by D. G. Driver
“I’m in charge,” I said. “What I say goes.”
The other three nodded and then followed me up to my room where I promptly turned on my computer and opened the file with the mermaid video. I continued to buy their sincerity because there wasn’t one single comment about the authentic American Indian quilts hung all over the walls. My grandmother and her sister made them, and my parents insisted I keep them up to remind me of my heritage. I imagined Regina and Marlee’s rooms were covered with posters of celebrities. Or large mirrors. Regina and Marlee both probably had make-up tables and walk-in closets. They probably had pink desks with satin comforters on their beds, their own HD flat screen TVs and shelves of old Barbies they used to play with as girls but now just sat on display in fancy get-ups they wished they could wear. But instead of comparing or insulting, the two popular girls simply sat on the floor, leaning against my bed patiently until I was ready. Regina kept her eyes on Haley and me at the desk while Marlee grabbed a book from the bottom row of my bookshelf and read the back cover.
The size of the video on my screen was only about two inches square. Between that and the dark quality, it really was hard to tell for sure that these were pictures of mermaids and not just large fish. I told Haley that I wanted the picture brighter, with the mermaids enhanced so you could see them very well. I looked like Hell, but that part of the video couldn’t be changed, unfortunately. She dickered with it for a moment and then raised her face to squint at me.
“Your computer sucks. You know that, right?”
I cocked my head. “Does that mean you can’t do it?”
“Oh, I can do it,” Haley said. “But not with this. Hold on.”
She put up a finger signaling me to wait and then dashed out of the room. I glanced at Regina who just shrugged. “I’m not good with computers either,” she said. “Do you have a pillow I could use?”
I handed her one off my bed and she plumped it and put it behind her. Other than that she didn’t say anything else or move, choosing to inspect her nail polish. Marlee opened the book and flipped to the front page with a strange caution that made it look like she was afraid something might jump out at her. She squinted as she began to read and then her body visibly relaxed as she realized the book wasn’t going to harm her. I plopped into my desk chair and tried to come up with something to say to break the awkward silence, but I couldn’t think of anything nice. I figured Regina was pretty much in the same boat, so we just sat there with the uneasy tension between us until I heard my front door open again and Haley pounding up the stairs.
“Thank goodness,” I heard Regina whisper a second before Haley reappeared at my bedroom doorway with her laptop in her arms.
“Ah ha!” Haley cheered. “Now we are armed and ready!”
I moved my own laptop out of the way and let her set up. It only took moments for her to pull up the video I had sent her last night and get to work. On her computer the picture was nearly full screen but for the tools on the side from the editing program she was using—an editing program I didn’t have on my computer. Better than I hoped, she used her genius to brighten the color a touch and added a bit of contrast. Now, I could clearly see the bodies and tails of the creatures. I warned Haley that I didn’t want to adjust the picture too much. Then people might think the pictures were fakes. “They have to look genuine,” I said.
“Yeah, naturally,” Haley said with a nod, keeping at it until it looked just right.
As soon as the images looked clear enough, I tackled my dad’s voice-over narration. The waves from the ocean and the shakiness of his voice made it really difficult to hear him. I wrote down what he said on a pad of paper, changed it ever so slightly for impact, and then re-recorded the narration myself into the video camera’s microphone.
Regina raised her hand as soon as I was done, which I thought was pretty funny. Imagine, her asking permission to speak. I nodded for her to say whatever it was she had on her mind.
“I don’t think it makes sense to hear your voice as the voice-over, when you are clearly the one on screen. That makes it look fake.”
I hadn’t thought about that. She was right. “What should we do, then?”
She cleared her throat. “Well, I am the captain of the debate team at school. I’m pretty good at speaking. Let me do it.”
Haley shook her head, and Regina gave her a sharp “don’t mess with me” look. Haley stopped and nodded instead. “Yeah, good idea.”
I understood Haley’s hesitation, though. “Yours is still a girl’s voice. No one will know the difference if it’s you or me talking. Plus, a lot of people have already heard my dad’s voice on it.”
Marlee looked up from the novel. “What about more of a narrator. You know how in books there’s, like, a guy that tells everything in between what the characters are saying? What if Regina kind of says stuff in between your dad’s voice-over, to, I don’t know, make it clear what he’s talking about?”
“We know how narration works, Marlee,” Regina said to her friend. She offered a weak smile to me and said, “She’s more of a magazine kind of girl.”
Still, as convoluted as Marlee’s suggestion was, it made sense to all of us. We worked out a few new statements and recorded Regina’s voice. It pained me to admit it, but her speaking voice was way better than mine. Haley edited the new voice-over onto the video and then played the whole thing back for us.
It was perfect.
Piggy-backing on the WiFi from her house, Haley logged onto the Internet and in the time it would take me to type my name, she had it whizzing through cyberspace. Regina immediately popped up and opened her personal page and typed the new hyperlink on her wall with a note: “Updated and so much easier to see and understand. Everyone check it out and pass it on. Mermaids are real! Isn’t that the coolest thing ever? J”
Okay, that was cheesy, but she had like eight hundred “friends”, so right there we had a head start on our video going viral for the second time.
