Real Mermaids 2 - Don't Hold Their Breath (8 page)

Cori and I sat on the rocks at the edge of the road by the ocean. “We need to get in there,” I muttered.

“You really think your mom's in there?” Cori asked.

“I won't know until I can have a look,” I replied.

“Wow.” Cori shook her head in disbelief. “This is huge. I'm sorry I got mad at you back there, but I'm glad I finally know.”

I put an arm around her shoulder. “Me too.”

Just then, another truck filled with earth pulled up and stopped in front of the locked entry. It tooted its horn for someone to open the gate, but the security guard must have been busy catching the last few minutes of his show because he didn't come out of the trailer right away.

“Well, if we're gonna get in there, this is as good a chance as any.” Cori popped up from her seat on the rocks and ran to the back of the truck. She hopped onto the back bumper and grabbed the tailgate, turning toward me with her hand outstretched. “Come on!”

“You're crazy!” I laughed and raced after Cori, jumping onto the truck just before it lurched forward and continued through the gate. Thankfully, the security guard was busy securing the lock as we entered the construction site and didn't turn our way before rushing back into his trailer to catch the last few minutes of his show.

Luke and Trey ran for the gate, laughing, and gave us a thumbs-up as the truck rolled away. I waved to them and flashed a hopeful smile, then grasped onto the tailgate to keep from becoming road pizza, hoping I didn't just make a huge mistake.

“This secret-identity stuff is fun!” Cori exclaimed, choking on the cloud of dust kicked up by the truck's massive back tires.

I put a finger to my lips to get her to shush. What would happen if we got caught? I seriously contemplated running back to the gate and waiting for the next truck to come through so we could escape. But then we turned a corner and I caught a glimpse of shimmering water through scrub brush and bushes, and any worries I may have had fell away.

“Oh wow.”

“What?” Cori turned to see what I was “oh-wowing” about but the truck hit a pothole and she bounced off the bumper and onto the road.

“Cori!” The same weird superhuman (or super-mermish) force rose up inside of me like when she'd fallen into the ocean earlier, and suddenly I found myself leaping from the truck and shoulder rolling onto the gravel road to save her. “Oof!”

Okay. So maybe it wasn't the daintiest shoulder roll ever, but if my life ever became a blockbuster movie I promised myself I'd get a stunt double. I struggled to my feet and ran to Cori, just as she lifted her head. The truck rolled on down the road and around the bend, the driver oblivious, leaving us covered in dirt and coughing exhaust fumes.

I could hear another truck coming from the other way.

“Come on!” I propped Cori up and slung her arm over my shoulder. She stumbled as I dragged her off the road and into the bushes, out of the way of the oncoming truck. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I'll be fine.” Cori rubbed her knee and turned back to the road. “Do you think anyone saw us?”

“Not sure, but let's not wait and find out. Are you okay to walk?”

“Lead the way, fish-girl.” Cori raised her hand to point us onward.

We bushwhacked through the brush in the direction I'd seen the water. After a few minutes, my flip-flops began to sink in the muck as the brush gave way to marshy grass and then open water about a hundred feet across.

“Could this be it?” I looked to my left in the direction of the ocean and saw the other end of the metal culvert jutting out into the pond. I had my answer. The culvert ran from the ocean to the pond, making it a tidal pool. Somewhere in there was my mother. I just knew it!

“Oh, hey! Take a picture, take a picture!” Cori tried to hand me her phone with one hand and held up her other arm where two Monarch butterflies had landed.

“Your phone went for a swim earlier, remember?” I laughed and rolled my eyes. “We could be arrested for breaking and entering and you want me to take a photo of butterflies?” Using my phone instead, I lined up the shot so I could get the butterflies on her arm and the dozen others flocking on a bunch of bushes nearby. I slipped my phone back in my pocket and looked out over the water.

“So do you think this is it?” Cori asked, touching one of the butterfly's wings before it flew away.

“I really hope so,” I replied.

Sunlight glittered on the rippling waves of the pool, and all around it green shrubs waved in the summer breeze. A heron waded in the water not far from us but a loud clang set it off, just like it had earlier. I turned in the direction of the noise, and sure enough, up the hill closer to the mall, dump trunks unloaded earth while front-end loaders picked up a scoop at a time and dumped it into the north end of the pond. I worked my way through the bog to get to the open water but the mud was getting deeper and slowing me down.

