The first thing every mermaid learns is that if you see a human you're supposed to swim away as fast as you can. But the girl in the pink wetsuit was right here in front of me, and there was no way she would think she'd been mistaken about seeing me. My best recourse seemed to be to convince her not to tell anyone about meeting me, and as we talked (or rather I talked, while she typed her words on her neat little electronic message pad) this seemed to be working. But there were things Valerie was telling me here that made absolutely no sense. Either this girl was crazy or the whole universe was. Given the kind of week I'd had, my money was on it being the universe that had gone...

OFF THE DEEP END ~ Chapter 7
THE LITTLE HUMAN Part 1:
The Girl with the Gizmos
Laika Pupkino ~ 2016

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THURSDAY AUGUST 28, 2014:
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My sister was still asleep when I woke up so I decided to head down to the kitchen and grab us both some breakfast. I quietly slipped on my calling conch and belt, and was heading for the door when I heard a groan. Her clamshell bed popped open just enough to reveal a the face of a very miserable looking mermaid princess.

Anemone was obviously in pain she but managed to smile feebly and croak, “Hi.”

“Oh my God, what's wrong?!”

“I think I hit the water wrong when we jumped off that island. It's my back, mostly.”

“Do you want me to go get Mom?”

“Please don't! I just want to sleep another couple of hours. But I had to tell you I don't think we'll be swimming out to Sandy Bottom to see that sunken pirate ship today.”

“That can wait until you're feeling better. If that ship's been there a couple hundred years I don't think it's going anywhere,” I said, “But how did this happen? You seemed fine on the swim home.”

“I felt okay then, maybe it was the adrenalin or something. But when I woke up it's like I can barely move...”

“Then we don't have to do anything today. We can hang out here. I still have to beat you at Battleship,” I said. (Anee's dad had built her a simple wooden version of the game, having played it with his Royal Navy buddies back in WWII...)

She shook her head, “There's no reason for both of us to be bored and miserable. You've been enjoying our expeditions so much I think you can try a solo one today.”

“You think so?”

“You handled yourself really well with those two sharks yesterday, even when that big one was sniffing you. You didn't panic and start thrashing around.”

Actually I'd been too scared to move, but only until the beast moved on. It hadn't been so traumatizing that I would want to hide inside the castle for the rest of my life. If you lived in the ocean sharks were going to be a part of it.

And the idea of heading back to the corals or someplace really did appeal to me. As a human I'd found a solitary walk in the woods could be an amazing experience. It was great being twins with Anee but it wasn't like we were Siamese twins and had to spend every second together...

“But what if I get lost? It's a big ocean; You can go a thousand miles without seeing any sign of a merperson.”

“Ask a fish which way to the mermaid town. They all know where it is. You can find your way back from Shellcastle, can't you?”

“Sure. At least when there's daylight.”

“Then go, explore, have fun! And tell me about it when you get back.”

“Okay, but I'll make it a short one, in case you're feeling better later. Love you!” I said, and left. Now all I had to do was find my way out of this house.
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)))========> DOCTOR MOM
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Exiting the ramptube onto the second floor I ran into Queen Atlantea.

“Dear Poseidon! What happened to you?” she asked, seeing the big red gaping wound in my tail before I could turn it away from her.

“I uh... I was trying to ride a marlin.”

She made a mom face. “Then you're lucky that's all he did to you. That's a nasty cut! Let's get a proper dressing on that, shall we?”

She took me to a smallish room I'd never been in before, with a rack of scary looking surgical tools on the wall, shelves crammed with mason jars full of various medicines and a human-made chaise lounge like you'd see on someone's patio, that she had me lay down on.

She pulled an apothecary jar from the shelf and shook three pills into my hand. “Here, take these. They're an analgesic called aspirin.”

They were ordinary generic aspirins, but had been coated in wax or something to keep them from dissolving in all this seawater. I gulped them down. “Thanks.”

She started picking away at the broken scales around my wound with a pair of Revlon tweezers. This stung more than plucking out hairs, but not as much as pulling off fingernails. She lectured me nonstop while she fixed me up, but did seem to enjoy taking care of me.

“Just be glad this wound happened where it did. Farther up the tail it would have bled a lot more, and anywhere above the waist we would've had to send you to the clinic in town to get stitches. Which is something I could do, but you'd look like that poor patchwork creature from that human novel Frankenstein.”

“I read that last year in- I mean last night, in bed,” I said.

She nodded approvingly, “Every merperson should read it. It's a perfect illustration of the horrible things that happen when humans play god, something they seem to be doing with increasing regularity these days. I hear they've even got Frankenfoods now, and something called Bridezillas- Oh those poor women!"

“The fiends!” I burbled. On all the walls were medical charts showing different aspects of mermaid physiology. The mermaid skeleton, cardiovascular system, and one that showed an egg growing and making its way from the infundibulum to the uterus (where it was given its shell by some gland), and finally being pushed out through the vagina- which since this didn't take place in the pelvic area might or might not hurt less than when a human woman gives birth. I was in no hurry to find out. I looked around, “Wow, this castle really has everything. Even your own little doctor's office.”

“This surgery, and the living quarters next to it were intended to be used by a Royal Healer. Which was a nice idea, but our physicians can better serve more mers at the clinic in town than they could from here. So this room just serves as a sort of help-yourself first aid station now. I'm afraid that when Genie created this castle he didn't consider the kind of budget it would take to staff it with all the specialized employees he designed it to house. It's ridiculous! Although I'll admit the sight of all these impossible seashell domes and towers does serve to intimidate our visitors from the other kingdoms.”

