The Mermaid Girl Read online

  We headed out, excited to show off our costumes and get candy. Lots of people had carved pumpkins and orange lights, or put giant spiders and webs on their houses. At one place, someone had stuffed pants and a shirt so it looked like a body leaning up against the house, with a skull for a head and an arrow stuck in his chest. Another place had a scarecrow in the yard with a lady’s hat and six arms, made of sticks with gloves at the end. Some people had gone to a lot of work with their decorations, like making their front lawn into a graveyard with tombstones and bones sticking out of the ground here and there. Some even had scary music.

  Whenever we went up on someone’s porch, Elmo got up on one foot and hopped, pretending to be a parrot, Reggie would brandish her cutlass, and the three of us mermaids would put our arms on each other’s shoulders. Zander would just roar, but it was hard to hear him because his voice was muffled behind the mask.

  A couple of times we met other pirates. Once Reggie got into a sword fight.

  “Avast there ye hornswoggler!” she said, getting out her rubber cutlass. The other pirate yelled “Avast!” and pulled out his fake knife and they fought for a minute, until the boy quit and ran to catch up with his friends.

  “Run, like the scurvy dog ye be!” Reggie yelled after him.

  Anyway, it wasn’t really a fair fight because his knife was way too short for her sword.

  One old house was completely dark except for a dim light on the porch. We reached the front and heard a terrible scream that sounded real. We all looked at each other.

  “Let’s not go here,” Elmo said. “Anyway, I think they’re not doing Halloween.”

  “I’m not scared. I want my candy!” Reggie said and charged up the walkway, Zander behind her.

  The rest of us followed. Spooky sounds came on, like an old door creaking open and slow, heavy steps. We all looked at each other. Suddenly the door flew open and a monster came out roaring and grabbed Reggie around the neck and the back of Zander’s vest as he started to run away. We mermaids all screamed. Then the monster pulled off his head mask and it was a guy, and he was laughing.

  “How did you like my Halloween trick?” he asked. “It’s too scary for most kids this year.” Even though he had tricked us, he showered us with candy and even shouted at our mothers to come and get some. “Come on up here! I can’t eat all this myself!”

  After a while Elmo was walking slower and slower and lagging behind us. He kept complaining about his feet being cold and hurting.

  “I told you to wear shoes,” Reggie grumbled.

  “Whoever heard of a parrot with shoes.” Finally Elmo said, “I’m going home,” and headed off down the street.

  “Oh, Elmo, don’t be such a drag,” Reggie yelled, but he kept going.

  “Let me walk you home,” my mother said.

  “No. Anyway, I live right there.” He pointed at a house down the street.

  After he left we went to a few more houses, but we were all getting tired, and anyway we already had lots of candy. Reggie and Zander weren’t tired, but Kitty said she had to get home, so we headed back to Reggie’s house for the car and my mother drove Bambi and Kitty home.

  “Thank you for the ride, Mrs. Barcela,” Bambi said. “And thank you for taking us trick-or-treating. It was so much fun!”

  “Yes, thank you, Mrs. Barcela!” Kitty said. “See you at school tomorrow, Camile.”

  “Well, it looks like you’re making lots of friends. Is it fun?” my mother said on the way home.

  I nodded. Having friends was even more fun than it looked!

  Chapter 35

  New Friends

  The next morning I told Mermary about our Halloween night.

  “I liked seeing your friends in their costumes when you came over,” she said.

  “I was hoping you would see us.”

  “Is it usual for people to dress up like mermaids?”

  “Sometimes, like for Halloween, or a costume party. Oh yeah, some people wear mermaid tails to swim in too, but mainly they do that in swimming pools. I’ve seen videos on the Internet. It’s just girls who do it. Probably because we love mermaids.”

  “You told me most people don’t believe mermaids are real,” Mermary said. “Yet humans are so interested in mermaids and write about them and paint them all the time. Why is that?”