“I can't believe they're just going to fill all this in,” Cori said. “It's so pretty here…oooo…ouch!”

I turned to check on Cori and waited for her to catch up. “Are you sure you're okay?”

“Yeah.” She limped toward me, grasping my arm for support, then shielded her eyes from the sun. “I'm good. Can you see anything?”

“Nothing. But I'm going to try to call out to her.”

Cori glanced up the hill. “What if they hear you?”

“They won't hear me.” I smiled.

Mom?
I rang out over the water, hoping she'd hear.

“What was that?” Cori looked at me in amazement. “Was that you? Is that like mermaid Parseltongue or something?”

“Yeah. Sorta.” I strained to hear in case Mom was trying to ring back but couldn't hear anything except a booming voice from behind us.

“Hey! You two!”

My heart seized in my chest.

“We are
so
dead.” Cori tightened her grip on my arm and we turned slowly to face the guy who was probably about to bury us in the bog and make it look like an accident.

“I thought I told you kids to scram.”

“Just thought we'd do a bit of bird watching?” I said hopefully.

Grumpy McGrumpypants looked at me sternly and hitched up his leather utility belt which brimmed with brand-new looking survival gear. What exactly did he think he'd run up against in a field behind a shopping mall, I wondered. Killer turtles? Homicidal blue herons?

“I don't get paid enough for this,” the security guard muttered, stomping toward us through the boggy muck.

“Oh yeah? Well, I know your employers personally.” Cori put a hand on her hip. “And I doubt Mr. Chamberlain would appreciate the fact that you waste his money watching TV on company time.”

“Whoa, now. Wait just a second.” The security guard put up his hand. “No need to get all feisty.” He turned from us and answered his ringing phone. “Yeah. I've got them here. The little one's giving me trouble but…uh, don't worry. I'll deal with it.”

He eyed us and then continued his phone conversation.

I wasn't sure if “deal with it” meant fitting us with cement shoes, but any hope of finding Mom was slowly dwindling away. I turned back to the water, hoping for a sign before meeting my doom. And that's when I saw it.

An arm. Partway out of the water and only for a split second. Mom's arm? It had to be!

Mom!
I rang.

The security guard put a hand over his ear like there was feedback from his phone but Cori looked at me, wide-eyed. And I must have actually jammed the phone's frequency because the security guard tapped it with the back of his hand.

“You still there?” he spoke into the mouthpiece. “Okay. Yeah, I can hear you again. Yeah, yeah, don't worry. I'll make sure they don't bother us again.”

Cori's hand was beginning to cause deep tissue damage around my arm.

“Stay cool,” I whispered.

But I was far from cool. All I wanted to do was crash through the bog and dive in the water after Mom, but with Grumpy McGrumpypants right there, that was definitely out of the question.

“Okay.” The security guard clipped the phone back onto his belt and led us back to the road. “Here's what we're gonna do.”

I turned back to see if I could catch one last glimpse of Mom but there was nothing. My chest filled with a rush of panic. Would I ever see her again? Could we stop the construction in time for her to make it back home safely?

Encouraged by the hand the security guard was keeping on his nightstick, we made it back to the road and kept walking to the chain-link gate. “You're gonna walk on out of here just like this never happened. Otherwise, I'll have the cops on you for trespassing like there's no tomorrow.
Capisce?
”

“Yup! We got it.” Cori made a beeline for the gate, limping along on her bum leg.

“But Cori,” I whispered, catching up to her, “my mom just waved to me back there.”

“She did?” Cori replied as we spilled out to the road.

“What?” Luke asked. He and Trey rose from where they'd been sitting on the rocks at the side of the road to greet us. “What happened?”

“My mom is in the tidal pool. I saw her!” I looked back through the fence, desperate to run back into the construction site and fireman's carry her out of there. “We've got to do something.”

“Well, we could tell that guy to tell his boss to stop piling rocks into the tidal pool because your mermaid mother is in the way, but I doubt that would help with the whole ‘secret identity' thing.” Cori nodded in the direction of the security guard as he swung the massive chain link gate closed.

“But…” My hands dropped to my sides. Cori was right.