“They're beautiful too. Majestic. And you have to admit he did a really nice job on the grounds.”

“Yes he did. They're starting to get a bit ragged now that Mr. Pescanova has left us, but the gardens are my favorite part of this whole estate. We go through a lot of mackerel keeping those giant sea anemones fed, but that's one extravagance I decided to keep. I couldn't just let the poor things starve. But as for the rest of this big ridiculous pile. It's just... just...” she waved her hand around in the same gesture I'd seen her daughter use.

“Ridiculous?”

“To say the least! Anemone, bless her heart, she meant well. But she shouldn't have left the designing of our home to a being who was so.... whimsical. I'm just glad the populace didn't have to pay for all this pomp and splendor. Gods of the Deep! A hundred and eighty bedrooms, a dining hall on every floor, a billiards hall, a squash court, offices and oratories. Living rooms, dying rooms, lebensraums; dry rooms and larders. Armories, legories, elbow rooms and several pillow-fluffing chambers. Dark rooms, bright rooms, changing rooms, staying-the-same rooms; an Ame's room, a porter's lodge, a Polo Lounge and a puppet theater. Not to mention three grand ballrooms; that immense attic- all done up like some gothic cathedral; And something called an 'arbitrarium', which he never did explain. And OH! All those dungeons! I have no idea what kind of kingdom he thought we were running here! Was he expecting us to reinstate the Spanish Inquisition?”

“Well you know what they say: No one expects the Spa-”

“'They' are always saying something,” she huffed, cutting off my quip, which I guess she wouldn't have gotten anyway. "All those armchair heads-of-state should try spending a week in my chair!”

I couldn't remember which play it was from, but I quoted,“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown...”

“Ah! My favorite human author! And the finest chronicler of human flaws and human follies.”

“Only humans flaws and follies?”

“Well of course. Shakespeare was a human.”

“But I thought the appeal of Shakespeare---and how he's been popular all over the world for all these centuries, and under the water and with the Klingons too, although they're not technically real---was that his stories and themes and ideas were like... universal. I mean, take what Perri was telling me about how Empress Ramora seized power down there in Amazonia. That sounded like something right out of Richard III!”

She grinned sardonically, “I guess it was. With a little Othello and some Julius Caesar thrown in...”

“And you talk about his plays being about folly and flaws, but aren't there virtues in some of them? Like how brave his Henry the Fifth was, or Shakespeare's Fool, who wasn't really a fool at all. And this was a human author.”

“I suppose,” she grudgingly conceded. “I must say, you're very well read for being only two days old.”

“Well I... I've been trying to make up for lost time.”

“That's my girl! Too bad you weren't here for our little production of King Lear in Coral Park. We really needed someone younger than me playing Goneril, but when Adriana had to drop out, well I knew her lines. That lovely young woman who runs the confectioner's shop was excellent as Regan, and your sister handled her part as Cordelia fairly well. But it was Jasper's Lear that stole the show! After five minutes you completely forgot that he's a dolphin,” she said, and pointed toward the ceiling, "Although he did have to disappear a few times between acts so he could go breathe."

“I wish I could've seen that,” I said, picturing Jasper cussing out his 'daughters' in a silly fake beard.

She grabbed my arm, “Now let me see that elbow. Ow, That looks painful! Well there's nothing we can do about a bruise. I hope this serves as a reminder to not go risking your neck trying to ride marlins or some other foolish game!”

She smeared some cold greasy goo onto my tail wound and stuck a wad of gauze onto it.

“We mers are hearty organisms and we can usually shake off the sorts of bacteria that might land on a wound like this; but seeing as you're practically newborn let's bandage it,” she said as she snipped a length of three inch wide red-and-black cloth tartan ribbon off of a big roll of it she had; then wrapped the ribbon around that part of my tail where the gauze was. She tied it into a big floppy bow, like she was gift wrapping my tail, and smiled, “There, that should do it!”

As bandages went, this one on my tail was kind of pretty. “That you Your Maj- I mean Mom.”

“I do wish you'd learn to call me Mummy,” sighed Atlantea.

“Thank you, Mommy,” I said, and she sent me off with a kiss on my forehead.
.

I was trying. I really was. I knew this merwoman had a big heart, and had found a place for me in it the minute she met me, but I still had a hard time calling her my mother. I already had parents, who I missed something awful. I would even go back to being a human boy if I could be with them again. It wasn't like I'd have to stay one forever...

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==========>
I remembered the night my mom joined the local chapter of Parents Of Transgender and Transsexual Youth; and how she came back from her first meeting talking a mile a minute about the other parents she met and the way she related to just about everything they said; and the hope she got from their stories.

And weirdly, Dad didn't make fun of her but seemed sort of interested. That it might be good if I could be happy and not all depressed and losing interest in all the things I used to want to do, like I had done for a while there; even if I wound up being just some girl instead of my new school's star quarterback or whatever it was he'd been hoping I would turn out to be. It was one of those hints I got that he really was trying, or trying to try anyway...

Because me and him had actually gotten along pretty good before I came out to them with this thing that seemed so weird to him; that made him think some little circuit in my brain had gotten damaged and caused me to start mislabeling myself. And I saw that if he was being super-negative about this, it was mostly because he wanted to discourage me from doing a thing that he thought would make life really hard for me; since he couldn't understand how much harder it would be if I didn't.

My father had been through some tough times in his life, but never anything that would help him relate to how I felt; the way things that every other boy in town seemed okay with could bum me out as bad as they did. Things like to go on using the name you'd been given at birth and dressing like you were expected to, which made me feel like everything about my life was this huge gigantic lie. And if that stuff had felt like a lie, my being a girl now felt like the truth, the real me, and like finally being at peace with myself!