“All done,” Regina said, logging off to be sure I couldn’t hack her page.
I addressed Haley. “So, if I want to send that to someone specific, all I have to do is give them the link, right?”
“That’s it,” Haley said with a big grin.
“Awesome.”
I thanked them all for coming and told Marlee she could borrow the book. It was nice to see her reading. It was kind of like watching a kid discover popcorn for the first time the way she flipped the pages with such enthusiasm. They wanted to stay and talk, but I told them I still had a lot more work to do.
“We can help,” Regina said.
I smiled at her as politely as I could. “I’ll call you if I think of anything for you to do.”
“Okay,” she said. Then she grabbed me up into a hug. In the bubbliest voice I’ve ever heard, she said, “Love you!”
“Uh, yeah,” I said, pulling back away from her. “You too.”
Haley gave me a more uncomfortable wave as she stepped outside, while Marlee tripped a little over the landing, refusing to look up from the book while she walked. Regina followed them out and I closed the door before they said or did anything else. I felt sure I’d hear from Haley again and that things were mended between us. I just wasn’t sure we were best friends anymore. That, I suspected, was changed.
I went straight to my parents’ office and turned on their computer. Next, I opened up the e-mail list of news correspondents. I wrote a quick press release with the link to the video and then CC’d all those addresses. All I had left to do was press “send”.
I held off, though. I wanted to talk to my mother first.
My mom was still a little on edge with me at first; we still hadn’t had time to talk things out. But when I told her what I was going to do, her enthusiasm jumped through the phone. “Push the button, June,” she cried. “Do it right now. No hesitation.”
“Mom,” I said, my finger hovering over the “enter” key on the keyboard. “Are you sure this is the right th
ing? Could anything go wrong, do you think?”
“I don’t see what could possibly go wrong,” Mom answered. “Expose these Affron hypocrites and let the world know there are people who live in the ocean. This is your finest moment, June. I am so proud of you.”
My mother was proud of me. I couldn’t remember that last time my mom had said that. It always seemed like the other way around: I was rooting for my mom. “Go Mom, save the whales!” “That’s it, Mom, rescue the owls!” “Right on, Mom, you saved that Redwood tree! You’re so amazing!” What did I ever do that could make parents like mine proud?
Up until now—nothing.
I pressed send.
Chapter Twelve
The mermaid images zipped through cyberspace and opened on the desktops of over two thousand news editors across the United States. They went to the magazines, newspapers, major news, and some minor web sources, and all the television news channels. For good measure, I sent a couple more releases to places my parents wouldn’t think of, like MTV, VH-1, TMZ, and Comedy Central. By the following morning you couldn’t open your eyes without seeing some image from the video.
I’d already heard an earful from my dad when he got home from the beach all the way up until I went to bed (which I did early just to be done with him). He was ticked at my mom and me for making this decision and was “astounded” that we would be so “damn stupid”. Well, this was a change: to have Mom’s approval instead of Dad’s. The world must have been tipped on its axis.
After a brief and unfulfilling text-only conversation with Haley, where she told me the video already had like 300,000 hits or something like that, I called my mom to say goodnight. She assured me one more time that I had done the right thing while I cried in her ear. “I’ll be coming home tomorrow,” she told me. “Be strong.”
Dad never came back in to say he was sorry, but I heard him say as much into the phone when Mom called him right after I hung up. He hollered at her some more, loud enough for me to hear through both his and my closed bedroom doors. Eventually, though, he got quiet, and I drifted off to sleep.
He was up and gone when I woke up for school in the morning. He’d left the newspaper spread out on the kitchen table, the leading headline reading: LOCAL ACTIVISTS CLAIM TO HAVE DISCOVERED REAL MERMAIDS. I read enough of the article to get that it was suggesting that we were trying to make a bigger deal out of the so-called oil spill by inventing a story to garner attention. It said something to the effect of, “Well known activist, Peter Sawfeather, has been known to stretch the truth on occasion to further his causes, and now he appears to be teaching his daughter to do the same.” In another paragraph it let the reader know that photographic experts would be studying the video for any fakery. Basically, they thought it was all a hoax and we were nothing more than the weirdos that chase after Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster. The article belittled all the work my dad really did as though it were nothing more than bellyaching.
I thought about calling Dad to see if he was okay, but Haley honked her horn from the street and I had to run.
When I got to school I was mobbed by students wanting me to sign their newspapers or printed web pages. All of them had questions about the mermaids and wanted to know which beach they should visit to see more of them. The biggest question of all, over and over again: “Where are they now?” Each time someone asked it, my stomach flipped. I didn’t know, and I didn’t know how to find out. My mermaid was probably dead.
Suddenly, Regina was at my side. She grabbed my hand. “Leave my friend alone,” she said firmly to the crowd. “We will answer all your questions later. Right now, we have to get to class.” Like Moses parting the Red Sea, I saw a corridor full of teenagers split down the center so Regina could lead me through and drop me at my Homeroom classroom door. “I’ll come back in twenty to help you to 1st period, if you want.” Haley was practically jumping up and down behind her with glee.
