by Dana Langer
“Horrible?” Red blotches appear on her neck, beneath her freckled skin. “Who are you to call me horrible? I’m the one who saved her. What have you ever done?”
“I think you’re a liar,” he says. “I think you’re just using them, and now they’re hurt, and I think this whole thing is your fault!”
“You know nothing!” The Sea Witch sweeps the teapot from the table and it falls to the ground and shatters.
Out of the darkness comes a click-clicking of claws on the wooden floor, and then the wolf is in the room with us, wild and monstrous with his matted fur and sharp yellow eyes, and ribbons of drool hang from his mouth.
Jason’s face turns pale. “What—what is that?”
“Oh,” I tell him. “That’s her wolf. He just—”
But then the wolf starts barking like crazy, and he raises himself up on his hind legs and lunges at Jason.
“Stop it!” The Sea Witch gets up and yanks the wolf backward. He loses his balance and skids on the floor. “No more of this!” She gives him a shove, and he whimpers and pads away down the hall.
“He clawed me,” Jason says. Jason, whose shirt is now stained with blood and whose stricken face is white and slicked with sweat.
“Oh dear.” The Sea Witch looks at me. “The wound is deep.”
This is an understatement. In fact, it’s a good thing Jason can’t see what’s happening because it’s completely horrifying.
“Do something!” I tell her. “He’s hurt!”
“All right, now. Just a second. Let’s not get hysterical here.” She leads Jason back to the cabinet of potions, sits him on a stool, and pulls down a glass jar, a needle, and a spool of blue thread. She puts the jar up to his mouth and pours some liquid down his throat. Then she licks the thread and slips it through the needle, and she starts sewing up the gash on his shoulder as if his skin were torn pieces of fabric.
“Oh, don’t look so frightened,” she says, glancing at me. “These medicines are very powerful, and this is a special, healing thread. He’ll be fixed up in no time. You know, by the time I was your age, I was bribing my way onto a whaling ship bound for the New World. You children are different now, I suppose. Softer.” She breaks the thread with her teeth and ties a knot. Then she kneels to Jason’s eye level. “I am sorry, young man. I don’t let people in my home very often. I don’t trust people easily.”
Jason touches his shoulder with the tips of his fingers, and when he speaks his voice is a whisper. “I don’t either.”
The Sea Witch lifts her chin in the direction of the living room, which is a small room set farther back in the house—a room she’s never invited us to before. “Let’s go sit by the fire and collect ourselves, shall we? I believe this has been rather a trying encounter for us all.”
The wolf is already there, curled beneath the window, and we hesitate to get near him again, but she pushes us forward. “Go on,” she says. “He won’t hurt you now. I swear.”
Jason and I sit on the rug, and the Sea Witch takes off her shawl and wraps it around us both like a blanket. Beneath my skin, my bones feel like icicles, and there is a strange humming sound in my head. The fire pops and sparks, and it’s so warm, I wish I could crawl right inside.
She sits in a rocking chair and pats the wolf on his head. “I apologize again on his behalf,” she tells us. “He is very protective of me.”
Jason nods. “I’m sorry I said you were horrible.”
“Well, you’re certainly not the first.”
I inch closer to the fire, and the humming gets louder. “I want to know more about the night of the accident.”
She starts rocking the chair with the balls of her feet and narrows her eyes. “Such as?”
“Such as, well, where were we going?”
“According to your sisters, your mother was driving you home from some sort of gymnastics competition. As you know, we had a terrible winter last year; the roads were covered in ice. Apparently, your father told her to stay the night, but she insisted on driving back home.”
I search my memory for some image or sensation from that night. Glistening roads, hail pinging off the roof of the car, icicles hanging from the bridge. My mother stops singing with the radio for a moment, glances at me in the warm semidarkness of the car, and tries to smile. I’m holding a box of chicken nuggets in my lap, and I can tell that something is wrong. Something bad’s about to happen. But I don’t know if those memories are real or made up or from some other night entirely.
