Emily Windsnap and the Siren's Secret - Liz Kessler [33]
“What are you going to do?” she asked after a while.
What was I going to do? All I knew for sure was that I had to get away from Brightport. My first thought was to head for Shiprock, but I wasn’t even welcome there now! Then I remembered I was supposed to hang out with Shona today. It was Sunday — the day we said we’d go out looking for the lost sirens.
I leaped up. The lost sirens! Maybe I could hide away with them!
I shook the sand off my clothes and headed down to the water’s edge. Mandy was behind me. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Where are you going?”
“Look, just cover for me, will you? Tell my mom I forgot to tell her I was spending the day at Shona’s. I had to get going and I didn’t want to wake her.”
Mandy nodded. “So you’ll be gone all day?” she asked. She sounded disappointed. I’d be out at least all day, I thought. This problem wasn’t going to have gone away by tomorrow. But I’d worry about that later. At this point, all I wanted to do was hide.
“Yeah,” I said.
“What about Aaron?”
“Tell him I’ve gone to see Shona and I’ll catch him soon, OK?”
“OK.” She turned to walk away.
“And, Mandy?”
She turned around. “What?”
I smiled at her. “Thanks. I like being friends again.”
She held my eyes and nodded. “Yeah, me too,” she said.
And with that, I glanced around one last time, whipped off my sandals, and slid into the sea.
“So the whole town knows about you?” Shona asked as we swam along. I’d filled her in on the news in Brightport, but I didn’t want to tell her about Aaron — yet. I felt weird keeping a secret from Shona, but I felt even weirder telling her that Aaron and I had a special power — stronger even than Neptune!
“Well, not exactly about me,” I said. “At least, I hope not.” Maybe it would blow over soon. People would throw their newspapers out in a few days and forget all about it again. The picture was pretty blurred, after all. Perhaps it would be safe for me to return in a couple of weeks.
Yeah, and perhaps sharks would walk across the moon.
I might as well get used to the idea of living as a recluse.
We swam on, gliding over pastel-pink bushes and lime-green rocks. Sea urchins littered the seabed, still and spiky like curled-up hedgehogs. Black wavy rays with fins like Dracula’s cloak passed beneath us, tickling the sand as they slid by.
“Miss Merlin told us a bit more about the lost sirens,” Shona said as we swam.
“What did she tell you?” I asked, glad for a change of subject.
“She thinks she knows roughly where they were last seen. She said that after class last week, she looked into it more and she figured out some coordinates that no one’s ever worked out before, so I put them into my splishometer.”
“And? What did it tell you?”
“It’s about five miles away — hardly any distance,” she said, so excited that her eyes looked about ready to pop out of her face.
I thought about Brightport — people waking up and buying their local paper, all eager to catch a mermaid and win a reward. My photograph on page two. I shuddered and swam ahead. “Come on,” I said. “What are we waiting for?”
It felt as though we’d been swimming for hours. The sea had grown colder and deeper and darker. Lone, sleek, gray fish slid by, weaving among seaweed that trailed up from the seabed. Shoals of flat round fish swam toward us and then away again, flickering like mirrors in sunlight as they flashed by.
Ahead of us, below, all around us, sea life went about its business, oblivious to the two intruders swimming all around looking for something that might be no more than an ocean myth.
A lion fish with ornate markings around its jowls stared through us as we passed. A dancing crab with stick-thin legs jiggled sideways across our path. Ferns opened and closed with the rhythm of the sea. We swam on.
“Are you sure you put the right numbers in?” I asked. “We must have swum more than five miles by now.”
“It’s got to be around here somewhere,” Shona said, consulting her splishometer. “Unless Miss Merlin