chapter seven
The Ocean Club meets in the library, which is a huge redbrick building in downtown Rose Harbor. It’s set right on the water and, according to Lemon’s incessant chattering, used to be some rich person’s summer house back in the 1800s.
I offer up a hmm every now and then, but mostly, I’m thinking up a new plan. Clearly, leaving for home is out of the question.
Or at least, it’s out of the question for now.
Mama has booked Sea Rose Cottage until the end of August, and we’ve never left a town after only a few days anyway. I’ve survived three-month stays in towns before. Seven times before this, in fact. I can do it again.
And I can do it perfectly. Calmly, just like Mama wants. I can grit my teeth through Ocean Club, tune it all out, tune Lemon out, and then, in August, Mama will have to listen to me about going home. She’ll have to, because I will have done everything right, been the calm, serene daughter she clearly wants. I won’t bring up Mum. I won’t freak out over Peach and the ocean. I’ll keep it all to myself.
And then I’ll tell her—with my voice and not just my thoughts—that I want to go home. No, I’ll demand it.
I nod to myself as we enter the Rose Harbor Library, my plan taking shape. I take a deep breath in, let it out slowly, just to calm down my roiling thoughts. Best start now, this new worry-free Hazel. I can do it. It’s just a matter of deciding to, right?
Inside, everything is dark wood shelving and furniture and high ceilings. Stained-glass windows cover the back of the building, refracting the morning light into a million colors. It’s beautiful in here—I’ll admit it.
But only to myself.
I follow Lemon up a set of stairs and then down a hall lined with what look like meeting rooms.
“I can’t wait for you to meet Kiko and Jules,” Lemon says, coming to a stop in front of the last door on the left. I peek through the window, catch a glimpse of at least twenty kids sitting at several round tables. My heart leaps into my throat. Other plans whirl through my thoughts.
Faking a headache.
Faking getting a text—oops, family emergency!
Actually vomiting, because my stomach feels like it might rear up at any second and try to exit my body.
“My friends are really amazing,” she says.
Friends. I crane my neck, watching everyone inside the room talking and laughing. Lemon has friends in there. Meaning kids my age. Meaning several sets of eyes staring at me, wondering about my scars, eventually asking. I’ll just have to make absolutely sure they never get that curious. I roll my shoulders back, fix my hair against my face. Calm. Cool. Uninterested.
Then she pushes the door open, grabs my hand, and yanks me into the room.
We spill inside and every head turns our way.
No one is talking.
No one is hanging around, laughing, waiting for the class or club or whatever this is to start.
It’s already started.
“… five zones in the ocean,” a woman at the front of the room is saying.
“Crap, we’re late,” Lemon says, barely whispering as she pulls me to a table in the middle of the room with two other kids sitting at it.
“Let’s call it barely on time, Ms. Calloway,” the woman says, crinkled smile directed at Lemon. “As usual.” Everyone laughs, but not in a mean way. Still, I know it pulls every single eye in the room toward Lemon and me, and my face goes right on ahead and flames up. I press my hair against my warm cheek and slide into the chair next to Lemon, slink down as much as I can without it looking super obvious that I’m, well, slinking down.
“It’s about time,” a girl whispers to Lemon from across the table. She’s Asian, with long dark hair and sleek bangs, purple-framed glasses, and braces on her teeth. She’s wearing a fitted T-shirt that, now that I look closely at it, matches Lemon’s exactly. It’s blush pink with a white mermaid printed on it. But instead of shorts like Lemon has on, this girl has her tee tucked into a high-waisted skirt with orange, navy, pink, and light blue stripes. I glance down at my own ratty cutoff shorts and plain gray T-shirt—both of which are in need of washing—and my knockoff black-and-white Skechers I got at a Target for twenty bucks back in Ohio.
“Sorry, hey,” Lemon whispers back as she digs a notebook and pen out of her backpack. The notebook is blue and has tiny silver mermaids printed all over the cover, because of course it does.
“Ocean zones today,” the other kid at the table says. “She already said.”
“Ooh, fun,” Lemon says, then glances at me. Opens her mouth. I brace myself. “This is Hazel. Hazel, this is Kiko Masuda”—the girl—“and Jules Renleigh”—ocean zones kid.
“Hey,” Jules says, waving at me, which is when I notice a button on their shirt that says ASK ME ABOUT MY PRONOUNS.
