Emily Windsnap and the Siren's Secret - Liz Kessler [51]
I reached in and tried to grab it. My fingertips touched the corner, but I couldn’t grasp it. “It looks like a piece of plastic!” I said, dismay hitting me like a hard slap. We’d gotten it all wrong. Morvena was mistaken; there was nothing magical about the shell. We’d done all this for a piece of plastic that had probably been swept out to sea with someone’s trash and ended up in the shell! We’d done it all for nothing.
“I can’t get a hold of it,” I said flatly.
“Hang on a sec.” Aaron got up and left the room. A minute later, he was back, with a pair of tweezers. He held them out to me. “Now try.”
Reaching carefully in with the tweezers, I gripped the corner of the plastic and pulled at it.
Soon, I’d pulled enough of it out to grip it with my fingers — but they were shaking. What if I was wrong and it was magical after all? What might we be about to find? I’d had enough surprises in the last few months to know that you don’t always find the answers you’re looking for without finding about fifty unwanted ones first.
I pulled it out and held it in my palm. I was right about one thing. It was just an ordinary piece of plastic. It looked like the kind of thing Mom used to wrap my sandwiches in for school. And it had something inside it — but it wasn’t a sandwich! It looked like a sheet of paper, folded over and over into a tiny package.
“You do it,” I said to Aaron, suddenly losing my nerve.
He took the bag and opened it up. “Time to find out what this is all about.”
The knock at the door startled us so much, we both literally jumped out of our chairs, banging knees as we did so.
Aaron quickly shoved the shell and package on to another chair and slid it under the table. “Who’s that?” he called.
“King Kong,” replied a familiar voice. “Who do you think?”
Aaron opened the door. Mandy stood on the doorstep, peering into the cottage. “Thought I saw you,” she said. “What’s going on?”
“We — we’re just —”
“Let her in, Aaron,” I said, getting up. Aaron held the door open for her and Mandy came in. Sticking his head out and glancing quickly in both directions, he closed it again and followed her inside. The three of us stood in an awkward circle.
“Thanks for telling Mom I was going to be out for the day,” I said.
Mandy shrugged. “No problem. How did it go, anyway — whatever you were doing?”
I didn’t know how to reply. Where could I start? And I still couldn’t stop a bit of me from wondering if Mandy really was being genuine — or if, any moment now, she would laugh in my face and tell me she’d just been pretending and had never had the slightest intention of being my friend.
“It’s OK, I get it. You don’t trust me,” Mandy said, before I’d worked out how to answer her question.
“No, I —” I began. Then I stopped. I took a breath and started again. “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I said carefully. “It’s — well, maybe I’m scared.”
“Scared? Of me?” Mandy laughed. Then she flushed deep red. “I suppose I’ve given you reason to feel scared of me in the past,” she said sadly. “I was a bully. I made your life terrible. I’m not surprised that’s how you feel.” She turned and headed back toward the front door. “Sorry for bothering you.”
I grabbed her arm. “No! That’s not what I meant,” I said. “Don’t go.”
“Why not? Why on earth would you want to be around me? I was an idiot to think you’d want us to be friends,” she said.
And despite everything that had happened today, and how much of a mess everything was, I suddenly got this really good feeling. It was like looking out at a calm sea and feeling at peace. Mandy and I were friends, and I had to stop doubting it. The only block to our friendship was me, and my silly suspicious mind. We had enough battles to fight without trying to turn our friendship into another one.
I patted the chair next to me. “Look, come and sit down,” I said. “I’m going to tell you everything.”
“So that’s pretty much it,” I said. Mandy had sat openmouthed