But I'd had to lose everything I knew and everyone I loved to get this, so it was weird.
Bittersweet I guess you'd call it.
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It was getting to be second nature to grab a club on my way out the door. We'd had a couple of sharks checking us out on our way to the island yesterday---one was a big bruiser the size of both of us put together, who seemed to think my butt was really interesting---but we hadn't even needed to pull our clubs from our belts. Anemone had just ordered them to “move along” in a regal, commanding voice, and damn if they both didn't comply. Hopefully any that I ran into today would listen to me like that too. And if not...

I'd really liked my baseball bat, but it was stuck in the sand back on that island. But digging around in the umbrella stand I found its cousin, a more paddle-like sawed off bat that had St. George's Cricket Club ~ CAVALIERS written on it. It had a nice heft to it.

A baseball or cricket bat wasn't the greatest weapon to go up against a toothsome predator that conceivably might be as big as the one in JAWS (that would be a shark-seeking torpedo, launched from a mile away...) but it was better than using your bare fist, which against a shark's rough hide would do more damage to your hand.

I stuck it through my belt and was off on my adventure.
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)))========> OFFENDING NEMO
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I swam in the same direction Anee and I had gone on Tuesday, except that I veered around town entirely, and wound up at the coral beds like I'd hoped.

It was a beautiful bright morning on the sea floor, and the joint was jumping- all kinds of colorful fish and crawly things going about their business. I wasn't sure about coral reef etiquette, whether it would be rude to swim right past something without acknowledging it; but after I noticed how all these creatures were mostly limiting their conversation to among their own kind I decided not to speak unless spoken to. But I did get a number of “Good morning, your highness”-es, that I responded to with a warm hello, a compliment when I could think of one, and “safe swimming”...

From a cautious few feet away I observed a scarlet hermit crab trying on different shells until it found one it liked, then watched a pretty little Caribbean clownfish wriggling around in the tentacles of a big sea anemone with obvious pleasure, like a dog rolling on grass.

“Having fun?” I asked.

“Yep!” squeaked the fish.

“Aren't you afraid that anemone might eat you? They eat fish, you know.”

The clownfish giggled, “Nawwww, we're buddies. We gots a simbee-osis!”

“Yeah.... Buddies!” agreed the anemone.

I remembered what Fluke had said about some of the species around here spontaneously changing sex, so I asked, “Are you a boy fish or a girl fish?”

“A girl fishie!” said the clownfish, bouncing on her friend's tentacles, “Can't ya tell?”

“Well of course,” I fibbed, “But I was wondering... Were you always a girl fishie?”

She stopped her bouncing and swam up, parking herself about an inch in front of my face, and said indignantly, “That's a purty darn personal question to ask a fishie before ya even knows her name!”

“Sorry, I was just curious.”

“Yah, well everyfishie's curious! Ever since my transition every fish and his brother thinks he can just swim up to me and start askin' me fer the most intimate details about my pro-ceedure: Did it hurt? Can you has orgasms? Are you done changin' or do ya still have some of yer boy parts?” It's quite pre-zum-shis, if ya ask me!”

“I'm sorry! I didn't mean to-”

“It always seems ta get down to 'parts' with you fishies! Well lemme tell ya, I is more that just the sum of my parts. And way more than the sum of just some of my parts- Them parts you is all so innarested in!”

“But I'm not! I just-”

“What is it with you cis-fishes and parts? It's just weird, is what it is! I don't go around askin' you about your parts, do I?! Don't ya got lives of yer own, that you gotta all the time be gettin' so nosy about a trans-fishie and her parts?!!”

“But-”

And suddenly a big black shadow was blocking out the coral bed's sunlight.

YIKES!!” she shrieked, thinking it was some immense predator, and vanished.

She had swum off in an orange and white streak, leaving me talking to nobody, “But I'm...... I'm like you...”
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)))========> THE WHITE BEAST
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The shadow that had fallen across this patch of reef was too big to be some marine predator, unless it was one that had escaped from Jurassic Park. I looked up and saw the white fiberglass keel of a sixty foot boat. A keel that narrowed, and then narrowed again- like upside-down steps. It was pointed the wrong way for me to see the porthole windows in the bow, but I would have bet anything that this was the same white vessel Anemone and I had had our run-in with yesterday.

“Can you tell her that I'm sorry?” I asked the anemone, but it was closed up tight.

“Ya better scram before that thing eats you,” he mumbled through his clenched tentacles, sounding like a bad ventriloquist.

“Good idea,” I replied, but not because I was afraid the boat was going to eat me.

As I looked around for a hiding place I heard something hit the water's surface and saw a strangely shaped anchor that seemed too lightweight for a boat this size, descending on a line that was almost too thin to see. I knew I should have been hiding but I just had to stop and watch when a pair of winglike vanes sticking out from the anchor twisted, changing its angle of descent.

It seemed to know right where it wanted to go, heading for a big rock that it latched onto like the claw that you try to grab a teddy bear with in one of those mechanical crane games. Except that this grabber thing seemed to actually grab. And then from the center of it a doo-hickey like a drill bit drove itself into the rock with a slow high torque whirring sound. Nice anchor!

