Aquamarine

by Alice Hoffman

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  About the Author

  Copyright

  AT THE CAPRI BEACH CLUB, every day was hotter and hotter until the asphalt in the parking lot began to bubble. Snow cones and ice-cream sandwiches melted as soon as they were removed from the snack shop’s freezers, and the sand burned the feet of anyone who dared to walk along the beach at noon. The heat popped and crackled and wouldn’t let up. It didn’t matter if there was an evening storm with high winds and buckets of pouring rain; by morning the sky was once again blue and clear. People began to sit in the shade, and after a while most of them stayed home in their cool, air-conditioned rooms. Even those families who had been coming to the beach club for years gave up their memberships and found other ways to while away the scorching days of August.

  The Capri had been more run-down every season, but this year was clearly the worst. No wonder the owner was closing the club at the end of the month. Weeds were sprouting in the tennis courts, beach umbrellas were filled with holes, seagulls had taken over the pool area, nesting on chaise lounges and sipping chlorinated water. The lifeguards had gone out on strike in July, and had never returned. Even the cafeteria had closed down — the windows were boarded over, the door nailed shut — leaving only the snack shop, run by Raymond, who would soon be going off to college in Miami and was far too busy reading to fix a

  sandwich or fetch a glass of lemonade.

  The only people who still came to the Capri every day were two twelve-year-old girls and they didn’t mind the heat one bit. Hailey and Claire had lived next door to each other and been best friends all their lives. Unlike most people in town, they wanted this summer to go on forever, no matter how humid or hot. They both hoped that August would continue beyond the confines of its thirty-one days, in a blaze of sunshine and heat. These girls had stopped looking at calendars. They didn’t wear watches. They shut their eyes when the first star appeared in the sky. The reason they wished every day to be the same was that at the end of the month, Claire would be moving to Florida with her grandparents and Hailey would be left behind.

  “Don’t talk about it,” Hailey said whenever Claire brought up the subject. “Don’t even think about it.”

  For although Hailey thought nothing of leaping from the highest diving platform or swimming so far out to sea that she disappeared from sight, she was easily frightened by other things — a future she couldn’t control, for instance, or the notion that a lifelong friendship might be lost at the end of the week when the Capri closed down for good and Claire moved away.

  As for Claire, she was quiet and shy and as afraid of water as Hailey was drawn to it. She had lost both her parents in an accident on the expressway, and ever since, her vision of the world had darkened. She’d become skittish, forsaking those things which brought other girls joy. Swimming, for instance, made her so nervous she refused to dip her toes into shallow water, not even on a burning hot day.

  Between the two friends, Claire had always been the problem solver. She was the sort of girl who could take an old dress, stitch a hem, add a sash, and wind up with an outfit that made it seem as though she’d just walked out of the finest store. Given a patch of bare ground and some flower seeds, she would soon have the prettiest garden on the block. But now Claire was faced with a problem she couldn’t solve.

  She had begged and she’d pleaded, promising to never again ask for another favor if only they could stay, but her grandparents had already sold their house and rented an apartment in Florida, right on the beach. As if an oceanfront view mattered to Claire. As if she ever wanted to go to any beach but the one at the Capri where she and Hailey had spent every summer of their lives.

  Both girls knew that things changed, sometimes for the worse. Claire had lost her parents and Hailey’s mother and father had been divorced, and now her mother worked long hours and hadn’t any time to have fun. But the Capri had always stayed the same, a place to hold on to even in the darkest days of winter when snow piled up by their back doors.

  All summer long, the girls had been dropped off at the Capri by Hailey’s mom on her way to work, and picked up at six o’clock sharp by Claire’s grandfather, Maury. Maury was so happy to be moving to Florida that all the neighbors agreed he now looked at least ten years younger, much better than he had last winter when he’d broken his leg after slipping on a patch of slick ice. He’d needed to use a wheelchair until the following spring, and it was this accident which had convinced Claire’s grandmother it was time to relocate to a place where winter was no longer a concern for what she called rickety old bones.

