Emily Windsnap and the Siren's Secret - Liz Kessler [10]
“We won’t,” I said, getting up and climbing farther up the rock.
“We’re just going to have a quick look around the other side,” Aaron added. “Back in two minutes.”
Which is honestly what we were planning to do, and exactly how long we were planning to take doing it — before Aaron slipped and trapped his leg.
“YOUCH!”
I heard him yell from the other side of a jagged peak and clambered over to him. Aaron was lying on his side clutching his leg.
“Are you OK?”
“It’s stuck. I can’t move.”
I edged down the rock. His leg was jammed into a tiny crevice between two overhanging slabs of rock. “My foot slipped,” he said.
I tried to push the rock away from his leg, but it wouldn’t move. I pulled on his leg.
“Arrgh! Don’t do that!”
“What are we going to do?” I asked.
“Emily! Aaron!” Shona called from the other side of the rock. “We need to head back. We’re not even supposed to come up here during school.”
“You go,” Aaron said. “No point in all of us getting in trouble.”
I shook my head. “I’m not going to leave you.”
“Emily?” Shona called again.
I ran back to the top of the rock. “Aaron’s stuck,” I said. I was about to tell her to go back to school when we heard voices coming from below us.
Before we had time to do anything, a head appeared next to Shona. Or, to be more precise, the principal’s head. Mrs. Sharktail. I hadn’t met her yet, but I’d heard enough to know that you didn’t want to get on her bad side. We were supposed to have had a meeting with her that morning, but she’d had important visitors and couldn’t see us.
It looked like she was with those important visitors now. Two mermen and a mermaid, all wearing smart suits and sharp frowns.
“Now, this is where we had the minor landslide,” she was saying. “About five days ago. You can see —” She suddenly stopped.
“Shona Silkfin! What on earth are you doing out here?” Mrs. Sharktail snapped.
“It’s my fault,” I cut in quickly. I wasn’t having Shona get into trouble on her first day back here, especially when she’d been trying to get us to go back down. “I wanted to come up. Shona didn’t want to.”
The principal squinted up at me. “You’re the new girl, I take it?” she asked. She opened her mouth to say something else, but suddenly clapped a hand across it and gasped in horror. With the other hand she was pointing — at my legs. “What are those?” she cried with about as much disgust as if I’d had giant spiders crawling out of every pore.
I had the feeling I might have just discovered the bad side we’d been told to avoid.
“Um. They’re my —” I tried to think of another word for legs, one that might have been more acceptable to her.
I didn’t have to try for very long. Before I finished my sentence, Aaron came running over the top of the rock. “I got free!” he called, beaming. Then he saw Mrs. Sharktail and the smile disappeared from his face as rapidly as if it had been washed away by a freak wave.
She took one look at him and gasped again. “Both of you — my office now!” was all she said before disappearing back below the surface, her visitors scurrying off with her.
Aaron clambered back into the water. “What did we do?” he asked.
“Apart from come up here, you mean?” I said.
Shona shook her head. “I think there may be more to it,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s this place. The rules. The stupid rules.”
I jumped into the water. I hardly noticed the tingling feeling as my tail shimmered and shook and came to life. I was too worried about the tone of concern in Shona’s voice. “Shona, what is it?” I asked. “Tell me!”
“No humans allowed at the school,” she said simply.
“But we’re not complete humans,” Aaron said. “We’re merpeople when we’re in water.”
“I know. And that might have been OK a while ago. But things have changed around here. My aunt was telling me last night. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it.”
“Think of what?” I asked.
“They’re tightening the rules everywhere, becoming more anti-human.”
“But we’re not —” Aaron began.