“Coming,” I replied, and headed up the path to join my friends, trying to put my questions about this strange corner of the island to the back of my mind.
We rejoined the road at the top of the path and found our way back to the house.
“There you are,” Miss Platt said, greeting us at the door. “We’re meeting out here in five minutes. Shiprock School has arrived, and we’re all going to Deep Blue Bay to discuss plans for the week. Hurry, hurry. Don’t make us late.”
I ran upstairs, quickly got changed, and joined the others a few minutes later. As we walked, I told Aaron about what I’d seen earlier. “I’m sure it was a big fish or a shark or something,” I said. “Just, it looked . . . well, like a person.”
“It was probably one of the kids from Shiprock,” Aaron said.
Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of that?
“What about the ripples, though?”
Aaron shrugged. “Whoever it was must have flipdived into the water or something.” He laughed.
“What?”
“Just you. You’re determined to find mystery and adventure everywhere you go, aren’t you?”
I shrugged and folded my arms. “No,” I said defensively.
Aaron laughed again and slipped an arm around my waist. “No need to sulk,” he said. “I meant it as a compliment. It’s one of the things I —”
He stopped and coughed. “Sorry, swallowed a fly,” he said, thumping his chest a couple of times.
“One of the things . . .” I prompted him when he’d gotten over his coughing fit.
“Just, you know, it’s why I don’t mind hanging out with you,” he said lightly.
He doesn’t mind hanging out with me? Was that all he thought of me? When I’d been practically picturing us getting married! That put me in my place!
“Come on, we’re getting behind.” And with that, he sped up and practically marched to the front of the group.
“Now, then, children. Please remember we are not only making history this week; we are also here to learn about each other’s worlds,” Miss Platt began. We were huddled at one end of the bay, sitting on the ground, leaning against the boulders that lined the shore. It was the only bit of land that we could sit on. The rest was cut off by the tide now. The Shiprock class was in the sea in front of us.
Mr. Finsplash rose a little higher in the water. “Well said, Miss Platt,” he agreed.
“Please, call me Andrea,” Miss Platt said with a tiny blush.
Mr. Finsplash smiled at Miss Platt. “Very well. In that case, you must call me Kal.”
Miss Platt returned the smile. “Thank you, Kal. I shall.”
Mandy nudged me and winked. I laughed.
Miss Platt shot us a warning look as Mr. Finsplash continued. “I am in full agreement with Miss . . . with Andrea. We are here to learn, to share, and to enjoy everything that this splendid island has to offer.” He glanced around. “Now, I believe that a Lowenna Waters is going to tell us what we are doing next.”
Miss Platt stepped forward. “Actually, Lowenna isn’t here. She’s . . . well, actually, we don’t know exactly what’s happened to her, but we believe she’s been called away. Her husband, Lyle, is taking care of us.”
“Fine. Let’s hand it over to Lyle, then,” Mr. Finsplash said, looking around again, presumably wondering which one of the children in front of him might possibly be a man named Lyle, who was married to Lowenna and in charge of today’s activities.
“Lyle isn’t here,” Miss Platt said tightly. “We looked for him at his house on the way here, but he —”
“Miss Platt, look!” One of the girls, Evie, was pointing to the other side of the bay, where Lyle was hurrying across to join us.
“I’m so sorry to keep you waiting,” he said breathlessly as he rushed over. He looked as if he’d just gotten out of the shower.
Smoothing down his wet hair and half tucking his shirt into his pants, Lyle gave Mr. Finsplash and the Shiprock kids an awkward wave. “I’m Lyle,” he said. “Welcome to Fivebays Island.”
Mr. Finsplash raised a disapproving eyebrow. “Nice to meet you,” he said stiffly.
“All right, then. We’re all here now,” Miss Platt said. “Shall we get on with the activity, then?”
“The . . . ah, yes,” Lyle said.
“You do have an activity for us?” Miss Platt asked impatiently.
“Um. Well, actually, I . . .”
