“Are you the ones who got bullied at school last year?” I asked, irritation heating my cheeks. “Are you the ones who only recently discovered a whole new self and for the first time in your lives had the chance to go to school with others like you? Are you the ones who will have to live our lives?”
All three of them were staring at me now, mouths open, eyes round and wide. I felt like I’d reached the important part of the speech, but I didn’t know what came next. Luckily, Aaron stepped in.
“Look, you’re right,” he said to the others. “This is an important decision. So why don’t we take it gradually?” He looked at all three of us. “How about a compromise? What if we go to Shiprock School for what’s left of the school year, while we all find our fins in Brightport, and then discuss it again over summer vacation?”
Mom and Aaron’s mom looked at each other. “I suppose there are only a few weeks left,” Mom said.
“And it would give us time to think about what to do in the long run,” Aaron’s mom added.
Mom looked at me. “We’ll have to see what your dad says first.”
I laughed. There was no way Dad would say I should go to Brightport High. That was settled, then. I was going to mermaid school again! And, even better, in a few days Shona would be there too. As I felt my whole body relax, I realized how much I’d been worrying about the idea of going back to Brightport High. I wasn’t ready to exchange the life we’d had at Allpoints Island for one where I got taunted and bullied — not yet.
Aaron moved his knight. “Checkmate,” he said. “You lose. Sorry.”
But he was wrong. I hadn’t lost anything. I was back in Brightport and was about to go to mer-school with my two best friends. “No, I don’t,” I said, grinning at him. “I win!”
Arriving at Shiprock School, we felt like celebrities. It seemed as if half the school crowded around us. Most of them went straight to Shona — hugging her and squealing with delight when she said she was back to stay. When she explained who Aaron was and reminded them about me from when I visited before, they fell on us too, firing questions and welcoming us to the school. A million light-years from the kind of reception I’d been dreading at Brightport High! This was definitely where we belonged.
The school bell rang and we followed everyone to the lines that led inside.
A couple of boys dragged Aaron off to his line.
“See you at lunchtime,” I called. Since he was a couple of years older than Shona and me, he was in a different class. I pointed to the other side of the playground. “Meet you over there at Shining Rock.”
Aaron nodded and swam off. It felt weird watching him swim away. We’d hardly spent a moment apart since we’d been back in Brightport.
“Come on, you’ll see him in about two hours.” Shona pulled at my arm. “Think you can survive till then?”
“Of course I can!” I replied, forcing a laugh out. “I’m not — I mean it’s just —”
“Anyway, it’ll be nice for us to have some time on our own together,” she said. “It feels like we haven’t done that for ages.”
“Yeah,” I said. Aaron swam up to the edge of a tunnel and looked around. He gave a quick wave, and I waved back before he disappeared inside.
Shona sighed dramatically.
“I’m just concerned for him,” I said. “He’s never been to school before, that’s all.”
“Mm, yes. Whatever,” Shona said. Then she swam off. “I’m going to class.”
“Hey! Wait for me!” I spun my tail and swam over to catch up with her and join the line heading to our class. We chased each other in between the rocks, darting through hordes of white fish that were sprinkled all around us, so tiny they looked like falling snowflakes. We laughed and teased each other all the way, just like old times.
Except, as it turned out, it wasn’t going to be anything like old times. And quite soon, we weren’t going to have anything to laugh about, either.
Shona, Aaron, and I ate our lunch at Shining Rock and talked about our first morning. Aaron’s eyes shone with excitement. He’d had Shipwreck Studies first, and he was buzzing about all the new things he’d learned.
We’d had Beauty and Deportment — Shona’s favorite subject. We’d been decorating hairbrushes, and Shona and I had done matching crescent moons and stars on ours. Shona loves anything to do with acting like a siren. She wants to be one when she grows up. Her favorite thing in the world is singing, which is what being a siren is all about.
“Where does this rock lead to?” Aaron asked, looking up. It was tall, like an obelisk, and it was called Shining Rock because of the light that shone on it, making it the brightest part of the playground.
“It goes right up to the top,” Shona replied. “It’s the only part of the school that breaks the surface of the water.”
“Swishy!” Aaron said, and Shona and I both laughed. He ignored us. “Can we see?” He started swimming upward.
Shona glanced down at the seabed below us, where an old ship’s anchor had been turned into a sundial. This was the only part of the school where you could see the time.
“We’ve got about half an hour,” she said. “But it’s out of bounds up there. We should really be —”
I looked around. “No one’s watching,” I said, flicking my tail into action and following Aaron upward. His enthusiasm had caught hold of me, too. “Can’t we check it out? Just quickly.”
Shona shook her head and smiled. “You’re a bad influence!” she said. “Come on, then.”
I smiled back at her. Shona can’t resist an adventure any more than I can.
We swam up for about five minutes, feeling our way along the rock and shielding our eyes from the light that was getting brighter and brighter. An orange fish with a splotch of bright blue eye shadow above each eye stared blankly ahead as we swam past it. A long green-and-black fish swam with us, edging upward in short staccato bursts. Finally, we reached the surface. The rock burst through the top of the ocean, piercing it like a rocket breaking through clouds.
