Maybe a Mermaid Page 4

  I’d never been swimming, not even at the YMCA. I’d wanted to, but Mom always said pools were disgusting and when she got to be Queen Bee, I’d learn to swim the right way—in Thunder Lake. Except she wasn’t Queen Bee. And we weren’t doing anything the right way.

  Mom tossed me her towel the minute she stepped onto the dock, took two quick strides, and dove into the lake. The rickety dock swayed as if it might collapse, and I sat down to avoid toppling into the water. Rain that had pooled on the wood seeped into my suit, spreading the bone-chill deeper. Any positive thoughts I’d ever had about learning how to swim vanished into thin air. Up close, Thunder Lake, like everything else about The Showboat and possibly my entire life, wasn’t nearly as spectacular as I’d imagined.

  When you saw it from far away, like in a postcard or from a window seat in a cabin loft, Thunder Lake looked blue. But when you got close enough to put your toes in, it was a sickly color—orange-brown, with weeds and lily pads covering the surface in patches. About two feet offshore, the rusty water turned so deep and dark that you couldn’t see through it. I shuddered. It wasn’t the green film growing on the surface that bothered me. It was something more sinister. The lake seemed bottomless. Unknowable. Like you could get sucked in and never come out.

  When she surfaced, Mom propped her elbows on the dock and kicked her legs out behind her like a kid.

  “Put your feet in,” she said. “It feels heavenly.”

  I stared at the spot where her feet kicked the water into a froth—exactly where the eerie ripples had formed and faded early this morning—and I kept my feet where they were.

  “Can you see Anna Lee’s?” she asked, pointing across Thunder Lake.

  Almost directly on the other side of the lake, I could see a rectangular patch of sand that I thought must be the public beach, and behind it, the blue store. In the distance, a speedboat pulling a water-skier zipped past the yellow church, and a sailboat floated near the shore. On our side of the lake, in the bay, the only movement was a family of ducks bobbing along, occasionally tipping their heads into the water and flashing white tails.

  “Once, Mary Pepper and I took inner tubes and floated all the way across to get ice cream at Anna Lee’s,” Mom said. “It took us an hour to get over there and two hours to get back because of the wind. It was the best ice cream I’d ever had!”

  Mom pushed her wet bangs out of her face, and a trick of the light made the dark circles under her eyes disappear. I knew she wanted me to smile or laugh. But I couldn’t.

  “Thunder Lake felt so magical,” she continued. “It seemed like incredible, amazing things were happening all the time.”

  “Like what?”

  I looked around for a spark of magic—something incredible and amazing that would send that Meant to Be tingle down my neck. I didn’t need it to be big. I’d take anything that would make this disaster of a summer seem like a detour worth taking. Instead, my eyes settled on a cluster of brown, slimy, half-eaten lily pads.

  Mom pushed herself away from the dock. “Like this.”

  She ducked her head, did a somersault under the water, and emerged laughing. That was the thing about Mom. Even after our entire Five-Year Plan had fallen apart, the Gillis Girls trust had evaporated, and The Showboat Resort had turned out to be a tragic dump, she could find a way to laugh. Mom never waited for magic to come to her. She made her own.

  “Watch. Dolphin dive,” she said, and leaped out of the water high enough to dive back down, letting her feet flip in the air like a dolphin tail.

  It hit me that I’d never seen Mom swim. She was different in the lake—lighter, happier, more like herself. As mad as I was at her, I felt a seed of hope plant itself in my brain. We could fix this. It might not be easy, but if we stayed positive and worked hard, we could create our own destiny. We had to. And if Mom couldn’t come up with a decent plan, I would.

  “Where are we?” I asked. “Number-wise. How many Worker Bees did you sign up at the air-conditioning conference?”

  Mom treaded water with her arms. “I didn’t go. It wasn’t a great idea to begin with. You’re not really supposed to sell at a conference unless you’re an official sponsor.”

  She didn’t even go. I wanted to grind my teeth, but I shook it off.

  “How many do we need? Not to make Queen Bee. Just to pay back Mr. Li.”

  Mom swam closer and put her elbows back on the dock.

  “If we can get five Worker Bees at the Basic level or one at the Premium level before the end of the month, I’ll get a bonus that will pay our back rent. But … I don’t know, Anthoni. That’s not much time.”