I’ve seen the button before. Lots of times, back in California. It’s blue and pink and white, and Mum’s good friend Sidney, who worked at the university with her, used to wear the same one a lot. They were nonbinary and preferred the pronouns they and them. I’d talked to them enough to know that when they wore the button, they really did want people to ask.
“Plus, it just makes people think,” Sidney had said the first time I saw their button. “It makes them pause, stop thinking so much in terms of only he and she and girls and boys.”
Now, I press my hair against my cheek, clear my throat, and try to make Sidney proud. Make Mum proud too. “So, um, what… what are your pronouns?”
Jules grins. “Oh. Wow, awesome. Yeah, thanks for asking.”
I nod. “So…”
“Oh, sorry! I use they and them.” They laugh, and Kiko pats them on the shoulder. They’ve got pale skin and dark hair, short on the sides and longer on top so that it swoops over their forehead and curls at the ends. Their eyes are so deep blue they look like sapphires.
“See?” Kiko says. “I told you people would ask.”
“Yeah. She’s the third person in two whole weeks,” Jules says.
“That’s more people than none,” Lemon says.
“What about you?” Jules asks me. “What are your pronouns?”
“Oh,” I say. “Um, she and her.”
Jules nods and smiles at me again. I feel something warm in my chest, knowing from Sidney how much asking meant to them, but then it’s sort of like I remember where I am and start shrinking in on myself. The lady at the front keeps talking, and Lemon and Jules and Kiko tune in, so I use the time to take a deep breath and study my tablemates a bit more. They just seem like normal kids, but the odd thing is that Jules is also wearing the same mermaid-printed blush tee as Kiko and Lemon, like the three of them are in some sort of weird club. A quick glance around tells me that no one else is in matching T-shirts, so there’s that, at least.
Kiko catches my eye and offers a smile. I try to smile back, try to act as normal as possible, nice and flat and boring, but it’s hard, with my hair covering half my face, which isn’t exactly a normal look. Plus, my hair is pretty fine, so it doesn’t want to stay in place. It wants to flit around, little wisps reaching for any part of my face it can find so that, before I know it, a tickle starts in my nose and shoots up between my eyes. I try to think of strawberries, look up at the light, but it’s no use. I let out the loudest sneeze the world has ever heard. On instinct, I cover my mouth, pushing my hair out of my face, so when I drop my hands, my scars are right there for all the world to see. Kiko’s eyes go round behind her glasses, and Jules says what sounds a lot like whoa under their breath.
I fix my hair over my cheek again fast.
“Bless you,” the teacher says. “I see we’ve got a new friend with us today. Lemon? Care to make an introduction?”
“Um, yeah, totally,” Lemon says, then proceeds to tell everyone else in the room that I’m Hazel and I’m here for the summer and our moms are BFFs from when they were kids, which makes several people say Awww, and I just want Lemon to shut up so everyone will stop looking at me.
“Welcome, Hazel,” the woman says. She’s got nearly black hair and brown skin, dark eyes that sparkle in the fluorescent lighting. “I’m Dr. Amira Khoury and I work at the aquarium just outside of town. You can call me Amira, though, and I hope you’ve brought a sense of adventure with you today.”
I blink at her.
She tilts her head at me. Smiles. “Okay, then. So, like I said, we’re talking about ocean zones today. Just like Earth has layers, so does the ocean. Does anyone know how many?”
“Five.”
My eyes go wide as I hear my own voice echo through the room. Lemon shoots me a thumbs-up, but I look down. I hadn’t meant to answer. I hadn’t meant to even remember that tiny little ocean fact.
“Very good,” Amira says. “Anyone know their names?”
Sunlight zone.
Midnight zone.
Abyss.
Trenches.
The words float through my head, but I keep my mouth shut this time. A boy in the back gets sunlight and midnight but can’t remember the others. Amira goes over all five with a diagram on the big screen at the front of the room, then gestures to several jars on the table there, holding up the only one with five layers of colored liquid, ranging from the lightest blue, at the top, to black. The liquid undulates just like an ocean current, but the colors don’t mix together.
“You’re each going to make your own ocean,” she says, “with all five zones accurately represented. Then we’ll observe each other’s creations, talk a little more about each zone’s characteristics.”
A girl sitting in the very front shoots her hand up.
“Yes, Vanessa,” Amira says, “you can take it home with you today.”
The girl’s hand goes down and a few people laugh.