  “Probably because they wish mermaids were real. It must be because they’re so beautiful and magical.”

  “I wish I could be with other mermaids,” she said.

  I didn’t know how to respond, and the early bell rang anyway, so I said good-bye and Mermary and I gave each other wind kisses like we always did.

  Kitty was already at her desk when I got there and came over to talk to me.

  “Wasn’t that fun last night?” she asked. “What did you do with all your candy?”

  “My mother let me pick out one piece for my lunch today.” Then I remembered to ask, “How about you?”

  “I have to hide mine so my older brother doesn’t eat it all.”

  Bambi showed up, but we only had time to say hi before the bell rang and we had to go to our seats.

  “Let’s talk at lunch!” she said to us, but I didn’t know if I was included.

  At lunch Kitty and Bambi called me over to sit with them again. We talked about trick-or-treating. They also asked me questions about Zander and Elmo, if they were my friends. I told them about knowing Reggie and them from summer school.

  “Do you like one of them? You know, as a boyfriend maybe?”

  Except for the night before, I didn’t really know them and I wasn’t sure what to say. “I liked Elmo’s costume. I liked how he made it himself . . . how about you?”

  They both giggled.

  “They’re all right,” Kitty said.

  “I thought they were nice,” Bambi said.

  Making conversation was starting to get easier, especially when Kitty and Bambi asked questions. The trick my father told me about asking people the same question back really worked, plus it helped that Kitty and Bambi did most of the talking. Once in a while one of them asked me a question about mermaids. That was an easy subject. They seemed to think I was an expert or something. Otherwise I spent most of the time just listening to them.

  That night when he called, I told my father about Kitty and Bambi.

  “They might become my friends,” I said. “But I’m afraid they might think I’m boring.”

  “Why?”

  “I hardly talk at all. It’s hard to think of things to say.”

  “You know what I do? After I say something, I ask people ‘what do you think?’ That gets other people talking. I find many non-talkers turn out to be deep thinkers. Maybe because people who don’t talk much, spend their time thinking. I think you’re one of those kinds, Camile.”

  I was surprised. I never knew not talking could have a good side.

  Chapter 36

  Reggie’s House

  Saturday, a couple of weeks later, I was reading a book on evolution, trying to find more information about mermaids. The phone rang, and it was Reggie.

  “Elmo and Zander are coming over later and we’re going to watch Pirates of the Caribbean. Want to come over? Mom’s going to order pizza.”

  “Pirates of the Caribbean? I’ve—” I was about to say I’d already seen it, but my mother turned around from the computer and waved her hand in front of her mouth.

  “Hold on,” I said to Reggie. “What?”

  “Camile, you liked that movie. Do you mind seeing it again?” I shook my head. “Then accept the invitation.”

  I told Reggie I could come over.

  “Great!” she said. “Come over early, say about three, so we can hang out before the guys get here.”

  When I got there, she was wearing a T-shirt with a skull on the front, a curved knife in his teeth, and “Dead Men Tell No Tales” in a banner. She showed me the DVD we were going to watch.

  “This one is On Stranger Tides. I got it because it ha
s mermaids. Have you seen it?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t even know they had made more chapters of that movie.

  “We watch lots of pirate movies. Sometimes they have women pirates. Those are my favorites. Come on, let’s go up to my room.”

  We climbed the stairs to the second floor, where she opened a door off the hallway, then I followed her up a second, smaller staircase to the attic. Her room was in one end of the attic. It had slanted ceilings and a window in a little cut-out room at one end. Reggie went over to an old trunk with a humped top and worn leather belts around it. It looked like a pirate’s trunk. Inside was a jumble of clothes.

  “We always wear something pirate-like when we’re going to watch a pirate movie,” Reggie said. “I have something you might like.”

