CHAPTER

12

We head to open sea. I stretch my arm over the side of the boat and watch my shadow flicker over the blue water. There’s so much under there. A whole universe.

Quinn and I stand at the front of the boat—pardon me, the bow—and lean on the railing as it speeds over the waves. Quinn used some of my lip balm, so she smells like coconut and her mouth is super-shiny, which makes me want to bust up laughing and makes my stomach flip and flop all at the same time. I can’t believe I might get my first kiss today.

Quinn tosses another look over her shoulder at Sam, who’s standing with his dad in the wheelhouse. Marisol is still snapping and clicking camera stuff. Quinn and I have decided to play it cool with Sam. Act totally uninterested. That’s what I remember Margot doing and it seemed to work. We flip our hair a lot. Or, at least, I do. Quinn doesn’t need to try too hard to act cool and pretty.

“Do you ever wish mermaids were real?” I ask her.

“Totally,” she says. “Wouldn’t that be amazing?”

“Maybe they are. There’s no way we can know everything that’s out there, right?” I sweep my hand over the ocean.

“I guess not. When I was little, I used to believe there were people in the water. I called them the Water People.”

“Clever.”

She nudges my shoulder and laughs. “Shut up. I was, like, four. Plus, I was on boats a lot, because of what my mom does, and it got pretty lonely. I made up friends, that’s all.”

“Mermaid friends?”

She shrugs.

“I used to tell myself that my mom was a mermaid,” I say.

Quinn laughs.

“No, really.” Then I tell her the whole story. How Lena left me with Kate when I was four and never came back, so I made up this whole tale about how she was a mermaid. And since I was a human girl, with legs and all, she decided that I fit better on land than in the water with her.

Quinn doesn’t say anything for a couple of seconds. When I finally glance at her, she’s looking at me with her eyes all sad.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I know she’s not really a mermaid.”

“No, I know,” Quinn says, her voice super-soft. “So… that lady on the beach yesterday. She’s not your mom?”

I shake my head. “She’s my Kate.”

“Your Kate.”

“A Kate is better than a mom.”

Quinn nods, like that makes complete sense, and I think I like her even more.

“I don’t have a dad,” she says. “Well, I do, but he died.”

“Oh. Wow, I’m sorry.”

She shrugs. “It was before I was born.”

“How?”

“Cancer.”

I wince and press my hand to my chest, feeling that my heart is still in there. Then I reach out and slip my fingers between hers. She jolts a little, her eyes widening on our hands. I’m about to yank my arm away when she squeezes my palm. I squeeze back.

“My dad died too,” I say. “Right after I was born.”

She squeezes my hand even harder. “How?”

“Motorcycle accident.”

“That’s sad.”

“Yeah.” I don’t think about my dad very much. Kate doesn’t even have any pictures to show me. He was never like Lena, where I had to figure out how to fit in my brain somehow the fact that she was alive and chose to live without me. My dad never even had the chance.

“Do you know why your mom really left?” Quinn asks. “Do you think it was because of your dad dying?” She scoots closer to me so our shoulders touch. Her hand is warm in mine, as balmy as the sea air.

“No way.” I stick out one flip-flopped foot and wiggle my toes. “It was because I don’t have a mermaid tail.”

Quinn laughs and I laugh, but my stomach knots up. I want to tell Quinn the truth, that Lena is an alcoholic and couldn’t take care of me, but suddenly, I feel embarrassed. Like, why couldn’t Lena just stop drinking? If she really loved me, couldn’t she stop? Even if she had to leave me for a while, why did she stay gone for so long? Eight years. That’s two-thirds of my whole life. I’ve never talked about it with Kate, but I’ve thought about this stuff a lot over the past few years. Like maybe Lena knew. She knew there was something wrong with me, with my heart, which is the most important part of a person ever, and that’s why she stayed away.

And now that I’m all fixed, she’s back, looking all cool with tattoos, tugging at all the questions I’d knotted up in my secret heart of hearts for years and years.

I press my other hand to my chest and take a few quiet breaths. But before I can think on it all too much, Quinn yanks her fingers out of mine and grabs my arm.

“Ow, what—”

“Hey,” Sam says as he joins us at the rail.

Ah, that’s what.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” Quinn says.

The boat’s motor rumbles to a stop and we slow until we’re bobbing up and down, up and down. There’s so much blue, everywhere, all the shades. I can almost taste it, clean and bright and a little tangy.

“We’re stopping,” Sam says.

“Oh, are we?” Quinn asks, even though it’s pretty obvious we are. Her voice is like a thousand-watt bulb. She glances at me and grimaces and I have to swallow a laugh.

Sam and I follow her to the back of the boat—the stern for the seafaring folk—and over to where her mom is fitting a mask over her face. Nathan checks all these tubes that sprout from the big tank strapped to Marisol’s back and then lowers the dive platform. Quinn helps her mom pick up a camera that, honestly, looks like a giant insect. There’s a big lens in the middle, along with two handholds on either side. Two lights stick out from the sides like antennae. It looks like it weighs a thousand pounds.

Marisol sticks a big rubber mouthpiece between her teeth and gives Quinn a thumbs-up. Then she just falls off the boat, back first. It’s pretty much the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

“Keep an eye out, kids,” Nathan says as he checks some official-looking gauge on some official-looking instrument in the wheelhouse. “Dolphins love to play in this area and show off.”

“Did you know that the killer whale is actually a type of dolphin?” Sam asks as we head back to the bow and sit on the padded benches that border the boat. Quinn stuffs me between her and Sam, and the wind keeps snapping pieces of her blue hair in my face.