Miss Platt shot a This-is-what-we’ve-had-to-put-up-with look at Mr. Finsplash, who decided to jump in and save the day — probably to impress Andrea.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said brightly. “First, let’s split into boys and girls.” We all dutifully shuffled into position in our separate groups.
“Now, all of you form pairs.”
We started shuffling again. I looked for Mandy to see if she wanted to pair up with me.
“I hadn’t finished,” Mr. Finsplash announced. We stopped shuffling. “One human, one mer in each pair.”
That was easy. I sought out Shona in the group in the water. She gave me a nod and a thumbs-up.
Miss Platt clapped her hands together like she does when one of us comes up with a good answer. “Wonderful idea!” she trilled. Taking over from Mr. Finsplash, she went on. “In your pairs, we’d like each of you to teach the other something new about your worlds.”
“And about the island,” Lyle interjected, glancing at both teachers as if they were in charge and he was the overeager student.
“And about the island,” Miss Platt agreed.
“You’ll have to figure out how to do this together,” Mr. Finsplash added. “Deal with the limitations you have in exploring each other’s worlds, and together find a way to overcome any obstacles.”
Lyle looked at his watch. “It’s high tide in an hour. How about we meet at Sandy Bay just after that? There won’t be much space here for the Brightport students when the tide is fully in.”
“Perfect,” Miss Platt agreed.
“In your pairs, we want you to tell us what you have learned about each other’s worlds, and then tell us something you have discovered together about the island,” Mr. Finsplash concluded. “Any questions?”
Tommy put his hand up. “Yeah. Miss Platt, are you and Mr. Finsplash going to teach each other about your worlds, too?”
We all started to laugh, till a look from Miss Platt stopped us. Her eyes were stern, but her pink cheeks gave her away.
“Yes, Tommy,” Mr. Finsplash said. “That’s a very good idea. OK. What are you waiting for? Team up and get going. We’ll see you in just over an hour at Sandy Bay.”
With that, the two groups shuffled and jostled and awkwardly made introductions. Luckily for Shona and me, our teachers were too interested in getting to know each other to worry about whether it was cheating if we teamed up when we were already best friends.
I slid into the water, and Shona and I swam off to gossip, chat, and catch up while the others discussed how to go about their assignment.
We got right down to important matters.
“So, are you and Seth officially boyfriend and girlfriend yet?” I asked Shona as we swam off. We stayed above the surface of the water, gently flicking our tails as we meandered out to sea.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “He hasn’t mentioned it and neither have I. Maybe we’ll figure it out while we’re here. You like him, don’t you?”
“Hmmm. A good-looking boy who saved the narwhal from certain death, is one of Neptune’s closest advisers, and clearly adores you . . . Let me think!” I teased.
“You think he’s good-looking?”
“Of course. Obviously not as good-looking as Aaron, but, you know, he’s OK.”
Shona laughed and splashed water at me. “Come on, let’s explore,” she said, diving under the surface. I followed her down.
I marveled, as I always did, at the change in life under the water. I’d been a mermaid for only the last year. Or, at least, I’d only kn
own I was a mermaid for that long, so it was all still relatively new to me — the silence of the underwater world, the bright colors, the gentle swaying of the plant life at the bottom of the ocean.
We zigzagged through a mini forest of seaweed. Bright-green tubes with feathery yellow tops, reaching up toward the surface of the sea, jostled against one another and stretched upward, like a crowd of people all craving a glimpse of the sky.
We raced alongside a pair of sleek black fish. They looked like mini skinny sharks: focused and serious. Long-tailed, long-nosed, and fast, they seemed to be on a mission. They barely flicked their tails as they sped through the water. We let them zoom ahead.
We swam past a shoal of tiny black fish, swimming around and around to a spinning circle, constantly on the move, like a snowball getting bigger and bigger as it rolls down a hill.