“Sure, thanks,” I mumbled before slinking into my classroom and going straight to my desk to sit down. I put my forehead down on the cool, flat desk and closed my eyes for a second. The buzz of all those people talking at once calmed down, and I began to single out individual voices again. My teacher calling role up at the front of the room. The kid in the front row saying “here.”
“Juniper Sawfeather.”
Had my ears been that messed up? I swear my teacher suddenly sounded like she was right in front of me.
“Here,” I said, lifting my head.
It hadn’t been my teacher. Mrs. Slater stood to the side of me, a rolled up newspaper in one hand, smacking it against the other like she was deciding whether or not to hit me with it. “You missed the second half of school yesterday, Miss Sawfeather. Do you have an excuse?”
“No, Ma’am. At least not one you’d probably accept.”
“Then come with me.”
As I stood up and slung my backpack over my shoulder, I was careful to push my cell phone as far down to the bottom of the pack as my arm would reach. Let her work for it, I thought. A few stragglers paused to gawk at us in the hall. Mrs. Slater clapped her hands and hissed at them to get on to class. Each of them skittered into a room followed immediately by half a dozen heads popping back out to watch us head toward the front office.
As we rounded the corner into the front hall where the offices were located, Regina came practically skidding toward us from the other direction. “Mrs. Slater,” she called. “Where are you taking June?”
“It’s not your business, Regina,” Mrs. Slater said, passing the school favorite right by without so much as a glance. “You’d do better to associate with other students. Not liars like this one.”
“But Mrs. Slater,” Regina said, keeping pace with us as we walked. “I need June to come with me. The Student Council and the Recycling Club are going from classroom to classroom to make presentations about the new rewards program we’re starting on Monday.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Mrs. Slater said. “It’s not on the calendar.”
“We just planned it at our meeting two days ago, and we were so excited we wanted to get started right away.”
Mrs. Slater stopped then and turned so abruptly on Regina I actually saw the girl lose her cool for a second and stumble backward. “Juniper Sawfeather is going to be doing an in-school suspension today and possibly all next week. Your presentations will have to wait.”
“But Mrs. Slater, it’s such a good cause...”
“Another week of soda cans in the trash won’t bring about the end of the world any sooner, Regina. Go to class. Now.”
Regina flashed the sorriest look at me that I’ve ever seen. I gave her a weak smile to thank her for trying. Mrs. Slater put a firm hand on my back and led me toward the office. She sat me down at a skinny, rickety old school desk that was stowed by the file cabinet behind the reception area and informed me that my classwork would be gathered and brought to me.
“If I so much as see you touch your cell phone, you’ll never see it again. Is that clear?” she asked. I nodded, glad I’d put the thing on silent because I could feel it buzzing through the canvas of my backpack against my leg. I hoped it was just Haley trying to find out what was going on and not Carter or my dad trying to reach me for something vital.
I’d seen so many kids stuck at this very desk over the past three years. They were always the kind you’d expect, I guess. Troubled kids with stringy hair, tough bullies who barely fit, trampy girls who had their bra straps showing, and occasionally a skinny Freshman just choosing to hide out for a bit. Never did I look at one of those kids and wonder what it would be like to be them. The times when I’d popped into the office because I was late for school or turning in the attendance for a teacher, or something like that, I would see those kids and figure they deserved to be there for whatever stupid thing they had done. It had never occurred to me that some of them might not have done anything wrong and were being forced to sit there for no other reason than being on the nerves
of that crazy woman. And I never, not once, thought that I would be sitting in this chair.
It was going to look so bad on my college transcripts.
I slunk as deep in that uncomfortable wooden seat as I could and sulked. I didn’t try very hard to get my class work done with any hurry or accuracy. Mostly, I just doodled in the margins and tapped a pencil on my books, which were full of blurry paragraphs. I couldn’t help it. My attention was seriously being tested because the phones in the front office rang off the hook. Mrs. Campbell, the school secretary, and the Mom-volunteer-of-the-day receptionist could barely catch their breath for answering them. From what I could tell, a handful of the calls were regular school business: a kid getting called out for an appointment, someone had the flu, the paper order was running late, blah blah blah. The rest of the time, though, the calls were all about me.
At first all I noticed was how their eyes kept shifting to me as they talked on the phone. Then I started to really listen to what they were saying.
“She’s in class right now, ma’am.”
“No sir, we can’t get her out of class for an interview.”
“She’s going to be busy until 3:00.”
“We have no information for you about that. You’ll have to talk to her parents.”
“No, you absolutely may not come here and find her.”
“A press badge does not give you the right to interrupt her education.”
And on it went until right before lunch when one reporter was tired of getting the brush off and barged through the front door with a cameraman right behind him. I recognized him from the Channel 4 News but couldn’t think of his name. He was pretty decent as reporters go. My dad often sent him releases, and this guy actually reported it once in a while.
“I am Juarez Peña, correspondent for Channel 4 News, and I am looking for Juniper Sawfeather.” That was it, the guy with two last names. I used to laugh at that when he came on the news, and my parents would bark at me for making too much noise when they were trying to watch.