by Xequina
On my first day of summer school, I said goodbye to Mermary before I left and put my lips up to the side of the tank to kiss her through the glass. She came to the glass on the other side and kissed me back.
“I’ll be back after one o’clock,” I told her. She could see my digital clock from the tank, and of course I had taught her to read the time. “My mom won’t be home for a couple of hours, so we’ll have lots of time to hang out then.”
“Are you excited about school?” she asked.
“Sort of,” I said. “But it’s not my regular school, and I won’t know anyone.”
“You’ll probably get to know some of the kids,” she said.
“Yeah, probably,” I said, although I doubted it.
My mother drove me to a large community center on the other side of town on her way to work.
“Have a good time,” she said. “Try to make some friends, Cammie. You could invite them over.” She always said that. Today she added, “People need friends. They’re part of your personal resources.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, sometimes you need a friend to tell things to. Sometimes they help you figure things out, or do favors for you. And you do the same for them. Friends make you feel better about yourself, and not so alone.”
I said I would try, and she kissed me and I got out of the car. I looked around. It was sunny but not hot yet. The community center was large, with a glass front, and there were kids everywhere. I didn’t know how to make friends, and I wished I wasn’t so quiet all the time.
My first class was Dance and Movement. I was worried it was going to be hard, but it was easy and fun. We started by stretching, “to get all the yawns out.”
“Come on, everyone!” Miss Calista, the teacher, said. “Stretch, and don’t be afraid to yawn!” She stretched her arms and legs and bent backward and forward and opened her mouth and made loud noises when she yawned. We all copied her, and some kids laughed, but she didn’t mind. Then she taught us some yoga positions.
The next class was creative writing, where Mr. Mildigger taught us to write a poem, which was easy because we could choose whatever topic we wanted, and then use a kind of formula to write the poem. We were supposed to start the poem with “if I were,” and it didn’t have to rhyme. I wrote,
If I were a mermaid
I would live in the ocean
With my mermaid friend
And we would swim together
For a thousand years.
I didn’t know that after we wrote the poems, we were going to have to read them out loud. The teacher called on me.
I was afraid Mr. Mildigger would say I didn’t really have a mermaid friend, but instead he said, “Very nice use of imagination. Boys and girls, you can always write about made up things, like Camile did.”
We wrote another poem, then it was time to go to the next class, which was art. We had to draw apples and bananas with charcoal. Miss Cavanaugh, the teacher, showed us how to draw their shapes, and then put shading in so our drawings looked “realistic.” She used a lamp with a bright light and a shade to shine on an apple so we could see the shadows it made. The charcoal was messy and we had to wash our hands before we went to lunch.
After art we went into a big room for lunch that was being set up for us on turquoise-and-coral colored trays. We each got a sandwich, cookie, orange, and container of milk. I sat at a long table between two girls, but they were both talking to the person next to them on their other side. I looked at the girl across from me and said, “hello,” but I don’t think she could hear me because it was so noisy.
Our last class was science. It was about green ecology. A really nice guy with long hair tied back into a pony tail introduced himself as Green Jerry. He wore an orange T-shirt with “THINK GREEN” on it. He gave each one of us a pair of bright orange gloves that we were supposed to write our names on with big black marking pens.
“How many of you do recycling?” he asked. Only a few kids raised their hands. We did recycling at home, but I didn’t raise my hand because I was afraid he’d call on me. “Well, today you’re going to learn all about it. Follow me.”
He took us out in back of the community center and brought over the receptacles and the garbage barrel we had used after lunch and dumped it all out on a tarp.
“Garbage and trash is not the same thing, kids, even though people sometimes use the words interchangeably,” he told us. “Garbage is old food, fruit and vegetable peelings, bones, stuff like that. Trash is junk you can’t use anymore that gets thrown away, broken toys, plastic things that can’t be recycled, or what you might have after you eat fast food. But a lot of things that get put into the trash can be put into the green barrel, which is for composting. Learn good green habits. Green living starts when you sort what’s left over after you eat.”
He had us put on the gloves and start sorting everything on the tarp and putting them in the correct barrels. Before I knew it, class was over. We stowed the gloves where he told us, and kids started going home. I went out front where there were shuttles that I was supposed to take home.
As soon as I got there, I ran up to my room. Mermary got up on her raft and I told her about my first day. I showed her the yoga positions we had learned, and it was pretty easy to remember because they were connected.
“We get on our hands and knees like this—this is called Table position.” Then I arched my back. “This is cat pose,” then I bent my back in the other direction, “and this is cow.”
Mermary climbed further up out of the water and, bending her tail about where her knees would be, she copied what I did as well as she could.
“The teacher said the stretching and yoga was to warm up, and then she told us to follow her in a line around the classroom and do whatever she did.”
I couldn’t remember exactly what the teacher had done so I made some stuff up. This time Mermary jumped into the water and copied me. I stopped to put on some music, and we both danced around. I kept laughing because sometimes Mermary looked funny dancing. But sometimes she looked really beautiful and I would stop to watch her. It was totally awesome.
