And Then I Turned Into a Mermaid Read online

  ‘But mermaids aren’t real,’ she said, her words growing in uncertainty the more she examined her bright white tail. ‘They . . . We . . . Mermaids aren’t real.’

  ‘That’s what we want them to think,’ Mum replied, winking.

  Who’s ‘them’? Molly wondered as she stared at her shimmering scales. The tail was as easy to move and control as her legs, and twice as powerful.

  Looking around at her sisters, Molly noticed they weren’t wearing those tacky seashell bras, like mermaids do in cartoons. Instead they were wearing elegant long-sleeved tops – perfectly fitted and cropped just above their tails, in the same shimmery colours as their scales – that they definitely had not left the house in. Even her mum, who’d had a double mastectomy not long after Minnie was born, wore a top so well-fitting it was like her very own skin had turned a glittering lavender-purple. Molly looked down to find her own pyjama top had somehow been replaced with a beautiful shimmering white top.

  Molly dimly wondered how all their pyjamas and shoes had disappeared, but it seemed quite minor compared to suddenly sprouting a fishtail, so she shook the thought away.

  ‘I’m . . . I’m a mermaid?’ she said, as though saying it out loud would make it feel more real.

  ‘But you only get the tail when you’re near water,’ Margot explained, adjusting her sleep turban. Her poppy-coloured tail was vivid and, Molly had to admit, beautiful.

  ‘How near?’ Molly asked.

  ‘When you can feel the ocean in your heart, then you’re near enough,’ murmured Mum, eyes glazed and glassy.

  ‘Right, fantastic,’ Molly snapped. ‘In my heart. Got it. But just as a rough estimate, how many metres?’

  ‘The mermaid instinct cannot be measured in metres,’ her mum answered, laying her hand over her heart. ‘There’s no tape measure for the soul.’

  Wondering gravely why her mother had suddenly transformed into a raving lunatic, Molly tried again. ‘Right, but if there were a tape measure for the soul, what might it say? Like, am I going to flop around the school hallways whenever it rains outside? Am I going to knock people out with my flailing tail whenever we pass the swimming pool?’

  Mum nodded. ‘If your soul desires it.’

  Molly had the strong urge to slap her mother with a wet cod, but reckoned there was every chance mermaids liked that sort of thing.

  ‘Mum’s mastered it to the extent where she doesn’t transform until she’s actually in the water. It’s very impressive.’

  ‘Hence the skinny-dipping,’ Margot added with an eye-roll.

  ‘How is this happening?’ Molly whispered fearfully, a thousand questions simmering in her brain.

  ‘How does anything happen?’ Mum answered. ‘It just . . . is.’

  ‘So if Minnie came home one day with an elephant trunk you’d say, oh, never mind, it just is?’

  Margot snorted. ‘Be realistic, Molly.’

  ‘Realistic! You call this thing realistic?’

  Myla tutted, shaking her head. ‘You’re really being very closed-minded.’

  ‘Well, excuse me for not just immediately being like, oh, I have a tail, cool, what’s for dinner?’

  ‘We already had dinner,’ Margot pointed out. ‘It was awful.’

  ‘Oh my God, why are you deliberately dodging my questions?’

  Mum snapped out of her sea-witch whisper and sighed. ‘Molly, if you’d just calm down –’

  Anger bubbled in Molly’s throat. ‘How do you honestly expect me to calm down?’

  Melissa inhaled deeply, then exhaled exaggeratedly. ‘Just . . . breathe.’ She looked up at Mum for approval.

  ‘Through what, my face or my gills?’ Molly snapped. ‘Assuming I have gills? For the whole breathing underwater thing?’ Running her hands over her once smooth neck, sure enough there were a set of gills. ‘Brilliant. Just what I’ve always wanted. Holes in my skin! The hot new look! Coming to a freak show near you!’

  Even Margot looked worked up now, wringing her hands together and gritting her teeth. ‘Molly, seriously, can you please just relax?’

  ‘I’ll relax you!’ Molly shouted. ‘Permanently! You know, because you’d be dead.’

  ‘Molly!’ her mum yelled, raising her voice for the first time in forever, at the same time as Margot said, ‘That’s a bit much.’

