Fins Are Forever Read online

“Most likely,” Miss Molina answers.

  “Then what kind of effects will it have on ocean geology and sea life?” I feel a little self-conscious, especially since I already know the answers. The students of Seaview probably don’t, though. And maybe they should. “Do earthquakes cause the same kind of destruction underwater as they do on land?”

  “Not usually,” she responds, speaking directly to the camera. “The vibrations, which cause so much damage up here, are absorbed by the water.”

  “How interesting,” Brody says, wresting the interview back into his control while sticking to the new direction. “Tell us more about underwater quakes.”

  I smile behind the camera, content to watch Brody go after the topic with his usual determination. For the next ten minutes, he quizzes Miss Molina about earthquakes and plate tectonics and undersea land shifts with the agility of a seasoned reporter. I throw in a couple more questions, when the interview slacks, but for the most part Brody is masterful.

  With only a few minutes before the bell, he calls the shoot a wrap. I hand him the video disk, and he heads to the editing station with Ferret to pull together the final cut. I shut down the camera and start to strike the teleprompter.

  “Can I have a moment, Lily?” Miss Molina asks.

  Her serious tone makes me a little nervous, but I say, “Sure.”

  I carefully coil the cable that connects the teleprompter to the computer.

  “I was very impressed with your knowledge of under-water geology,” she says. “You plan on going to college?”

  “I do,” I answer. “If I get in. My grades aren’t great and I still have to take the SATs.”

  She reaches into her purse and pulls out a green paper. “Do you know what school you’d like to attend?”

  “Whichever one will take me,” I say. Slacker mer princesses can’t be choosy.

  “You should think about Seaview Community,” she says, handing me the paper. “Their admission requirements are not as stringent as at the four-year colleges, but their classes and professors are first-rate. I’m actually a graduate of the marine biology program.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t tell anyone earth science is only my second love.” She nods at the paper. “They offer a summer internship program for incoming first years. Unpaid,” she explains, “but terrific experience.”

  I skim over the paper. According to the bullet points, students accepted into the program are set up with internships at the aquarium, the zoo, or a local scientific firm. That’s a huge opportunity for anyone who wants to go into marine biology. Which I just might. I need a career now, and that one seems like a perfect fit. The program has a special concentration in marine ecology and conservation. That would give me a chance to help Thalassinia, even if I’m not the queen.

  The paper also says that students must demonstrate sufficient interest and aptitude for the field, as well as having both practical and educational experience.

  Well, that takes me out of the running.

  “I don’t think I have enough experience,” I insist. “I’ve only had one year of biology, and I haven’t been in Environmental Club since freshman year.”

  “That’s more than most of their applicants will have,” she argues. “I can guarantee you a good chance at acceptance into the program and a tuition scholarship.”

  “How?”

  “Because I can see you have a passion for the field,” she says. Leaning back, she smiles. “And I have brunch with the program director every Sunday.”

  “That’s—” I shake my head. “Wow.”

  “If you’re seriously interested,” she says, “I could set up an interview for you.”

  “That would be awesome, Miss Molina.”

  “How about next Saturday?” she suggests. “Denise is free in the mornings, and you could swing by her office on campus.”

  I do a quick mental calendar check. “Next Saturday would be perfect.”

  “Great,” she says. “I’ll set it up. Meanwhile, you go online and research the school and the program.”

  “Absolutely!”

  I shake my head in awe as Miss Molina walks away. Talk about a perfect situation. Me studying marine ecology. Working to protect the oceans from up here on land. I shove the paper into my backpack, promising myself I’ll go online tonight and check out the program’s website.

  The school bell rings, sending me scurrying to clean up. I finish with the teleprompter and then help Ferret put away the sound gear. We’re just locking the sound cabinet door when Brody finishes his edit.

  “Done!” he announces as he clicks the send button, shooting the digital video to Principal Brown’s email account for approval so it can run during homeroom Monday morning.

  We give one another a round of high fives and then grab up our bags. I flung mine farther than the rest, so I’m the last one left in the classroom.

  “I figured you’d be in here,” a deep voice says.

  Quince! I turn and find him leaning in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest and an amused smile on his face.

  He lifts his brows. “I thought we were meeting outside the gym.”

  Damselfish.

  He’s teasing, but I still feel bad. I completely blanked.

  “Sorry,” I say, hurrying over and slipping my arms around his waist. “I lost track of time. Miss Molina was telling me about the marine biology program at Seaview Community.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “She’s going to set up a meeting for me with the head of the program. She thinks I have a good chance of getting in and getting an internship and a scholarship.”

  “That’s great.” He slips a hand beneath my backpack strap, pulls it off my arm, and slings it onto his shoulder as we leave the classroom.

  I hope I haven’t made him late for work.

  Quince and I fall into a comfortable silence as we walk to his motorcycle and then on the ride to our street. All in all, it’s pretty handy having a next-door boyfriend. Especially when he has transportation.