Then I showed her my drawings and explained about shading. She didn’t get it very well, probably because my drawings weren’t very good. So I went and found a flashlight and got a tennis ball and shone the light on the ball the way the teacher had, and then Mermary understood.
I got out my poems and I read them to her. She loved the mermaid poem. I read the second one I did:
Moon, moon
You’re coming soon
Right now you’re just a smile
In the sky.
“I didn’t know how to write the second half of my poem, but the teacher said we could always go back and change it.”
Mermary thought for a minute, then said, “How about . . . ?”
Moon, Full Moon
Coming soon.
You’re just a smile
In early June.
“Mermary! How did you think of that so fast?”
“It just came to me.”
I got a pencil and wrote down the improved poem on the same page as the first poem. Mermary was going into one her resting moods, and I was tired too. I crossed my arms and laid my head down on the desk to rest for a minute.
“Camile?” It was my mother.
I opened my eyes and sat up quickly to look at the tank, but all I could see was the forest of greenery and the two guppies swimming in and out of them. Mermary was nowhere in sight.
“I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t mean to scare you. Why are you sleeping at your desk?”
“I just put my head down to rest. I guess I fell asleep.”
“What have you got on your face?”
I got up to look in the mirror. “It’s charcoal. From art.”
“How was your first day at summer school?” She was looking at the papers on my desk, but I was scared for her to be so close to Mermary, so I picked them up and gave them to her.
>
“School was fun.” I went to the bathroom to wash my face. My mother followed me, just like I hoped she would.
“Tell me about these, Cammie.” She was going through the pages.
“Okay. Can I get some lemonade?”
“Of course.”
We went downstairs to the kitchen. My mother was amazed about the poems, especially the one Mermary helped me with. I had to let her think I wrote it.
“You should take this to school and show the teacher how you re-wrote the poem,” my mom said.
I shrugged and said, “Okay,” but I knew I wouldn’t. I was afraid he’d make me read it out loud, and I hated that.
Chapter 17
Shopping
One of the things my mother and I did together was go to garage sales and thrift stores. Sometimes she needed to get clothes for work because the ones she had were ruined or worn out, and she didn’t want to wear new clothes and get them dirty. I looked at books and toys, but first I would always look to see if there was anything I could get for Mermary. I found a little ceramic castle that I knew was made for an aquarium because it was with other aquarium things like a bag of sand with a bunch of shells and a piece of white coral, which I also got.
I also found a little doll hand mirror. The mirror part was round and the handle and frame was silver plastic with curlicues in it, which sort of looked like waves. I knew from reading about mermaids that they sometimes had mirrors, and in one story I read, a mermaid used her mirror to predict the future. I had also noticed that Mermary sometimes looked at herself in the top of the water when she swam slowly up to it.
I gave it to Mermary, and she sat on the raft and had to hold it in both her hands. She tried to touch the face in the mirror. It was funny.
“Cammie, what is this?”
“Mermary, that’s a mirror, and you’re looking at yourself. It’s like what I have—” I pointed at the mirror on the wall. “I was able to find one in your size.”
“I thought it was a little TV at first.”
Mermary played with the mirror, looking at herself all over. As I watched her, I noticed that Mermary was growing. She was much bigger than when I first found her. Not just longer (she was more than five inches now), but bigger all around. She was almost as thick as my little finger. The fin at the end of her tail was developing too into a fan shape.
After a while Mermary dove with the mirror into the water and held it in front of herself as she swam through the tank, watching to see how she looked when she swam. She went up to each fish and tried to hold the mirror in front of them, but after nibbling at the edges, they lost interest. They didn’t care what they looked like.
Mermary swam down to the bottom of the tank and stuck the handle into the sand and lay in front of it, studying her reflection, turning her head this way and that and sometimes shaking her head to see what her hair looked like, or moving her tail and curling it over her. It was really interesting to watch her studying herself. I used to think my mother’s biological work must be boring, but now I could understand why she loved it so much.
I had been excited when I found the mirror, but the best thing of all was when I found a mermaid doll at a Salvation Army. She was about six inches long and had big painted eyes and long, light green hair. At her waist was a tiny comb attached to a string around her waist, and her bottom half was a tail with shimmery, metallic blue-green fabric with pink that showed when you turned her a certain way. Mermary would love it!
When my mother was done shopping she looked to see what I had found.
“I thought you stopped playing with dolls, Camile,” she said.
“It’s so pretty,” was all I could think of to say. Of course I couldn’t tell her why I really wanted it.
When I got home I ran upstairs to show it to Mermary.
“Mermary, look what I found for you!”
I was able to bend the doll’s tail so she could sit on the raft partly in the water, like Mermary. Mermary jumped onto the raft fast and splashy like she usually did, and the doll tipped over and fell in the water. Mermary dove in after her and rescued her. Even though the doll was a bigger than Mermary, she didn’t seem to have a problem bringing her back to the surface, although I had to help put her back on the raft.
“Let’s think of a name for her,” I said. I mentioned a lot of names. “How about Sita.”
“How about Sea-li?” Mermary said.
“That’s perfect, Mermary!”
