It wasn’t a night for going out. Not unless you had to.
Sharp tunnels of wind whistled and shrieked around every corner. Trees bowed and shook
and broke. Rain splattered viciously down on the pavement.
Out at sea, it was even worse. On the water, the storm had turned swells into walls the size of
skyscrapers. Waves foamed hungrily, like giant rabid dogs.
Anyone who knew about the sea knew that this meant one thing: Neptune was angry.
And anyone wild or crazy or brave enough to be out on such a night might have seen two figures in the distance, way out at sea, way beyond safe. A man leaned out from his fishing boat, calling to a woman in the water below him. “Take it. Take it. Keep it close.”
“What is it?” the woman called back, shouting to be heard over the thunderous waves.
The man shook his head. “I can’t hear you!” Leaning farther out, he added, “When it’s safe again, find me.”
“How?” she called, panic hitting her as hard as the waves that were now dragging them farther and farther apart.
He pointed to the package he had just given her. “The shell!” she thought she heard him say, and then he added something that sounded like, “There’s magic in it.”
The woman thought about what she was leaving, and the pain of it slapped against her harder than the next wave. “What about —?”
The wave washed the rest of her question away — but he knew what she was asking.
“I’ll look after everything,” he called. “Everything. Don’t worry. It will be OK. Go
now. Go, before it’s too late.”
A moment later, the onlooker would have seen them part, each disappearing behind the hills and mountains of the raging sea. Then the onlooker would have wondered if they’d imagined the whole thing, because surely no one would go out on a night like this.
Not unless they had to.
I know you’re going to think I’m crazy when I say this, but something about my life wasn’t right.
Why would that mean I was crazy?
Because for the first time in my life, I was living with my mom and dad, together, in our beautiful home at Allpoints Island, with my best friend, Shona, living just around the corner and my new friend Aaron and his mom living nearby.
There was
nothing wrong with our lives.
Really. Absolutely nothing. No dad to be rescued from prison, no sea monsters trying to squeeze the life out of me, no storms hurling our home halfway across the planet — all of which
had happened to me in the last year.
Now all I had was day after day filled with sun, sand, friends, and laughter. My life was perfect.
So why had I woken up restless and rattled every morning for the last week? I just didn’t get it.
I sat up in bed and stretched, trying to remember what I’d been dreaming about. Fragments from a jumbled mass of weird dreams chased each other around in my head, but I couldn’t piece them together. All I could remember was the feeling they’d left behind. Not exactly unhappy — but definitely unsettled and, well, not right.
Like I said — crazy. How could anything about my life not be right?
There was something, though, and I couldn’t ignore it. What’s more, I had the feeling that Mom felt the same way. Once or twice, while she was making dinner or reading a book, I’d seen her eyes get all distant and gray, as though she were looking for something far away, something
she was missing.
I think deep down inside, I knew what was eating at us both; I knew what we were missing,
even before the conversation with Archie that changed everything.
“Knock, knock. It’s me!” a familiar voice trilled through the doorway, followed by a familiar thump as Mom’s best friend, Millie, landed on
the deck.
Fortuna, the boat we lived on, was moored out in the bay, half-sunk in the sand so that the lower level was underwater. With Dad being a merman, and me being a semi-mer, this meant we could both swim around on the lower level. Mom’s bedroom was upstairs, but all the trapdoors in between made it easy for us to live here together. And the long jetty leading out from the beach to the boat was handy for getting on the boat without having to swim — which made it very easy for Millie to visit us without getting more than her feet wet.
She stuck her head around the door. “Anyone home?”
I dragged myself out of bed and gestured for her to come in. Not that she needed an invitation. She’d already clambered in through the door and was busily wringing out the bottom of her dress over the side.
“Is your mom up?” she asked.
I rubbed my eyes and yawned. “Not yet, I don’t think. Why?”
“Someone’s coming home!” she said excitedly. “I just heard it on the seaweed vine.”
“The seaweed vine?”
“Just trying to keep up with the mer-speak,” Millie said, frowning. “I meant I heard it on the grapevine. Archie’s back today!”
That was when I noticed her face. Well, obviously I’d already noticed her face — I was looking straight at it. But I finally noticed the bright blue eye shadow arching high over each eye and the thick red line of lipstick smeared across her mouth — and across a few teeth. I pointed this
out, and she peered into the mirror by the door.
“It’sh been nearly tcho weeksh,” she said, wiping lipstick off her teeth with the edge of her sleeve. “I’ve misshed him sho much!”
Archie is Millie’s boyfriend. He’s a merman, and he’d been away on an assignment for
Neptune.
“Is that Millie?” Mom’s voice warbled out from her room. “Come on in, Mill, and put the kettle on, would you?”
Half an hour later, Mom was dressed and sitting upstairs with Millie in the saloon — that’s what you call the living room on a boat. I wanted to go out and play with Shona and Aaron, but Mom said we should all wait with Millie; she was far too excitable to be left on her own.
Copyright © 2011 by Liz Kessler; illustrations by Natacha Ledwidge. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
