Maybe a Mermaid Page 14

  “You were right, you know,” Mom said. “I’ve made a lot of choices that made things harder on you than they should be. I didn’t pay attention to how lonely you were feeling. And I put a lot on your plate. With Beauty & the Bee. And Gramps.”

  The duckling poked his head into the water and came up with a bill full of weeds.

  “It’s not fair to you,” she said. “I shouldn’t be your only person in the world.”

  “I know. But I’m glad I have you.”

  Mom put her arm around me.

  “Forget ‘Gillis Girls Always Stick to the Plan,’” she said. “As long as we stick together, we’ll pull through.”

  I nodded. “Gillis Girls always do.”

  She pulled me close again and I melted into her warm, honey-scented hug. Home.

  * * *

  After dinner, I handed a packet of pages to Mom. The title page read: A Proposal for Staying Seven More Days, by Anthoni Gillis. Charlotte had argued for Seven Spectacular Days That Will Change the Course of Your Life, but I thought we’d have better luck with a more straightforward approach. We’d worked all afternoon on the proposal. I created flowcharts, checklists, and Action Steps while Charlotte added adjectives and what she called “fuzzy numbers.”

  “Everybody loves statistics,” she’d said. “They’re inherently trustworthy.”

  I did the dishes while Mom flipped through the documents. I wanted to let her concentrate, but it was hard not to watch for her reaction. At some points she smiled, but at others, she rubbed her forehead and groaned. Once, she laughed out loud.

  “What’s funny?” I asked. I didn’t remember putting in any jokes.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I just didn’t know that eighty-nine percent of people who watch fireworks on July Fourth report excellent physical health.” She ran her finger down the page. “Or that one in four people who move right before a national holiday suffer from severe acne and, in rare instances, head lice.”

  I blushed. Some of Charlotte’s fuzzy numbers were fuzzier than others. “Those numbers are estimates,” I said.

  “I see,” Mom said, and went back to reading. When she finished, she set the proposal on the table, and patted the seat next to her. I sat down.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “That was a lot of work,” Mom said.

  I nodded.

  “This is really important to you.”

  I nodded again.

  “I have to admit, aside from some very bizarre statistics, you make some good points,” she said. “You could use more swimming lessons. One week is not going to make or break my career. And realistically, I’m not going to be able to do a lot of networking over the holiday when everyone else in the world is on vacation.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Did you see my cost-benefit analysis? If we leave now, we lose more than we gain if we stay.”

  “I saw it,” Mom said. “It actually made sense.” She flipped through the packet again. “Unlike this sentence: Some countries consider it a federal crime to cut a vacation shorter than originally planned. What countries?”

  “I’ll … have to check my sources.”

  “Here’s the deal,” she said. “We’ll stay to watch the fireworks. I’ll use the extra days to set up some meetings and checklists for Chicago. But after the Fourth, we’re leaving, and I can promise you, no proposal will change my mind.”

  I jumped out of my seat and threw my arms around her.

  “Okay, okay, don’t strangle me,” Mom said, but she locked me in a bear hug and whispered, “I wanted to see the fireworks, too.”

  29

  CHOPPING WOOD

  The next morning, I found a note on the door of The Black Bear.

  FIRST REHEARSAL: 2:00 P.M. ON THE DOCK.

  DJ showed up five minutes late, and Charlotte read him the riot act, lecturing him about punctuality and the laziness of “kids these days.”

  “I came, didn’t I?” DJ protested. “I don’t even know what I’m here for!”

  “Greatness!” Charlotte bellowed. “You’ve heeded the call to greatness! Seize the cup! Fame waits for no man!”

  DJ shot me a wary look. Even I wasn’t sure what I’d gotten us into.

  Charlotte rummaged around in a small trunk on the dock and extracted a hat, a cape, and some lighting equipment.

  “What are we doing?” DJ whispered to me while she rifled through the trunk.

  I grinned. “The Boulay Mermaid show.”

  DJ’s eyes widened. “Really? How come?”