So that became her name. Mermary talked to Sea-li the way she talked to me, or the way we talked to my dolls. After a while Mermary went down into the little fish castle and brought up the tiny doll I had given her that didn’t float.
“Let’s play dolls!” she said. “Sea-li will be my mermaid friend, and this will be her baby.”
I got out my dolls. Only one of them had a bathing suit. I walked one doll up to the other.
“Why don’t we go to the beach to look for mermaids, Holly?” I said in doll talk.
“Okay. Let me put on my bathing suit.” I changed Holly into her bathing suit and got a sun hat for Isabel, then I walked them toward the tank. Mermary was sitting on the raft with Sea-li and the tiny doll.
Holly: “Oh, look! There are some mermaids now!”
Isabel: “Let’s go talk to them!” I moved them up to the top of the tank. “Hello, what are your names?”
“I’m Mermary, and this is my friend, Sea-li,” Mermary said.
“Are those baby mermaids?”
“Yes,” Mermary said. “They haven’t grown their tails yet.”
We were having so much fun I didn’t hear my mother coming. Mermary suddenly disappeared into the seaweed. Then I heard a tap on the door and my mother came in.
“Mom!”
“Hi, Cammie, what are you doing?” I looked at the tank, but Mermary blended in perfectly with the seaweed forest. Sea-li was rocking gently on the raft, next to the two baby mermaids. “You’re playing with your dolls.”
I nodded.
She came over and looked at them. It seemed like she was a little upset, but I didn’t know why. She looked into the aquarium at Mermary’s raft and the dolls still sitting on it.
After a moment, she sighed. “You haven’t watered the garden or done your other chores.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll do them right now.”
But I could tell that wasn’t what was bothering her. She was still looking at my dolls. I checked again, but Mermary was nowhere in sight.
That evening I went to the kitchen to get my bedtime snack and I heard my mother in the living room, talking on her phone.
“She’s playing with dolls again! And not only that, but she talks to her fish . . .” Of course, I couldn’t hear what the other person said. “It’s just that I think she’s too old for imaginary playmates . . . well, yes, I guess it is good that she’s talking more . . . I’m just afraid she’s regressing.” That was a word I would have to look up.
“ . . . I’m not sure what the age range is. I stopped playing with dolls when I was about seven . . . I know, I just worry she isn’t developing the way she should . . . Why can she talk to her dolls, and not to other children? . . . Do you think I should take them away from her?”
Take them away?
I tip-toed back to my room so she wouldn’t catch me listening. I got my dictionary and looked up “regressing.” It meant to go back to an earlier stage of development. I wondered how playing with dolls again meant I was regressing. Lots of girls in my class played with dolls. They talked about collecting Bratz dolls and getting clothes for them, or the different kinds of American Dolls and outfits they could get. One girl was always bragging that she had more than fifty dolls.
Actually, it wasn’t exactly true that I had stopped playing with them. Before Mermary, I didn’t play with dolls as much as I used to when I was little. And sometimes I slept with a doll or one of my stuffed animals, which are doll animals. But now that I had Mermary, it was so much more fun to
play with them. I didn’t know how to let my mother know it was all right. I worried about her taking them away from us. I decided to put the dolls away after I played with them, instead of leaving them out to keep Mermary company when I wasn’t there.
Chapter 18
The Mermaid Website
“Camile, I have to run some errands. Want to go with me?”
It was Saturday, and I had other ideas. “Can I go to the library?”
“Sure.”
I liked it when my mother left me at the library while she did something else. I used the computers to look up mermaids. I couldn’t do it at home too much because my mother checked the history. Even though she had never said anything, I knew she didn’t like my interest in mermaids. She only liked subjects that were true and scientific.
I searched the library catalog and got 243 items about mermaids! I was confused why my list was so different from Ms. Tanglewood’s, but when I actually looked at the books, it seemed like most of them weren’t really about mermaids. Some just had “mermaid” in the title, like one about a man with a yacht called The White Mermaid. One with the title Mermaid Island, wasn’t a place where mermaids lived, and didn’t even have mermaids in it; it was some kind of spy story about a missile testing site. Those were adult books, and I finally figured out there were two catalogs, one for adults and one for children. The adult catalog included all the children’s titles. That’s why so many more titles came up than I had on Ms. Tanglewood’s list.
The library had just opened when my mother dropped me off, so it wasn’t busy yet. I sneaked and got on my favorite adult computer, which was behind a pillar so the librarians couldn’t see me from their desk. One of them, Ms. Brady (who I secretly thought of as Miss Bratty), was always kicking me off and sending me to the children’s computers. But the children’s computer had a filter and prevented me from going to a lot of sites.
The first thing I did was check a web page called “Do You Believe in Mermaids,” where I had been reading postings. My mother didn’t want me posting messages without her checking the website first, but this was just a site where people were debating whether mermaids were real or not. There were two columns. On one side the people who believed in mermaids posted, and the other side were the ones who didn’t. The believers talked about sighting mermaids, or gave reasons why they believed in them. The non-believers wrote all the reasons why mermaids were impossible or ridiculous. Sometimes the posters argued with each other.
