“As long as they are still your people.” Elias growls loud enough
so that only we who are nearest can hear him.
“I’d like to take her place in the challenge,” I say.
Kurt shakes his head. “You can’t. It’s done. They’ve accepted.”
“What happens if Elias loses?”
Thalia shrugs. “This never happens. If he challenged another
merman and lost, he’d have his fins stripped and he’d be left out in
the sea to die.”
My laugh is bitter, nervous. “Comforting.”
Layla pulls on the straps of her dress, and the silk pools around
her feet. She’s down to her bra, the same lacy pink-and-black thing
she was wearing when she decided to surprise me in the pool.
I hold my hands out to them. “Are you sure there isn’t anything to
be done?”
Kurt and Thalia shake their heads. Even Thalia’s pretty smile is a
tight line.
I follow behind Layla. “Why, why, why , couldn’t you have just let
me talk?”
“You don’t talk for me, Finn . Don’t you believe in me?”
“It’s not that, Layla. I do.” I just can’t have anything happen to
you. I leave it unsaid.
“Not enough, I guess.”
I grab her wrist. My whole body is hot. I don’t know what to say
to her now. I love you? Please don’t die? She’s almost a better
swimmer than me. On my bad days she beats me. But this guy is a
full-blown merman. The whispers of the court surround us like a swarm
of mosquitoes. She pulls her hand free from my hold and practices her
breathing. Just like at any other meet.
I rub my hands over my face. This is happening.
This is happening, and I’m not doing anything to stop it.
They dive at the same time.
There is one giant intake of breath from all of us that makes the
hair on my body stand on end. She hits the water. A clean, perfect
dolphin dive. That’s what Coach calls her, his pet dolphin. I don’t
know how the water is, but it looks warm at least. She doesn’t come up
right away for breath. Her body is a blur beside Elias’s.
My heart feels like the time I spent an entire homeroom making a
rubber ball, twisting and snapping rubber band after rubber band into
a tight ball the size of my fist. My heart is a ball of twisted
rubber-and that’s how every girl wants to make a guy feel, right?
She’s falling behind Elias. Not by much, but enough to keep even
my grandfather at the edge of his throne. She comes up for air, and
that’s the beauty of it: he doesn’t have to. She’s going to lose. And
she’s going to die. And it’s all going to be my fault.
Her arms are like hummingbird wings flitting through the water.
She’s almost a foot away from him. They reach the rocks. He flips
right around, a smile visible when he breaks the surface just for
show. My own gills burn.
“Will you stop pacing?” Marty pulls on my cargo shorts. “It isn’t
going to help.”
Maybe not looking might somehow make this nauseous feeling go
away. I pick the spot directly across from me where the herald tents
are. Alone, while her future husband is racing my best friend, the
Snow White mermaid lies on heaps of blankets. The servants who
surrounded her moments ago are gathered at the edge of the lake. She
leans her cheek on her fist, bored. That’s when I see it. I mean, see
her. In a second, her gray eyes glaze over with a black shadow and her
lips mouth a single word, a word I can’t even begin to guess the
meaning of.
The crowd gasps and squeals as Layla speeds up. One, two, three,
four strokes, and she’s reached the other side of the shore.
Elias is only a second behind her, but it’s clear to everyone
watching that he’s lost.
The court is a mess-girls, kids, fathers- laughing. My grandfather
is still and pulls at the tip of his chin hair. He makes a motion to
reach for something at his right, his trident, and then realizes it
isn’t there anymore.
Elias has lost. He’s lost to a human girl, an intruder, and the
court is laughing at him. I look for his fiancйe, but she isn’t there
anymore, and I can’t find her in the crowds of the court.
In the lake, Layla cries out and cringes. She has a cramp and
grabs on to the rocky ledge. Kurt and Marty are weaving their way
through to help pull her out of the water as Elias turns his bloodshot
eyes on my friend. My Layla.
Brow tight, lips curled in a growl, hands outstretched for her
neck, he is literally a creature rising from the lake to attack her. I
can’t say I do this without thinking. I think he’s going to hurt her.
I don’t think about what this might do to my standing as a champion. I
run and dive into the lake, close enough to him that my splash
distracts him. Elias turns to me full on.
The shift comes naturally. It starts as a tingle in my spine,
right where my tattoo is, and it travels all the way down. In two
strokes I adjust to one tail movement instead of two kicking legs.
One, two, and I have my arms around him. One under the right arm and
one over his left shoulder. I squeeze him and he pushes hard against
me, so we sink into the water.
He’s physically stronger, and we go down, down, down. We hit
against a wall, and I let go of him. He charges at me with arms
outstretched, full speed, Superman underwater. We’re locked in a
wrestler’s grip, forearm to forearm.
Something in me is awakening. I don’t know what to call it.
Instinct is too simple. It’s older, more primal. It’s more than
defending a girl I’m possibly in love with; it’s knowing that I can
beat him. I push as hard as I can through the water. I can feel every
fiber in my body, every bone in my tail, and he cannot overpower me.
Something in me knows nothing can harm me. I am untouchable.
And then there is the darkness. We’re so far from the surface that
the light doesn’t reach us anymore. He breaks my hold and hits me
right on the jaw, sending me slamming against a boulder. His hands
close around my neck so my gills can’t take in water. I hold my
breath, but it isn’t enough. I wrap my tail around his, and even
though I can’t see his face, I can still see the whites of his eyes.
His grip loosens, and his eyes roll back into his head. He lets go
completely, falling down into the pitch-black. Did I do that? I
couldn’t have. I wouldn’t know how.
My stomach contracts and there’s that nauseous feeling again. My
head feels like it’s splitting open. I reach for Elias’s hand and try
to pull him up to the surface, but he’s as heavy as he looks, and my
muscles feel like elastic that’s given out and snapped.
I shut my eyes against the throbbing pain in my head, and I know
this is all happening because of her. I can see her face again.
Smiling, waiting in the black coldness of my dreams, the silver
mermaid. Waiting for a moment like this.
It’s daylight.
I’m drooling all over my arm in Ancient History. The teacher, Mr.
Van Oppen, leans his Hugh-Grant-looking self against the chalkboard.
He has a funny accent I can’t ever guess right and the kind of hair
that flops everywhere when he runs his fingers through it.
The girls are crazy about him. I’m talking Indiana-Jones-writing-o
n-their-eyelids-and-hanging-around-after-class-washing-the-eraser-boar
d-for-him kind of crazy.
“And what year did Alexander the Great conquer all? Come on, now,
it’s not like it’s in front of you on the reading assignment from last
night, hmm?”
Silence.
A sliver of light peers through the blinds and hits me right in
the eyes. Mr. Van Oppen pulls on the string to make the shutters stay