I had just enough time to duck behind a ridge of coral before I heard a KER-SPLOOSH! sound and saw a scuba diver in an electric blue wetsuit plowing down into the water in a cloud of bubbles. As he turned himself right-side up he was joined by a smaller adult in a lipstick-red wet suit. I'm not sure why they even needed suits in this warm water, maybe it was to help them see each other. Three seconds later a child in a bright pink suit with pink flippers joined them. Yep, it was definitely our friends from the island...
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)))========> WAITING FOR THE ALL CLEAR
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If I tried to make a break for it now they would see me, so as they hovered there making hand signals at each other I settled down on the sea bottom behind the coral ridge and pressed myself into a hollow in it, hoping that when I poked my head back up in a few minutes they would be far enough away that I could make my exit. From the small size of those tanks on their backs it didn't seem like they planned to be down here very long.

I sat in the sand looking at my tail stretched out in front of me. I liked my red tartan bow, maybe I would continue to wear them after my wound had healed...

My mind drifted into thoughts of Anemone and Fluke again. How amazing it was that in spite of the decline in births that had made each of them a statistical rarity, they had been born within a year and a mile of each other, as if the Sea Gods had willed that they be together. And maybe They had. But from there my thoughts smacked up against how dismal my own chances of ever finding romance seemed...

The only merperson I had the slightest interest in---since I refused to think about Fluke that way---was Sandee at the candy shop. I pictured her: that radiant smile, of course, which made her seem like such a positive and friendly person; but also the earlobes poking out of her pixie haircut with those adorable shiny starfish earrings on them; and her cute nose, her pert little breasts, her belly button, and even the spread of her caudal fin; which I'd caught a glimpse of when it flipped up as she hopped across the counter to feed me that salmon candy. Its rich, translucent almost peacock blue color, and the filigree pattern of its spines- as graceful and delicate as a Japanese fan. To be turned on by a fish tail would be extremely kinky if I was a human, but I supposed it was normal now.

But Sandee could well have been married, or otherwise committed to someone; and even if she wasn't... what were the odds that she was gay? Or for that matter did bi or lesbian mermaids even exist (besides apparently me)?

Well of course they must, from the casual way Anemone had asked me if I liked boys or girls. This wouldn't have been something she would think of if they didn't exist. And if our teacher Mr. Mergolis was a gay merman then there must be gay mermaids too.

This close to the end of summer vacation Mr. M. was probably on his way back here by now. I wondered what he would be like. As our teacher, I mean, not sexually; which would be fairly futile. Like trying to be romantic with my friend Chiro, who out of the blue one day had said that he'd never suspected I was trans, but that even as a boy I had seemed too feminine for him to get interested in. Then he backpeddled, saying it wasn't that I'm not nice-looking “in a weak-chinned kind of way”, like he was afraid I would be hurt by his rejection; when actually his saying that had made my whole day, and maybe my whole week, and...

And there's somebody staring at me, isn't there?
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)))========> THE KID
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The girl hovered there, working her pink flippers and gawking at me, sending up bubbles every time she exhaled. She wasn't wearing a diver's mask but had a little rubber goggle-thing with a glass lens stuck over each eye with some kind of adhesive.

I knew that when you saw a human---or especially if they saw you---you were supposed to swim away into the murkiness as fast as you could. Or jump off a cliff if you have to. But she was right in front of me and there was no way she might have thought she was mistaken about seeing a mermaid. And this kid might convince her parents (“Well I know for sure I saw something strange. Maybe it's whatever made those weird tracks on that island!”) to come searching for me and possibly find our whole village. Especially after seeing how relentless her dad was about us yesterday. So the wisest course of action seemed be to try and befriend this girl and convince her not to tell anyone about me.

Or this is what I was telling myself, because hadn't it worked out that way for Princess Atlantea with a whole boatload of Frenchmen?

But later I realized that the real reason I kept on sitting in the sand in front of her might have been that I just didn't want to swim away. Here was someone from that world I'd left behind, who I maybe could hang out with and reconnect with the human race, if even for just a short while.

I heard a Velcro-ish ripping sound as she pried a flat yellow plastic case that was about six by nine inches off of her hip. I figured it had one of those underwater writing pads and a pencil in it. But when she flipped open the top what I saw was a little LCD screen, with some buttons and a miniature keyboard below it. She wrote something, and then while shyly staring down at her slowly wigwagging flippers she showed me the screen: HI Im Valerie. Valerie Rosado. U?

She was offering me the device to type on but I waved it away, saying, “Pleased to meet you Valerie, I'm Enomena. I don't have a last name.”

She cupped her ear in a what-did-you-say gesture, and typed: EMOMOMO?

She wrote my name as I spelled it for her and showed it to me, adding: Great MM name! Its ANEMONE bt backwrds!

“Right! I'm surprised you caught that.”

Most humans would be freaking out if they met one of us, but Valerie seemed to be taking this pretty well. Although she had this tendency to avert her eyes, even when she wasn't typing on her pad. She wrote: How do u do tht?

“Do what?”

TALK

“Can't you talk?” I asked.

Not undrwatr, she wrote, then pulled out her mouthpiece and said something on the exhale that sounded like it had been run through a scrambler. Typed: See? I just sound Lk bubbles. But not U …. So ???

I shrugged, “I guess it comes with the tail.”

GREAT tail btw! +++HOLY great wig!, she typed, then patted the hair on the side of her head, which was chestnut brown and pulled back into a ponytail.

Her non-metallic hair made me homesick. I told her, “You have pretty hair.”

TY, she wrote. Then: HAY where u get ur AIR?!!?

“I get it out of the water.”

So do I BUT WHERS UR AIRVERTER?

“My what?”