  I eyed the murky water. “Swim lessons start Monday, right?”

  She nodded.

  The last thing I wanted to do was put one toe in that soupy lake, but there were only two weeks left in the month. She needed to meet people.

  “Bring your sample kits,” I said. “You can pitch the parents on the beach.” It was a plan that had worked with my karate class in Cleveland, but there were fifty kids in that class. I didn’t know if there were fifty people in the entire town of Eagle Waters.

  “I’ll … try, but…”

  I forced myself to smile at her. If this was going to work, I knew the number-one thing I had to do was stay upbeat and positive, but “try” was not going to cut it. If anyone should know that, it’s Mom. Every Chief Pollinator is trained in the Three Steps to Making It BIG:

  1. Bee Positive

  2. Invest in Success

  3. Get ’er done!

  “Difficult Is Just a Challenge,” I reminded her.

  “Of course. You’re right, Anthoni.”

  Mom let go of the dock and floated on her back, staring up at the clouds with a frown. I practiced my happy thoughts while she backstroked away from me. On Monday, I’d go to swim lessons, and Mom would meet Potential Clients. She’d sign up enough Worker Bees to pay back Mr. Li and then we could start saving for the deposit on our next apartment.

  Wherever that would be …

  I stopped the negative thought before it went any further. Besides, I reminded myself, I had my own plan. Everything would be easier once Maddy Quinn and I were True Blue Friends. No matter where I went, she’d write and call. No matter what happened, we’d stay friends. The Showboat was a detour, I decided. The good kind. The Meant to Be kind.

  The tightness in my chest loosened, and I felt the seed of hope grow roots. The happy thoughts were working. I tried a few more. The woods weren’t scary, they were magical. The nighttime shriek was nothing but a loon. And for all I knew, the splash came from something incredible and amazing like an otter, or a mermaid.

  It helped. I felt better. But I still didn’t put my feet in the water.

  9

  SWIM LESSONS

  “You can let me off here, Mom,” I said as soon as Anna Lee’s Little Store came into sight through the trees. It had taken seven minutes to drive the bumpy woodland roads leading to the town side of Thunder Lake, and with every lurch of the Beemobile, I felt more anxious. The straps of Mom’s ancient Waterbugs Water-Ski Club swimsuit dug into my shoulders like a not-so-subtle warning. Danger. Don’t go.

  “Don’t be silly,” Mom said. “I want to meet your swim teacher.”

  “You could let me get out while you find parking,” I suggested, but I’d forgotten that Eagle Waters wasn’t the kind of town with parking lots or sidewalks. Eagle Waters didn’t even have a stoplight.

  “Too late!” Mom pulled off onto the shoulder of the road, adding the Beemobile to a row of cars lined up on the beach side of the highway. Where had they all come from? There were more people at the beach than Mom and I had seen in three days. I checked to make sure Mom’s B&B sample kits were in the bag with the towels.

  Mom squeezed my arm. “Rule number one: no swimming without an adult this summer,” she said. “Okay?”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. “I don’t think I want to go in at all,” I said.

  Mom tsk-ed he
r tongue and hit me with three of her favorite Mottos for Life. “Negative Thoughts Attract Negative Results. It Doesn’t Matter If You Feel Brave; It Matters If You Act Brave. Change Your State,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

  She tugged at the rearview mirror and opened her tube of Bee-You-tiful Lipstick.

  On the other side of the highway, Julie and a little boy wearing bright-yellow arm floaties stood outside Anna Lee’s Little Store. She tugged at the boy’s arm, trying to get him to cross, but he looked both ways about a thousand times before running top-speed across the pavement to the beach, leaving Julie to race after him.

  “See?” Mom said. “Julie’s here. You’ll make some good connections.”

  I was trying not to be a Negative Nelly, but it was hard to come up with happy thoughts about swim lessons. It was just a lake. Mom had been swimming in it hundreds of times. But every time I thought about jumping into that murky abyss, my legs got wobbly. What was living down there? What if I jumped in and disappeared without leaving a trace? It was silly, but it didn’t help that the way the water in Thunder Lake creeped back and forth on the edge of the sand looked exactly like an evil spirit in a horror movie I once saw. Add that to the shrieking loons and the loud splash that had been waking me up every day at dawn since we’d arrived—there was no way I wanted to get into that lake.