“At least now we know where she is,” Luke said quietly. “Didn't he say that was the last truck for the night?”

“Yes, but—”

“So, she'll be okay until the morning when we can figure something out.” Luke put a hand on my shoulder and tried to catch my eye. “Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, hearing the sound of metal on metal as the gate swung closed, just like the boat lock of Talisman Lake.

“Hey, fish-girl.” Cori grabbed me by the arm and led me back up to the mall parking lot. “How about I buy you a Big Mac for your troubles? You know, for saving my life and all that?”

My stomach rumbled. I looked longingly at the golden arches off in the distance.

“That depends. Can I get fries with that?”

Port Toulouse wasn't going to win any awards for its wild and crazy night life. By the time we'd scarfed down our Super Value meals, the mall was closed and the buses had stopped running. I was bursting to tell Dad about what we'd found when I called to ask if he could pick us up, but the McDonald's was packed with screaming kids terrorizing the PlayPlace and I could barely hear him. Besides, I really wanted to see Dad's face when I delivered the news that we'd found Mom.

Luke and Trey were still waiting for their father when Dad arrived. His eyes scanned the booth, doing the mental calculations on our group.

“Hello…fellas.” He nodded to Luke and Trey, then shuttled me and Cori to the car since Cori was coming over to my house to sleep over.

“You won't believe—” I began, but Dad interrupted me.

“You said you were going to McDonald's with Cori and ‘the gang.'” Dad pulled onto the highway, stressing the last two words.

“Well, technically—” I glanced at Cori. Apparently, the trade-off for sleeping over was witnessing a lecture from my dad.

“Technically?” Dad interrupted me. “It may have been the nineteen hundreds when I was a teenager, but back in my day, two girls plus two boys was
technically
a double-date.”

“It's not like that, we were just…” It was time to come clean before I got myself in even more trouble for stuff I didn't
actually
do. “We went looking for the tidal pool.”

“Jade…” Dad looked from me to Cori in the rearview mirror.

“Oh, don't worry, Mr. Baxter,” Cori chimed in. “I know everything.”

“Jade!” Dad cried.

“Dad, wait! I saw her! I saw Mom.”

So, I spilled it all—Reese, Uncle Alzear, the culvert, and Renata. Then I explained about McDonald's and the construction site and the locked gate and seeing Mom's arm. Dad listened until we rumbled along the drawbridge, crossing over the canal.

“You saw her?” he said. “Was she okay?”

“I couldn't tell. The security guard almost called the cops on us before he kicked us out.”

“The cops? Jade! This is exactly the kind of thing I was afraid of.”

“But she was there, Dad. We actually found her.”

“And I am
thrilled
you've found your mom.” I could see Dad blink a few times in the rearview mirror. “But I am less than thrilled with the fact that you risked your life and almost got arrested in the process. Why didn't you call me right away when you first met Reese?”

“I dunno.”

“Honestly, Jade. We talked about this!”

Cori gave me an understanding smile. Despite getting reamed out by Dad, one thing was for sure: it was a relief to finally have her in on my secret.

“It's just…” I looked past the railing to the dark waters of Talisman Lake where my mermaid journey had begun just a few short weeks before. “We've been disappointed so many times. I just wanted to make sure.”

Thankfully, Dad didn't continue to freak out on me just then, but I think I had Cori's presence to thank for that. When we got home and Cori ducked into the bathroom, though, Dad obviously had a little time to think about what he had to say.

“You have
got
to stop doing this.” Dad rested his hands on my shoulders as we stood in our front hall. “How can I trust you if you keep shutting me out? We're supposed to be a team, remember?”

It was true. I
had
gone behind his back. And if I ever hoped to leave the house again, I'd have to grovel like a prairie dog.

“I know. I'm really sorry, Dad. It was thoughtless and reckless and I'm a horrible, horrible daughter.” I finished off my groveling with a goofy grin and jazz hands to help lighten the mood. “But ta-da! I still found Mom.”

Dad couldn't hide his smile. “A horrible daughter who is growing up horribly fast.”

“So, do you forgive me?” I asked.

“I'll think about it.” Dad gave me a hug. “Right now, I am going to go upstairs to the computer to try and figure out what's going on with this mall construction business. Try not to put your life in mortal peril in the meantime?”

