Emily Windsnap and the Siren's Secret - Liz Kessler [28]
“He’s not my —” I began. Or was he? How did you know if someone was your boyfriend or not? I’d never had one before, so I wasn’t sure. Did you have to announce it to each other? Did one of you ask the other one, like a marriage proposal? Do you, Emily, take me, Aaron, to be your boyfriend? How did you know? And why did no one tell you these things?
Mandy was still laughing. “Ah, so sweet. Feel better now? So scared of Mandy-Wandy that you have to hold each other’s hands. You’re pathetic!” She stuck her face so close to me, her nose was almost touching mine.
And then I felt it. The tingling feeling in my arms. Like pins and needles, only — well, nicer. It felt a bit like having soft, fine sand trickled over my fingers, then up my arm. Soon, the feeling spread into my whole body. Something was happening.
Mandy took a step back.
I looked at Aaron. He could feel it, too. I could see it in his eyes.
Mandy opened her mouth to speak. She curled her face into a sneer. Or she tried to, but it stopped halfway so that her expression ended up half-sneering and half-perplexed. It reminded me of what Mom always used to say when I made faces. “Better watch out, sausage,” she’d say. “If the wind changes, you’ll be stuck like that.”
Mandy’s face seemed to be moving in slow motion now. I could almost see the cogs working in her brain, going back to Allpoints Island. Remembering. I think she’s starting to remember! I gripped Aaron’s hand even tighter.
“We’re friends,” she said finally, in a quiet voice that was so different from the voice she’d been using a moment ago, you would have sworn it was a different person.
I held my breath, keeping my mouth tightly closed, afraid to do anything in case she forgot again.
“We were friends,” Mandy repeated. “We were on an island. You had a tail, and my dad wanted to put you in a show.” Her voice was soft and dazed. She sounded as though she was talking from inside a dream. “There was a big ferry.” She suddenly stopped and took another step back. Her eyes darkened. “There was a monster,” she said slowly. “We saved lots of people, you and I, didn’t we?”
Finally, she looked at me. She caught my eye and I nodded.
“It was nice, being friends,” Mandy went on.
I smiled. “It was, yes.”
None of us spoke for a while. Then Mandy took a breath and said, “Maybe we should do it again then. Shall we?”
She’d really remembered! I grinned at her. “Yes, please!”
She grinned back at me. I still didn’t quite believe that it would last.
Mandy turned to face Aaron. “That means we’re friends too, if you want to be,” she said.
“Fine by me,” Aaron said, gripping my hand a little bit closer. The tingling feeling went through me again.
“I’m sorry,” Mandy said to us both. “Start again?” She held out a hand as a gesture of peace.
I took Mandy’s hand and shook it. “Start again,” I said. Then she and Aaron did the same.
None of us was quite sure what to do after that, and I kicked the sand around with my feet, trying to think of what to say next.
Aaron got us out of it. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go to the theme park!” We still hadn’t actually been inside yet, in case we ran into Mandy, but I knew he’d been dying to see it.
Mandy looked relieved. “Cool,” she said. “I’ll show you around.”
We headed up the beach together. “And you can tell Mandy everything she’s missed along the way,” Aaron said.
I wasn’t sure I was ready to trust her with everything just yet, but as we walked, I started to tell her about leaving the island, the journey back to Brightport. She told me what had been happening at Brightport High.
Nothing out of this world. Nothing top secret. Just enough to fill the space between the beach and the rides, and to start closing up the gaps between us, too.
After Mandy showed us around the theme park, I needed some time to think about everything that had happened. My grandparents had remembered the past and then forgotten. Would it be the same