  “What’s new, Susie Q’s?” Maury would always say when the two friends traipsed through the heat waves that rose up in the parking lot at the end of the day. Time was speeding forward regardless of their wishes. No matter how slowly they dragged their feet, every day was still twenty-four hours closer to moving day.

  Whenever they left the Capri, they’d see Raymond’s motorbike parked in the shadows of the breezeway. But there wasn’t another vehicle in sight. Who would want to spend their precious summer days at a beach club that had become a disaster area? Beyond a wire fence, several bulldozers were already at work tearing down the playground where the swings had long ago rusted into place. Still, it hadn’t been that many summers since Hailey and Claire had ridden those swings into the sky, up through the heat waves and the white clouds, convinced they had all the time in the world.

  Now, in the last days of the Capri, time seemed to be their enemy. Sometimes, when they looked into the mirror in the changing room of the cabana, where bathing suits and towels were stored, they didn’t even look like themselves anymore. Their legs were too long, their arms too rangy, their hair cut too short to be pulled into ponytails or braids.

  Each day when Claire’s grandfather asked “What’s new, Susie Q’s?” the girls always responded, “Nothing” in voices so glum, anyone would think they had no hope whatsoever for what the future might bring. By next summer, the Capri would be a bird sanctuary, and although the girls were happy for the birds, they didn’t understand why this one piece of their lives couldn’t go on as before.

  Once the bulldozers started in on the wooden cabanas, once they destroyed the pool and the patio and the snack bar, wasn’t it possible that Claire would no longer remember summers spent at the Capri with her parents? Would Hailey still recall how her father took her swimming in the farthest waves when her mom and dad were still married? When the Capri was gone, maybe they would forget each other as well. They’d grow up and be just like all those other people who didn’t know what it meant to have your best friend living right next door, grown-ups who had no idea of what it was like to have someone understand you so well they could tell what you were thinking even before you spoke aloud.

  The last days of August were identical, blistering mornings fading into white-hot afternoons. At the start of the day, the girls sat by the pool, trailing their fingers in the water and shooing the seagulls away. At lunch time, they bothered Raymond, who seemed much too handsome to be as nice as he was. He never minded when Hailey and Claire sat at the counter for hours, drinking lemonade and watching him read. In past summers, there had been flocks of teenaged girls hanging around Raymond, but all those girls’ families had joined town pools or rented summer houses, and only Hailey and Claire remained to admire him. Late in the afternoon, when it was almost time to go, the girls walked along the beach. Sometimes Hailey went in for a swim to cool off, but Claire stayed on the shore, adding to her collection of stones and shells.

  And so every day blended into the next, until one morning there was
a storm with gusts of sixty miles an hour and extraordinarily high tides. The girls had to stay home that day, and they shivered at the nearness of September. They barely said a word all afternoon. That night, in houses right next door to each other, neither one could sleep. The wind was so strong, it knocked on the rooftops and rattled the stars up above. Both Hailey and Claire had the feeling that something was about to happen, in spite of how much they wanted their lives to remain the same.

  When they arrived at the beach club the next morning, they found that the storm had left its mark. The wooden paths were littered with purple snails. Starfish and scallops were trapped in the fountain at the center of the patio and the snack bar was missing its roof. The pool had been roped off and a NO SWIMMING sign had been hastily installed by the owner, who hardly even bothered to visit the club anymore.

  The water in the pool was as thick as soup. Seaweed clogged up the filter. Barnacles clung to the blue-and-white tiles and luminous moon jellyfish slowly drifted by. Hailey, who had learned how to swim in this very pool when she was only a toddler, was outraged at what a mess it had become.

  “What difference does it make?” Claire said. “After next Saturday, they’ll drain the pool and bulldoze it, too.”