“So it was my fault, then, what they did. It was because of me.” I’m sure I’m speaking out loud, but the humming in my head has become a roar, like the ocean, and my voice sounds so distant, like it’s being filtered through a speaker and broadcast from a million miles away.
“But—” Jason looks up. “If Lolly was in that car, if she had—if something had happened to her, we all would have heard about it, right? Wouldn’t we remember?”
The Sea Witch shakes her head. “That was part of the bargain, you see. They were to go out to the graveyard and exhume her body, carry her home, and tuck her in her bed, and in the morning she’d be awake again, their little sister, good as new, as if she’d never left. And nobody in town, including her, would have any memory of what happened that night. Those sorts of community spells, the erasing of unpleasant memories from a large group of like-minded people, are among the easiest to perform. Much simpler than raising the dead.” She smooths my hair back. “You see, your sisters don’t really love being sirens. Or maybe they do. I suppose I couldn’t say. But what motivated them originally, the reason they came to me and made this trade in the first place, was to save you.”
The wolf whimpers in his sleep, and she scratches behind his ears. “Now, these sorts of transformations take a toll on the body. Quite soon, dear, you’re going to be in excruciating agony. Once that happens, if I try to change you back, it could cost you your life. And so that, young man, is why I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“But if you can do this, if you can bring people back from the dead, why didn’t you bring their mother back too?”
“Oh, a trip to the underworld is an exhausting journey. Picture a bus ride in traffic on a rainy afternoon. Or the helpless desperation of the wait for a stalled baggage carousel at the airport.”
“I’ve never been to the airport,” Jason tells her.
“Take my word for it then, dear. It is most unpleasant. Besides, magic like this won’t work for everyone. I can only bring certain girls back. Outsiders. Motherless girls with a predilection for music. Girls whom I can then use as sirens to lure ships to our shore.”
“Why do they have to be girls?”
“I don’t make the rules, Jason. I didn’t invent this system. I merely figured out a way to operate within it.”
I remember a dream I once had of a hallway, like a bright hospital corridor. The smell of saltwater. The burn of blood returning to my veins.
I can feel it now.
I try to stand, but my legs won’t hold. It’s as if my bones have melted right out from inside me. “There’s something wrong with me.”
“No, there’s nothing wrong.” The Sea Witch takes a watch out of the pocket of her dress and smiles. “Everything is exactly right.”
“What’s happening?” Jason asks.
“She’s becoming a siren. The transformation is complete.”
“Now?”
“Yes, Lolly is thirteen years old today. Surely you know that. Wish her a happy birthday.”
It hits me before I can do or say anything else. There is a feeling like a lead weight falling through my stomach, and then the whole room seems to tilt. Jason lets me lean on him, and we stumble back into the kitchen, and I feel too sick to even care how disgusting I must look.
The Sea Witch follows us. “Take her outside,” she advises. She kneels and begins gathering the pieces of her broken teapot. “Things are bound to get a bit messy now.”
Chapter
5
Sirens appeal to the spirit, not to the flesh.
—Jane Ellen Harrison
When I wake up, the first thing that happens is I roll onto my side and throw up all over the sand. I pull off my boots to check my feet and ankles, and they’re completely covered in scales now, bright, thick, bottle-green scales. My hair is nearly white.
I get up and stagger to the edge of the shore, and I start yelling at the ocean. I know it’s crazy, but I can’t stop. “I hate you!” I start screaming, and throwing rocks into the waves, as if I could hurt them. As if my fury could change anything. “I hate you!”
When I’m too cold and tired to yell at the ocean anymore, I sit back on the sand. I pick up one last pebble and hurl it away down the beach.
Jason waits a few minutes before coming to sit with me. Normally, I would die of embarrassment that he witnessed that whole display, but right now I don’t even care. I’m sure he’s terrified. I’m shocked he’s even still here.
“It’s like I told you before,” he says. “You’re not a monster. You’re a guardian.”
I sniff, and look at him through my hair. “It’s the same thing.”
He reaches out and wraps his fingers around my ankle.
“What are you doing?”
“I want to see your scales.”
“No! Stop. It’s gross. You don’t want to see.”
