chapter ten

The best thing I can say about the next two weeks is that they pass quickly, getting me that much closer to the end of summer. Mama makes me go to Ocean Club every weekday. There’s no way I can even leave the house and then skip out on the club and spend the day reading on a beanbag chair in the library’s kid section instead, because Lemon knocks on our door at what feels like the crack of dawn every single morning, ready to escort me like I’m four years old.

And every day I have to leave Peach with Mama—and Claire, who seems to be with Mama anytime she’s not at her restaurant, even if it’s just to sit on our porch or on the beach while Mama taps away at her laptop—trusting that my sister won’t drown or break a bone while I’m gone.

Which gets even harder when Mama enrolls her in a ballet class.

Ballet.

As in jumping and pirouetting and spinning on her little five-year-old legs, with other equally clumsy and spindly five-year-old legs, which, in my opinion, has all the makings of a disaster. The only good thing I can say about it is that it meets every afternoon from twelve to one thirty, so that’s one less hour and a half Peach spends frolicking in the treacherous Atlantic.

I can’t say the same for me. At Ocean Club, we go to the beach every day for lunch. Sometimes we just sit and eat and watch the surf. Other times, Amira brings along buckets and magnifying glasses and we—and by we, I mean everyone but me—walk along the edge of the sea, barefoot, searching for shells and tiny crabs to examine before setting them free again. Lemon and Jules try to get me to join, but they don’t push too much.

I think they’re afraid to, like I might break. I don’t like feeling weak, but at least it makes them leave me alone, for the most part.

When Lemon showed up at our front door the day after my panic attack, she didn’t say anything about it. Neither did Kiko or Jules when we got to the library, although Kiko kept shooting me looks like I was about to sprout tentacles and strangle everyone. Even Amira simply asked if I was feeling well, to which I offered some unclear combination of a nod and a shrug. She seemed to take it as a yes, though, because she asked everyone to settle down and launched into an in-depth presentation about the sunlight zone and the marine life found there. Sharks and tuna and mackerel, stingrays and sea turtles, jellyfish and seals and sea lions. Manatees in Florida. Atlantic white-sided dolphins in the Gulf of Maine.

It wasn’t at all interesting.

Nope, not one bit.

Since then, she’s covered all five zones and the kinds of life we might find there. I guess, because we’re living in mermaid central, someone asks about the Rose Maid every single day. And every single time someone asks about the Rose Maid, Lemon’s, Kiko’s, and Jules’s gazes float over to me, just for a second. And not only them—apparently, the pale, ghostly visage of Rosemary Lee is well known, so now more and more kids are glancing at me all the time, whispering.

Just yesterday, this one kid named Jackson asked me outright if I was her.

“Who?” I asked. We were on the beach. The kayak was gone, but the whole ocean was still there, and I was sitting as far up on the dry sand as possible. I was practically in the sea oats.

“You know, her,” he said again. His friends chuckled around him. Stared at me.

I wasn’t going to give him an inch. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“If it is her, she’s having some memory problems,” another kid, Huntley, said.

“Maybe if we dump some salt water on her legs, she’ll sprout fins.” This from a genius named Nate.

“If mermaids were real,” I said, “they’d have flukes on the end of their tails, not fins.”

Jackson wrinkled his nose at me. “What’s the difference?”

The facts flooded into my brain and straight out of my mouth, completely without my permission. “Ocean mammals have flukes, which are two lobes that come together in the middle. Whales, dolphins, and porpoises move their tail up and down instead of side to side like a shark, which has fins, not flukes. And each set of flukes is unique, like a fingerprint. It’s how researchers identify certain whales when they see them out in the water.”

“Yeah, but you’re not a whale,” Nate said.

“Well spotted,” I said.

“Shut up, you idiots,” a new voice piped up.

The boys turned around, revealing Lemon with Kiko and Jules flanking her.

“Oh, it’s the MerSquad,” Huntley said, lifting his hands like he was surrendering. “Don’t want to piss them off—they might aim a spyglass at you!” Then the boys laughed like hyenas and scattered.

Lemon, Kiko, and Jules sat down next to me.

Lemon handed me a turkey sandwich.

“They’ve got a point,” I said, gesturing to Lemon’s T-shirt, which, as usual, matched Jules’s and Kiko’s. So far, the three of them have worn a different one every day. That day’s flavor was hunter green with a mermaid in the center. The words Seas the Day curled around her head in white script.

“You know you want one,” Jules said before biting a huge hunk out of their pimento-cheese-on-wheat sandwich, the same kind they’ve eaten every day for the past nine club sessions.

I snorted, ignoring the strange feeling fluttering in my chest.

Today, two weeks into Ocean Club, we’re finally going to the Gulf of Maine Aquarium. It’s not huge, not like the Georgia Aquarium, which is the largest in the United States and has 10 million gallons of fresh and salt water and over 100,000 animals. Used to be, I’d pull up images of the Georgia Aquarium online, salivating over their whale shark exhibit—they have four, named Trixie, Alice, Yushan, and Taroko—and the beluga whales, whose population they’re trying to preserve. It’s a marvel.

Gulf of Maine is dinky in comparison, but one thing it has that even the Georgia one doesn’t is direct ocean viewing. Yesterday, before we went to the beach and Jackson and his friends tried to turn me into a sea creature, Amira told us all about the observation level. The top floor is the main level of the aquarium and houses their jellyfish exhibit, crustaceans, and all sorts of other small ocean life. But if you go below, there’s an entire wall of thick glass, a window into the sea’s depths.