Above the surface, the rock was jagged and hilly. It felt as though we’d reached the surface of the moon. Aaron pulled himself out of the water and sat on the edge of the rock. As he did, his tail flapped and flickered, then disappeared. He rubbed his legs and stood up, reaching down to pull me onto the rock.
As I sat on the side, waiting for my legs to come back, Shona swam up to meet us. She perched on the edge of the rock. “Hey, don’t go wandering off, OK? You know I can’t join you up there!”
“We won’t,” I said, getting up and climbing farther up the rock.
“We’re just going to have a quick look around the other side,” Aaron added. “Back in two minutes.”
Which is honestly what we were planning to do, and exactly how long we were planning to take doing it — before Aaron slipped and trapped his leg.
“YOUCH!”
I heard him yell from the other side of a jagged peak and clambered over to him. Aaron was lying on his side clutching his leg.
“Are you OK?”
“It’s stuck. I can’t move.”
I edged down the rock. His leg was jammed into a tiny crevice between two overhanging slabs of rock. “My foot slipped,” he said.
I tried to push the rock away from his leg, but it wouldn’t move. I pulled on his leg.
“Arrgh! Don’t do that!”
“What are we going to do?” I asked.
“Emily! Aaron!” Shona called from the other side of the rock. “We need to head back. We’re not even supposed to come up here during school.”
“You go,” Aaron said. “No point in all of us getting in trouble.”
I shook my head. “I’m not going to leave you.”
“Emily?” Shona called again.
I ran back to the top of the rock. “Aaron’s stuck,” I said. I was about to tell her to go back to school when we heard voices coming from below us.
Before we had time to do anything, a head appeared next t
o Shona. Or, to be more precise, the principal’s head. Mrs. Sharktail. I hadn’t met her yet, but I’d heard enough to know that you didn’t want to get on her bad side. We were supposed to have had a meeting with her that morning, but she’d had important visitors and couldn’t see us.
It looked like she was with those important visitors now. Two mermen and a mermaid, all wearing smart suits and sharp frowns.
“Now, this is where we had the minor landslide,” she was saying. “About five days ago. You can see —” She suddenly stopped.
“Shona Silkfin! What on earth are you doing out here?” Mrs. Sharktail snapped.
“It’s my fault,” I cut in quickly. I wasn’t having Shona get into trouble on her first day back here, especially when she’d been trying to get us to go back down. “I wanted to come up. Shona didn’t want to.”
The principal squinted up at me. “You’re the new girl, I take it?” she asked. She opened her mouth to say something else, but suddenly clapped a hand across it and gasped in horror. With the other hand she was pointing — at my legs. “What are those?” she cried with about as much disgust as if I’d had giant spiders crawling out of every pore.
I had the feeling I might have just discovered the bad side we’d been told to avoid.
“Um. They’re my —” I tried to think of another word for legs, one that might have been more acceptable to her.
I didn’t have to try for very long. Before I finished my sentence, Aaron came running over the top of the rock. “I got free!” he called, beaming. Then he saw Mrs. Sharktail and the smile disappeared from his face as rapidly as if it had been washed away by a freak wave.
She took one look at him and gasped again. “Both of you — my office now!” was all she said before disappearing back below the surface, her visitors scurrying off with her.
Aaron clambered back into the water. “What did we do?” he asked.
“Apart from come up here, you mean?” I said.
Shona shook her head. “I think there may be more to it,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s this place. The rules. The stupid rules.”
I jumped into the water. I hardly noticed the tingling feeling as my tail shimmered and shook and came to life. I was too worried about the tone of concern in Shona’s voice. “Shona, what is it?” I asked. “Tell me!”
“No humans allowed at the school,” she said simply.
“But we’re not complete humans,” Aaron said. “We’re merpeople when we’re in water.”
“I know. And that might have been OK a while ago. But things have changed around here. My aunt was telling me last night. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it.”
“Think of what?” I asked.
“They’re tightening the rules everywhere, becoming more anti-human.”
“But we’re not —” Aaron began.
“I know,” Shona said again. “But I bet I know what they’ve done. Mrs. Sharktail’s always wanted to do it, but the school council has never agreed to it. They said it was unnecessary. But the latest events will have been just what she needed to get her way.”
“Get her way with what?” Aaron asked.
“With her plans to make the school stricter,” she said darkly. “If I’m right, I bet you anything the school’s just gotten a new rule.”
“What rule?” I asked, although a part of me knew what she was going to say. I just couldn’t help hoping I was wrong.
Shona looked at me almost guiltily before confirming my suspicion. “No semi-mers.”
“Now, children, I would like you all to listen very carefully, and watch closely.” Mrs. Sharktail had canceled afternoon classes and gathered the whole school together in the main chamber for a special afternoon assembly.
I was guessing we were the “special” bit.
