unzipped the top, and yanked it open, revealing a book with several strips of paper marking favorite pages. I knew the book. It was the one I’d seen her with back in Minneapolis, as I lurked in her bedroom closet. The memory was shameful, but it was burned onto my brain— the book, the green velvet bag, the black miniskirt, her bending over to tie up her boots, the tattoo. It was the moment I decided she was the wrong target, and the moment I knew— subconsciously, I guessed— she was right for me. That was, if we were the same species and I wasn’t planning on killing her father by the end of the week.
“I found a couple poems that might interest you. They’re some of my favorites. Want to hear them?”
“No.”
She gave me a funny look, then cleared her throat, bending over the book. Her hair fell in thick curtains along the sides of her face.
“ ‘A mermaid found a swimming lad,”
she read.
“Picked him for her own. / Pressed her body to his body.’ ”
“I’m not a fan of Yeats,” I said curtly.
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“Okay.” Her stifled smile snuck back into her eyes. “How ‘bout Tennyson?”
I shook my head, but she started up anyway.
“I would be a merman bold;
I would sit and sing the whole of the day; I would fill the sea- halls with a voice of power; But at night I would roam abroad and play With the mermaids in and out of the rocks . . .”
She paused, then nervously jumped ahead:
“I would kiss them often under the sea, / And kiss them again till they kiss’d me.’ ”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.” She looked at me with huge innocent eyes. Like one of those old Betty Boop cartoons. “You don’t like that one, either, do you?”
I glared at her. What did she want me to do? Did she want me to acknowledge her ludicrous assumptions? Did she want me to admit what I was? What would she think when I told her I was more like the monster lying on the bottom of the lake than any of Tennyson’s nauseating, narcissistic mermen?
She shivered, but she didn’t give up. “Okay. No Tennyson. Do you want to hear something I wrote instead?”
“That might be better.” It came out like a growl.
“You won’t laugh?” She chewed on her bottom lip as if she wished she could take back the offer.
Now I was intrigued. “I doubt I’ll laugh,” I assured her. I was pretty sure it was a promise I could keep. Nothing seemed funny right now.
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Lily pulled out a thick spiral notebook with the words
MY SCRIBBLINGS
written in capital letters on its purple cover. She flipped it open and cleared her throat. “I wrote this the other night.”
“Go ahead.”
She took one more anxious look at me. “You promise you won’t laugh.”
I drew a crisscross over my heart, and she read the words slowly. Cautiously.
“Father, when I’m gone from you Mother, when I die
Do not sit round my little grave But look in treetops high.”
She stopped and looked at my face to see if she should go on. I nodded, prodding her forward. So far so good. Maybe her little Victorian poetry reading was just an unlucky coincidence. She cleared her throat again.
“It’s not in flowers planted there Where you will find me still But in the soaring heavenward Of a humble whippoorwill.”
Birds. Good. This was better. Lily looked up at me like she expected me to freak out. She shifted her weight before finishing the last stanza.
“Or down I’ll go into the stripèd sturgeon’s slippery lair
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Where I’ll find myself entangled in a merman’s silken hair.”
“Stop.”
“Something wrong, Calder?” She looked at me again with the most serene, wide- eyed innocence.
“What’s with all the mermaid poetry? This isn’t still about your dolphin?” I tried to sound disdainful, but I couldn’t disguise the panic in my voice.
“There are no dolphins in the lake, Calder. You know that. You probably know that better than anyone.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what I mean.” She closed her book quietly and slipped it into her backpack. In the same fluid movement, her fingers laced through mine. The flow of electricity from my hand into hers raised goose bumps on her arm, and I watched in horror as the air around our hands turned to raspberry syrup. The sweetness seeped into the spaces between my fingers and pulled color across the back of my hand and then through my wrist. Lily leaned in, and I choked on the sugary heat between us. It burned my lips, and I pulled back with a gasp. My throat swelled shut, and beads of sweat popped up on my forehead.
“Do you smell incense?” she asked, leaning in.
“I’m not feeling well. I need to go.” Before I raced for the door, I thought I saw a satisfied smile pull at the corners of her mouth.