Half-turning, she slapped the device on her back, which gave off a dull metallic clang. If it was a scuba tank it was a strange looking one. I swam up from my seat and motioned for her to turn around, which she did for me. On her back was streamlined silver thing no bigger than a gallon milk jug, with two rows of skinny oval vents down its sloping back. Below the vents, on a wide hatch that might have been where its battery went, were the words:

AIR*PRO
Osmotic Air Extractor

WOW! So this was the next generation of diving gear. No heavy tanks but---like she'd said---just pull the air right out of the water. I swear, the rich sure have some cool toys!
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)))========> OMG MERMAID ARE REAL?!?!!
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Then it dawned on me that Valerie was under the impression I was some kind of pretend mermaid, like those Weeki Wachee girls. And why wouldn't she think this? Any sane person---when they see a mermaid at a water park or someone in a superhero suit or a zombie on Halloween---they just assume it's a normal person in a costume. But Valerie was getting more and more baffled about what I was doing for an air supply here eighty feet below the surface.

A really good professional mermaid-impersonator has a whole slew of stage-magician-type tricks to make it seem like she's existing effortlessly in an environment that should kill her. But sooner or later you will catch her doing something that explains it. As I swam around to get in front of her, Valerie hit a couple of buttons, then showed me a question mark that filled the texter pad's whole screen and changed colors at a frantic pace.

And if I wasn't being such a chowderhead I might of been able to come up with something to convince her that a costumed fake was what I was (“Air tank?!! Damn, I knew I forgot something! I'd better surface before I drown, huh?”).

But instead I told her, “An air extractor? That is so cool! I didn't even know they made those. But you know what's even cooler?”

She shook her head no.

“It's when you can do this,” I said, and sucked in then let out four or five deep exaggerated gasping breaths of seawater. The way her jaw fell open it looked like she was gonna start breathing water herself before she clamped it shut around her mouthpiece.

Valerie goggled at me. She had dropped her message pad, which was swinging across the sea bed at the end of its tether. She hauled it up and typed: NO WAY!! UR REAL????

“SURPRI-I-I-I-I-SE!!” I sang out, “Mermaids are real!”

She typed frantically, then held up the pad for me, not realizing she had it upside down. I grabbed it, turned it over and read: NO!!! OMFG REALLY?! LIKE UR REALLY REAL U LIVE DOWN HERE + CN BREATH WATR +CN TALK + THATIS REALLY ALL U iN THERE + UR LIKE NO JOKE NO HOKUS A MERMAiD 4 REAL?!??!!!?

“Really and truly,” I said. I flipped my tail up, holding it for her to inspect, bending it in a couple of places where nobody just wearing a fake one could bend theirs.

I have to admit I was enjoying her amazement. But her face had such a stunned expression on it I was afraid she might faint, which is a bad thing to have happen underwater. I asked, “Are you okay?”

She nodded, wrote: JUST HOLY IN REALITYSHOCK! FEEL LIKE M DREAMING OR IDK

“I know the feeling,” I said, remembering how I'd thought my first sight of a mermaid swimming toward me out of the black water was some kiss-your-brain-goodbye hallucination. I told her, “But actually, aside from being a mermaid I'm just a kid like you. Like you I love swimming around the corals checking out all the neat fish and things. I play bobsticks out in our yard with my sister and then get called in for dinner, I get in fights with my mom; I'm bummed out when summer vacation ends. I wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, go to school...” I paused for a beat, “Only it's a school of fish.”

That's the kind of joke nobody over the age of ten would think was funny. Valerie must have been nine and a half because she started laughing, really hard, and only stopped when she began taking on water. She pulled out her mouthpiece, expelled the water with an out-breath of air, popped the thing back in and breathed deep for a few seconds.

“And see?” I said, “I can even make dumb jokes. So really, I'm just a person. Only I'm a kind of person you never believed was real until now...”

I alwys believd. Like w/ those faries. I just didn't BELIEVE-believe. U compy?

Comprehend, I figured; and I seemed to remember her dad using the word yesterday. I nodded.

OMG THIS IS HOLY BONE!

“'Holy bone' means good?”

means VERY good!

“I'm glad you're liking this, because I'm breaking about fifteen mermaid laws by even talking to you. We're not even supposed to let humans see us.”

She nodded emphatically and wrote: I holy compy NEED 2B SECRET

“Good. Then I'm sure you understand why I need to ask you---beg you if I have to!---to never tell anyone about meeting me.”

i SWEAR i wont tell! she typed, then gravely stuck out her pinkie finger and curled it. I hooked my pinkie around it and tugged.

“A pinky swear! That's legally binding in some cultures, and good enough for me! And you crossed your heart too, even better!” I grinned when she solemnly traced an X on her chest, “Because it could be unbelievably bad for us mermaids if the land people found out about us. ”

i KNOW! she wrote, Like STRATOSFARIES!

“I don't know what that is.”

its BAD!! she wrote, FAYS GETTNG HUNTD. LOCKD UP. EXPERIMENTD ON!!! HUMAN-ONLY LAWS/ WHICH HUNTS +TEACHRS GETTNG FIRED 4 FAIRY BLOOD! So STUPID FLOOPY FEEK + WRONG!!!!

I got the gist of what she was describing: a nightmare worst-case scenario of humans discovering another race in their midst and getting medieval on them. But I had to ask, “What would teachers be doing with fairy blood?”

HAVING it!!! she wrote, and tapped the underside of her pink-sheathed forearm.

“Teachers being persecuted for being part fairy?”

She nodded.