  Molly wasn’t about to stick around to be told off. She began shuffling up the beach as best she could, using her hands to drag her impossibly heavy tail through the wet sand. Gasping and panting, Molly cursed this stupid situation as she moved mere flounders at a time, while her mother and sisters watched with alarm – and a little amusement.

  She’d gone no further than two metres when she finally gave up, collapsing to the ground with a sob.

  Mum shuffled over to the spot where Molly lay face down in the sand, and rubbed her shoulder affectionately. Her palm was warm and soft and comforting. ‘Molly, talk to me. Why is this upsetting you so much?’

  ‘Because . . . because . . .’ Molly spluttered, mouth full of sand. ‘I’m a freak. We’re all freaks. We always have been, and now we’re even more so. Why can’t I – we – just be normal?’

  ‘There will come a time when you’re grateful for the things that make you stand out. Trust me. Until then, you just have to weather the storm. And you’re a Seabrook – we’ve always been good at weathering storms.’ Mum gestured to her flat chest, then her empty ring finger, and smiled warmly.

  Molly did understand what Mum was saying, but all she could muster was a half-hearted, ‘Hmph.’

  ‘And you mustn’t tell a single soul, all right? This is a secret we will take to the grave. Not a single soul. Do you understand?’

  Molly snorted then. Did her mum think she was some kind of idiot? Like she’d ever tell anyone how much of a freak she truly was.

  And that was it. The truth bigger than all of this. Bigger than discovering her freakish family were in fact mermaids. Bigger than having her very own tail.

  Fit Steve would never fancy her now.

  And she would never, ever be popular. Not in a million years.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  So Many Questions

  After they’d crawled far enough away from the sea to transform back into humans, Molly finally caught her breath, and focused on one thing and one thing only: getting out of this cove.

  When they got back to Kittiwake Keep, everyone went to their bedrooms, somehow in the very clothes they’d worn down to the beach. Molly’s mind reeled. She had a million questions about the mermaid deal, and the pyjama situation was near the top of the list.

  However, when they got to their room, Melissa seemed intent on lecturing Molly, rather than answering her many questions.

  ‘You know, you really shouldn’t speak to Mum like that, Molly.’ Melissa perched on her side of her bed, arms folded across her nightgown. ‘You can be very hurtful at times. I know this is all a shock, but there’s no need to be so . . . Molly about it.’

  Through gritted teeth, Molly muttered, ‘Yep. Got it. Don’t be who I am. Excellent.’

  Melissa sighed, and lay down, shutting the light off.

  Molly’s entire body was shaking as she got under the covers. It wasn’t through cold, she didn’t think, although it had been bitter down on the beach – just adrenaline, and shock, and the urge to laugh and cry and scream and do a weird little dance all at the same time.

  How could she possibly fall asleep now? There were so many thoughts whizzing through her head, and nobody to talk them through with. She’d been too shocked to speak on the walk back to the lighthouse, but now she was buried under the weight of her questions. She would gladly be turned into a cannon if it meant being able to chat to Margot. Unfortunately, she had to room-share with an unsympathetic goody two shoes, who Molly would really quite like to shove –

  There was a tap on the door. Several taps, in fact. One long one, three short ones and another long one.

  The secret knock.

  Margot.
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  Molly smiled gratefully into the darkness. The door creaked open and sure enough, Margot padded through in her squid-print dressing gown, lighting the way with the torch on her phone. She then swivelled around and did a moonwalk the rest of the way to Molly’s bed. Melissa sighed extravagantly, as though she were the Queen of England and someone had just peed on her corgi.

  ‘How you doing, Mol?’ Margot whispered, perching on the end of Molly’s bed and awkwardly patting her foot through the duvet.

  ‘I’m –’

  Just then, there was another tap on the door. Margot and Molly stared quizzically at each other. The door creaked open once again, and this time, Myla’s head appeared through the crack.

  ‘Room for a big one?’ she mumbled, and Molly had to fight the urge to burst into tears. It had been so long since Myla had come to her bedroom for a chat, and she hadn’t realised how much she’d missed it until now.

  ‘Yes,’ Molly sniffed, trying to swallow the emotion as best she could.

