Siren & Fang

Seriously, I cannot believe my parents are making me switch schools during senior year! I adore Crescent Tide High: I'm captain of the water polo team, I dive like a champ, and I run debate. Sure, I've never actually gone on a date, but at this point my odds of ever landing a boyfriend feel fully extinct. You'd think all those debate skills would let me talk my parents out of this. Instead, here's what went down earlier today: I was stretched out on my hammock inside my underwater bedroom cave, braiding seagrass into a charity basket and zoning out over Kieran Holloway's ridiculous torso and outlaw grin, when my mom drifted past the heart-shaped fissure in my bedroom wall. The very last thing I wanted was another round of questions about why my algebra homework wasn't done, so I slipped out of the hammock and tried to hide underneath it. While I spun through the water, I sliced my finger on a razor-edged strand of seagrass. Pink clouded into the water. I stuck the finger in my mouth to stop the bleeding, wincing when that metallic taste spread across my tongue. Naturally, I gagged anyway. Blood is beyond gross. Then Mom glided into my room through the shell strands hanging in the doorway, materializing like a surprise quiz. My heart started pounding, and orange sparks shot through my hair. (Sparking hair you can't control is humiliating. I'm the baby of seventeen brothers and sisters, and somehow I'm the only Tidewell fingerling who got this super-fun genetic mutation.) 'Maren!' Mom called in tele-speak. (Underwater, merfolk do not exactly speak out loud. We use telepathy, which is kind of like thinking except more deliberate. Thoughts just happen. Telepathy means pushing those thoughts outward as brain signals.) 'Mom! You freaked me out,' I whined, not realizing right away how suspicious that probably made me seem. (I seriously need to learn how to sound innocent around parents every second of the day. See, mermaids can shade our tele-speak any way we want, and because I'm seventeen, I've basically mastered 'whiny' and 'condescending.' Along with 'innocent,' I'm working on 'sexy,' but in my head sexy mostly sounds like I've been doing laps from the coast clear out to the Farallon Islands for seven straight days. Very breathy. Also a little desperate.) The half-finished basket drifted across Mom's face. She frowned. (Even frowning, my mom is absurdly beautiful, partly because she's one-quarter fairy. Her scales shine aqua and purple, while her hair glows moonlight silver with the faintest wash of green. It falls past her waist, and unlike mine, it never sparks. Ever. She has rainbow eyes like every mer, but hers lean bright purple. Too bad being gorgeous doesn't save her from making dreadful wardrobe decisions. At the moment she's in a ludicrously ancient shell bra dripping pearls. It belongs in a museum.) She swam over, looped her arms around my shoulders, kissed the top of my head, then flicked her tail and settled in front of me with the kind of pitying look you'd give someone about to cage-match a shark. Uh-oh. Something was definitely wrong. (Moms do not hug you when they've caught you avoiding polynomials.) 'Sorry I scared you, angelfish,' she said, using the awful nickname she'd started when I was two, like I was still some tiny fingerling instead of a fully grown seventeen-year-old mermaid. 'It's okay, Mom,' I said, arranging my voice into innocence. I did not roll my eyes at the vile nickname, because Mom finds it sweet instead of babyish for reasons no one understands, and I could tell this was not the moment to provoke her. 'You look upset. Did Kieran not manage to invite you to the Boardwalk Boogie tonight?' Mom asked, pivoting to a different topic.