The Tail of Emily Windsnap - Liz Kessler [20]
“Look!” Shona’s voice echoed in front of me.
I peered ahead. We’d reached another door, facing us at the end of the tunnel. “Locked,” Shona said quietly. “Hey, but look at —”
Suddenly a luminous fish with huge wide-open jaws sprang out of the darkness, almost swimming into my face.
I screamed and grabbed Shona’s arm. “I’m getting out of here!” I burst out, forgetting about the ballroom, the slimy rubbery walls, the trapdoor. All that mattered was getting away from that ship.
We sat on Rainbow Rocks, low down by the water’s edge, out of sight from the coast. Water lapped gently against the stones. Shona’s tail glistened in the chilly light. Mine had disappeared again, and I rubbed my goosepimply legs dry with my jacket. Shona stared. She obviously found the transformation as weird as I did.
“Do you want to tell me what that was all about?” She broke the silence.
“What?”
“What happened to you back there?”
I threw a pebble into the water and watched the circle around it grow bigger and wider until it disappeared. “I can’t.’”
“You don’t want to?”
“No, I mean, I really, actually can’t! I don’t even know what it’s about myself.”
Shona fell quiet again. “I understand if you don’t trust me,” she said after a while. “I mean, it’s not like I’m your best friend or anything.”
“I haven’t got a best friend.”
“Me, either.” Shona smiled a little bit, her tail flapping on the rock as she spoke.
Then we fell quiet again.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I said after a while. “I do. It’s just . . . well, you would think I’m crazy.”
“Of course I wouldn’t. Apart from the fact that you’re a human half the time and a mermaid who sneaks out to play at night, I haven’t met anyone as normal as you in ages!”
I smiled.
“Come on, try me,” she said.
So I did. I told her everything; I told her about the swimming lesson and Mystic Millie and about Mom’s dream and the ship being exactly the same. I even told her about seeing Mr. Beeston on my way home that first night. Once I’d started letting things out, I couldn’t seem to stop.
When I finished, Shona stared at me without speaking.
“What?”
She looked away.
“What?”
“I don’t want to say. You might get mad, like last time.”
“What do you mean? Do you know something? You’ve got to tell me!”
Shona shook her head. “I don’t know anything for sure. But do you remember when we first met, and I thought I’d heard your name before?”
“You said you’d got it wrong.”
“I know. But I don’t think I did.”
“You had heard it?”
She nodded. “I think so.”
“Where?”
“It was at school.”
“At school?”
“I think it was in a book. I never knew if it was true, or just an ocean myth. We studied it in history.”
“Studied what in history?”
Shona paused before saying in a quiet voice, “Illegal marriages.”
“Illegal? You mean —”
“Between merpeople and humans.”
I tried to take in her words. What was she trying to tell me? That my parents —
“There’ll be something in the library at school. Let’s go back.” Shona slid down off her rock.
“I thought you finished at lunch time on Saturdays.”
“There are clubs and practices and stuff in the afternoon. Come on, I’m sure we can find out more.”
I slipped into the water and followed her back to mermaid school, my thoughts as tangled as a heap of washed-up fishing nets.
Back through the hole in the rock, back along the caves and tunnels and tubes until we came to the school playground. It was empty.
“This way.” Shona pointed to a rocky structure standing on its own, spiral-shaped and full of giant holes and crevices. We swam inside through a thick crack and slithered up through the swirls, coming out into a circular room with jagged rocky edges. A few mergirls and boys sat on mushroom-shaped spongy seats in front of long pieces of scratchy paper that hung from the ceiling. They wound the paper up or down, silently moving their heads from side to side as they examined the sheets.