“Wait a second.” He touches my foot.
“I said stop!” I move a few feet away from him and sit down again with my arms wrapped around my legs and my head down. “I can’t believe you did that.”
“Lolly, I was just kidding around. I’m sorry.”
I look down at my bare feet. A week ago, Lula painted my toenails bright green to match the scales. It seemed cool at the time, but now it looks totally ridiculous. I try to curl my toes into the sand. “Just stop talking, please.”
“Listen, I don’t . . . I don’t think it’s gross. Really.” Jason walks over and sits next to me. “You know, if you could just stop causing shipwrecks, you’d be fine. You wouldn’t hurt anybody and nobody would want to hurt you.”
“But I don’t think I can. I mean, you heard her. I can’t control it. She can’t even control it really. I’m a monster—a mystery of the deep. I might as well be a giant squid.”
“Well, I love giant squids. They can withstand an enormous amount of pressure, you know. They can survive in some of the most hostile environments on the planet.”
“Okay, you admire giant squids. But you wouldn’t want to be best friends with one.”
“Who knows?” Jason reaches up and touches the scar on his shoulder. His shirt is all torn and spattered with blood, but that doesn’t seem to bother him now.
“It’s already fading,” I tell him. “Don’t worry. You can barely see it.”
“I don’t care about that.” He gets to his feet and grabs a nearby stick. “Come on! We have to stop my stepfather and save your sisters. That’s all that matters.”
“But I’m a siren now,” I tell him. “Like, officially.”
“I know. So what?”
This strange tiredness is settling over my body. A heaviness. I don’t think I could do a cartwheel now if my life depended on it. I think about my sisters and how, since they became sirens, they don’t really play outside or run around or anything. I used to get mad at them for it. “Jason, I don’t know if sirens do this sort of thing.”
“What sort of thing?”
“Well, what if she’s lying about the symbol? What if she’s lying about everything? What if she just wants to hurt us?”
Jason breaks the stick in half and hands me a piece. “We have a common enemy. She was right about that. Now, I know what we can do. The festival starts in six hours, and he’ll have the crown with him there. We can steal it during the parade and bring it to the fort first thing the next morning. I’ll sail us there myself.”
“But we’re still wearing pajamas. And you’re covered in blood.”
“We’ll stop at my house and change.”
“But what if your stepdad’s there?”
“He told us he’d be away all night before the festival, putting the finishing touches on his knarr. Come on!” He takes his end of the stick and taps it against mine. “This is our chance. Finally. And who cares if you’re a siren? You can still decide what you want to do.”
“I think that’s easy for you to say.” I hold up my part of the stick, which is pronged like a wishbone, and look at him through the forked end. “What are we doing with these?”
“We’re not doing anything with them. Come on, now you’re just being annoying.”
“Okay. Fine.” I get up slowly from the sand.
“Are you ready?” he asks.
“Ready.” I take the stick and point it in the direction of his house. “Let’s go.”
We get back to Jason’s house and scan the premises for signs of his stepdad. His truck is nowhere to be found, and his boots and coat are missing from the front hallway, so we determine that the coast is clear. Then Jason sneaks up to his room to change while I wait in the kitchen and try to think of a lie about why I’m there. A flyer for the festival is sitting on the counter, and because I don’t know what else to do with myself, I pick it up and start reading through the schedule of events.
*THE ANNUAL SALT AND STARS
FOLK FESTIVAL*
SPONSORED BY BISHOP’S FISH AND VIKING INDUSTRIES
DAY ONE
4 P.M.: GRAND HIGH PARADE AND SUNRISE COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOL ASSEMBLY
6 P.M.: SUNSET CONCERT
DAY TWO
9 A.M.: PANCAKE BREAKFAST (HOSTED BY THE STARBRIDGE DINER)
6 P.M.: FIREWORKS DISPLAY
“Lolly, honey?” Alice enters the kitchen wearing slippers and a pink silk bathrobe. Without makeup on, she looks like a faded watercolor version of herself. “What are you doing here, sweetheart?”