So obviously she was talking about some TV show she watched called Stratosfaries. Probably a cartoon series. And from her quick synopsis it sounded interesting, but dark. But then a lot of the best ones are pretty dark, like Gargoyles or Robot Robot 777. Shows where the fairies, space aliens or whoever are the good guys and the humans---especially the cops or military types---all act like frightened ignorant cave men with big guns! If Mom ever loses her job as the Mermaid Queen she can probably find work writing for one of these shows...

These cartoons writers use made-up situations like this as an allegory or whatever, to show how ignorant and wrong human-against-human prejudice is. But what they're also doing and don't even know it is creating a generation of kids who will know what they can or can't do if they ever meet a mermaid or a centaur or something. Kids who will see themselves as that one plucky human character these shows always have, who has been let inside the title-characters's secret world; a smarter and clearly more decent person than all those paranoid jerko-piggo characters screaming about The Mermaid Menace.
.

.
)))========> MY STARS
.

Valerie looked at my tail closely. She inspected the pattern of my scales, how they were obviously made of something alive and growing; and she peered at the veins and ribs in my caudal fin. She reached out, hesitated, and when I nodded for her to go ahead she ran her hand up and down my smooth scales, grinning around the plug of her mouthpiece.

Assuming it was just a decoration she tapped on the tartan bandage wrapped around my tail where my wound was, and typed on her device: Thats so cute!

“Thanks,” I said, and I noticed she was looking away again. This tendency to not want to look directly at me was something she'd been doing since we'd first met, but it was only now that I figured out what it was about.

It wasn't some personality quirk; shyness, insecurity, a lack of confidence around other people like I'd been assuming, or even anything to do with me not being human. She was simply doing her damnedest to look anywhere but at my tits. Whenever she'd catch sight of them she would sort of blush and glance away; except for during those moments when I was doing something so impossible (like breathing water) that she would forget to be embarrassed. I should have figured that out a long time ago, but evidently I'd gone so totally native in this mermaid world over the past few days that I wasn't even thinking of myself as being naked now, any more than an unclothed dog or cat does.

But at her age Valerie hadn't even taken a gym class yet, which is something that sort of gets you used to the idea of people getting naked around each other. Although as Stewart, the boy's locker room was probably still my least favorite place at school, even after a couple of years of suiting up for PE. And although the vague edge of discomfort I experienced in there---(down from the dread I'd felt during my first week of 7th grade...)---had been rooted in a different set of issues, I could sympathize with this Valerie's feeling awkward around me...

I motioned at my chest and asked, “Is this a problem for you?”

NO, she typed, not wanting to seem prudish, but her cheeks turned an even deeper red.

I wished I had my HUSSONG'S t-shirt to slip into, but who knew where that was now? In our haste to jump off that island we'd sort of lost track of Anee's backpack. So there didn't seem to be much I could do about this except float here with my hands pressed against my boobs and hope this didn't make it worse for her.

But then looking across the sea bed I saw a clan of those common whitish yellow starfish (the kind you're most likely to see used as nick-nacks on land), and I got an idea...

“I'll be right back,” I told her, and swam over to them. Yep, the old starfish bra trick!

Being a ruler over a queendom full merpeople was something I was still trying to get my head around. But at least kings, queens, princesses and various types of lesser nobles were things we'd had on land, even if not where I lived. But the notion that my family's rule extended to all the sea life around here just seemed too silly to be any kind of real thing at all. So I was surprised when these stars started arguing over which two should have the honor of serving as “their princess's” bra for the next hour. I finally wound up picking two at random- “You... and you.”

But since a starfish is an animal that can bust open a mussel as easy as shucking a peanut then dissolve the poor critter inside with their powerful digestive juices, I was a bit hesitant about putting them on my nipples. Also I wasn't too sure they'd stay on without straps, until---using nothing but muscle tension---they clamped themselves onto me and stayed put. This felt a little strange but wasn't painful and only slightly uncomfortable. And it was such a cute look! Like being a mermaid in some old cartoon...

As I swam back to my human friend one of the stars asked me if there was something to eat inside the conch shell that was hanging between her and her clanmate.

“Sorry. But I'll get you both some nice treat when all this is over,” I promised. Hopefully some little beastie that I could smash with my shark club before it knew what hit it.

Valerie had been watching my conversation with the sea star clan with fascination. At the sight of my starfish bra thingies the edges of her mouth went up into an amused grin and she gave me a thumbs up.
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.
)))========> THE GIRL WITH THE GIZMOS
.

I glanced around to make sure that Valerie's parents weren't coming our way. If they did I would have to split in a hurry. I told her, “I'm surprised your folks are letting you solo dive like this. I thought wandering off by yourself was one of the big no-nos in diving.”

M NOT BY MYSLF. THEY HAV ME ON R BOATS LOCATR, she answered, and before I could ask what that meant she punched a button on her pad and showed me.

On the screen was a topographic map of the substrate around here, a black background covered in looping green lines, with the depth alongside them in little white numbers. There were three red dots, one of which had a blue triangle beside it that must have been me. The other two dots were side by side and moving away from us, which was good, and also away from where Shellcastle sat, which was better. It must have been the lack of right angles in our architecture but the village looked like a strange maze-like pattern of big rocks; maybe natural or maybe not. I would have been curious to know what our castle showed up as, but it was just beyond the edge of the screen. What a neat little gizmo this was!

+++ also I hav PANIC BUTTON, she typed, and showed me a thing like a built-in wristwatch on the left sleeve of her wetsuit, a fat red button behind a glass face, which I guessed would send her parents rushing this way if she opened the top and pressed it.

“And what does this one do?” I asked, pointing at the plastic disk with a dial on it on her other wrist.

