shut, and my eyes are unblinded. The lights in the classroom are so
bright that I can’t imagine how I fell asleep in the first place.
He taps my desk with his long, skinny index finger.
“Mr. Hart?” He never calls anyone by their first name.
“‘At the age of nineteen / He became the Macedon King / And he
swore to free all of Asia Minor / By the Aegean Sea / In 334 B.C. / He
utterly beat the armies of Persia’?”
“Very good, Mr. Hart. I see you’ve been listening to your Iron
Maiden, hmm?”
The class snickers.
“What made him a good king? Ms. Shea?”
Maddy sits with her legs up on the chair. She’s wearing a tiara
from her Sweet Sixteen party, which was really just me, her, Layla,
and some of her drama club nerds at Ruby’s on the boardwalk, because
her mom wouldn’t let her have a party. The tiara was my
will-you-be-my-girlfriend gift, along with a few other things I fished
out of my mom’s junk trunk.
Maddy pops a big, green bubble-gum ball and rolls her eyes. “Down
with kings! Alexander the Great was such a poser. Did he even fight?
No. He just got people killed, and killed a whole bunch of other
people who didn’t even want to be ruled. He killed them right there
and then-dead. Dead, dead.”
My head pounds at the temples.
There’s a knock on the door. Everyone looks at me, then at the
door. Then me again.
I stand and bump into the desk next to mine. It’s Layla’s. She
sits with her hands tied and propped on the desk. She has her head
down like she doesn’t want anyone to look at her face. “This is all
your fault, Tristan. All your fault,” she says.
“What the-” I grab her hands and start trying to undo the ropes,
but every time I get one knot undone, another one pops up in its
place.
Maddy gets up and out of her desk, and everyone goes, “ Oooooooh.
”
She stands over me and says, “You always picked Layla over me. Now
you got her dead. All you do is hurt people, Tristan Hart.”
“The door , Mr. Hart. The door. ” Mr. Van Oppen walks around and
sits on his desk. “Everyone else turn to page 1001, the future-the
destruction of New York City by a little merman.”
“Wh-”
“The door , Mr. Hart. Answer the door. ”
I can’t shake the numbness spreading through my body. I turn the
knob, and when I open my eyes, the silver mermaid is there. She bares
her shark teeth at me. The hallway is full of water. She moves her
hands to try and grab me, but she can’t breach the glass wall between
us. I shut the door in her face and press my back against it.
Mr. Van Oppen stares at me with a furrowed brow and a crooked
smile. “My, my. And here I was wondering what all the fuss was about.
Hmm?”
When I breathe, I breathe hard.
Breathe like I haven’t had any air in years. Layla’s face is right
over me. Her eyes are wet, and she wipes her hand across them. She
brings her closed fist right down on my chest. Dйjа vu.
“Easy, girl,” I hear Marty say.
“Where am I?”
“You’re alive is what you are,” Thalia says. She’s in between
shifts. Her deep green scales cover her breasts, and she’s still
wearing her puffy pink skirt. She’s rubbing a black paste onto my
chest where I’ve got more long red scratches.
“You’re in the king’s quarters,” Kurt says from somewhere. I
recognize the bed, the throne across the room, the empty stand where
the trident used to be.
I stretch my arms out and feel the sheer blanket, too fine to be
silk but the softest thing I’ve ever felt. Then I glance at Layla’s
face again and think of the kiss I stole from her. No way, her lips
are definitely the softest.
But other memories push past that one-the silver mermaid, over and
over again. She’s here. She’s somewhere on the island.
“Elias. That shark mermaid was down there. Where’s my
grandfather?”
“The king is calming the crowds,” Thalia says. Her cuteness is
replaced with that all-knowing, kick-ass attitude she doesn’t always
let peek through. Shit must be serious then.
“Elias’s followers want your fins stripped on a platter.”
“He’s not back?” Of course he’s not back. I remember him trying to
choke me, then letting go and sinking into the abyss.
I can see it in their faces. They think it was me.
“I didn’t kill him! I didn’t!” I sit up, past the ache in my legs.
“The last thing I remember is trying to reach for him. He was beating
me, and then he just started-sinking. Then I got this feeling like my
brain was ripping in half. I saw her, the silver mermaid. The shark
mermaid from my dream! It’s like she was inside my head.”
Heavy footsteps enter the room. “Why didn’t you tell me of this,
Kurtomathetis?” The king’s voice booms through the glittering stone
walls.
“I didn’t know-”
“Do you know how severe this is? How dangerous she is?” His face
is red. His white mane curls wildly around his leathery shoulders.
“Wait, hold up. Rewind.” I cross my hands in a T for time-out.
Grandfather walks over to his chair and sits. He slumps in his
chair like he’s beaten, like with every minute the trident is gone,
more of the power he’s held for centuries is washing away.
Layla and Thalia link arms at the edge of the bed. Marty leans
against a wall, looking exactly the way he did when I first saw him,
coffee straw and all.
“Tell me, Tristan,” says the king, “when did the mermaid first
come to you? What did she look like?”
“The day of the storm. I have zero memory of surviving except for
this dream. She comes at me and attacks me, but this shark wearing
some kind of helmet comes and saves me and drags me to shore.”
“That explains the missing sharks on the guard,” Kurt says.
“Indeed,” my grandfather responds.
I tell them about all of my memories of her, the storm, the
hospital, the dreams, the tunnel and pool right here in Toliss. “And
when I was fighting Elias, it felt like she was trying to get into my
mind. It’s always like that, but there’s a barrier and she can’t ever
break through. Who is she? What does she want with me?”
“She is my sister.” My grandfather leans back on his tall golden
chair and concentrates on the fireflies. “She is Nieve-a murderer and
a deceiver. She’s a sorceress and a traitor to the throne. When we
were young, she killed my mother’s newest babe out of jealousy. She
was banished for two hundred years by my father, who feared the
harpies’ fury if he killed his own daughter. Then she was released,
and she tried to become part of us again, but there was something
rotting inside her, so she never could. Her blood is wrong, poison.
When Father made me king in her stead as eldest, she killed him. So I
locked her up below the sea, and she’s been there for centuries.”
“Why didn’t you just off her?” Marty asks. I’m afraid my
grandfather is going to turn around and drown him or just smack him,
but he doesn’t.
“Because I am an utter fool.” He sighs long and hard. “I am
foolish to think our kind can change. I am foolish to think that my
people can find their way in this new world when I’ve clung to my
father’s tradition for so long. My father could not kill his own
daughter, no matter how dreadful she was. She was still his. I knew I
should’ve destroyed her when I took the throne. But there is no
greater crime than killing your own family.”