“Oh, Jason and I are going to walk to school together this morning. We have an early dress rehearsal.”
“You let your sisters do that to your hair?” She bustles around the kitchen, tossing a few slices of bread into the toaster and flipping the switch on the coffeepot.
I tap my fingers on the counter. “Um, yes.”
She shakes her head. “You girls. I remember when Lily tried to give Jason a haircut. Do you remember that? He was practically bald.”
“I remember,” I tell her.
“You know, you look a little . . . tired. Are you feeling okay? Can I get you anything?”
“I’ll take some coffee.”
She raises one eyebrow. “Aren’t you a little young for coffee?” But she puts a napkin and a mug in the shape of a moose head down on the counter in front of me. “I guess you kids start everything early these days.”
“I guess so.”
“Do you take milk?”
“I’ll just drink it black.”
As soon as we walk through the front doors of the school, Coach Bouchard grabs us and pushes us toward the gym, where about eighty middle and elementary school students dressed as indigenous fish, foliage, and animals are warming up on wind instruments and practicing dance routines. A second-grade girl wearing a giant jellyfish hat with streamers is standing in the middle of the room sobbing, and a school of third-grade goldfish is trying to console her. Meanwhile, an eighth-grade moose narrowly misses stabbing me with her antlers. “Move, seventh grader!”
“Attention, people!” In deference to his authority as official festival choreographer, the school has outfitted Coach Bouchard with a new megaphone. “Attention!”
We cover our ears against the squeal of feedback.
“Find your costumes!”
I trudge to the pile marked 7TH-GRADE SHELLFISH and start sifting through antennae, while Jason looks for the sign saying 8TH-GRADE FOLIAGE. I grab my costume, and then I look up and notice Emma flipping through a rack of mermaid tails, which are actually just long, sparkly skirts so the mermaids can still perform their gymnasti
cs routines. “Oh,” she says. “It’s you.”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “It’s me.”
“You look awful. What’s wrong with your hair?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you bleach it? That’s really bad for you, you know. You could lose all your hair that way. I mean, it looks almost white—”
“Emma, we’ve never really liked each other.”
“Well, that’s true. What’s your point?”
“Okay, um . . . I want to know if I can ask for your help with something.”
“With what?”
“Well, as a mermaid, you have special access to the grand high float.”
“Of course I do.” She tosses her ponytail. “That’s only natural.”
“Right. And as a snail, I don’t have any access at all.”
“That’s the circle of life, Lolly.”
I’m tempted to argue with her, but it’s difficult to debate social justice in the mermaid kingdom when you’re wearing antennae. “Okay, so what I’m wondering is if you can pour something into the Viking’s goblet. And make sure he drinks it.”
She wrinkles her nose. “Why would I do that?”
Jason comes up behind us. “Because he’s my stepdad,” he says. “And we’re playing a trick on him. Like, a prank.”
“Oh!” Emma tosses her hair again. Her eyes light up at the mere sight of Jason, and her voice goes up about three octaves. “I love pranks. Is this your idea, Jay?”
“Um, yeah.”
“That’s so cool.”
“Okay, so you’ll do it?”
“Sure. Give me the drink.”
I hand it to her, and she holds it up to her face. “What’s in there? It looks like nail polish.”
“It’s a long story,” Jason says. “Just make sure he drinks it.”
She salutes him. “Will do! Now, if you’ll excuse me.” She loops her mermaid tail over one arm. “I have to go to my dressing room.”
At three forty-five, grades one through seven are lined up in the hallway, awaiting our cue. I tried hiding when Nurse Claire came through to do everybody’s makeup, but she caught me, so now I’m wearing my full snail regalia: brown stockings, a puffy white tutu, antennae, the giant cardboard shell, green glitter eyeliner, and blue mascara. With moments to go before the big opening number, I climb the radiator and pull myself into a crouching position on the windowsill. Outside, it’s a beautiful fall day, clear and cold with the sun just starting to set, but I can’t feel anything except worried and a little sick. I can’t stop thinking about my sisters frozen in the motel and what we’re about to do to Mr. Bergstrom.