“I'll do my best,” I replied.

•••

Cori pelted me with mermaid-related trivia questions while we watched music videos on YouTube and raided the kitchen for snacks.

“So, what happens to your legs when you grow a tail? Like where do they go?” she asked.

“I dunno. It happens so fast it's kind of like an explosion. Growing legs is a bit slower and a lot more painful.”

“Like burning-your neck-with-a-hair-straightener painful or plucking-your-eyebrows-with-a-pair-of-tweezers painful? Cause one is more of a searing pain and the other is more of a sharp, stabbing pain, I think.”

Where did she get this stuff?

“I'd have to go with hair-straightener option if I had to choose,” I answered.

Grocery shopping wasn't really my dad's specialty, so it was slim pickings in the kitchen unless you wanted Sugar-O cereal, two week-old Wonder bread, or soy sauce.

“You got any popcorn?” Cori searched in the cupboard over the fridge. “Ah, here.”

Cori plucked an Orville Redenbacher box from the shelf but shook it upside down to show it was empty. I stashed the box in the overflowing recycle bin underneath the kitchen sink.

“Sorry. We might have some leftover kernels from that time we made popcorn cranberry garlands with my grandmother at Christmas. We don't have a popper, though.”

“No biggie.” Cori found a paper lunch bag in one of the kitchen cupboards. She measured the leftover popcorn before pouring it inside, then stapled the bag shut.

“Are you going to put that in the microwave like that?” I asked, worried that we were going to get electrocuted from the metal on the staples.

“Trust me, I Googled it.” Cori set the microwave to Popcorn and pressed Enter just as the song on YouTube ended. “Oh! Did you see the video of Chelse yet?”

“Is it really bad?” It felt a little wrong wanting to look, but Cori had the video cued up on Facebook before I had a chance to say no.

The video started off with Chelse walking along the dock at her family's cottage near my Gran's in Dundee. She had her head down, texting someone on her phone while her dog ran around her, barking at something in the water. The video maker had added really bad, super dorky pop music and text message captions at the bottom of the screen.

gurl1: hey gurl!

gurl2: hey gurl! whatcha doing?

gurl1: i dunno. whatcha doing?

gurl2: i dunno…just texting you. whatcha doing?

Just then, the dog ran in front of Chelse and she wiped out and fell in the water, phone in hand.

I'm not proud of it, but I stifled a laugh.

“I know, right?” Cori said. “Looks like someone else we know, huh?”

“I think your splash was bigger,” I teased, remembering Cori's swan dive into the Atlantic Ocean earlier that day.

At the end of the video, Chelse flailed in the water, holding her phone overhead and a final message crossed the screen.

WARNING: Friends don't let friends walk and text.

“It has 1,584 likes and 374 comments?” I stared at the view counter. “No wonder Chelse was upset. This thing is spreading like crazy.”

“It's all over Facebook.” Cori plopped a glob of butter into a measuring cup then found brown sugar, salt, and chocolate chips, and mixed it all into a gooey buttery concoction while the popcorn finished popping.

“I feel kinda bad for watching it,” I admitted, shutting the laptop.

“Yeah.” Cori looked at me and cringed. “After doing the same thing at Toulouse Point, now I kind of do too.”

The timer dinged, so I pulled out the steaming bag of popcorn so Cori could put her buttery mixture in the microwave to melt.

“Sorry,” I said. “This is the lamest sleepover ever. First you have to listen to a lecture from my dad, then you have to make your own snacks. At least when my mom was here we had a better stocked kitchen.”

“Yeah, about that. How exactly are you going to explain your mom's sudden reappearance when she makes it back home?”

“
If
she makes it back home.” I pulled down a bowl from the cupboard and set it on the counter, then ripped open the paper bag to pour the popcorn into it.

“She's
totally
going to make it back.”

“Thanks, Cori.” I smiled, relieved to know I had a few extra people on my side now compared to my lone-girl rescue mission when I helped my mom escape Talisman Lake a few weeks before. “You're awesome.”

“So I've been told. But you wanna know what else is awesome?” Cori poured the steaming mixture of butter, salt, sugar, and chocolate over the bowl of popcorn, and tossed it all together. “This popcorn.”

She held out the bowl for me.

“Don't mind if I do,” I replied.