  I hesitated. I could tell him the truth—that it was all an elaborate plan to get a hairpin for Charlotte and help me become the person who made Maddy Quinn’s dreams come true. Charlotte had understood. But I wasn’t sure about DJ. He didn’t like Maddy. He wasn’t going to be all gung ho about a plan to get her to like me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “For fun?”

  DJ shrugged. “Okay. I’m in.”

  Two hours later, Charlotte was still barking at us.

  “Bing! Boom! Bam! Chop-chop! What is this, amateur night?”

  Charlotte slapped her hands together as DJ and I scrambled to our “marks.” DJ stood at the spotlight we’d assembled in the bushes, and I flipped my cape and walked down the stairs to the dock.

  “Follow her, DJ! Follow her!” Charlotte yelled, even though he seemed to be doing a perfectly good job keeping the spotlight aimed right at me as I moved. Not that we could tell for sure. It was broad daylight, and it was impossible to know whether the light was on me or not. Charlotte said it didn’t matter. It was a dry run. We had to get the motions down.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, throwing my arms wide and taking the deep bow Charlotte had already made me re-do seven times. “You are about to see something so spectacular, so amazing, that you won’t believe your eyes.”

  “You call that delivery?”

  I made my voice even louder. “So specTACular, so aMAZing…”

  “Yes, YES!” She jumped up and down.

  “The Boulay Mermaid is a rare creature,” I continued, “born in the clear waters of the South Seas. At a young age, her parents were brutally murdered by a sea serpent, and she was left an orphan. It’s sad enough to make a whale blubber.”

  “Pause for the laughs,” Charlotte coached.

  “But it’s not funny,” I said.

  “Whale? Blubber? It’s gold! Now hit ’em with the sob story.”

  “Imagine,” I said, “being left as a child to fend for yourself. How lonely. How cold. How terrifying.”

  Charlotte hit herself on the forehead. “How many times do I have to say it? Make eye contact. Sell it! How LONELY, how TERRIFYING.” She sobbed. “Tear their hearts out! I’m telling you, it would be much easier if you sang.”

  This was where my musical number was supposed to come in, but I’d put my foot down. There was no way I was going to dance and sing. I didn’t care if it ruined the effect.

  “How LONELY! How COLD! How TERRIFYING!” I belted.

  “Better. Now take it from the top.”

  DJ’s job was much easier than mine. First, he was in charge of watching the emergency line—a rope that Charlotte would pull if anything went wrong.

  “A precaution,” she said. “Government regulation. Hardly necessary.”

  Other than that, all he had to do was follow me with the spotlight. When I got to the part about how the mermaid had been rescued by the Boulays and brought to Thunder Lake, he was supposed to swing the light toward the dock where Charlotte would be sitting. Once she dove into the lake, there were numbers on the spotlight that marked the right angle for each trick. Number one was for her first trick, number two for the second, and so on. It seemed easy enough, but she drilled him on it as hard as she drilled me on my lines.

  “One! Four! Three!” she shouted, mixing up the order of the tricks to see if he was paying attention. Rehearsal, she said, was chopping wood. You had to do it again, and again, and again, and again in order to see results.


  But she didn’t rehearse her own tricks.

  “I’m the headliner,” she said. “I’ve been chopping wood since before your grandparents were born. My job isn’t to rehearse. It’s to go out with a bang. Right, kid?”

  * * *

  We rehearsed all weekend, and on Sunday, Charlotte gave us the game plan. The show would go live on July Fourth.

  “It’s more dramatic when it happens right after the fireworks. There’s something about sparkling lights exploding in the air that preps people to believe in magic. Can you make that happen?”

  DJ and I both nodded. I hoped so.

  “Fine. Meet me on this dock, in costume, as soon as the brouhaha’s all over. Swear you won’t be late?”

  We linked our pinkies and swore, and even though I knew the Fourth of July would bring fireworks and secret dreams and a True Blue Friend, I couldn’t forget it also meant leaving the next day. No more rehearsals, no more zany Charlotte Boulay. Maybe Mom was right and there was something magical about The Showboat Resort. Clearly, I was under some kind of spell. How else could you explain how badly I wanted to stay?

  After our final rehearsal, DJ stood outside The Black Bear while I shoved my costume in my backpack.