Amira explains the directions, how we’re going to use food coloring, vegetable oil, Dawn dish soap, corn syrup, water, and rubbing alcohol to create liquids with different densities so the layers don’t mix. I watch as she demonstrates making a new jar, using black food coloring and corn syrup to create the trenches layer, the darkest, coldest, most mysterious part of the ocean. Oceanographers and marine biologists keep learning more about it, but nearly eighty percent of Earth’s oceans is still unexplored. And a lot of the sea life we do know about is wild and strange. Some of it seems impossible. Like the frilled shark, which looks like something right out of the dinosaur era. Or the red-lipped batfish, which looks like a nightmarish combination of a frog and a crab but which is, in fact, a fish.
“Cool, huh?” Jules asks me.
I hadn’t realized I was perched on the edge of my chair, my elbows on the table and my mouth hanging open a little as I listened to Amira. The ocean is vast and weird and used to fascinate me no end. Now, though, the sea just feels like fear. Like cold and blood and loss.
I snap my mouth shut. “I guess.”
Jules lifts a skeptical eyebrow, but they’re smiling at me, like maybe they’re trying to get me to smile back. I almost do, too, but then Jules edges forward, looking at me with softly narrowed eyes like I’m some creature newly discovered in the ocean’s trenches. “Wow.”
“I know,” Kiko says. She leans toward me too, so far it’s like she’s trying to crawl across the table. “It’s wild.”
I lean away. My face goes end-of-the-world red and I can’t decide if I’m humiliated or furious. Who just stares like this at someone’s scars and then talks about them to their friends right in front of the scarred person? Who does that? Apparently, Lemon’s rude friends do that. Looks like I won’t have any trouble staying uninterested in this club, in this whole stupid town.
“I told you,” Lemon says, sitting back and smiling at me proudly.
I glare at her, then push my chair back. Most of the other kids are diving into the materials Amira is placing at their tables. They won’t notice if I just walk out, which is exactly what I plan to do, without a single word of explanation to Lemon and her imbecilic friends.
“I mean, you really do look just like her,” Jules says. “I didn’t believe Lemon at first, but it’s true.”
Lemon and Kiko both nod.
“Wait, what?” I ask, shoulders relaxing just a little. But then a whole other set of questions and worries fills my head. Before I can ask, though, Amira comes by with jars for all four of us, then sets a big tub on the table full of the materials we need to make our zones.
“You didn’t tell her?” Kiko asks Lemon.
“Well… no. I didn’t really know how,” Lemon says.
“Tell me what?” I ask.
“I guess it is a weird conversation,” Jules says.
“Yeah, but still. She needs to know—”
“Hello?” I sort of yell it. A few kids’ heads snap toward our table, and Kiko’s eyes go wide. “She is right here,” I say, quieter.
“Sorry,” Lemon says, wincing.
“Whatever,” I say, and notice Kiko’s eyes narrowing, her mouth dipping into a frown. “Who are you talking about?”
“Um, Rosemary Lee,” Lemon says as she passes around the jars. I close my hands around mine, feeling the cool glass under my fingers.
“You ever heard of her?” Kiko asks. She squints up at the directions Amira posted on the screen at the front of the room, then reaches for the corn syrup.
The pale-haired mermaid in the drawings from the Rose Maid Café flashes through my head, along with words that gave me goose bumps.
Her tears are the ocean,
her heartbreak the wind…
“The mermaid from that poem?” I ask, rubbing my arms.
“Yes!” Lemon says.
“Well, Rosemary Lee is the girl,” Jules says, swirling the trenches layer in their jar, black oozing up the sides. “The Rose Maid is the mermaid.”
“Aren’t they the same?” I ask.
Jules peers at me through the jar, the glass magnifying their eyes. “One’s a girl. And one’s a mermaid.”
“Yes, they’re the same in essence,” Lemon says, shoving Jules’s shoulder. “Rosemary Lee became the Rose Maid.”
“You really believe that?” I ask, finishing up my own trenches layer and grabbing the blue dish soap for the abyss.
Kiko stops, her measuring cup frozen in midair. “You don’t?”
“Um. Mermaids aren’t real.”
Jules makes a sound like they’re in pain. Kiko rubs her forehead.
“It’s okay, she doesn’t know the story yet,” Lemon says.
“Then tell her,” Jules says. “No way can someone who looks like Rosemary Lee’s doppelgänger not believe in the Rose Maid.”
“I really look that much like her?” I ask. “I mean, I saw the drawings in the café, but still. Those are drawings.”