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24
TRAPS AND SNARES
I ran to the car, muttering a string of obscenities. The more distance I put between myself and the café, the better. My heart rate lowered with each step. But the farther I got from Lily, the more restless I became. I couldn’t put a label on this. The only thing I could compare it to was being caught in a whirlpool. But not in a bad way. It turned me upside down, but I wanted more of it.
And
I wanted to end it. It was a pull as compelling as the urge to migrate.
I jumped into the Impala and slammed the door shut. No one could see me in the car. The oak trees cast shadows
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over the parking lot, and Maris had been smart enough to snatch a car with tinted windows. This degree of cover gave me the luxury of time. I needed to regroup. I closed my eyes and banged my forehead on the steering wheel. All I could see was Lily— her ivory face and serious gray eyes, her long red hair curling around her cheek and cascading past her shoulders. The tattoo at the small of her back, her quizzical smile, the feel of her hand in mine . . . the raspberry- pink fire running up the length of my arm.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid,
I all but cried out loud. I shook my head and tried to clear the image, tried to regain some sense of sanity. This was not the plan.
Damn you, Pavati.
It was all her fault for planting the ridiculous idea in my head in the first place. Lily and I as a real pairing . . . I would have never come up with that on my own. Not in a hundred years. But there was no other explanation. I liked her too much. Way too much. I refused to think the bigger word; were merpeople even capable of that? The possibility was too awful to bear.
But it seemed I had fallen for a human— and not just any human, the worst possible human out of all seven billion possibilities. I dissolved into hysterics and lay down on the front seat of the car, holding my sides while my body shook. It was beyond ridiculous. Tears rolled down my cheeks as another round of laughter hissed through my teeth. What would I tell Maris? Nothing, that was what. Nothing at all. So the Hancock girl likes mermaid poems. Big freakin’ deal.
I leaned back against the headrest and counted out my breaths, clearing Lily from my brain, envisioning the metamorphosis instead.
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Since arriving in Bayfield, I had shortened my time by six seconds, but I was still on a seven- second delay from the girls. It might as well have been an hour. Pavati practically made the switch before her hands hit the water. Maris and Tallulah could have the job done within one or two seconds. The quickest I’d made it this season was nine, but I wasn’t consistent with it.
That was where the self- visualization exercise came in. Without it, sometimes I’d have to surface for air before the change occurred. When that happened I usually came up yelling, which made my sisters laugh. There was nothing more eerie than underwater hysterics. Plus, I hated calling unnecessary attention to myself. A few summers ago, a boater thought I was drowning. By the time the man got to me, I was gone. I was reported as another drowning. No one thought it strange that a body was never found. They say Lake Superior doesn’t give up its dead.
I stripped off my clothes, not bothering to fold them, and stuffed them under the driver’s seat. I waited for the Coast Guard boat to pass; it was pulling a smaller boat with a red UW pennant flying off its stern.
Once it was gone, I set the timer on my watch and flung open the car door. I ran for the shoreline and dove, propelling myself through the air like a javelin before slicing through the water.
For the first two seconds, I was no different than any human swimmer, completely enthralled by the sensation of being encased in water, the cool pressure against my skin. Then the water rushed into my lungs, filling my hungry cells with oxygen. Now I could really breathe.
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Still, despite the relief, I braced myself for the metamorphosis. The ripple and gush of cell transformation had a panic quality about it— like a manic roller coaster, or falling down an elevator shaft. The rush of energy raced through my thighs and out my toes, exploding into a great silver tail as fantastic as it was terrifying.
I checked my watch, squinting through the red silt. Twelve seconds. Two seconds worse than last time. I cursed my pathetic lack of focus.
Tallulah must have sensed me hit the water, because she was streaming toward me. Her golden hair waved in the current, barely brushing her shoulders. Her thoughts carried to me underwater.
“I didn’t think you’d be coming out to the island.”
“Listen, Lu. I don’t know what the others are saying, but everything is just fine with me. We’re on course. You don’t have to worry.”
The mental gymnastics it took to lie like that were exhausting.
When she got to me, she put her hands up, palms forward, and I pressed my own against hers in greeting. We surfaced together.