  While she searched the trunk, I looked around at her room. It was completely different from mine. Bookcases were built into the wall with books and stacks of comics, toys and objects like a piggy bank and a little guitar stored there. She also had a desk with a computer, and next to it a bulletin board crammed with papers and postcards and pictures from magazines. On the slanted part of the ceiling were posters, a map, and a Jolly Roger flag. There were bunk beds with dark blue spreads that had stars and moons and astrological symbols. Reggie pulled a grey hoodie out of the trunk and handed it to me.

  “Here, try it on,” she said.

  It had a pink skull and cross bones on it, and the skull had a bow on her head. Underneath was written, “Pirate Girls Rule.”

  “My grandmother gave it to me.”

  I put the hoodie on over my sweater.

  “Hey, it fits!” Reggie said. “You can have it. It’s too girly for me.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I like your room.”

  “Doesn’t it look like a ship’s cabin?” Reggie asked. “There’s a room downstairs I could have, but I wanted this one. It’s a gable, that’s why it has a slanted ceiling. That’s called a dormer.” She pointed at the little cutout room.

  “You have your own computer?” I asked.

  “It used to be my brother’s, but he got a laptop when he went away to college, so I got his old PC. How about you?”

  “I use my mother’s.”

  “How do you do your homework?”

  “I use her computer in the evenings, after dinner.”

  “Can you surf the net?”

  “No. I’m only supposed to do that with supervision.”

  “Your mom sounds strict.”

  “She does?” I had never thought of my mother as strict.

  “My brother set some filters for my protection, but other than that, I can look at anything.” She went to the window. “Come here, look.” The window looked out on the street.

  “We can see Elmo’s house from here,” she said, pointing. “That’s his roof right there, the red one. You can see his back door.”

  Trees and houses were in the way so we couldn’t see the whole house, but we had a clear view of the back door, just like she said.

  “Want to see something really cool?” She ran out of the room and I followed her to the other end of the attic. There was a door, and next to it, a shelf with binoculars and a telescope. She took the telescope and handed me the binoculars, then opened the door. There were some steps, then a trap door Reggie pushed open and propped with a stick. I followed her out to the roof.

  On one side, the roof slanted up, and on the other we could look down on the tops of houses and trees. At the edge of the roof was a narrow walkway, surrounded by a little iron fence.

  Reggie headed down the walkway, and I followed, slower because it was scary.

  “This house is over a hundred years old,” Reggie told me. “This is called a widow’s walk. They used to make these so women could come up and see if their husband’s ship was coming back from sea.”

  It was exciting to be up so high. Reggie stopped and pointed to the top of the roof. “Isn’t our weather vane cool?” It was of a witch riding a broom toward a crescent moon, and it was a pretty, sort of turquoise color, which I knew was from being stained by the weather.

  On the other side of the house we could see far out over the ocean. Reggie knelt down, so I did too, and we looked at the ocean through our instruments.

  “Look, there’s a tanker,” she said. I looked through the binoculars in the direction she was pointing. The ship looked ghostly grey against the sky.

  “I wanted to be a pirate when I was a kid. I used to sit out here with my flag and a telescope and pretend I was in the crow’s nest of a ship.” We watched the ocean for a while. “I’ve seen whales breaching, and sometimes I see dolphins and seals. Once I saw something that didn’t look like dolphins or seals.”

  “What were they?”

  “I thought they might be a school of mermaids,” Reggie said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. They were breaching, and they looked different in the front from the back.”

  “How?”

  “Well, their skin was different, and I thought I could see heads. Human-like heads.”

  I thought about this. I knew there had to be mermaids in the area, but if they were so careful about not being seen by humans, would they risk breaching where people could see them from land? They had to know about instruments that helped people see long distances.

  I looked at the ocean again but mostly all I could see was water. After a while we heard a yell. It was Elmo, wearing a black shirt with a crooked skull and crossbones on it.

  “Ahoy, matey!” Reggie called. “Come in! We’ll be right down.”

  We went back down the little staircase and Reggie closed the trap door. Reggie grabbed her three-pointed hat from a nail in her room.

