Emily Windsnap and the Siren's Secret - Liz Kessler [50]
“Be careful!” Mom called to my back. In reply, I turned and gave her a quick wave. A moment later, I was on the pier and out of sight. I dropped the smile, broke into a run, and hurried over to Aaron’s.
“I don’t get it. It’s just a shell,” Aaron said. He was holding it in his hands, turning it around and around for the hundredth time. “It doesn’t do anything!”
He shook the shell. He lifted it to his ear. “I mean, it does that thing that all conches like this do. It sounds like waves when you listen to it.” He put the shell down on the table in front of us. “But that’s it. Nothing else. I think Morvena’s wrong. I don’t think it’s got anything magical about it at all.”
I stared at the shell. “Why would Melody talk to it, though? Why would she hold it and cry over it every morning? We must be missing something.”
“OK, maybe we are — but I’ve got no idea how we’re going to figure out what it is.”
I reached out to pick up the shell — and so did Aaron. As our hands touched, I got that tingly feeling in my fingers. I snatched my hand away, embarrassed in case he could tell how it made me feel when he touched my hand, in case it wasn’t the same for him.
“That’s it!” he said. “Of course! How could we be so stupid?”
“What is it?”
Aaron lowered his eyes and shuffled awkwardly. “Look, you know when I — when we — you know, kind of touch hands . . .” His voice trailed away.
“Uh-huh,” I said, trying to keep my voice casual. Touch hands? Did we? Oh — maybe, yeah. I hadn’t really noticed.
“Well, d’you ever get, like, a kind of tingly feeling?”
“You get it too?” I asked.
Aaron grinned. “Course I do!”
I smiled back at him. That meant he felt the same way I did. Maybe he was my boyfriend!
“Just — well, you know there’s all the stuff about the power that we have,” he went on. “You know, the thing about Neptune.”
Oh. OK, so maybe it wasn’t about him being so crazy about me that his skin danced in happy leaps because I was close. It was just about overturning a curse.
“Mm, yeah, that’s what I was thinking too,” I lied.
Aaron laughed. “As well as anything else,” he said. He’d gone and read my mind again. And this time, his face had turned as pink as mine felt. He did feel the same way! I couldn’t suppress a happy smile.
“Just now, when we touched hands, and we were both touching the shell too, did you feel it then?”
I considered lying. If I said I’d felt it, what if he laughed in my face and said that he hadn’t? It could be a trick to get me to confess to my feelings for him so he could tell me he didn’t feel the same way.
Then I thought about it a bit more. This was Aaron I was talking about. He wasn’t like that. He would never do something like that.
“Yes,” I confessed. “Actually, I felt it really strongly.”
“Me too,” he said. Then he lifted the shell and held it between us. “Link my fingers,” he said. “If we hold hands and hold the shell between us, maybe something will happen. Perhaps the shell’s magic has something to do with Neptune — and if so, maybe we can undo it!”
I took his hand. As soon as we touched, I felt the tingle again. First in my fingertips, then it traveled up my arm. Soon it felt as though it was spreading through my whole body.
“Look!” Aaron said. The shell had started to vibrate in our hands. I tightened my grip on his fingers so we didn’t drop it.
“It’s working — it’s doing something!”
The shell rumbled and shook, and it was making a noise — a bit like the sound it had made when we held it to our ears, only about fifty times as loud! It was shaking more and more violently. And then, without any warning, it suddenly stopped.
We stared at the shell, at our hands, at each other.
It hadn’t worked. Nothing had changed. So much for our magical powers.
“Now what?” I asked.
Aaron disentangled his fingers from mine and held the shell to his ear. “There’s something inside it,” he said, shaking it softly.
Then he passed it to me. I turned it over and shook it. He was right! Something was jiggling around inside