Some time later, Sophie awoke under the water. The talisman she wore around her neck softly illuminated the rippling area closest to her. Even the watery fist of her grandmother—as big, it seemed, as the ocean itself—had not been enough to rip the sea glass from her neck. It was strong, just like Angel, who had given it to her. Unable to move, Sophie thought of Angel hard at work in Kishka’s dump, working the glass tumbler with thick, dirty gloves on her hands, hoisting barrels of sparkling color onto her shoulders, her brow sweating beneath the band of the woolly cap she wore no matter the weather. Sophie wished she could reach out to her friend’s mind to let her know she was okay, but then, Sophie wasn’t sure she was okay. But if she was going to be okay she knew that the talisman would help her, and she thanked Angel in her heart as she lay inside its cool, blue glow.
The light attracted a small school of curious fish. They were nothing more than slivers, silvery and translucent. As one they darted toward the glow, and as one they quickly twitched away. If Sophie had been able to move she could have reached out and touched them. Instead, she just watched their movements, all as one, as if conducted by a giant fish just out of sight, holding a baton. The brave ones at the front of the school put their tiny fish mouths right onto the glass and ate the small bits of effluvia that had settled there. She wished she could communicate with them as she had with the pigeons of Chelsea, that she could expect a new group of English-speaking animals to join up with her wherever she went, helping her out like she was some urban Snow White. But Sophie knew the pigeons were special, with their sweetness and their fierceness, and how her heart ached for them as she lay there at the bottom of the bay. What Sophie would have given to listen to Arthur rage against Kishka then, at her terrible powers, at how she had made the creek come alive and turn against them all. Arthur would have some choice words for her grandmother, delivered in his husky squawk with much flapping of feathers. But as quickly as a tiny smile came to her lips, Sophie realized that Arthur’s beloved Livia was gone—gone from all of them, forever. It probably wasn’t spite Arthur was feeling right now. It was probably something much more heartbreaking.
Sophie sighed, a jellyfish-sized air bubble that shimmered up and away. She watched it travel, losing sight of it before it reached the surface. She could tell that she was deep, but not terribly so. In fact, she realized, it was the noise of what sounded like a party boat that had roused her. The dull thump of bad music and the shrill chorus of people yelling, hollering because the music was too loud or they were too drunk or both. Booze cruises, her mother called them. Sophie had seen them twinkling by on summer nights when she and her mom drove out to where the harbor sloshed up against Chelsea. To Sophie, they looked like toys; they looked fun. Her mother had dismissed them. “Just a bunch of drunk people,” Andrea had said. “They pay a lot of money to get seasick and puke off the side of a boat.” Sophie had made a gross joke about the harbor being filled with vomit, and Andrea indulged her with a laugh. The tinny sounds of a Madonna song wafted over them, gentle as the waves.
It had been a sweet moment, but now it made Sophie feel sad. Andrea probably would have loved to have gone on a booze cruise. She worked hard, with barely a day off. Days she didn’t work she either ran errands for hours or conked out in front of the television, exhausted. Or both. Sophie didn’t think she’d ever seen her mother get dressed up, flick a fan of frosty eye shadow above her eyes, and go dancing. She figured her mom probably wanted to so badly she’d made herself hate it. When I’m done with saving humanity, I am going to make my mom go on a booze cruise, Sophie vowed. She thought Ella would probably love such a thing too, and promised that when she reconnected with her best friend she wouldn’t be such a nerd. She’d let Ella put makeup on her like she was one of those giant Barbie heads little girls smear fake lipstick onto. She’d let Ella do something with her head of snarls—even just detangling it would make Ella so happy. She’d ask her friend if she could borrow a pair of her jeans, one of her strappy tops, a pair of platform flip-flops. She’d suggest they go dancing at one of the awful underage dance clubs Ella always wanted to go to. They sounded horrible to Sophie—cheesy music, dumb boys with gelled hair trying to rub their hips on you on the dance floor, blinking lights making it hard to see, hard to focus—but for Ella she would do it. Sophie swore that if she got better and got out of the bay and back to Chelsea she would be a better friend.
If she got better, if she got back? Sophie’s own thoughts sent a chill through her spine—or where her spine once was. Things had gotten so crazy, science-fiction crazy, action-movie crazy, that she really didn’t know what was going to happen, just that somehow she was going to make it all better. She, the girl with the broken bones at the bottom of the bay, too scared to go to a teen dance club with her best friend: she was going to save the world from her grandmother’s ancient evil.
At this thought, Sophie began to cry a little, tiny tears that squeezed out the sides of her eyes and became lost in the bay. She was such a baby. But she suddenly didn’t care. She’d give anything to be back at home, huddled on the couch watching a dumb reality show beside her snoozing, overworked mom. If that made her a baby she didn’t care. She wanted it so badly she could practically taste it, and it tasted like a bowl of cereal for dinner, milky and sweet.
She thought of sweet Hennie, her magical aunt. Hennie, working every day at the creepy old grocery store down the street, the store Sophie had avoided for so many years. She could have known Hennie for so much longer, could have learned so much magic from her! But Sophie had had no idea, and like everyone else she’d been scared of Hennie, Hennie who looked like a witch with her wild gray hair and craggy face. She wondered where Hennie was now, and what had happened to Laurie LeClair, the girl with the worst reputation in all of Chelsea. She had come into Hennie’s grocery store possessed by the Dola, that destiny-policing creature, but when Sophie had left she was just herself, Laurie, cranky and messed-up and confused about where she was, with her screaming, neglected baby screaming and neglected by her side. Too much had happened, and look where it had left Sophie: lumped in the Boston Harbor, useless, cut off from everything and everyone. Not even in pain. That was what really scared her. She was too badly beaten by the fist of the creek not to be feeling any pain.
The coming and going of the school of silvery fish eventually lulled Sophie back into a sort of sleep; like a hypnotic pendulum, they danced back and forth around her necklace, and her eyes grew heavy. She imagined the flash of them leaping over the moon, full tonight, its bright beam cutting the water dimly. What would become of her? She was like a patch of weeds at the water’s bottom, alive but immobile. Could she even speak? She tried. “Help,” she spoke into the water. She repeated herself, louder. “Help.” And louder again, “Help!” The fish startled away at the sound, moving as one, a silver cloud. Sophie closed her eyes. And when she opened them again, the mermaid was there.