  Even though she had never dared swim in the pool, there were tears in Claire’s eyes as she gazed into the murky waters. For the first time in a long while, she had no idea of what to do next. Maybe that was why Hailey ducked under the ropes to take a closer look.

  Hailey had always been fearless and a little too curious for her own good, but she’d always had Claire there behind her, urging her on, concocting their plans. She stuck her toes in the water and wondered what would become of her once she was all by herself. A nobody, a nothing, with no one to talk to and no one to call in the middle of the night when she heard her mother crying, or when a stray dog knocked over a garbage can. Hailey stood at the very edge of the pool. Before Claire could tell her it wasn’t a good idea, before she lost all of her courage, she dove in.

  Hailey was such a good diver, there wasn’t a sound when she entered the water, just a series of ripples circling out from the center of the pool. Claire quickly clambered over the ropes and ran to the spot where Hailey had last been standing, making certain to hold onto the railing so she wouldn’t fall in herself. Claire had spent her whole life worrying that her friend would do something foolish and jump in headfirst where she didn’t belong, and now Hailey had done exactly that.

  The strange, cloudy water made Claire more nervous about the pool than she usually was. She had never even learned the Dead Man’s Float, which, when you really thought about it, wasn’t the most comforting name. You never could tell what might happen in the water. You’d have to have faith in yourself to dive in, and that was something Claire didn’t possess.

  Sixty seconds later, Hailey came bursting back through the surface, sputtering and shaking with cold. She dragged herself up the rungs of the ladder, too chilled and breathless to speak. In the deep end of the pool, the moon jellyfish rode the current through strands of brown seaweed.

  Best friends don’t need to be told when something extraordinary has happened, and this was the case with Hailey and Claire. One look, and Claire knew that her friend’s swim had been anything but ordinary.

  “What did you see?” Claire asked. “What’s down there?”

  Hailey didn’t say, You’ll never believe me, which is what she would have told anyone else. She knew Claire would believe her, no matter what, so she whispered the name of what she’d seen in the deep end of the pool where everything was hazy and dim. Claire held even more tightly to the railing, lest she fall in and be faced with the creature Hailey had seen, because she absolutely, positively, without a doubt, believed.

  On this day when Claire’s grandfather asked, “What’s new Susie Q’s?” the girls stared at each other, eyes shining.

  “Nothing,” they said together, the way best friends often do. Of course, what they really meant was that they weren’t quite sure. What they meant was that for the first time in a very long while, they couldn’t wait for morning to come.

  THE NEXT DAY, as soon as they got out of Hailey’s mother’s car in the parking lot, Hailey was the one who took charge. After all, she’d been the one to see the mermaid at the bottom of the pool, huddled in a murky corner, her long hair streaming. Claire wouldn’t have ventured into the water for any reason, not even to see such a wondrous being.

  As they went through the entranceway to the Capri, Hailey handed her friend a jar she’d stored in her backpack. Claire held the jar up to the light and tried her best to figure out what the slippery-looking things were inside.

  “Herring,” Hailey told her when Claire couldn’t venture a guess. “It’s a kind of marinated fish. I found it in the back of the pantry. Mermaids must get hungry. All we need to do is hide behind the diving board, and when she comes to the surface to eat, we can study her.”

  “Good plan,” Claire said. At any other time, Claire would have been the one to come up with the plans, but lately she’d been up half the night, thinking about how her sweaters and boots would be pointless in Florida, and how the leaves wouldn’t change in the fall, and how it would be summer all year long.

  Hailey, herself, was somewhat surprised to find that she’d actually been the one with the ideas. “You really think it’s a good plan?” she asked uncertainly.

  “Excellent,” Claire said, although she, too, was surprised at how quickly everything was changing already, even though it was still the same.

  After they’d sprinkled the herring in the pool, the girls waited behind the diving board. Jellyfish floated on the surface of the water, and a few bubbles arose up from the deep, but there was no sign of the mermaid. Hours passed and the girls didn’t move. Time was so slow, and the air was so hot, they almost fell asleep.

