, certainly that would be a worthwhile exchange.”
Gwen laughed, this time out of anxiousness. “And what’s your heart’s desire, Lasiandra?”
“Oh, I can’t tell you,” she emphatically responded. “Not any more than you could tell me what yours was. It breaks the spell if you say it out loud. My dreams hide out of reach on land, but I could tell you where to find them. All I would need is a sky glass. I'm sure you've seen them somewhere in your world, the beautiful glasses that show you what is? We could do it for each other, Gwen, and have everything we want together.”
The mermaids’ greed for mirrors was somewhat explained by this. Gwen couldn't begin to imagine how all these things were tied together, but clearly mirrors became powerful magical tools in the aquatic hands of mermaids. She had an unsettling urge to hand over her compact to Lasiandra.
The proposition smacked of being too good to be true. Gwen believed it was possible, but she doubted that it could come without a price. She remembered what Peter had told her about mermaids and their mysterious desires.
“It’s a nice thought.” Gwen stood up on the rock, feeling fully dry at last. “But I don’t think I’m ready for my heart’s desire.”
“How can you not be ready to have what you want?” Lasiandra demanded. Gwen walked over the rocks, minding her balance as she trekked to the shore, and Lasiandra swam to keep up with her. Gwen shrugged her bare shoulders as she made her way back. There was no answer for why there was quite literally nothing Lasiandra could offer her to sway her. Lasiandra, obviously surprised and frustrated by this, announced, “Isn’t there something you want?
Considering that thought and remembering the wisdom Old Willow had imparted, Gwen answered, “Oh, I’m sure I want something… I just don’t think I know what it is.”
“Then all the more reason to get it from the stars, Gwen. They know what you can’t see. Why follow dreams you don’t understand when you could catch them here and now with my help?”
“I guess I just like the idea of finding out what I want the old-fashioned way.”
“But when will you know what you want, Gwen?” Lasiandra begged, trying to get the landmaid to see how foolish she was being.
Gwen smirked as she stepped onto the shore. She was perfectly dry now; the sand didn’t even stick to the bottoms of her feet. “When I’m older,” she answered, confident in that much.
Gwen redressed and
shook out her hair, which was still slightly damp. The sky had completely clouded over at this point, and there was no longer a sun to bask in. Once she was fully clothed, Gwen pulled the three mangoes out of her satchel and gave them all to Lasiandra in gratitude for guiding her through Neverland’s waters.
Lasiandra took them hungrily, but there was no longer a playful spark in her eye. Her smile had fallen, and her charms were no longer employed to guile Gwen into security and familiarity. Gwen could not know what was running through the mermaid’s mind, but she saw the stilted, half-hidden look of melancholy, and knew that this was not how the beautiful Lasiandra had intended for this meeting to go.
“Goodbye, Lasiandra,” Gwen said, waving as the mermaid laid back and slowly swam away, her hands full of the mangoes she balanced on her stomach.
“Until we meet again, Gwen.”
“I don’t think that we ever will.”
“Oh, we will,” Lasiandra replied, her feminine voice only partially obscuring her bitterness. “The stars have whispered that much to me. We will meet again, under circumstances you cannot yet conceive.”
“That doesn’t sound good.” It wasn’t the words, but how Lasiandra spoke them that put Gwen on edge.
“Oh, don’t worry. You’ve swam with me in the depths of Neverland’s waters, you’ve brought me mangoes, and I’ve given you my scale… you can believe me when I tell you what the planets themselves know—we are going to be great friends, in the end.”
It was an amicable promise, but Gwen had never heard anything that sounded so much like a threat.
A shudder struck Gwen squarely in the spine. “The end of what?”
Lasiandra’s smile preyed on Gwen’s mind. “Silly girl, have you forgotten that there’s a war going on? You’d better hurry back before it finds you, Gwen.”
The Neverland Wars Page 17