  “Yay!” she said. “Let’s go watch the movie!”

  Chapter 37

  A Party of Pirates

  We went downstairs, and I saw that Elmo had probably painted the skull and crossbones on his shirt. Not only was it crooked, but the paint was uneven, going every which way. Yet somehow it looked like something a real pirate would make. Zander showed up a few minutes later. He wore a dark red T-shirt that had a skull with wings and “Flying Pirates” on it, with a picture of a plane on the back.

  “You’re a different character every time we see you,” he said to me. “What’s it going to be next time, a whale?” He laughed at his own joke. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.

  “Let’s get our drinks, then we can start the movie,” Reggie said.

  We went into the kitchen and Reggie got out four pint-sized glasses with pictures on them and gave each of us a different one. I got one with palm trees on it. Then she got ice trays out of the freezer.

  “There’s ginger ale, Coke, and apple juice,” she told us. “Fix your drink however you want it.”

  “Hey, you kids, don’t make a big mess!” Reggie’s mom called from another room.

  “We won’t,” Reggie called back. “Just a little mess,” she said to us and we all laughed.

  We put ice in our glasses and poured our drinks. Reggie and I had ginger ale, and Zander had Coke. Elmo said he couldn’t make up his mind so he put ginger ale and Coke and apple juice in his glass, then tasted it.

  “It’s good,” he said. “Anyone wanna try it?”

  Nobody did.

  Reggie put two bags of popcorn into the microwave, then we carried our drinks to the den. The den had a fireplace with a heater in it and tall windows with drapes that Reggie and Zander pulled closed. Sections of a couch were against one wall with lots of pillows, an old coffee table, and a thick rug on the floor. Zander put his drink and his feet on the coffee table. Elmo sat on the floor. I sat on another part of the sectional. Between two of the couch sections was a projector sitting on top of a DVD player, but there wasn’t a TV screen. Reggie put the DVD in the player and turned it on. Trailers started showing on the big white wall opposite us. I was amazed, it was just like a movie screen.

  “Isn’t this cool?” Reggie a
sked me. “My brother came up with this idea and set it up.”

  We watched the trailers while Reggie went back to the kitchen to get the popcorn. She came back with two bowls and gave one to the boys and sat next to me with the other one. We watched the previews and talked about which ones we wanted to see and ate popcorn. Actually, everyone else talked, and I just listened. Finally the movie started.

  In the first part, Jack Sparrow, the main pirate character, was trying to escape from the law and got in a sword fight with a pirate who had been using his name. They were crashing around in a storeroom and knocking things over.

  All of a sudden, Reggie pointed at one of them. “That’s a lady pirate!”

  “How do you know?” Zander asked doubtfully.

  “Look at her. She’s a lot smaller than Jack, plus, she moves like a woman.”

  We finally got a look at the pirate, and he looked just like Jack Sparrow and I thought Reggie was wrong, that Jack had a twin brother he didn’t know about. They kept fighting, then all of a sudden Jack kissed the other pirate, and it was a woman. Reggie was right.

  In this episode, the English, the Spanish, and the pirates were all trying to get to the Fountain of Youth in the New World. They needed to make a potion that had a mermaid’s tear, so they went out on a row boat at night, and beautiful mermaids surfaced around them, singing. Then they turned out to have fangs and were trying to get the sailors. They hissed and shrieked and leapt out of the water.

  “Killer mermaids!” Zander said. “Cool!”

  The pirates caught a mermaid and carried her with them in a box. In the end, everyone got to the Fountain at the same time, and while everyone was fighting, the mermaid escaped.

  When it was over, Reggie turned off the system. “Okay, now let’s talk about the movie!”

  Chapter 38

  An Argument about Mermaids

  “What was everyone’s favorite scene?” Reggie asked.

  “I liked Blackbeard’s magic sword and magic ship,” Elmo said.

  “My favorite scene was when Blackbeard turned into a skeleton,” Zander said. “What was yours?”