  “My aunt said I could invite you and your mom over to watch the fireworks. You like hot dogs?” he asked. “And s’mores?”

  “I’ve never had one.”

  DJ threw his hand over his heart and fell to his knees on the ground. “You’ve never had a hot dog? That’s insanity!”

  I laughed. “No, a s’more.”

  DJ’s shocked expression deepened. “Even weirder,” he said. “So. Want to come?”

  “I’ll ask my mom,” I said. “Sounds fun.”

  DJ scrambled back to his feet and handed me one of his rocks.

  “I thought you might want to borrow it. For swim lessons tomorrow. For luck.”

  I rubbed the quartzite between my fingers. It was his good one, with the extra stripes and jagged edge. The one he’d found with his parents, and he was trusting it to me.

  “Don’t you need it?”

  DJ’s face flamed up. “It’s okay. Just don’t lose it.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”

  DJ started to turn away, then paused. “I think she’s good strange,” he said. “Do you?”

  “Charlotte? Yeah.”

  “I also think she thinks there’s going to be an actual audience for her show. I mean, besides us. The way she made us rehearse so much? How bizarre is that? Who would she invite?”

  Maddy Quinn. Kurt. Julie. I almost blurted it out and told him the truth. That there really was going to be an audience. But we’d worked so hard, and I was so close to completing my plan. I knew DJ wouldn’t want to perform for Maddy. If I told him, then he might not show up. That would ruin the whole thing.

  “She likes the extra drama?” I suggested.

  “I don’t care, it’s fun,” DJ said. “Anyway. Smell ya later!”

  * * *

  That night, I opened my notebook and took a close look at my Action Plan:

  1. Meet Potentials

  2. Narrow In

  3. Develop Trust

  4. Discover Her Secret Dream

  5. Do What It Takes: Become the Person who can make that dream come true!

  I re-read the quote from the article Mom had given me. “You’ll no longer have a client, you’ll have a True Blue Friend for life—guaranteed!”

  I unfolded Maddy’s drawing of the poor fish getting eaten alive by a scary, scary mermaid. But that was only one scenario. On the other half of the page, the fish had a heart of gold and a best friend. It all depended on what happened next. The comic couldn’t be clearer. Maddy Quinn was trying to send me a message: I had Potential. She wanted to be my friend. She would’ve been my friend, but then I snooped in her closet and broke her trust. Of course she didn’t know if I was True or False. Which was why I had to Do What It Takes to earn back her trust. I had to prove to her I was True.

  I opened a new page in my notebook and wrote out an invitation:

  COME SEE THE SPECTACULAR BOULAY MERMAID!

  A MAGICAL EVENING YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS!!

  JULY 4th—ONE NIGHT ONLY!!!!

  Meet on the Showboat dock after the fireworks

  100% SATISFACTION—GUARANTEED!!!!!!

  I folded the note into a small square and tucked it in my backpack with DJ’s quartzite and Josh’s floaties. I climbed into bed and read a comic where Wolverine’s past self travels into the future. The real-time Wolverine is old and losing his powers and he’s not sure how to do the right thing, but he still ends up a hero because his younger self is willing to do anything—even manipulate the space-time continuum—to make sure he stays loyal to the bitter end.

  30

  SWIM LESSONS: TAKE THREE

  I left my towel and backpack with Mom and marched down to the water, doing my best to pretend everyone wasn’t staring at me. I started to visualize myself on a vast, empty beach with no spectators … then I stopped. Let them look. It was my last swim lesson, and I was going to make it count.

  Before I put my feet in the water, I adjusted the SpongeBob SquarePants floaties on my arms. DJ’s goggles made the whole world greenish blue. Thunder Lake was almost purple, like a washed-out photograph, and the kids running around in the weekly water fight looked sickly with their pale-blue skin.

  It wasn’t hard to spot DJ leaping around in the water with his arm stuck in the black garbage bag. He ran over, splashed water at my knees, and said, “You look like a bug-eyed mutant.”

  I splashed him back. “So? You look like a one-armed gorilla.”

  DJ raised his bagged cast in the air and yelled, “Tadpoles … charge!”

