CHAPTER
23
“Kate—” Lena starts, but Kate whirls around and jabs a finger right in her face, cutting her off.
“Don’t,” Kate says, her teeth gritted together. “Don’t. You. Dare.”
“It’s okay,” Lena says. “We just—”
“You don’t get to tell me what’s okay right now, Lena,” Kate says. She turns back to me, her jaw clenched, her nostrils flaring with too-fast breaths. I’ve never seen her so mad. She’s coiled like a snake about to strike. “Sunny, go to your room. Quinn, I need you to head home, okay?”
Quinn nods, but I hold on to her hand. “Kate, don’t—”
“Sunny, you need to do what I ask. I am barely holding it together right now and, frankly, this is none of Quinn’s business.”
Her voice is sharp and kind of rude and I feel my cheeks flame up from embarrassment.
“It’s okay,” Quinn whispers, squeezing my hand again. “Text me later.”
“She won’t be texting you tonight,” Kate says, her voice even more razor-y.
“What?” I say. “Kate—”
“Go to your room!”
Her yell echoes off the bathroom walls. Behind Kate, Lena watches, her face pale.
“I’m sorry,” Quinn says, letting go of my hand and trying to edge past Atomic Kate, who’s not budging.
“Quinn, wait—”
“It’s okay,” Quinn whispers. “It’s okay, I’m sorry.”
No, it’s not okay and she shouldn’t be sorry. Kate’s acting like it’s Quinn’s fault I dyed my hair and I don’t want Quinn to think anything is her fault ever again. But she’s already down the hall and I hear the front door slam.
“Sunny. Your room. Now,” Kate says.
“No.”
She glares at me, but her eyes are shiny and her chin is trembling. I know her about-to-cry look and this is it. “Excuse me?”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I say.
“You didn’t do anything wrong?” she echoes. “So, going surfing when I expressly told you not to wasn’t wrong?”
“We didn’t—”
“You did. There’s a salty, sand-covered surfboard leaning against my house right now. That rash guard is wet and on the floor in the hallway. And I don’t even know what to say about the cut on your arm.”
I glare right back at her, but my chin is bouncing around too.
“Kate, that was me,” Lena says. “I took her surfing. I thought it was important and her arm is fine, I promise. Just a scrape. But you should’ve seen her. She was amazing and it made her feel confident out there. So don’t be mad at Sunny. Blame me.”
Kate turns around. “I do. I do blame you. This is not okay, Lena. This is not what I wanted to happen, at all.”
“You’re the one who told me she’d come around,” Lena says. “You told me it was important that Sunny know I’d wait, as long as it took, for her to give me a chance. Well, she’s giving me a chance.”
“I wanted you to get to know your daughter and for her to know you. For her to know she was worth knowing. Don’t you get that? I did not mean for you to go behind my back and take her into the ocean and dye her hair blue.”
“I wanted it blue,” I say, but Kate doesn’t hear me.
“You have no idea,” she says to Lena, her voice more shaky now than razor-y. “She may be your daughter, but she’s my kid. I kept her fed and clothed. I watched her cry when she lost her best friend and wouldn’t tell me why. I read to her every night. I felt my world falling apart when she got sick. I paid all the bills that insurance didn’t cover. I wished, night after night after night, that she’d get a heart. I watched her grow into this beautiful, amazing person who I would do anything for, anything to protect. I did that, which you would know if you’d called or written, even once, in the past eight years.”
“Katie—”
“No.” Kate shakes her head, tears careening down her face. “No, we’re done. You don’t get to swoop in and undo our entire lives. She could’ve been hurt today. She could’ve died.”
“But she didn’t.”
“Yeah. Today. But you lied to me. To my face. And she’s not like every other kid, Lena. She’s fragile.”
Lena sighs and rubs her forehead. I don’t know what to say. I knew Kate would be mad if she found out we went surfing, but this is more than mad. This is… destroyed.
“Please go,” Kate says, looking right at Lena.
“Wait, what?” I ask. Lena just stares at her.
“You need to leave, Lena. Right now.”
“Katie, that’s not fair,” Lena says.
“No, it’s not,” Kate says, “but I don’t know what else to do here.”
“She’s fine,” Lena says. “Sunny is fine. She proved to herself she could do it and she’s—”
“You put her in danger,” Kate says.
“Kate,” I say. “She didn’t. I just surfed, that’s all.”
“We need some time,” Kate says. “We all need some time.”
“Some time?” I say. Panic curls my hands into tight fists. “What? What are you saying?”
“Sunny, for the last time, go to your room!”
“No!” I turn to Lena. I want to grab her hands, but her arms are folded tight across her chest. “Lena, don’t go, please.”
Lena doesn’t answer me, though. She stares at Kate and Kate stares back. Finally, Lena lets out a big breath and looks at me. “Sunny—”
“No,” I say. “Please don’t.”