Boyancy Regulater, she typed. She turned the dial counterclockwise and a second later started drifting down, picking up speed until she was standing on the sea bed. She twisted it the other way and came back up until she was level with me again.

“That's pretty neat! I have one of those inside my body. Only mine will explode and all my guts will come out of my mouth if I go too deep.”

EEEEEEWWW!! she wrote. I like my kind better

“Me too. But they didn't give me the option of some other kind when they installed mine,” I said. “So what do your parents do?”

Dad is inventer + Mom designs sw, mostly 4 accting . . . BORING sw!

Accounting software, I deduced. “What did your dad invent?”

A thing . . . . I cnt Xplain it but it made us prtty rich

“I guess there's good money in things.”

She frowned. Was I making fun of her? But then she got excited about something and wrote: Oh! &Mom+Dad both workd on BBP awile- Tht was BONE!

“BBP?”

BIG BRAIN PROJECT! is wher they met, she wrote.

“Which is what? Some big computer?”

BIGGEST EVR

“What? They were trying to create artificial intelligence?”

She nodded. Exactly!

“And this was at some university?”

U never heard of BBP?!!!!!!

“Afraid not.”

govermnt thing. HOLY huge + $$$$$$$$$$$$ like that Man Hatin Project 100 yrs ago . . . only BBP not a BIG SECRET like Abomb

“Well too bad it got shut down,” I said.

'Further proof that YAHOO NEWS really blows when it comes to covering any kind of science,' I thought. 'I've really got to find a better news site!'

Then I remembered that down here there was no Yahoo News. That the only options I had for news these days were our town crier and the DAILY TAIL. These last few days had been so busy and fun that I hadn't missed my computer or the internet, but now suddenly I missed it like crazy. I could try to tell myself that I was a mermaid now, that I'd willingly left all that human junk behind for the simple life under the sea; but there was no way this particular bit of Amish-ness wasn't going to be the utter pits.

Valerie was intently typing something. She finished, and showed me: +its so STUPID they did 2!!! Cuz whn CHINA built there AI we lost AI RACE &Daisy turnd out NICE + non of that MACHINES TAKNG OVER b.s. like SENATER GREENSPOONER ws yellng about even HAPPEND!!! Was all floopy parnoid baloney +DAISY has her own TV show now!

“Wait, slow down! Could you try and write in real words? What the hell is DAISY?”

Shes chinese COMPUTER. Mom+Dad both sooooo mad that $$$ 4 our's got cut!

“Are you telling me that China has AI? And their AI has it's own TV show?!”

Dont u watch DAISY”S VARIETY HOUR or evn any NEWS??

“We don't exactly have televisions down here. Hell, we didn't even have telegraphs down here!” I said, and laughed bitterly, “Welcome to the freakin' 18th century!”

I had to expect that I would be falling out of touch with what was going on up on land now, but I'd only been a mermaid for a few days. How could I not have heard of this AI Race?!! It didn't sound like something that had just happened over this last weekend.

Was I so wrapped up in my own gender problems that I completely tuned out all the news about some big Artificial Intelligence project and how it got shut down by the legislature because they feared a Terminator-type end of the world scenario?! Well I must have been...

But even if I'd been oblivious to all this myself I'm sure my dad would of mentioned it at the dinner table---he would be making jokes about that computer that went psycho in that 2001 movie (oh I get it... DAISY!)---or if he didn't start talking about it my mom would. As geeky as my land family was there is just NO WAY that a thing like this would never have been discussed. In fact AI had been discussed at least once that I can recall, but only as something theoretical.

So this whole situation was extremely weird. An alarms-going-off-in-my-head level of weirdness, like when I first realized that those 'movie actor' pirates were the real thing. Something was seriously out of whack here! And what was with all this strange hardware- from their boat's self-guiding anchor to Valerie's 'air-extractor' unit and 'buoyancy regulator'??!

Well there was one explanation. It was a ridiculous one, but this had been a really ridiculous week. I began retracing everything I had done today, trying to figure out the exact moment when I'd slipped through into this alternate universe.

Valerie was looking at me curiously. She wrote: Whats wrong?

“Nothing really, I'm just trying to figure out how all of a sudden there's all this stuff in the world that I never knew existed! I guess this is just one more freaky impossible thing that I'm just gonna have to roll with if I don't want to go insane. It's been such a strange week! But at least I don't think I'll have to jump off any cliffs today!”

She startled, and typed: CLIFFS?

“Yeah. Yesterday my sister took me crawling around on this island. Which was a lot of fun until these three really weird looking humans showed up and we had to hide-”

OMFG that was U!!!!

"Yep," I grinned.

+++That was US too!!!

“I kind of figured...”

SO GLAD UR OK + MONSTER SORRY WE MADE U JUMP THT WAS A LONG WAY DWN!!

“It wasn't your fault. We heard you guys talking. None of you knew what we were and your dad sounded like he just had to know what the heck could make tracks like that. Which is totally understandable, especially if he's an inventor. He'd have that kind of mind.”

She wrote: LOLOLOL! I knew what u were. I TOLD them it was MM but their all like- ITS ALWAYS MERMAIDS WITH U VALLI!!! MERMAIDS!MERMAIDS!MERMAIDS! THERS NO MERMAIDS SHUTUP ABOUT YR DAM MERMAiDS ALLREADY!!!

I giggled, remembering my own parents and their frustration with their mermaid-obsessed kid. “So you're into mermaids?”

Valerie smiled and was hurrying to write something when her pad's whole screen began flashing bright red. Whatever it was it looked pretty urgent.

“What's that?”

