I gasp and clutch my book bag in front of me. In the morning’s craziness I’d totally forgotten the message from Daddy.

“Perv!”

He just winks and then roars back out to the street. Was that a tint of blush I saw on his cheeks? Doubtful. Quince is never shy about anything. When he is out of sight and I can’t hear the roar of his bike anymore, I drop my bag and reach into my bra.

As I begin the walk home, I break the royal seal and unfold the note.

FROM THE DESK OF
KING WHELK OF THALASSINIA

Dearest Lily,
Your cousin Dosinia’s sixteenth-birthday celebration is this weekend. I’m sure she would love to have you attend. Also, I miss you a great deal. Why don’t you come home for a few days?
Yours,
Daddy
Not likely. I mean, I love Dosinia…mostly (she can be a little boy crazy and kind of a brat) and I totally love my dad. But hopefully, if everything works out tomorrow night, I’ll be spending the weekend with the boy I love. No birthday party in all the seven seas could top that.

5

“Did you ask him?” Peri asks before I’ve even had a chance to transfigure in the shadowy waters beneath Seaview Pier.

When I left Thalassinia, we agreed to meet once a week between here and home. Since mer and human calendars don’t quite match up, she swims to the coast to meet me on Thursday afternoon, the equivalent of Friday in the sea. She’s my link to the ocean world when I don’t have time to visit home—which I haven’t done in almost three months.

Also, Peri knows me better than anyone. She’s like my personal therapist.

Turning to the sound of her voice, I say, “Yes, I asked him.”

“Congratu—”

“And he turned me down.”

“Oh, honey,” she says, swimming into view. “I’m so sorry.”

At the sight of her super-sympathetic face—her mouth tightened into a sad shadow of a smile, her eyes soft and gentle—I break down all over again. The tears come back, vanishing into the salty sea, and I take only a tiny bit of solace in the thought that, in the shadows of the pier above, Peri won’t be able to see my eyes glittering.

I allow myself a second to relive my pain at Brody’s rejection. Just a brief moment when I let the pain course through me, reminding me of my foolish hope, before I push it to the back of my mind.

That’s not what I need to talk to her about. The asking-Brody-to-the-dance thing is over, and now I have another reason to seek her advice.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” I say. “I need to talk about what came next.”

She takes my hands in hers, giving me a reassuring squeeze. “Tell me everything.”

And I do.

As we start to swim out to sea, leaving the human-dense shore for the safety of the barrier reef a few nautical miles out, I tell her every last pathetic detail about the paper-wad incident and finally asking Brody at lunch and my complete and total meltdown afterward and how Quince Fletcher—Quince Fletcher, of all people!—came to my aid. Peri knows my stormy history with the blowfish, so she’s just as shocked as I was about his behavior.

“And then,” I exclaim, stopping at the western edge of the reef, “he offered to help! He has this plan where I’ll wait in the library during the dance and he’ll get Brody to go in there so I can kiss him.”

“Kiss him?” Peri gasps. “You’re not really going to kiss him, are you?”

“No, of course not,” I reassure her. “I’m not stupid. But it will be dark, and I might have the courage to finally tell Brody how I feel about him.”

Peri looks beyond relieved that I’m not going to kiss an unsuspecting and unwilling Brody. I may be a girl in love, but I’m not dishonest. I would never trick anyone into that.

“That sounds like a good plan,” she says. “What’s not to like?”

I don’t ask how she knows I don’t like it—after more than a dozen years of best friendship, she can practically read my mind.

“It’s Quince,” I explain. “I don’t trust him.”

“That’s nothing new.”

“I know.” I run my hands through a small green clump of mermaid’s-hair, letting the silky seaweed slip through my fingers. “But the problem is…I want to trust him this time.”

Peri swims around behind me and starts absently braiding my hair. It feels nice, because on land my hair can’t be coaxed into anything but a blond halo. And once I get back to Seaview, her braid will dry too tight for me to leave it in. Moments like these are my only reprieve from the frizz.

“So you’re afraid,” she says, “that, because he’s offering to help with the one thing you want most, he might be setting you up for the biggest fall of all.”

“Exactly!”

I hadn’t put it into those words, but that’s my fear.

She circles her fingertips over a spot just below my neck, and I know she’s tracing my mer mark—the tattoolike design all merfolk are born with that brands them as a child of the sea. I picture the design, a circle of waves surrounding a stylized kelp flower, lime green to match my scales. Peri’s, I know from experience, is copper. Daddy’s is royal blue.

When a mermaid is in terraped form, the mark is the only thing that distinguishes her from a human.

“I don’t see how.” Finished with my braid, Peri swims around to face me. “All you’ll be doing is waiting in a library, right?”