I shivered just thinking about it.

Now, as Lemon rings the doorbell and Peach runs to answer it in the purple tutu Mama bought her a few days ago, my stomach feels like it’s full of moths. I can’t tell if it’s from excitement or dread. Funny how those emotions feel the same sometimes.

I hook my Safety Pack around my waist and follow my sister to the door. She flings it open, then spins on her tiptoes with her hands above her head so Lemon can see all she’s learned in the past few days since she started her dance class. We both wait for Lemon to squeal and tell Peach how awesome she is, but there’s nothing but the roar of the sea, a few gulls squawking in the sky.

Lemon stands in the doorway, her eyes red-rimmed, her hair a mess—I mean, more of a mess than usual—and her gaze is inward, like she’s staring at a whole world happening in her mind and doesn’t even see us.

She looks terrible.

Peach lowers her arms and looks up at me, frowning.

I shrug. “Lemon?”

Nothing.

“Lemon!”

She startles, bleary eyes focusing on me. “Oh. Hey.”

“‘Oh. Hey’? You did ring the doorbell, didn’t you?”

She swallows and smiles, this weird bend to her lips that doesn’t reach her eyes. “Yeah, totally. You ready to go?” She looks down at my sister. “Hey, Peach, I like your tutu.”

Peach glances at me again. Lemon’s never called her by her regular nickname. It’s always Guava or Mango or Nectarine, which Peach thinks is the funniest thing in the world.

“Hey, is that Lemon and—” Mama comes out from the back hall into the living room, hand fiddling with a large gold hoop she just put in her ear. She’s got on makeup and she’s actually wearing her hair down instead of her usual sloppy bun. “Oh, hey, Lemon. Your mom’s not with you?” She comes closer and cranes her neck toward the porch, like she’s hoping Claire is hiding behind her daughter.

Lemon shakes her head. “Not today.”

Mama nods but then frowns at Lemon. “You okay, honey?”

Lemon nods. “Yeah. Yeah, fine. I’m just fine. Totally fine. You ready, Hazel?”

“Um. Yeah. I guess.”

Lemon nods again, fake smiles, then takes off toward the stairs that will lead us to the path into town without another word.

I glance at Mama, but she’s busy staring after Lemon, her eyebrows pushed together. She takes out her phone and starts typing. When she’s done, she waits for a second, eyes on the screen, but I guess there’s no response, because her frown stays put and she tucks her phone into her pocket.

“Go on, Hazel,” she says when she notices me watching her. “Make sure she’s okay, all right?”

I’m already out the door and halfway down the stairs when I realize I have no idea in the world how to do that.

“Um… are you okay?” I ask Lemon when I catch up to her.

“Yeah, fine,” she says.

I try to think of something else to say, something to make sure she’s okay, but the only thing I can think of is “It’s warm today.”

She just nods.

“First official day of summer,” I say, the fact that it’s June twenty-first popping into my mind. I grab on to it. “So I guess that makes sense.”

Her mouth tightens and I don’t even get a nod out of that one. She speeds up her already fast walking. She’s got long legs, longer than mine, and I nearly have to run to keep up with her.

“What’s the hurry?” I ask.

“Nothing. I just want to get there.”

After that, we lapse into silence, which almost never happens. Usually, she babbles about I don’t even know what the entire walk to the library, so I should be welcoming this bit of quiet. Instead, I feel unsettled, like I’ve left home without my Safety Pack, even though I can feel it bumping against my hip.

When the library comes into view, the rest of the kids from Ocean Club are already gathered outside the front doors near a big white van with the words GULF OF MAINE AQUARIUM on the sides. Amira stands nearby, a clipboard in her hand.

Relief washes over me when I spot Jules and Kiko near the back of the group in their usual matching tees. These are heather gray with a navy mermaid in profile, her body and hair formed from swirls and stars. Lemon doesn’t walk over to them, though. She weaves her way through all the other kids and stands near Amira. I follow her, because I don’t know what else to do. I lock eyes with Jules as they and Kiko make their way over to us.

“Hey,” Lemon says when they reach us, like everything is totally normal.

“Hey,” Kiko says softly. “How… how are you?”

“I’m fine, okay?” Lemon says, her voice so tight it’s a wonder it doesn’t snap in two.

Jules just nods, reaches out and squeezes Lemon’s shoulder once, and leaves it at that. I know I’m missing something, but I don’t know what to ask to find out what. I remind myself that I don’t really care, that Lemon says she’s fine, so that means she’s fine, but then I think of the times that I say I’m fine. To Mama, to Peach, to a cashier at a gas station who I guess thought I looked particularly sour as I paid for some travel snacks. I say I’m fine a lot, thinking maybe if I say it enough it’ll be true, I’ll deserve for it to be true.

I’m not always fine, though.

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure I ever am.

“Okay, let’s get going,” Amira says, and a cheer goes up from everyone except the four of us. “There are seat belts for all of you, so buckle up and keep your butt on the seat. No horsing around. You hear that, Nate?”

“Yes, ma’am!” Nate calls back, then socks his friend Max in the shoulder.

We file into the van. There are five rows and each row can fit about four kids, so Lemon, Kiko, Jules, and I all squeeze into the front. I’m the last to join, which is when I notice that Lemon is wearing a plain green tee, no gray mermaid shirt in sight.