Girl at the Bottom of the Sea (2 page)

The light attracted a small school of curious fish. They were nothing more than slivers, silvery and translucent. As one they darted toward
the glow, and as one they quickly twitched away. If Sophie had been able to move she could have reached out and touched them. Instead, she just watched their movements, all as one, as if conducted by a giant fish just out of sight, holding a baton. The brave ones at the front of the school put their tiny fish mouths right onto the glass and ate the small bits of effluvia that had settled there. She wished she could communicate with them as she had with the pigeons of Chelsea, that she could expect a new group of English-speaking animals to join up with her wherever she went, helping her out like she was some urban Snow White. But Sophie knew the pigeons were special, with their sweetness and their fierceness, and how her heart ached for them as she lay there at the bottom of the bay. What Sophie would have given to listen to Arthur rage against Kishka then, at her terrible powers, at how she had made the creek come alive and turn against them all. Arthur would have some choice words for her grandmother,
delivered in his husky squawk with much flapping of feathers. But as quickly as a tiny smile came to her lips, Sophie realized that Arthur's beloved Livia was gone—gone from all of them, forever. It probably wasn't spite Arthur was feeling right now. It was probably something much more heartbreaking.

Sophie sighed, a jellyfish-sized air bubble that shimmered up and away. She watched it travel, losing sight of it before it reached the surface. She could tell that she was deep, but not terribly so. In fact, she realized, it was the noise of what sounded like a party boat that had roused her. The dull thump of bad music and the shrill chorus of people yelling, hollering because the music was too loud or they were too drunk or both.
Booze cruises
, her mother called them. Sophie had seen them twinkling by on summer nights when she and her mom drove out to where the harbor sloshed up against Chelsea. To Sophie, they looked like toys; they looked fun. Her mother had dismissed them. “Just a bunch of drunk people,” Andrea had said. “They pay a lot of money to get seasick and puke off the side of a boat.” Sophie had made a gross joke about the harbor being filled with vomit, and Andrea indulged her with a laugh. The tinny sounds of a Madonna song wafted over them, gentle as the waves.

It had been a sweet moment, but now it made Sophie feel sad. Andrea probably would have loved to have gone on a booze cruise. She worked hard, with barely a day off. Days she didn't work she either ran errands for hours or conked out in front of the television, exhausted. Or both. Sophie didn't think she'd ever seen her mother get dressed up, flick
a fan of frosty eye shadow above her eyes, and go dancing. She figured her mom probably wanted to so badly she'd made herself hate it.
When I'm done with saving humanity, I am going to make my mom go on a booze cruise
, Sophie vowed. She thought Ella would probably love such a thing too, and promised that when she reconnected with her best friend she wouldn't be such a nerd. She'd let Ella put makeup on her like she was one of those giant Barbie heads little girls smear fake lipstick onto. She'd let Ella do something with her head of snarls—even just detangling it would make Ella so happy. She'd ask her friend if she could borrow a pair of her jeans, one of her strappy tops, a pair of platform flip-flops. She'd suggest they go dancing at one of the awful underage dance clubs Ella always wanted to go to. They sounded horrible to Sophie—cheesy music, dumb boys with gelled hair trying to rub their hips on you on the dance floor, blinking lights making it hard to see, hard to focus—but for Ella she would do it. Sophie swore that if she got better and got out of the bay and back to Chelsea she would be a better friend.

If
she got better,
if
she got back? Sophie's own thoughts sent a chill through her spine—or where her spine once was. Things had gotten so crazy, science-fiction crazy, action-movie crazy, that she really didn't know what was going to happen, just that somehow she was going to make it all better. She, the girl with the broken bones at the bottom of the bay, too scared to go to a teen dance club with her best friend: she was going to save the world from her grandmother's ancient evil.

At this thought, Sophie began to cry a little, tiny tears that squeezed out the sides of her eyes and became lost in the bay. She was
such
a
baby. But she suddenly didn't care. She'd give anything to be back at home, huddled on the couch watching a dumb reality show beside her snoozing, overworked mom. If that made her a baby she didn't care. She wanted it so badly she could practically taste it, and it tasted like a bowl of cereal for dinner, milky and sweet.

She thought of sweet Hennie, her magical aunt. Hennie, working every day at the creepy old grocery store down the street, the store Sophie had avoided for so many years. She could have known Hennie for so much longer, could have learned so much magic from her! But Sophie had had no idea, and like everyone else she'd been scared of Hennie, Hennie who looked like a witch with her wild gray hair and craggy face. She wondered where Hennie was now, and what had happened to Laurie LeClair, the girl with the worst reputation in all of Chelsea. She had come into Hennie's grocery store possessed by the
Dola
, that destiny-policing creature, but when Sophie had left she was just herself, Laurie, cranky and messed-up and confused about where she was, with her screaming, neglected baby screaming and neglected by her side. Too much had happened, and look where it had left Sophie: lumped in the Boston Harbor, useless, cut off from everything and everyone. Not even in pain. That was what really scared her. She was too badly beaten by the fist of the creek not to be feeling any pain.

