CHAPTER

2

It turns out that being dead is a lot like dreaming.

The world feels soft and gauzy and slow, as though I’m underwater. In fact, I think I am underwater. Everything is blue. All sorts of blue—navy and cerulean, aqua and royal, all swirling together like a kaleidoscope.

Way off in the distance, I see a dark shape moving toward me. It gets closer and closer, bigger and bigger, and soon, I can tell it’s a person.

A woman. She has a graceful tail instead of legs and her hair is long and inky, just like mine.

She moves closer and closer, her hands scooping away the deep blue to get to me. I hear my name, thick and bright at the same time, and I know exactly who the mermaid is.

I know because the mermaid’s face is the same face that’s in this picture in my nightstand at home. Kate gave it to me when I was super-little. She thinks I threw it away a long time ago—because that’s what I told her—but instead I take it out every night after Kate goes to bed and think about how the face inside the photo looks just like mine, only older.

When I was seven years old, and eight and nine, and okay, maybe even ten, I would look and look at that picture and tell myself the lady inside was a mermaid. She was a mermaid and that was why she was gone. She was a beautiful, iridescent-tailed mermaid with long black hair who didn’t know what to do with a two-legged human girl. After a few years of pulling me up from the deepest parts of the ocean to gulp at the salty sea air, she finally decided that I fit better on land and left me nestled in Juniper Island’s sun-white sand for Kate to find. Then she disappeared into the great big blue, never to be seen again.

But now I’m in the sea with her. We’re together, so I know something’s off. Something about this isn’t real, so maybe I really am dead. I pump my human arms and legs to swim toward the mermaid. And the closer I get, the happier I feel, but my eyes sting with a whole bunch of sad tears that shouldn’t even be able to fall if I was really underwater.

Soon she’s right in front of me. Our hair flows together, jet-black against the glowing aqua sea. Her amber-brown eyes stare into my amber-brown eyes. Freckles spill across her nose and onto her cheeks.

“I didn’t know you had those,” I say.

“I knew you had those,” she says back. She smiles and reaches out a fingertip, touching the dots on my own nose and cheeks. “We match.”

She says it like it’s a good thing, like it matters. I don’t know if it matters or not, so I stay quiet, floating, floating, floating in the middle of all the blue.

“Oh, Sunshine, I’m so sorry,” she finally says. Underwater tears fill up her eyes.

“Only Kate and Dave call me Sunshine,” I say.

“They call you that because I did.”

I shake my head, and my hair breaks away from hers, lacy and flowy like jellyfish tentacles. She looks so sad and her mouth is still moving, but I can’t hear her anymore. She’s getting smaller and smaller because the ocean is pulling me away from her, pushing me up to the surface. My mermaid reaches out both of her arms, her tail flapping wildly to get to me, but it’s no use. I’ve got legs, lungs that need air, and for the second time in my life, the ocean spits me back up on land.