Below us, the sandy seabed was broken up by occasional clumps of rocks and weeds. In among them, crabs and lobsters lay in wait, like old men sitting outside their houses watching the world go by and meeting up for games of chess and dominoes.
“Hey, look,” I said, pointing ahead. The clumps of rocks seemed to give way to something else. Or, rather, they seemed to build into something else. The individual clusters of rock became bigger and bigger, until there was no sand at all. Just rocks. The water grew colder as we swam above them.
“Look over there,” Shona said, gesturing ahead to where the rocks grew even higher and darker.
We swam carefully toward them, weaving between the jagged tops that reached higher and higher. Some of the peaks almost came to the surface of the water.
“It’s like a mountain range,” I whispered.
“It’s incredible,” Shona agreed.
As we swam over a particularly high peak, my tail brushed against the rock. It almost scratched me; it was cold, rough. I was about to suggest we forget it and turn back when I noticed something.
“Shona, it’s like a secret path!” On the other side of the peak, the range fell steeply away. It was a sheer drop down, not just from this peak but all the way along the rocks. Suddenly, the seabed was a long, long way down. The water was clear, blue, warm. I could see the sandy surface way down below us, a thin winding channel within the rocky mountain range.
Shona and I stared along the channel, then turned to gape at each other.
“OK, I have officially never seen anything like this,” Shona admitted.
“You want to explore?”
Shona twisted uncomfortably. As she did, her tail glinted and sparkled in the newly clear water. “I don’t know if we should,” she began. “I mean, we’ve been out for quite a while. Maybe we should start heading back.”
I’d dragged Shona into a lot of adventures in the past, and some of them had been pretty life-threatening. I wasn’t going to draw her into another one if she wasn’t up for it. I started to turn around to swim back. “OK, you’re right,” I said. “We probably should be heading —”
“No.” Shona stopped me. I don’t know if she’d seen the disappointment on my face or if something about this hidden channel had ignited her curiosity, too, but she pulled me back. “Come on. We might never find it again. Let’s just have a quick look. I’m sure we’ve got time.”
So we swam on. The channel narrowed and twisted and turned, like a giant eel snaking along the ocean floor. We followed each curve and bend, marveling at the huge sheer cliff faces on either side of us as we swam.
We passed shoals of tiny white-and-yellow fish, swimming along in a line like an obedient brood of ducklings behind their mother, and shoals of blue-and-purple striped fish, wide and round, moving along in perfect formation like a dance troupe.
Three sleek black fish darted through the channel beside us before racing ahead, like commuters hurrying to their offices. Small nests of seaweed bunched up here and there, green strands with their feathery yellow tops waving us on through the channel as tiny sand clouds puffed up between them.
And then something weird happened. . . .
Everything stopped.
The fish scattered and disappeared around the next bend. The seabed no longer sent up puffs of sand. Even the rocks seemed more still. All the motion of the ocean had frozen.
And then . . .
I gulped as I stared ahead — too shocked to speak, too enthralled to turn back and grab Shona. Coming around the bend and heading directly toward us was the huge, dark hull of a ship.
I tried to turn and swim away, but my tail had forgotten how to work. I couldn’t move. The ship was coming right at me — an enormous deep-blue hull with some kind of gold figurehead rising up out of the water at the bow. Any second now, it would hit me. What could I do? There was nowhere to escape to, no room in this channel to dive out of its way. I could dive down to the bottom, but to be honest, I didn’t really like the idea of a massive ship gliding directly over me. Which just left one other option: head upward.
Without pausing for another moment, I spun my tail as hard as I could and propelled myself upward. If I could get to the surface and out onto the top of the rocky peaks, perhaps I could get out of the ship’s way — everyone knows ships avoid rocks!
Panting and gasping, I reached the surface and looked around. The ocean was as calm and still as the channel below. The surface of the sea lay like a blue-tinted mirror: shiny, flat, glass-like. It was eerie. But that wasn’t the strangest thing.