“Sweetie,” Lena says, reaching out and tucking a piece of hair behind my ear. “Maybe Kate’s right.”
“She’s not right! How could you say that?”
Lena takes a step closer to me. “She’s right about taking a breather right now. This has been a lot, for all of us, and I want what’s best for you.”
I shake my head. “So best means leaving? Again? You’re just going to leave me?”
Kate sucks in a breath and reaches for my hand. I yank my arm back.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Lena says softly. “I promise. You have no reason to believe me, I know, but I won’t leave. We’re just going to take a few days so Kate and I can figure things out.”
Kate doesn’t say anything, but she’s stiff as a board as she stares at the ground.
“But I want to go surfing again tomorrow,” I say. “And you still need to take me shopping and I need to talk to you about… about…”
Liking.
Kissing.
Quinn.
The words bubble up and die before I can say them, but I know I want to say them all to Lena. She’d understand. She’d get it, all this confusion, all this starting over, all these big huge feelings in my stomach that I can’t get rid of. I want to wade out to the deepest part of the ocean and bob on our boards while we watch the sun tick across the sky and tell her everything.
“You’re not doing any of those things, Sunny,” Kate says. “Not anytime soon, anyway.”
My mouth drops open and tears leap into my eyes. I wait for Lena to protest, to tell Kate she’s wrong, but she just stands there with her tattooed arms folded over her chest.
“Lena,” I finally say.
She looks at me then, her eyes all big and sad. “I’ll see you soon, Sunshine. I promise.”
No, no, no. That sounds way too much like goodbye. It sounds like the end. It sounds like eight years without anything but mermaid dreams and a picture of a lady who has the same eyes as me.
I want to wrap my arms around her waist and never let go. I want her to fight for me. Because what if she doesn’t come back? What if this is just like when I was four years old and she figured out I’m not worth all of this?
What if?
But she doesn’t fight. She doesn’t do anything but give me one more sad-eyed look and then turn around and leave.
Kate and I don’t really talk about what happened.
Of course, she cleans my arm again, slathering it with a billion layers of Neosporin before covering it up with a hospital-grade Band-Aid. Then she takes my blood pressure. Then she calls Dr. Ahmed and yammers on and on to her about my surfing and the itty-bitty cut on my arm and hair dye. Like hair dye is going to make me suddenly sprint into cardiac arrest or something.
After she’s pretty sure that I’m probably going to live, at least for the next few hours, she tells me to go to my room. Again.
“That’s it?” I ask, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, watching her fill up the kettle with water.
She nods, her jaw tight.
“Can I call Lena later?”
She flips off the water and slams the kettle down on the stove. “Sunny. Not now.”
“Can I?”
“No.”
“Well, when?”
“In a few days, all right? I need to think this through, figure out the best way for her to be in your life. I might need to talk to a lawyer.”
“A lawyer? What for?”
“Honey, it’s complicated. There are financial issues and… just a lot of things to think about, okay? I thought I was ready. I thought we were all ready, but—”
“This is stupid,” I say, and my throat gets all tight. “You wanted me to talk to her. You kept saying I’d regret it if I didn’t.”
“I know that. I do want you to get to know her, but she can’t do this, Sunny. She can’t go against what I say and put your health and safety at risk.”
“She didn’t—”
“I’m your guardian. Legally. She gave you up.”
The last four words hurt and Kate knows it. She closes her eyes and shakes her head, but she doesn’t take the words back. She doesn’t even try to explain why Lena did what she did. Kate has always tried to explain. She’s always wanted to help me understand that Lena loves me, that she gave me up for my own good, that there were good reasons for it all.
But today’s different, I guess.
“Lena’s just trying to help me,” I say.
“Help you do what, exactly? Get hurt? Act like you’re eighteen years old when you’re twelve?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“Feel like I’m not about to drop dead all the time, that’s what!”
Kate’s face goes totally white. Tears spill fast down her cheeks. The kettle whistles, yelling like a banshee, and Kate still hasn’t said anything.
It’s still screaming when I stomp to my room, slamming my door so hard it rattles the whole house.
I wish I was a mermaid.
If I lived in the sea, I’d never get out,
never let my feet touch the sand.
Because if I was a mermaid,
I could swim the ocean wide with you,
the cold waters melting into warm.
If I lived in the sea, we wouldn’t be here
and I wouldn’t feel like this
because you never would have left me
alone.
If I was a mermaid, I’d fit with you like I should.
If I lived in the sea, I’d fit with me like I should.
If I was a mermaid, I’d sleep in the deep
and play in the shallows,
flipping my tail for the humans on shore.
They’d see a flash of color and shout.
They’d tell stories about me at night.
But I’d never let them get close enough
to hear my heart beat.
Mermaid girl.
Mermaid or girl?
Girl—real or not?