Tallulah smiled. Since our mother’s death, Tallulah was one of the few comforts in my life. It was the one thing I missed when I was away. She embraced me and kissed my cheek.
My mind flashed to Lily. Wondering what this would feel like if it were
her
arms around my shoulders, her lips at my cheek, my lips . . .
“Raceyoutotheisland,” I said, the words rushing out of me; I pushed every thought of Lily out of my head.
Tallulah’s face lit up, and she dove out of sight. I made it
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look good, but I didn’t really want to race. I just needed to be alone. Tallulah would think nothing of the fact that she’d beat me once again.
If Maris was going to let me continue with the original plan, I couldn’t let my conflicted thoughts betray me. I let images of our mother, trapped in a fisherman’s net, fill my brain. I filled my ears with her strangled calls for help. I filled my heart with our collective grief. I filled my gut with the hatred that only killing Jason Hancock would satisfy, until my inconvenient feelings for Lily were safeguarded in my heart.
When we surfaced at Basswood Island, Tallulah skipped away from me, taking a seat on the sand next to Maris and Pavati, who both sat grinning up at me in a happy stupor. Groaning, I looked around for the cause. Three corpses lay on the shore at the end of shallow drag marks.
“God, Maris, I thought we were pacing ourselves.” I knelt down by one of the wasted UW college kids and turned his face out of the water. His vacant expression stared up at the sky.
“We are,” Maris said, the words bursting from her lips with a revolting giggle. “This is only our first kill of the summer.” Her improved disposition gave me the creeps, and I glanced at Pavati, who raised one eyebrow at me, daring me to rat her out.
“You’ve gorged yourselves,” I said. “What happened to saving ourselves for Hancock?”
“Boys that age,” Maris said wistfully, looking at the corpses, “they think they’re immortal. In thirty years they would have realized their mistake, and that can make them so gloomy.” She sighed in mock compassion. “We were doing them a
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favor, stripping the life from them now. While they were still young and so deliciously happy.”
The corner of my mouth twisted, and I sniffed for any lingering life left in them, but they were just empty husks. Maris misread my expression as judgment rather than pity.
“Listen, little brother, I don’t know how you do it. What is this? Six months now? But don’t try to push your sick self- denial on us. Although, I have to say, I’m glad to hear how focused you are on Hancock. Pavati seemed to think you were getting distracted.”
“Pavati should worry about herself.” I closed the boy’s eyes, dragging my fingers over his lids, and wished Hancock could count on such a quick and easy death.
Tallulah offered me the seat in the sand by her, and there we sat, side by side on the beach— Maris, Pav, Lulah, and me— our bodies so close that I, sitting on the farthest right, could feel the post- kill heat radiating off Maris.
And the funny thing was, it held no temptation for me. Even the swim from Bayfield to Basswood hadn’t chilled the feel of Lily’s hand in mine. The more perplexing problem was Hancock. Despite my feelings for Lily, there was still the matter of my mother’s revenge and Maris’s promise of my freedom.
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25
CAUGHT
W hen I woke the next morning, I sat up like a shot, my heart bashing against my sternum, my head heavy with dreams of pale arms and bubbles rising from a beautiful but dangerous sea creature I couldn’t identify. The girls were still asleep, spooned together under a makeshift canopy of vines and bracken. Their faces tense even in sleep, their bodies twitching in fits and starts.
I waded into the water, letting it rise to my ankles and then to my knees and waist. My muscles tightened against the acclimation to the cold. I took a deep breath and headed out.
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If someone had asked me where I was going, I might have said, “Nowhere.” But my subconscious could have answered before the question was out. I was going to the Hancock house— or the waters outside the Hancock house. I needed to hear if Lily was talking about me. If maybe she was confessing her assumptions to her father.
When their dock came into sight, however, I realized it was too early for anyone to be up. Way too early. Only a few lights were twinkling out of the buildings in Bayfield, and the Hancock house, two miles north of town, was dark except for the window over the front porch. Light shone through the panes, throwing four distorted blocks of yellow onto the lawn, but there was no movement behind the glass. Lily must have fallen asleep with the light on. Maybe she was dreaming of a merman. Maybe she was having a nightmare.