  Mom tossed the lipstick into the glove box. “Did you change your state?”

  I knew I shouldn’t fake it. I should try to think of the whole thing as an exciting challenge and visualize myself swimming until I actually felt happy about it. Instead, I lied. “Sure, it’ll be fun.”

  A group of kids stood on the beach, jumping and pointing at the Beemobile, but when I shut the car door behind me, they scattered toward the lake. The car’s antennas bobbed up and down like it was all some hilarious joke.

  Compared to the dead-quiet bay at The Showboat, the other side of Thunder Lake was a bustling metropolis. Three Jet Skis zipped around, a guy and a dog sat in a fishing boat, and not too far from the beach, two women in floppy hats stood on wide surfboards and slowly propelled themselves forward with long paddles. The Eagle Waters Community Beach was so small that even though there were only forty or fifty people there, almost every patch of sand was covered with toddlers building sandcastles and parents sitting on towels.

  Mom threw her shoulders back in her confident Chief Pollinator pose, and marched me down to meet the swim teacher. Mrs. Nueske was a skinny, overly tanned woman with a Red Cross patch sewn to her swimsuit. She checked my name off a list and blew a silver whistle in the direction of the crowd.

  “Class starts in five minutes!” she shouted.

  She raised her eyebrows at the giant pink umbrella, folding chair, and beach bag Mom had found in the closet of The Blue Heron. “Good luck finding a place for all that,” she said, squeezing her lips shut like she was trying not to laugh. “I always do enjoy it when city people come to visit.”

  Normally, in a first-day situation, I would check out the scene, make eye contact with a few kids, and introduce myself. But other than the toddlers and a line of junior-high sunbathers in sparkly swimsuits, everyone was already in the water playing a game based entirely on running around and splashing people in the face. I froze until Mrs. Nueske blew three sharp blasts on her whistle. The kids who’d been whooping, hollering, and hurling water at each other gathered in front of us at the edge of the beach. The sparkly-suit girls shook out their towels and clumped together, holding up their arms to compare nonexistent tans.

  “DJ!” Mrs. Nueske laid on the whistle. “Sit it out! We’re doing buoy drills today, and I don’t want to have to save you when that thing weighs you down.”

  A boy with more freckles than face broke away from the group and trudged back to the beach. He flopped down on the sand and pulled a plastic bag off his arm, revealing a cast. Without mud on his face and branches in his pants, I almost didn’t recognize Camo Boy. Was he getting out of swim class because of a broken bone? Ridiculously, I felt jealous. Also, panicked. Buoy drills? Whatever those were, they sounded dangerous. I looked at the Red Cross patch on Mrs. Nueske’s suit. How many people had she saved during buoy drills? Was she going to have to save me?

  Mrs. Nueske blew her whistle and pointed toward the water on one side of the beach. “Tadpoles—left!”

  She blew the whistle again. “Minnows—center!”

  Thweet! “Muskies—right!”

  Thweet! “Junior Lifesavers—CPR station! On the beach!”

  Within seconds, everyone scattered. Kids chatted, laughed, and sorted themselves into groups. The sparkly-suit girls giggled their way over to the Junior Lifesavers corner of the beach and the littlest kids splashed their way to a shallow spot toward the left. Julie jumped up and down in waist-high water, waving at me from the Muskies group.

  “Anthoni! Hey, Anthoni! Over here!” she shouted.

  Maddy Quinn bounced in the water next to her, and I felt a little better. Swim lessons would be worth it if Mom could sign up some Worker Bees and I could accomplish Action Step Two and Make a Meaningful Connection with Maddy. Which shouldn’t be hard. All we needed was something in common, and I already knew she liked comics.

  I took a deep breath and stepped into the water. Goose bumps popped up on my arms. The water was cold as a freshly melted polar ice cap, yet the other kids were splashing around like it was bathwater. My toes squished into the bottom of the lake. I took another step, and the muck held my foot and sucked it deeper into the slime. I yanked it out and tried to find better footing, but the more I moved my feet, the more they sank.

