Emily Windsnap and the Siren's Secret - Liz Kessler [12]
Shona was right, then. Aaron and I were officially against the rules.
She went on. “And you will doubtless share my horror at a discovery I made earlier today.” She swam a few strokes in our direction.
Every eye that wasn’t already on Aaron and me turned toward us now.
“Humans!” she exclaimed in a tone that couldn’t have dripped with more venom even if it had come directly out of a snake’s mouth.
Her accusation was only tempered by one small detail: the fact that Aaron and I were as mer as anyone else when we were in water. I noticed a few puzzled looks pass between some of the girls.
“Yes, well, not now they’re not,” she snapped. “But they were. Semi-mers,” she said with that same disgusted tone that I was starting to get a bit sick of. “To think — coming to my school, and I didn’t even know it. Luckily for all of us, the issue has recently been rectified.”
The issue had been rectified? These were our lives she was talking about! We weren’t some problem that needed fixing. I’d had enough. I had to say something. If I could stand up to Neptune in his own court, which I had when I’d rescued my dad from prison, then surely I could speak out now.
“We haven’t done anything wrong,” I said in a voice that came out much smaller than I was expecting. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Semi-mers aren’t against the law. Neptune’s even changed all the intermarriage laws. He wants humans and merfolk to get along.”
With the slightest flick of her tail, Mrs. Sharktail whizzed over to me. “Did I ask you to say anything?” she snarled. She turned back to face the school. “Of course, strictly speaking, semi-mers are not against the law,” she said. “Although, if I had my way, they certainly would be,” she added under her breath. “But as of the last few weeks, they are against our school’s rules, and at a time like this, when our ways are under such threat from humans, it is more important than ever to enforce all of our rules.”
She turned back to me and Aaron. “As of this moment, the pair of you are no longer welcome in our school.”
She stared at us. We stared back at her. And then, in case we were in any doubt about exactly how unwelcome we were in her school, she added in a deep rumble, “Leave — now!”
There was a swishing noise at the back of the hall. Shona! She was pushing her way past the rest of her class to get to us. No, Shona, don’t! You’ll only get yourself in more trouble.
I grabbed Aaron’s arm. “We’re going,” I said, staring into Mrs. Sharktail’s sharp beady eyes. “We know when we’re not welcome.” Which, OK, wasn’t the cleverest retort ever. You’d have to be the most ignorant person in the world not to have known you weren’t welcome after all that. But I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
We swam away from the stage and away from the chamber with every eye in the school watching us go. I don’t think even Mandy Rushton had ever made me feel so humiliated. And to make matters worse, do you know what I heard as we swam off? Clapping. Mrs. Sharktail started it. I didn’t look back. I didn’t want to see how many others were joining in.
“Now what?” Aaron and I had stopped for a rest, perched on the side of a rock.
I fought back an urge to burst into tears. But the tears were there, jamming up my throat so hard I couldn’t reply. I just shook my head.
“I mean, did that really happen?” Aaron asked. The sound of his voice dislodged the tears I was holding back, and they started to trickle down my face.
“Hey, don’t cry,” he said in a voice so soft it only made me cry harder. He reached a hand out, as if he were going to wipe the tear from my face. His hand hovered in midair for a moment, before he changed his mind and let it drop. I noticed that his cheeks had turned pink.
“We were supposed to bring the human and mer worlds together,” I croaked. “What chance do we stand of doing that if the merpeople don’t even want us around?”
“I know,” he said. “I think we might have a harder job than we realized.” And then he reached out again. This time he didn’t change his mind.