The coming and going of the school of silvery fish eventually lulled Sophie back into a sort of sleep; like a hypnotic pendulum, they danced back and forth around her necklace, and her eyes grew heavy. She imagined the flash of them leaping over the moon, full tonight, its
bright beam cutting the water dimly. What would become of her? She was like a patch of weeds at the water's bottom, alive but immobile. Could she even speak? She tried. “Help,” she spoke into the water. She repeated herself, louder. “Help.” And louder again, “Help!” The fish startled away at the sound, moving as one, a silver cloud. Sophie closed her eyes. And when she opened them again, the mermaid was there.

Chapter 3

O
f course Syrena would not approach gently. Pushed toward Sophie by the underwater waves of a too-close boat, the mermaid shook her fist and yelled curses in a language too ancient for Sophie to understand. Propelled by her powerful tail, Syrena came straight for Sophie, pulling the girl into her arms in one fluid scoop. Nestled in the mermaid's arms like a baby, Sophie noticed that all around them were those tiny fish, that they were suspended in a whirling ball of them. Together they moved with the girl and the mermaid through the waters.

“We must get out of here,” Syrena said. “This harbor is terrible. So many boats, they push you around like bullies! We need deep water. You are very hurt.”

“I can't move,” Sophie managed to say.

“I know. Don't talk about it. You are, what is word—destroyed? If you had no magic you would be a dead girl. Is only magic keeping you alive right now. I must get you into deep ocean, for healing.”

*   *   *

UNDER THE MERMAID'S
arm, both of them held inside the shimmering school—
Like an underwater disco ball
, Sophie thought, dazzled by the swirl of tiny fish—Sophie was carried beneath the harbor. The currents of boats shoved them this way and that, it was like trying to cross a busy street, like running across the parkway where four lanes of traffic whizzed by. The school of fish slowed as a boat passed close, containing them in its wake. All the while Syrena grumbled and cursed the ships, until finally they had crossed from the harbor into the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

Finally safe from the party boats that crisscrossed the harbor, Syrena paused, letting Sophie to the ground gently. The disco ball of fish cracked open, releasing them, then hovered close by, a landscape of shining silver. Sophie noticed in all the commotion that she had lost her shoes. Her feet glowed pale and blue beneath the water.

“We have long way to go,” the mermaid spoke. “And we swim against the current. I will need all my power, my tail and my arms. So, I will make for you a cocoon. From this.” With her luminescent arms the mermaid gathered her hair and shook it wetly at Sophie. Like a sea plant it drifted in the water, swaying in the waves.

The mermaid slid into the heavy sand where Sophie lay like a broken doll, a marionette with cut strings. Never had she been so helpless, splayed on the seafloor like a jellyfish.
No, not a jellyfish
, she thought, watching the globe of a jellyfish pulse by. Jellyfish could move—their
glowing balloon bodies were nothing but movement. Sophie was just a bag of bones. Syrena dug into the sand beneath her, and with her strong, flat tail she pushed the girl up the length of her body until Sophie was stretched out on the creature's back.

Syrena's hair, its intricate tangle, settled down over Sophie like a net, binding her to the mermaid's body. Sophie was shocked at the softness of Syrena's skin. How could she be so old and so rugged, and yet her skin soft like a dolphin's? She should be tough as a whale, with barnacles cleaved to her scales, but she wasn't. With her cheek to the mermaid's back, Sophie felt such gratitude for her rescue that she nearly kissed her smooth shoulder, but she couldn't imagine the mermaid would like that, so she didn't.

Syrena pulled her tangles around her like a cape and with deft fingers braided her hair down the front of her body, securing Sophie tightly to her back. The mesh of hair was tight against the girl's face, and she worried briefly about her ability to breathe. Then she remembered she was underwater. Her bones were broken. She was magic, so magic that she could keep herself alive when her body had turned to soup. The thought made her proud, but frightened: sure she was alive, in this lumpy, paralyzed state, but she couldn't begin to imagine how to heal herself. What good was a magic that kept her half dead?
Better than a magic that left you fully dead
, she scolded herself. And she wasn't really half dead. Aside from the fact that she couldn't move and her limbs felt like sandbags, she was doing okay. She could think, her mind was clear, and she was breathing beneath the ocean. Her talisman
glowed its faint blue glow, lighting up her mermaid-hair cocoon prettily, illuminating the miniature world of it—tiny fishes darting hither and thither, a hermit crab snared in a snarl poking its spiny head out to look at her.

“You are good,” Syrena said plainly, though Sophie knew she meant it as a question.

“I… I think so,” Sophie said.

“Yes, very good, I believe.” With her hair pulled back from her face, Syrena had a clear view of her surroundings. Beneath her a long-legged crab, spindly as a spider, crept along the sand. Syrena grabbed it and snapped it in half. She tore a leg from the poor creature and dug it back through her hair, poking it in Sophie's face.

“Here,” the mermaid commanded. “You eat. Is long swim.”

Sophie screwed her face at the food the mermaid was offering. She'd eaten crab before, boiled and dipped in melted butter, but not this deep-sea creature, crusty and raw. “I'm not hungry,” she said.

The mermaid scoffed. “Well, you will be,” she said. “And when you are hungry enough you will eat mermaid food.”

At her words, Sophie suddenly felt a bit frightened about the journey ahead. “This would maybe be a great time to tell me where I'm going. Where you're taking me,” she said, slightly more accusingly than she meant to. Sophie didn't want to sound as if the mermaid were kidnapping her, but she did suddenly feel taken hostage—wound into the creature's hair like an insect snared in a web.