  Was this quicksand? Mom was right. My negative thoughts were attracting negative results. Frantically, I tried to change my state. This is fun. This is fun. Like stepping in pudding. Fun! Something slithery and solid squished between my toes and I stopped breathing. Happy thoughts. Not snakes. Lollipops and rainbows. Not snakes. Not snakes. Mrs. Nueske blew her whistle in my direction.

  “Anthoni Gillis!” she barked. “Hold it right there!”

  I made a wish that she’d send me back to the beach like the boy with the cast.

  Mrs. Nueske tapped her clipboard in my direction. “Can you butterfly?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How’s your backstroke?”

  Like tennis?

  “Can you crawl? Dead Man’s Float?”

  My swim teacher was from outer space. I was going to drown.

  “What grade are you in?” she asked.

  “Fifth,” I said. “I mean, I just finished. Sixth.” I couldn’t think. The lake water was affecting my brain.

  A couple kids tittered, and the teacher shook her head like there wasn’t enough pity in the world for a sixth grader who didn’t know how to swim.

  “Tadpoles!” Mrs. Nueske shouted to the left, where the little kids were picking their noses in the shallow water. “Meet your new teammate: Anthoni Gillis.”

  10

  GILLS

  The only thing more embarrassing than getting sent to the kindergartner class when you’re eleven years old is getting sent to the kindergartner class and then having to lie in the shallow water and blow bubbles for a half hour while the kids your age swim laps around buoys like they’re training for the Olympics.

  “Come on, Anthoni. Put your face in the water, like Josh is doing,” Shari said. Shari was the Tadpole Helper, a teenager with thick layers of purple eyeliner circling her eyes like a raccoon’s.

  We were lying on our bellies in the shallow, rust-colored water, heads pointing to the beach, feet floating behind us toward the deeper, creepier part of the lake. What we were supposed to do was dunk our faces in, blow bubbles for five counts, then lift our heads out and breathe air for five more. I propped myself up on my elbows as far out of the lake as I could get, and each time Shari started counting, I’d dip my head an inch closer and blow on the surface of the water.

  It’s not like my face had never gotten wet before. I’d dunked my head in the bath hun
dreds of times—but the water in my bathtub was clear and only went knee-high. It didn’t drift off into a bottomless pit two miles wide. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine hot steamy water and bubbles all around. It didn’t work. I wasn’t going to put my head in Thunder Lake.

  Julie’s younger brother lay next to me blowing perfect five-count bubbles. He lifted his head out of the lake on count five, gasping for air, water dripping from his hair into his mouth and eyes.

  “You could borrow these,” he sputtered, pointing to the SpongeBob SquarePants floaties on his arms. “If you want to feel safe.”

  His swim trunks floated around his skinny legs like a tent. When he came up for air again, he scooted his tiny body closer to me and whispered, “I’m Josh. I used to be scared of the water, too.”

  “I’m not scared,” I said. “I just don’t want to put my head in.”

  He nodded slowly, like an old man who could tell a war story or two. “That’s what I used to say.”

  When Mrs. Nueske blew her whistle and yelled, “Towel up!” I wanted to kiss her. I sprinted out of the water and grabbed my towel and sandals from Mom’s bag.

  “Watch it, honey! Don’t drip on me!”

  Mom had her Beauty & the Bee catalog open to the spread that lists 101 Vibrant Shades for Your Inner Queen Bee. She handed a frizzy-haired woman a sample palette and a pocket mirror.

  “This shade is really going to make your eyes pop, Eileen,” she said, but her voice didn’t have her usual Chief Pollinator ring to it. It sounded tired. Bored, even. “See how the orange tones complement those green highlights in your irises?”

  The woman blinked into the mirror. “I didn’t know my eyes had green in them,” she said. “But look at that. You’re right!”

  I was so cold, my teeth were vibrating and banging together inside my mouth.

  “How long do you need?” I asked.

  Mom shrugged. “Five more minutes?”

  That meant it wasn’t going well. If Eileen was hooked, Mom would need at least fifteen minutes to go over the Worker Bee Welcome Packet. I stepped aside and spotted Julie tromping in from the water with a pack of kids from the Muskie group. Josh ran toward them with his arms full of towels, shirts, and sandals. Maddy Quinn ruffled his hair and wrapped herself in a Wolverine towel. At least the morning wouldn’t be a total loss.