I looked around. A hundred mergirls and boys looked back at me. I tried not to meet anyone’s eyes, focusing instead on the pillars all around us, the light glinting in shiny purples and greens on the water, the rocks and boulders lining the sides of the chamber.
“As you know, this is a traditional mer-school,” Mrs. Sharktail went on. “We have traditional rules and we teach you, to the best of our ability, in all things mer, so that you may all grow up to be wonderfully gifted, competent, and happy merpeople. Is that not true, staff?”
She looked across to the teachers lined up along one side of the chamber. They all nodded fervently back at her.
“I’m sure all of you are aware that our community here at Shiprock has recently been under threat from humans.”
I don’t know if it was just me, but I was sure that she said the word humans as though something disgusting had gotten stuck in her throat.
“They are hovering around the edges of Shiprock, barging into areas that don’t belong to them, and are one step away from breaking into our town like burglars. At a time like this, it is more important than ever to protect our community. Would anyone like to disagree with me?”
When she put it like that, it was pretty hard for anyone to disagree. But she was making it sound as though humans were purposely trying to destroy Shiprock. As though they knew what they were doing. Mr. Beeston had already done some research, and the one thing he was categorically sure of was that the builders didn’t have the slightest inkling that there was a town of merpeople not far from where they were building.
He’d shown us what he called his “interim findings” the night before. Apparently, the council was planning to build new houses, but they’d discovered weaknesses below ground level. They’d investigated further and discovered that the land they’d been working on formed the roof of some impressive caves and tunnels.
What they didn’t know was that the tunnels stretched out for miles and that one of them led all the way to Shiprock.
The building work had been halted while the council decided what to do next. They were going to do one of two things: either fill in the caves completely, to make the ground stable enough for them to stick with the original plan to build houses, or change tack altogether and dig the caves out as far as they could and open them up as a tourist attraction.
Either option spelled utter disaster for Shiprock.
The first could result in massive underwater landslides that would probably destroy the whole town. The second would almost certainly lead to Shiprock’s discovery — meaning the inhabitants would have two choices: become a freak show to entertain humans or leave their homes forever.
The interim findings had not been good.
So Mrs. Sharktail had even more reason to hate humans than she realized. She didn’t know Brightport’s exact plans, but she could feel the effect of them — like everyone else in Shiprock.
“Good,” Mrs. Sharktail continued, looking around at the school with her version of a smile. It was like a jagged little line across her face with the tiniest upward curl in each corner. “In that case, you will understand why we have recently tightened our school rules.”
Shona was right, then. Aaron and I were officially against the rules.
She went on. “And you will doubtless share my horror at a discovery I made earlier today.” She swam a few strokes in our direction.
Every eye that wasn’t already on Aaron and me turned toward us now.
“Humans!” she exclaimed in a tone that couldn’t have dripped with more venom even if it had come directly out of a snake’s mouth.
Her accusation was only tempered by one small detail: the fact that Aaron and I were as mer as anyone else when we were in water. I noticed a few puzzled looks pass between some of the girls.
“Yes, well, not now they’re not,” she snapped. “But they were. Semi-mers,” she said with that same disgusted tone that I was starting to get a bit sick of. “To think — coming to my school, and I didn’t even know it. Luckily for all of us, the issue has recently been rectified.”
The issue had been rectified? These were our lives she was talking about! We weren’
t some problem that needed fixing. I’d had enough. I had to say something. If I could stand up to Neptune in his own court, which I had when I’d rescued my dad from prison, then surely I could speak out now.
“We haven’t done anything wrong,” I said in a voice that came out much smaller than I was expecting. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Semi-mers aren’t against the law. Neptune’s even changed all the intermarriage laws. He wants humans and merfolk to get along.”
With the slightest flick of her tail, Mrs. Sharktail whizzed over to me. “Did I ask you to say anything?” she snarled. She turned back to face the school. “Of course, strictly speaking, semi-mers are not against the law,” she said. “Although, if I had my way, they certainly would be,” she added under her breath. “But as of the last few weeks, they are against our school’s rules, and at a time like this, when our ways are under such threat from humans, it is more important than ever to enforce all of our rules.”
She turned back to me and Aaron. “As of this moment, the pair of you are no longer welcome in our school.”
She stared at us. We stared back at her. And then, in case we were in any doubt about exactly how unwelcome we were in her school, she added in a deep rumble, “Leave — now!”
There was a swishing noise at the back of the hall. Shona! She was pushing her way past the rest of her class to get to us. No, Shona, don’t! You’ll only get yourself in more trouble.
I grabbed Aaron’s arm. “We’re going,” I said, staring into Mrs. Sharktail’s sharp beady eyes. “We know when we’re not welcome.” Which, OK, wasn’t the cleverest retort ever. You’d have to be the most ignorant person in the world not to have known you weren’t welcome after all that. But I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
We swam away from the stage and away from the chamber with every eye in the school watching us go. I don’t think even Mandy Rushton had ever made me feel so humiliated. And to make matters worse, do you know what I heard as we swam off? Clapping. Mrs. Sharktail started it. I didn’t look back. I didn’t want to see how many others were joining in.