"Wakey, wakey!”
Mom’s voice called to me from the other side of a dream. “Rise and shine!” she added as she tapped on my bedroom door.
“I’m awake,” I mumbled, warm with sleep.
Mom poked her head around the door. “Come on, time to get up.”
I turned over and opened one eye. Mom came in and sat on the end of the bed. “Back to school!” she said, smiling at me. “Are you excited?”
“Too tired to be excited,” I said.
And too nervous. I didn’t say that, though. It wasn’t just the first day of the semester. It was my first day back after an adventure on a pirate ship that had pretty much changed my life.
Except it turned out that it hadn’t
really changed much at all. I was back in Brightport, and everything here seemed about as ordinary as it could get. I’d come home before the holidays, but there had been so much going on in my life and in my head that my feet had barely touched the ground. I’d definitely done that now, though, and it felt as if I had come back to earth with a bump.
I still hadn’t figured out how to stop thinking about adventures out at sea and concentrate on sitting at a desk, following school rules.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure I even
wanted to figure it out. A part of me wanted to be out there still, sailing the ocean on a pirate ship. Grammar tests and algebra somehow didn’t hold the same appeal.
But here I was, and, like it or not, I had to accept that the adventures were over and it was
time to get back to normality.
“I’ll get you some breakfast,” Mom said. “Hurry up, now. You don’t want to be late on
your first day back.”
I got dressed and joined Mom at the breakfast table. She’d made me poached eggs, sausages, bacon, and a crispy hash brown. We usually only had a breakfast like that on special days. Normally, I just had a bowl of cornflakes.
Mom saw me looking. “Back to school treat,” she said with a smile.
I knew why she was going to all this effort. My boyfriend — sorry, ex-boyfriend — Aaron, had gone away to live somewhere else. Meanwhile one of my best friends, Mandy, had barely spoken to me since I’d been home. I’d seen her a couple of times, but it felt like we didn’t have much to say
to each other anymore.
Mandy and I used to be sworn enemies. When I first discovered that I could become a mermaid, she called me names like “freak” and “fish girl.” It was horrible. We made up last year, though, and ever since then she’s been one of my best friends.
But after coming back, I wasn’t sure how to pick up the pieces of our friendship again. I’d wanted to tell her all about the amazing time I’d had at Forgotten Island and on the pirate ship, but whenever I tried, it seemed like she wasn’t interested. She’d change the subject or look bored or start talking to someone else.
So I stopped trying. We hadn’t seen each other since before Christmas. And now it felt like the old days — the days when I dreaded going to school because I didn’t have any real friends.
Which made the prospect of my first day back at school about as enticing as a muddy puddle on a winter’s day.
I didn’t want Mom to worry about me, though, so I forced myself to smile back. “Thanks, Mom,” I said.
“Come on, love,” Mom said as I sat there looking at my plate of food. “Eat up. You’ll be late.”
“I’m not really hungry,” I confessed. “Sorry.”
Mom leaned over to kiss my cheek. “OK, chicken,” she said. “Leave it by the sink and I’ll give it to your dad. He never turns down a hearty breakfast.”
She got up from her seat, pulled her bathrobe around her, and went to the fridge. “At least take some fruit with you,” she said.
“I will,” I promised as I took my almost full plate to the sink and went to brush my teeth and finish getting ready for school.
Mom came out onto the deck in her bathrobe to see me off.
“Have a good day at school, darling,” she said, giving me a quick kiss before I hopped off
Fortuna and onto the jetty.
Fortuna is our boat. It’s where we live. It sits on the seabed, half sunken, so the lower deck is underwater and the top half is dry. Mom lives upstairs, as she’s human. Dad lives in the watery part below, as he’s a merman. I’m a semi-mer. That means I’m a regular girl on land but I become a mermaid when I go in water. I mainly live upstairs with Mom but can hang out in the water, too, when I transform into a mermaid.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said. “Have a good day too.”
Just then, Dad swam around the back of the boat. “Hey, little ’un. Today’s the day,” he said as he wiped a strand of hair off his face. “It’ll be wonderful. I’m sure.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said.
I blew them both a kiss, threw my bag over my shoulder, and made my way up the jetty.
I didn’t know exactly what was in store for me at school today. But as I walked, I couldn’t
help mulling over Dad’s words and wondering if
I would ever again be likely to describe a school day as anything approaching “wonderful.”
Copyright © 2020 by Liz Kessler. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