The strangest thing was the sight ahead of me — the ship. It was the only thing around that showed any sign of movement. Its sails were billowing and then dropping, as if begging for wind — searching for the tiniest bit of breath in the air to propel the ship forward. But there was nothing, no wind to give it power.
Aside from its flapping sails, the ship was as still as everything else. Out there in the wide, open sea, it appeared to sit firm on the ocean, motionless.
I swam around its sides, looking at it from every angle. The hull was dark blue, with a white line that ran all the way around. The sides fanned out and upward, with the longest bowsprit I’d ever laid eyes on — that’s the big wooden pole that sticks out from the front of the ship. I’d never seen one like it. Beneath the pole, an intricate maze of ropes formed a netted hammock. Three huge masts stretched upward from the deck, sails now flapping uselessly.
I’d seen these sails and this ship before, from the chair on the edge of the cliff. Surely it couldn’t be . . .
I wasn’t a hundred percent certain, but it was so similar, and you didn’t often see tall ships like this. It had to be the same one.
Up close, I could see the figurehead below the bowsprit. The top was a woman’s face and torso with long hair stretching the length of her body. Her bottom half was a tail. I would have said the figurehead was a mermaid, except that the tip of her tail opened out into a jagged-edged fan, with swirling patterns and fire snaking along the hull below it. Part mermaid, part dragon? Freaky, whatever it was.
I swam alongside the hull. There were letters at the bow. I read them as I swam by: Prosperous II, the ship’s name.
I swam toward the stern — that’s the back end of the ship. Swimming away from the ship so I could see higher, I craned my neck and looked up. A wide, flat wooden deck looked polished to perfection. From the water, I could see only the edges of it, but it looked almost brand-new.
And then, as I scanned my eyes across the planks, they seemed to come to life! Either I was seeing some sort of weird optical illusion from the sunlight that was shining on the water and sending sparkles across the deck or there was some kind of disco going on up there!
And there was something else — people. A man was sitting on a bench near the stern. A woman was twirling around the edges of the dance floor. Another group of people stood by the rails, looking through binoculars and pointing out to sea.
Who were these people? Where had they come from? And why were they so silent?
“Hey!” I yelled. No one responded. No one even turned around. Maybe they were too busy havin
g fun.
I looked around. Where was Shona? What the heck was going on here?
An unpleasant cold feeling snaked through my body from my head to the tip of my tail. I suddenly felt too alone out here, with this.
I dived back under the water and back down into the channel.
“Shona!” I called. Nothing. Where was she?
The hull of the ship was still there, still dark, still huge. I swam toward it. “Shona?” I called again, less certainly.
I moved on, alongside the ship, heading back toward the bow and to where I’d last seen Shona. A line of large portholes was dotted all the way along the hull. As I passed them, I glanced inside. Each one looked into a tiny cabin. They were all empty.
Until I came to one about halfway along.
I swam toward it and glanced in, expecting to see the same dark emptiness inside. What I saw this time made me leap back so hard I hit my head against a rock.
A woman. As I peeked in, she hurried to the porthole and started banging her hand against the glass. Her hair was long and red, straggly and messy. Her eyes were green and wide open. Her fists pumped against the window. Who was she? Was she real? A ghost? A mermaid? What?
The woman banged harder against the glass. Her fists didn’t make any sound at all — but the urgency of her movements was matched by the expression on her face. She needed help. What could I do?
Her lips were desperately mouthing something, but I couldn’t make out the words clearly. It looked like she was saying, “All my weather” or “I’m a winner.” What could it mean?
I shook my head as I stared. “I don’t know what you’re saying!” I shouted to her.
She called something back that looked like “Happy! Happy!” But surely she couldn’t be saying that! The very last thing she looked was happy.
She continued repeating the same thing — her mouth forming the words more and more urgently each time. And then I realized what she was saying over and over again. It wasn’t “Happy! Happy!”
It was “Help us! Help us!”
I stared at the woman, powerless and panicked. How could I help them? Who were they? Where had they come from?