“So you noticed them?” Lemon says. “I knew it. I knew you liked the drawings.”
“I didn’t say I liked them.”
Lemon’s wide-eyed-wonder look drops. Something like hurt flashes across her face.
“Okay,” Kiko says, slamming her jar onto the table and glaring at me. “Who are you, again? Lemon, who is she and why is she here?”
Lemon looks miserable. A tiny flare of regret blooms in my chest, but I squash it quickly. I didn’t say anything wrong. I simply stated an opinion.
“Easy, Kik,” Jules says, but keeps their eyes on their own jar.
“What did I say?” I ask, glaring right back at Kiko. “Did one of you draw those pictures or something?”
Lemon’s mouth opens, but nothing comes out. The other two share another look, one of those looks that clearly say I’m missing something.
“Our friend did,” Jules says.
“Who?” I ask.
Lemon sets her jar to one side and dives into her backpack so deep, her entire head disappears.
“Immy,” Kiko says. “She… she’s our best friend. She’s not around anymore, though.”
“And this Immy is an artist?” I ask, getting tired of hunting for every little detail. It’s not like I actually care.
Jules nods, a soft smile on their lips. “The best. I wish I was half as good as her.”
“You draw too?”
They nod. “Mostly pencil sketches. Immy does watercolors.” They frown, glance at Lemon, who’s still buried in her bag. “I mean, she… she did watercolor.”
“She does,” Lemon says, bursting out of her bag, bringing out a glossy paperback called Coastal Lore. It’s thick but small, about the size of one of those travel guides that you can fit into your jacket pocket. She opens the book and flips furiously until she lands somewhere in the middle.
“Here. Read this.” She shoves the book into my hands and taps her finger on the heading at the top of a two-page spread.
Below that, there’s a bunch of text, but what catches my eye is the large sepia-toned photograph in the middle of the first page. It’s of a family—a mom, dad, a girl who looks around our age, and a smaller girl who looks around Peach’s age. In the photo, no one is smiling. They all just stare out at the camera, dead-eyed, stiff hands on shoulders and ruffly collars no doubt scratching at their necks. I remember hearing that, a long time ago, people wouldn’t smile in pictures. It was the style, I guess, but the style is beyond creepy.
But what’s even creepier is that the older girl looks like a long-haired me. Not just a resemblance, but exactly like me. I can’t tell what color her eyes are, but they look light—green or blue for sure—and her nose turns up at the end just a little bit, like mine does. Her eyebrows are straight and thick—like tiny caterpillars, Mum used to say—and I wonder, if the girl did smile, whether or not she’d have a tiny dimple on the right side of her mouth but not her left, just like I do.
Below the picture, there’s a caption.
The Lee Family, 1882: Aurelia (33), Jacob (39), Rosemary (12), and Nell (6).
I can’t seem to drag my eyes away from the photo. And it’s not just because she looks like me or I look like her or whatever. It’s the family. The parents, the little sister. Even though they’re unsmiling, my chest aches with a familiar feeling, a surrounding. A fullness I haven’t felt since Mum died. My eyes cloud over and I keep my head down, eyes on the photo, hair curtained around my face, until Lemon slides a finger into my vision, her brightly painted nail jabbing at the text.
“Read it,” she whispers, not unkindly but firmly enough to jolt me back into the room, remember where I am. Without looking up, I do what she says, knowing she’ll never let it go until I do. A sinking feeling settles into my stomach, though. Happy stories don’t make it into books like Coastal Lore. Only the sad ones do that.
Spend a mere hour in the sleepy coastal town of Rose Harbor, Maine, and you’ll no doubt hear about the famous Rose Maid, the purported mermaid who lurks in the cold harbor waters, intriguing lore-lovers for nearly one hundred and fifty years. But unlike the Loch Ness Monster or the kraken, this mythical creature is based on a real girl, a teenager who lived in Rose Harbor in the late 1800s, which is perhaps what makes the story so enticing to tourists and locals alike.
Rosemary Elizabeth Lee was born in Rose Harbor on May 1, 1870, on the heels of the Civil War. Rosemary was the elder daughter of Jacob Lee, a ship captain, and Aurelia Lee, a homemaker and seamstress. Very little is known about Rosemary’s early life. What we do know is that the family routinely accompanied Captain Lee on his maritime travels during the summer months. On July 22, 1882, Aurelia, Rosemary, and little Nell boarded Jacob’s ship, the Skylark, a small steam-powered ocean liner that ferried wealthy families to and from Southampton in England twice a month. On this particular trip, however, the vessel never made it to its destination. In the early-morning hours of July 26, a storm—which most historians now concur was a Category 3 hurricane—waylaid the ship, capsizing the vessel and killing nearly everyone on board.