“No, I didn’t know that,” I say.

“They can live up to twenty-nine years.”

“Wow. Killer.”

He blinks at me.

“You know… killer… like cool, but killer because it’s a killer whale.”

“Oh.” He frowns at me. “Yeah.”

I clear my throat. Maybe I shouldn’t get my adjectives from a retired rock star. “I bet Quinn knew that, though, right, Quinn?”

“Huh?” she says, trying to corral her hair. She let her bun down for optimum hair flipping, but the wind pulls at it like fingers. The ocean is really choppy, taking my stomach on a roller coaster.

“Um, yeah, I totally knew that,” she says. “And striped dolphins can live up to sixty years.”

“Whoa, really?” Sam asks.

Quinn nods and Sam grins at her. Quinn smiles back, but it looks weird on her face, and the second he looks away she nods her head toward him and mouths something I don’t understand. Does she just want me to lay one on him right here?

“Hey, Quinn,” I say, searching my brain for a question that might interest Sam. Then I’ve got it. “Could you die if you got stung by an immortal jellyfish?”

“Immortal jellyfish?” Sam asks. “That’s a thing?”

“Yeah,” Quinn says. “But I’d rather talk about… um… Sunny, what are you really good at?”

“What am I what?”

“Good at. Like, you know, art or music or running. You have long legs. I bet you’d be a good runner. Don’t you think, Sam?”

“Well, um, I can’t run,” I say. “At least, not for longer than about thirty seconds before Kate would call an ambulance.”

Her eyes go as big as planets. “Oh, god, Sunny, I’m sorry. I totally forgot.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, I just… I was…”

I nudge her arm and give her a chill the heck out kind of look.

“Um… what’s an immortal jellyfish?” Sam asks, scratching the back of his head.

“Oh,” Quinn says. “It’s a really tiny jellyfish. So, Sunny—”

“Wait, why is it immortal?” Sam asks.

“It can start its whole life cycle over again,” Quinn says, huffing a breath. “After they reproduce, they turn themselves back into their polyp state.”

Sam’s mouth drops open. “For real?”

Quinn barrels onward, a total rock star. You can tell she likes talking about this stuff. “Their tentacles retract, their bodies shrink up, and they sink to the bottom of the ocean and pretty much become a baby jellyfish again.”

“That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever heard,” Sam says. “What else do you know?”

“Um… a shrimp’s heart is in its head.”

Sam laughs. “Gross.”

“Totally. Good thing we don’t eat that part,” Quinn says.

“I don’t eat them anyway. They’re like water roaches,” Sam says.

“Ugh. I’ve never thought of them like that before.” Quinn makes a face and shudders. “Thanks a lot.”

Sam smirks. “No problem.”

I watch the conversation like a tennis match. Sam’s definitely flirting with her. He’s grinning like a doofus and watching Quinn from under his lashes.

Quinn flicks her eyes to me and I shoot her a quick thumbs-up. She frowns and shrugs and I waggle my eyebrows at her while Sam takes a few more gulps from his water bottle.

“Sam!” Nathan calls from the wheelhouse. “Come help me check this equipment for Marisol’s next dive.”

Sam groans but stands up. He tosses Quinn a tiny smile before he leaves, then heads into the wheelhouse.

“Wow,” I say when he’s gone. “That was a thing of beauty. You’re an expert flirter.”

Her eyes go big and round. “I am? I was just… talking.”

“If by talking you mean sweeping Sam off his feet, okay.”

“No, no, no. Sam is kissing you, remember?” she says.

“But he likes you,” I say, turning so I’m facing her.

“He totally doesn’t.”

“He does.”

“Well, I don’t like him,” she says.

“Well, I don’t like him either.”

“So what are we doing?”

“You’re going to kiss Sam,” I say.

“Sunny, I don’t want to.”

I stare at her for a second, because she kind of yelled it. Not loud, just… snappy. “Okay. You don’t have to. I just thought—”

“And you don’t have to either, you know. This whole thing is stupid.”

I sit back against the bench, my heart a weak little putter in my chest.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean that. I just—”

“Hey,” Sam says, “check out the dolph—”

But he doesn’t finish whatever he was going to say, because he lays a hand on my shoulder and it scares me half to death. I’m already all tense, so I jerk to my feet and whirl around, arm flailing, and my elbow catches Sam right in the nose.

Hard.

Blood squirts everywhere. And I mean, everywhere. Sam cries out and his hands fly to his face, bright red pouring between his fingers.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry!” I say.

Sam shakes his head, his eyes wide and shocked. I can’t even see his face for all the blood. It drips onto the boat’s white floor and drenches Sam’s shirt.

Quinn blinks at him, frozen. I think she’s in shock. I run around the back of the boat, looking for a towel or rag or something, but can’t find a single thing made of cloth.

“Where are the towels, Sam?” I ask. He tries to answer, but his words are clogged and total gobbledygook. I’m about to scream at the sky because this whole adventure went from amazing and exciting to a horror show in three seconds flat. Finally, I spot my bag on a seat. Surely there’s something in there that will mop up the mess that is Sam’s face.

I shove my hand in, feel something soft and cottony, and pull it out.

“Here!” I press it to Sam’s nose and he grabs on to it, tears and snot mixing with the blood and making a total mess of the—

Oh. God.

“Is that a…” Quinn starts to ask, but she can’t even say it. Because yes, Quinn, yes it is. That is Kate’s black, lacy bra smooshed up against Sam Blanchard’s broken nose.