Impishly, she reached out with the plastic gizmo and pressed it against my arm. It startled me---like she'd hoped it would---but not like it would have alarmed my sister, who wouldn't know what to make of the way it was vibrating. I said, “You better answer that.”
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)))====> MISS SIRENA'S SCHOOL FOR YOUNG MERMAIDS
.

She pushed a button, and showed me what was on the screen: Are U OK Valli? U havent moved in 15 minutes!

She let me watch as she typed: FINE!!!! AM WATCHNG VERY INTRESTING C-CREATUR!

I gave her a thumbs up and she pressed “Send”. Discretion is the better part of Valerie.

OK just checking, the distant parent wrote. Must be a big one to be here on my screen. You'll have 2 tell us about it. If u see any mermaids say hi 4 us. LUV U!

Sure will! LUV U2 MOMS. Bye! she wrote, and pushed the hang-up button.

“Mermaids?!” I asked. “Oh, she's teasing you...”

She nodded yes. Typed: B-cuz of my class.

“Class?”

Miss Sirena”s mermaid class. @ pool in Bentonhurst Park

I'd never heard of a mermaid class, but I knew what it must be. Swimming in fake mermaid tails was becoming such a craze with young girls that it was just a matter of time before someone would capitalize on it by having classes in it. It sounded like a good job for a retired professional mermaid, who could teach not just the odd style of swimming it took to use one of those tails, but could also choreograph little underwater ballet routines for the girls, and maybe throw in a bit of mermaid mythology and folklore from around the world.

.
==========>
It would be like how Pepper Davis's dance instructor had been with the Moscow Ballet Company for twenty years, and as far as I could tell she still had the moves, she just didn't have that youthful beauty that people expect from a ballerina. The teacher had said my friend showed incredible promise; until at the age of twelve Pepper just up and quit, deciding that she despised this “elitist” and “bourgeois” artform, and that her true calling was to be an important underground graffiti artist like her new hero Banksy.

Pepper's career as a political graffiti artist was a short one, that ended with us both being grounded for a month after those cops caught us up on that billboard at 2 a.m. defacing an ad for the Dover County Fair, which Pepper believed was a hotbed of animal cruelty. Modifying it so that the fair's little dancing pig mascot now looked like she was writhing all bloody on a cross, with the words: PEGGY THE PIG DIED FOR YOUR SINS!

But that year's fair had actually ended about five hours earlier. This was bad planning on our part but we were lucky, since this sign was coming down as soon as they got around to it anyway; and being first time offenders we got off with just a warning (a break that they assured us we would not get the next time!); and “FASCISTS!!” became Pepper's new favorite word.
=========>
.

I asked Valerie, “So these Mermaid classes, you go to them about once a week?”

Evry thurs nite @ 7, she wrote, and held the pad up for me sort of hesitantly. I noticed she was doing the not-looking-at-me thing again.

I looked down to make sure my starfish were still in place, but they were fine. “What's the matter?”

U must thnk were holy STUPID, she typed, looking all sheepish and dejected. She sure was a moody little thing.

“Stupid? Why would I think you're stupid?”

prtnding 2B mermaid whn were NOT!!!

Did she really think I would be offended by this? Someone like Pepper might come up with some gripe over 'appropriation of Mer-culture by the legged hemegony' or some such overly-politicalized bullcrap; but these were just little kids! What could be more innocent than little girls playing mermaid?

“What's wrong with pretending?” I asked, “Mermaid class sounds like a lot of fun. I wish they'd had something like this six or seven years ago. It's not like you're doing it to make fun of us, is it?”

NO!!!!!

“Then what's the big deal?! My mom is a pretty important merperson now, but when she was a little mermaid she totally wanted to be a dolphin. She wore a dolphin suit and went around all day going ' EeEeEeEeEeE I'M A DOLPHIN!!!' And do you think the real dolphins were offended? No, they were flattered!”

Really?

“Absolutely. Us mermaids have a saying: 'Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, when it's sincere.' And you know what? I would love to see you swimming in your mermaid tail!”

This perked Valerie was right up.

Bone!, she wrote to me, and then sent a message to her parents: Hay cn I go 2 my cabin + get 1 of my tails?

Of course, they answered. Go have fun! But BE CAREFUL! We just saw a hammerhead the size of a brood bus.

She signed off with: ALWAYS safe. LUV U!

“What's a brood bus?” I asked.

Big family bus . . . . like 4 Pollies

“Pollies?”

U know! Like w/ 3 wivs or 2 hsbnds, she wrote.

“Oh, those Pollies. That's not really legal though.”

Coarse it is! They wouldnt let thm get married if it wasnt

“Oh...”

So now I had big families of polygamists roaming around in buses (probably with clever stickers in the back window displaying slogans like “The More the Married-er”, or some polygamist version of the gay rainbow flag or the trans pink + blue one...) to add to my list of things that just sprang into existence today. Just what the hell was going on here?

She screened me one last message---GOING 2 EUREKA BRB!!!---then cranked her buoyancy regulator all the way to the right, and took off like a shot toward the surface and that boat up there, which I supposed was named the EUREKA. If it wasn't I was going to have a long wait...

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NEXT: VALLI GETS HER TAIL, JASPER IS NOT AMUSED,
D.A.I.S.Y. + OTHER MYSTERIES ARE EXPLAINED,
AND THERE'S SOME BUSINESS WITH A SHARK

...
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ThaNKS FoR ReaDiNG, PleaSe CoMMeNT!!!
(And if anyone can explain to me why this chapter
has got so many more kudos than any of them since
the first one I'd love to hear it so I could do it again!)
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...