  When they didn’t show up at the snack bar for lunch, Raymond came looking for them.

  “What happened to my only customers?” he asked. “I was worried. I thought the seagulls had carried you away.”

  Raymond sat on the edge of a lounge chair and gazed into the pool. He was so handsome that for a few minutes the girls forgot there was a mermaid nearby.

  “What a disaster,” Raymond said, looking around the beach club. “I should have taken a different job this summer, but I guess I got used to this place.” When he’d first come to the Capri, he’d been the assistant to the assistant cook at the snack bar, and at lunch time they’d all had to work like crazy just to fill the orders of hamburgers and sandwiches and fries. There were crowds of people and the air smelled like coconut-scented sunscreen. Not a single one of the chaise lounges would have been empty on a beautiful day such as this. But that was all in the past.

  “I don’t want it to end,” Raymond admitted.

  “We know,” the girls said at the very same time. “Neither do we.”

  “Don’t forget to come by and have a lemonade. My treat,” Raymond said as he started back to the snack bar. “After all, there are only a few days left to the summer.”

  Hailey had always noticed that Raymond often read two books at a time, and Claire had always noticed that he was so kindhearted, he fed day-old bread to the seagulls that followed him as though he were their favorite person on earth. Now they both could tell he was almost as sad as they were about the Capri closing.

  The girls had been watching Raymond so intently, it was a while before they realized that a mermaid had surfaced at the shallow end of the pool. Her hair was pale and silvery and her nails were a shimmering blue. Between each finger there was a thin webbing, of the sort you might find on a newborn seal or a duck.

  “What are you two staring at?” the mermaid said, when she turned and saw the girls gaping.

  Her voice was as cool and fresh as bubbles rising from the ocean. She was as beautiful as a pearl, with a faint turquoise tinge to her skin and eyes so blue they were the exact same color as the deepest sea. But her watery beau
ty didn’t mean the mermaid knew her manners.

  “Stop looking at me,” she demanded, as she splashed at the girls. “Go away!”

  The mermaid’s name was Aquamarine and she was much ruder than most creatures you might find at sea. At sixteen, she was the youngest of seven sisters, and had always been spoiled. She’d been indulged and cared for and allowed to act up in ways no self-respecting mermaid ever would.

  Her disagreeable temperament certainly hadn’t improved after spending two nights in the pool, tossed there like a stone or a sea urchin at the height of the terrible storm. Chlorine had seeped into her sensitive skin and silver scales dropped from her long, graceful tail. She hadn’t eaten anything more than a mouthful of that horrible herring the girls had strewn into the pool.

  “You heard me,” Aquamarine said to Hailey and Claire, who were mesmerized by her gleaming tail and by the way the mermaid could dive so quickly, she disappeared in a luminous flash. When she surfaced through the seaweed she was not pleased to see they were still there. “Scram,” she said. “Stop bothering me.”

  The mermaid glided into the deep end of the pool, the better to see Raymond at the snack bar. She had been watching him ever since she found herself stranded in the pool. His was the first human face she saw. She gazed at him with a bewildered expression, the sure sign of a mermaid in love.

  “They’re closing the Capri at the end of the week. The pool is going to be drained,” Hailey called to Aquamarine. “You’re going to have to go back to

  where you came from by Saturday.”

  The mermaid started to pay attention. “Where will the people go?”

  “What people?” Hailey said. “Everyone’s already gone except for us.”

  “Not exactly.” Claire nodded toward Raymond. “Not everyone.”

  “He’s going on Saturday, too,” Hailey said. “He’s leaving for college.”

  As soon as Aquamarine heard this, she began to cry blue, freshwater tears. No mermaid wants to fall in love with a human, but it was already too late for poor Aquamarine to be sensible. A sensible mermaid never would have