Emily Windsnap and the Siren's Secret - Liz Kessler [32]
I hurried down to the beach and cast a quick look around, then ran to the point below the pier where I could slip into the water unseen.
Except someone was already there.
“Emily!”
I spun around. Mandy! She’d come to sneer. Now I knew she was the one who’d done this. I didn’t know how, but there was no other explanation. It had to be her.
“What are you doing here?” I snapped. “Come to gloat, have you? Had your fun and now you want to see the effect it’s had? Well, congratulations. You’ve done a great job this time!”
Mandy stared at me in astonishment. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“I’ll bet you don’t! All those people seeing mermaids — funnily enough, since my conversation with you.” I grabbed the newspaper from my pocket and shoved it in her face. Mandy scanned the front page.
She looked up at me. “Emily, I don’t —”
“And a photograph — of me! Page two,” I said.
Mandy opened the paper and squinted at the photo. “How do you know it’s even you?” she asked. “Emily, no one would know who it is. You can hardly even tell it’s a —”
“Well, I know who it is. And you know who it is. And soon enough, the whole town is going to know.”
Mandy closed the newspaper and stared down at it. “Emily, I didn’t have anything to do with this,” she said. “You and I — yesterday, we were friends. Well, we made up ages ago. But yesterday I remembered. Do you have any idea how happy I was when I woke up this morning?”
I thought back to how I’d felt when I woke up, in those few minutes before everything had gone wrong yet again.
“Not just because of you and me being friends again,” Mandy went on. “That wasn’t the only thing I remembered. I remembered how it had felt when we saved all those people from the kraken. I remembered what it feels like to be nice. To do good things, to make people happy!”
I looked at her. She was smiling. Not her sneering, snarly smile. Her real one. The one that I hadn’t seen much of for years. “You really didn’t have anything to do with this?” I asked.
“I really didn’t,” she said. She drew a cross over her chest. “I promise.”
I slumped down on the sand. “Well, why did it happen, then?”
Mandy joined me. Picking up a handful of sand and letting it run through her fingers, she said, “Maybe it’s got something to do with you and Aaron.”
I stuck my feet into the sand. “What d’you mean? Aaron would never do anything like that.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Mandy turned to face me. “All these people have remembered since you and I became friends again, right?”
“Right,” I agreed.
“And how did you make that happen?”
I looked down. I still didn’t know if I could trust her, but I didn’t exactly have much to lose.
“Neptune has this thing called a memory drug,” I began. Then I told her about the verse, and why it meant that Aaron and I could overturn Neptune’s magic when we held hands.
“That’s it, then!” Mandy jumped to her knees, her eyes wide with excitement. What exactly there was to be excited about, I wasn’t so sure.
“That’s what?” I asked flatly.
“You undid the memory drug!”
“That’s what I just told you,” I said. “That’s why you remembered we were friends when Aaron and I held hands.”
“Not just on me! You undid the memory drug on the whole town of Brightport!”
“I — we —” I began. Then I stopped and stared at her. Of course! As soon as she said it, I realized that it was the most obvious thing in the world. So obvious that I hadn’t even thought of it!
Aaron and I must have been even more powerful than we’d realized. Mandy was right. It was the only answer that made sense.
“One thing I don’t understand, though, is why there are so many mermaids around here,” Mandy said.
“Shiprock,” I said simply.
“Ship what?”
“It’s a mermaid town,” I replied. “There aren’t many mermaid places near where humans live, but this one is close by, so it’s quite risky. I guess there’ve been a lot of accidental sightings over the years.”
Mandy looked as though she were going to say something. For a second,