  The three sisters squished together on Molly’s bed, Melissa glaring at them from across the room.

  ‘Are you joining us, your royal highness?’ asked Margot.

  Melissa looked like she desperately wanted to join in, but was still mad at Molly for being Molly. ‘No, I’ll just stay here.’

  Molly half-wished Minnie would potter up in her too-long jammies and snuggle between them all, but then she remembered the garlic sauce in her hair and thought better of it. She wasn’t really in the mood to smell like a kebab.

  Minnie. On the one hand, Molly was sad she’d have to keep this huge secret from her baby sister until she too turned thirteen. But on the other hand, if Minnie knew she would probably treat Molly like a giant sea turtle and constantly demand rides out to sea.

  Molly wondered how each of her other sisters had reacted when they first learned about the mermaid thing. Margot had taken it best, she guessed, and would’ve immediately started to plan the millions of new pranks she could play. She couldn’t even imagine how many intellectual questions Myla must’ve asked. Melissa . . . Melissa was a teacher’s pet. She’d probably started planning ways to impress Mum by being the best mermaid ever.

  ‘It’s not as bad as you think, Mol.’ Margot shuffled the duvet so it covered them all equally. ‘The mermaid thing. Once you get used to it, it’s actually quite fun.’

  ‘You think everything’s fun,’ Molly pointed out. ‘You had a whale of a time when we last went to the dentist.’

  ‘Oh come on, you can’t tell me that slobber-sucking machine isn’t hilarious.’

  ‘Is that why you held banana milkshake in your gob, and then when the machine drank it up, you patted it and said, “Was that nice, little guy?”’

  Margot almost wet herself from laughing. Unable to fight off the snickers, Molly started giggling too. Myla rolled her eyes. ‘You guys are ridiculous.’

  Molly’s laughter died as quickly as it had come on. She chewed her lip. ‘I just don’t understand how we’re supposed to go about our normal lives with this massive . . . thing hanging over us.’

  ‘You’re thinking about it the wrong way,’ Myla said quietly. ‘It’s not hanging over you. It’s deep inside you. It’s the thing you carry with you that lets you know you’re special.’

  Even though her stomach was still in knots, it was a comforting thought. Molly had never had something particularly special about her before. Not like Myla’s intelligence or Melissa’s moral compass or Margot’s humour or Minnie’s zest for life. And yet if she shared her special thing with her entire family, did that really make her special at all?

  Still, it was nice to have something connecting them. They were all such different people, and this was a common thread between them. Molly already felt closer to them, somehow.

  ‘You’re not alone, Mol,’ Margot said. ‘We’re all in this together. And the mermaid community is so great. You’re going to love old Alan. He’s this ancient merman with –’

  ‘Wait, what?’ Molly gasped. ‘There are other mermaids here? In Little Marmouth?’

  Myla nodded solemnly, lowering her voice to a whisper. ‘The legend goes that there used to be a grand mermaid queendom called Meire, but humans filled the sea with so much plastic and other rubbish, oil spills and extreme amounts of sewage –’

  ‘Poo,’ Margot added slowly, as though Molly were an idiot.

  Melissa tutted in the corner. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  ‘Yes, faeces, excrement, whatever you want to call it,’ Myla muttered impatiently, ‘it’s dumped in the sea, making it no longer safe for mermaids to live down there, so they moved up to the shore.’

  ‘All of them?’ Molly asked, suddenly feeling extremely guilty about pooing, and not recycling her juice cartons as often as she should.

  Wait, how do mermaids poo?

  Myla shrugged. ‘Most of them, yes, to seaside towns all around the world. Including Little Marmouth.’

  This piqued Molly’s interest. ‘Wow, OK. So who else in this town is a mermaid? Come on, dish the dirt.’

  ‘Fish the dirt,’ Margot corrected. She cracked her knuckles. ‘OK. Bertha Henderson, who owns the amusement arcade on the pier, and her husband. I forget his name. Long beard, like a goat or something. They’ve got a kid in primary school, I think. Oh, and Andy Miller in year eleven. He’s a good guy. Impressive spear. Who else . . . Amy Fairbairn from sixth form – her family own the butcher’s.’