  All at once, a gaggle of kindergartners came running at me, kicking and splashing. They chased me in thigh-high water while DJ jumped around like a zoo animal behind them.

  “Attack the bug-eyed mutant!” he yelled. “Attack! Attack!”

  The water was cold, but I didn’t have time to care; I was too busy fending off the miniature army. I watched DJ and saw that he got a much bigger splash when he held his fingers close together and skimmed his hand across the water. I tried it and got Josh in the back of the head. He spun around, laughing, and smacked the surface of the lake with the palm of his hand. Water spattered around us.

  “Watch this, Gills,” DJ yelled.

  He took a wide stance, held his good arm out, and made a wide sweep along the top of the lake. A wall of water seemed to fly through the air in slow motion before it hit me full in the face. I staggered, lost my footing, and fell backward. I felt my head go under before my butt hit the ground, and the floaties popped me back up to the surface. It all happened so fast. First I saw bubbles and then I was gasping for air and DJ was calling, “Time-out! Time-out!”

  He reached his hand out for me while the blue-skinned Tadpoles gathered around. I took a breath. Surprisingly, I was okay. I hadn’t swallowed any water. I wasn’t down long enough to panic. But DJ looked terrified.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to … I wasn’t thinking…”

  I took his hand and let him help me up. Then I yelled, “Attack the one-armed gorilla!”

  Josh chased after DJ, and the squealing army of kindergartners mobilized behind him. We ran, yelling and laughing, until Mrs. Nueske blew the whistle for lessons. As DJ unwrapped the plastic from his cast and headed to the beach, I saw Maddy Quinn watching me. She stood with the other Muskies, and her face was twisted into a strange greenish-blue expression. Even with the goggles on, I recognized it. Maddy Quinn thought I was a complete goon.

  Shari handed out foam kickboards. “Anthoni, aren’t you kind of big for floaties?”

  “They help her feel safe,” Josh said. “Right, Anthoni?”

  I straightened up and turned away from Maddy’s gaze. “That’s right,” I said, and smiled at him.

  We practiced kicking, and then we pra
cticed kicking with our heads in the water. Shari said we were supposed to turn our heads to the side to breathe, but every time I tried it, I felt like I was going to drown, so I developed my own method. I’d lift my head straight up to the sky, gasp for air, and then duck my chin down, all the while kicking like my life depended on it. It wasn’t Olympic style, but it worked. I was moving, and I was putting my head in the water.

  I watched the bottom of the lake underneath me as I kicked, taking an inventory of everything I saw. Sand, weeds, minnows, Shari’s hot-pink toenails. I sped past them all, gasping and ducking, gasping and ducking.

  The Muskies had finished early and were already drying off on the beach when we came in from the lake. I grabbed my backpack and towel and joined the group.

  “Nice floaties,” Kurt said.

  Josh shook his head like a dog and sprayed water all over him.

  “You’re doing pretty good for someone who never swam before,” Julie said. Her poison ivy was hardly noticeable anymore. “You haven’t drowned once. I bet those junior lifesavers are pretty glad, because they’ve never had to save anyone for real yet. I don’t even know if they…”

  She stopped talking the minute I handed the invitation over to Maddy.

  “I can show you the mermaid,” I said. “But I need to give her something in return.”

  A pang of guilt twitched through me as I said it. Technically, Charlotte wasn’t a mermaid. But she was going to swim and breathe underwater, wasn’t she? I was going to show Maddy what she wanted to see. That wasn’t exactly lying.

  “Give her what?” Maddy asked.

  “The mermaid pin on your lamp.”

  Maddy’s jaw tightened. I wasn’t sure she’d forgiven me for snooping in her closet, and bringing it up was risky. But I’d promised Charlotte I’d get her the pin.

  “You showed her our pin, too?” Julie turned to me. “Maddy and I found that together at the Wild Beach. We used to pretend it had magical powers that could help us find mermaids, but we never really found anything. Though once we did find some purple scales and my dad said they weren’t from any fish he knows.” She poked Maddy’s arm. “Don’t you remember that? Anyway. We’ll have to give her something else. Maddy can’t give that away.”