Rosemary Lee was among the few rescued from the cold Atlantic waters. Tragically, she was also the only member of her family who survived the wreck. She returned with a broken arm and several fractured ribs to Rose Harbor, where she found herself orphaned and without any other family to call her own. For the next two years, she lived with a widow named Anne Lancaster at the north end of town. Anne was kind, and her house was comfortable and boasted ocean views, but Rosemary Lee returned from her ordeal at sea a troubled soul. According to Anne’s journal, which now resides under glass at the Lancaster House Museum and attracts thousands of visitors a year, Rosemary was quiet, seldom speaking more than a few words a day, and would often spend hours frantically walking up and down the beach, eyes on the ocean, as though searching for her lost family.
“Her loneliness is a constant chill in my bones,” Anne wrote in her journal on December 15, 1882. “I try to help her, but she seems lost, a ghost in a girl’s skin.”
Anne wasn’t the only one who noticed the change in Rosemary. There are several written accounts of strange behavior by the girl, including splashing into the ocean fully clothed, losing her temper with classmates over trivial matters during school hours, and even disappearing for days at a time, only to return to Anne’s house as though nothing had happened.
On July 26, 1884, exactly two years after her family perished at sea, she told Anne she was going for a walk on the beach after dinner, which wasn’t unusual for the girl. “I thought nothing of it, nor did I offer to accompany her,” Anne wrote a few days later. “She often rebuffed my attempts at comfort and companionship. Now I wish I had insisted.”
As do those intrigued by the story of Rosemary Lee, for the girl never returned to Anne’s house that night. For a while, the town assumed she had run away or that some evil fate had befallen her. Anne, however, knew better.
“I looked for her just before darkness fell,” Anne’s journal recounts. “Of course I did. I followed her footprints across the sand, but as far as I could tell, she never left the beach. She simply walked and paced as was her custom, toward the water and then away and back again, until the tide swallowed any trace she’d left behind.”
Not long after Rosemary vanished, strange reports began to surface. Sightings. Whispers. Fishermen returned with their daily catch clearly spooked, rambling about iridescent flukes sliding through the water and blue eyes as big as the ocean itself. One or two wild stories might have been shrugged off, but soon tales of a mermaid in the harbor—a mermaid with swirling blond hair and a tattered blue dress, which was what Rosemary was wearing when she was last seen—were numerous, filling the town with both unease and excitement. Moreover, the sightings only increased as the years passed until Rosemary became the Rose Maid. Storms, shipwrecks, illness at sea, madness, unfruitful fishing trips, and pretty much any misfortune on the waves were soon attributed to her, as well as dozens of sailors’ accounts of experiencing “unearthly comfort and peace” upon making eye contact with the mermaid.
Now the Rose Maid is a local legend. Poems have been penned about her, beguiling drawings and paintings rendered. Sightings of a strangely beautiful fishtail, a flash of blond hair, or a hauntingly sad human face under the waves are still reported yearly. And every July 26, the town celebrates the mermaid with the Rose Maid Festival, a bacchanal of sea-green beverages, mermaid costumes, golden spyglasses, and sighting parties on one of the many boats in town. The Rose Maid, it seems, isn’t leaving Rose Harbor anytime soon.
Two days before the girl disappeared, Anne wrote these chilling—prophetic?—words in her journal: “She has the sea in her soul now. I fear one day it will claim her completely.”
Did the sea claim Rosemary Lee as Anne feared? Visit Rose Harbor today and decide for yourself.
At the bottom of the second page, there’s a painting of the sea. The view is from under the water, looking up to a fisherman standing on what’s left of his boat, barely more than a ragged plank of wood. Wreckage surrounds him and he gazes out, hand to his brow, as though looking for rescue. Below him, a mermaid drifts, reaching a hand toward his ruined vessel.
“Well?” Lemon says. “What do you think?”
I shiver. Goose bumps are everywhere now.
She has the sea in her soul now.
“Hazel?”
I fear one day it will claim her completely.
“Hazel!”
I jolt back into the room, so startled I drop the book on the floor.
“Oh, yeah,” Jules says, grinning and clapping their hands together, then points at me. “We got her. Total believer right there.”