  ‘Is she really a mermaid?’ Myla blinked, looking genuinely surprised. ‘I’d never noticed.’

  ‘That’s because she’s not a walking pencil case,’ Margot answered.

  Myla rolled her eyes, but this time there was a hint of a smile on her usually serious features.

  ‘Is that everyone?’ Molly asked.

  ‘There are a few more. No others in school, though.’ Margot smiled. ‘But the point is, Mol, you’re not alone. OK? You have us.’

  ‘All of us.’ Myla squeezed Molly’s hand. ‘Right, Melissa?’

  ‘All of us,’ Melissa said in a small, sheepish voice, right before Margot threw a stuffed alligator at her head.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The First Hurdle(s)

  The next morning, Molly might’ve thought the whole thing had been a very strange dream. She wished it had been a dream, but that was impossible, because she hadn’t had a single wink of sleep.

  As she got dressed for school, she had a sickly feeling in her stomach, like she’d eaten some bad kippers. Not because none of this felt real – in fact, it was quite the opposite, like a part of her had always known. Like she had always been building to this moment.

  It . . . fitted.

  That didn’t make it any easier to bear, though. The mermaid thing made her even more of a freak and outcast than she already was. Did her genes not know she had a swoony fifteen-year-old with floppy hair to seduce? The odds were already against her, since she was thirteen and a nobody. And she didn’t think there were any YouTube tutorials on how to hide a fishtail from the man of your dreams, but maybe she just needed to look harder.

  Then there was the whiteness of the tail. Everyone else had a gorgeous colour, and hers was plainer than plain could be. It made her feel like even more of a nobody than ever – the least exciting member of the world’s weirdest family.

  In any case, Molly vowed not to return to the beach anytime soon. The whole thing had left her even more at odds with herself than the time Margot had replaced her shampoo with blue hair dye (although being sent home from double maths to wash it out was something of a victory).

  That morning at school passed by in a haze of exhaustion. When she first bumped into Ada at their lockers, she felt like she had a neon sign flashing above her head, exposing her secret. Surely there was no way Ada wouldn’t notice this fundamental change in her best friend? But Ada seemed totally oblivious, which was fine by Molly. She was in no rush to share her very special brand of crazy with the world. Even if keeping secrets from her best friend did le
ave her feeling kind of gross.

  For the next few hours, Molly was so exhausted she could barely prop her eyelids open. She kept walking around with them closed while Ada steered her past various obstacles. Which worked well until Ada became distracted by Penalty Pete dribbling a football through the hall, and Molly collided nose-first with a disgruntled Mrs Figgenhall. The religious studies teacher squawked like a constipated gibbon. It was like the conch hat incident all over again. Molly felt a bit bad, and vowed to purchase Mrs Figgenhall a motorbike helmet as an apology. And also possibly to look into nose reductions as an act of a public service.

  Double history was a snooze-fest of epic proportions, and chemistry was a confusing blur of numbers and symbols Molly had no hope of understanding. Honestly, what kind of medieval torturer came up with the periodic table?

  Still, before she knew it, she was sitting with Margot and Melissa at lunch again. Ada was at choir practice, which made Molly consider getting a new best friend with fewer wholesome hobbies, but at least she had an opportunity to ask some of the many questions that had been bubbling over in her brain since the previous night.

  Stretching her arms in the air, Molly stifled a yawn and whispered, ‘So what’s the deal with mermaid peeing?’

  ‘Molly!’ Melissa snapped. ‘Remember what Mum told you! We can’t talk about that at school. Not ever, do you understand me? We could get in so much trouble! Nobody can know. Nobody.’ She shook her head gravely, as though Molly were some sort of criminal. ‘I’m going to eat with my friends.’

  And with that, Melissa flounced away towards the other goody two shoes she hung around with. As she walked past Felicity Davison from year nine, Molly saw Felicity mime holding her nose. Her fellow Populars laughed meanly.

  Molly felt a familiar flash of anger. Melissa might be annoying, but she was still Molly’s sister, and it was horrible seeing someone make fun of her. Especially someone like Felicity Davison, who had the whole of SPLUM at her feet.

  Note: feet. Like, permanently. Never tail. Molly never thought that was something of which she’d have to be jealous.