I pick up the book. “It’s a tourist guide. Not fact.”
“Facts are boring,” Kiko says as she mixes water with dark blue food coloring for her midnight layer.
“You’re holding a fact in your hands right now,” I say.
“She’s got you there, Kik,” Jules says.
Kiko sticks her tongue out at them and holds her three-layered jar up to the light, swirls it around. “Okay, fine, but I’m not here for the facts. I’m here for the arts and crafts and the magic.”
“The magic,” I say.
“The ocean is full of magic,” Kiko says, lifting one eyebrow at me like a challenge.
“I never thought about it like that before,” I say.
“Kiko is a fantasy nerd,” Jules says. “She’ll have you sprouting fairy wings and riding on a dragon in no time.”
Kiko sighs, gets a dreamy look in her eyes. “Wouldn’t that be amazing?”
“More like terrifying,” I say.
She lifts her eyebrows. “You wouldn’t want to ride on a dragon?”
I visibly shudder at the thought, which I hope is answer enough.
Lemon laughs, a shiny glint in her eye as she looks at her friends. It makes my throat go a little thick. But then I notice Kiko studying me for another beat before glancing down at her work, unsmiling. I feel a tug in my chest, embarrassment or worry or confusion over Kiko’s coldness, but then I breathe through it, remind myself that’s exactly what I wanted.
Thankfully, we all fall into our work for a few minutes. These three talk so fast and seem to know each other so well, they make me dizzy, and I need a second to shake off whatever Kiko thinks about me. The quiet settles around me, and my mind clears while I concentrate on my ocean zone jar. It’s beautiful, really, the way all the different liquids keep their own space, each blue just barely blurring into the next shade.
I hold my completed jar up. This project is actually really accurate. Daylight from the window gleams through the sunlight layer, dappling blue onto the table in front of me. A little gets through the twilight layer, just like it should. But the light can’t work its way through the midnight layer. And the abyss and trenches layers are so dark I shiver in my chair, all those mysteries pinging around in my brain just like they used to.
The ocean is full of magic.
“We think the Rose Maid lives somewhere around in here,” Lemon says, tapping the twilight layer on my jar. “And if we’re really lucky, like when all those sightings are reported, she’s here.” She taps the sunlight layer.
“If she lived in the twilight layer,” I say, “someone definitely would’ve spotted her already.”
“Who’s to say they haven’t?” Kiko says. “There are tons of sightings documented. And not just the Rose Maid either. My grandma? She swears she saw a mermaid in Japan when she was a kid, before she moved to America. She told me all about it, how she was in Ishigaki with her family and the water is super clear there. She was swimming with her brother and saw this creature with the body of a fish and the head of a girl. They call them ningyo.”
I shiver but shake my head. “I mean oceanographers. People like Amira.”
“Who’s like Amira?”
I look up to see the woman herself standing by our table, arms clasped behind her back.
“Oceanographers,” Kiko says. “Hazel here”—she says my name like it’s a swearword—“was saying that if the Rose Maid lived in the twilight zone, you would’ve found her already.”
“Oh, not necessarily,” Amira says. “The twilight zone can get pretty dark, and the ocean is vast. Lots of mysteries out there still to solve or discover.”
“Wait,” I say, ignoring how her words mirror my own thoughts from only a moment ago. “You believe in the Rose Maid?”
She smiles. “Well, oceanographers do like evidence, I’ll give you that. Facts, numbers, sure. But oceanographers also believe in possibility. If we don’t, what are we looking for when we go out to sea? What drives us?”
And with that proclamation, she walks back to the front of the room.
“See?” Jules says.
“Magic,” Kiko says, nearly squealing with excitement.
“I prefer the term mysteries,” says Jules, “but fine, have your fun.”
Kiko and Jules continue to banter, but I look down at my jar, run my finger over the darkest three zones. My mind spins, circles, rushes back to that last day with Mum on our kayak trip. We weren’t out that deep. The sunlight zone glimmered beneath us and still, it took her. Just like that. From life to death in a blink, like it was… like it was some sort of magic.
“Okay, it looks like everyone is finishing up their ocean zones,” Amira says from the front of the room, snapping me out of my memory. “Carefully seal them and place all the materials back in the tub. It’s time for lunch!”
The class cheers and everyone starts scrambling to clean up. I help, my limbs moving automatically, but my mind is far away, lost out at sea with Mum.