  He pulls into the shared driveway between Aunt Rachel’s house—my house, too, I guess—and his, purring his bike to a stop.

  I climb off and remove my pink helmet.

  “How late are you working?” I ask.

  His arm darts out and around my waist, tugging me closer. “Until eight.”

  I make a little pouty face, but I’m not trying to guilt him or anything. I don’t begrudge his job at the lumberyard. Not only does it help out with his mom’s expenses, it also helps out with those strong muscles that are holding me against his side right now.

  “You’ll stop by after?”

  He raises up and presses his lips against mine. “Absolutely.”

  I’m tempted to sink in to him and collect on the promise of more kisses, but I don’t want to make him later than he already is. He missed a bunch of work the last few weeks because of the time we had to spend in Thalassinia to get our separation. He and his mom can’t afford the lost pay for being late.

  You might think I’d regret choosing to sever the magical bond that formed between us when Quince gave me my first kiss, four weeks ago. At the time, though, it was the only choice I could make. I wasn’t sure of my feelings, I didn’t trust them, and I wasn’t about to ask him to make a lifetime commitment on a hunch. He would have been tied forever to me and Thalassinia, forced into whichever body form I was in for the rest of his life. That’s a lot to ask for a land-loving guy with a struggling single mom who relies on his help and his paycheck.

  And now that I’m sure of my feelings . . . well, I guess I’m still glad about the separation. If we’d stayed bonded, I’d probably be in Thalassinia right now, performing some kind of boring princess duty or tedious ceremony or critical judgment. Part of me belongs on land. An even bigger part of me belongs with Quince. The rest of me is terrified of the kind of responsibility that comes with becoming crown princess or—worse—queen. Yep, I’m happy with my choice.

  “Go the
n,” I say, giving him another quick kiss. When he starts to wrap his other arm around me, I twist out of his grasp. “Later.”

  He breaks into a grin. “See if Aunt Rachel will make those key lime bars again.”

  “Is food all you think about?” I tease, shoving against his shoulder.

  “No,” he replies, all serious. “Sometimes I think about football.”

  He twists the throttle and is backing down the driveway before I can smack him again.

  “Careful or I’ll request the prune pistachio balls!”

  Not one of Aunt Rachel’s greatest cookie experiments.

  He laughs, that deep, unrestrained laugh that makes me shiver all over. As he roars off down the street, I watch until he turns the corner and disappears from sight. Oh, sigh.

  When Aunt Rachel gets home from the pottery studio at seven, I have all the ingredients for key lime bars spread out on the counter. I am in no way prepared to actually attempt this recipe by myself. Electronics are my friend, but cooking is not. The one time I tried to use the oven without supervision I nearly burned off my eyebrows. Lesson learned.

  I’ve also finished my homework (except for trig, which I’m saving to do with Quince), so I quickly clear my books and notebooks into my backpack. Prithi meows in annoyance as I step away from the table, taking my toes out of licking range. Since the day I arrived, she hasn’t been able to resist licking or nibbling or rubbing against me at every opportunity. I wonder if mergirls are irresistible to all cats, or just to Prithi.

  “What’s for dessert tonight?” Aunt Rachel asks as she drops a paper shopping bag and her always overflowing tote bag—filled with magazines, art supply catalogs, shawls, aluminum water bottles, and who knows what else—on the bench by the kitchen door.

  She amazes me. Even after long hours at the studio, she still has a smile on her face and a bounce in her step. She is a woman of both boundless energy and unending generosity. Sometimes I step back and think about our situation, and I wonder how she managed to handle taking in a brand-new teenage niece without breaking stride for a second.

  I guess it’s a testament to her take-things-as-they-come attitude. I don’t think I’ll ever deal with change as well as she does. Especially not on an empty stomach.

  Even from halfway across the room, I can smell the takeout. My belly grumbles at the thought of food, but I tell it to wait.

  Aunt Rachel inspects the array of ingredients on the counter. Smiling, she picks up a bright green lime. “Key lime bars again?”

  I nod with a grin. “By special request.”

  I invited Quince to start stopping by after work because hours of hauling and lifting and cutting and loading always leave him famished. His mom works at night, so she leaves a reheatable dinner in the fridge. Now when he gets home, he grabs the container from his fridge and then comes over to eat dinner and cookies. Aunt Rachel and I have always made treats—well, she makes treats and I assist. It’s not much trouble to make plenty to share.

  We always make extra treats for him to take home to his mom. Quince is practically family, so she is, too. Besides, Aunt Rachel is always very generous with her kitchen.

  “Let’s get them in the oven.” She takes one of the pair of matching homemade aprons, a pale water blue covered with a rainbow of sea life—she let me pick the fabric, obviously—and quickly knots the neck and waist ties into bows. She hands the other apron to me. “Once they’re baking, we can eat dinner. Italian takeout.”

  Mmm.

  Fifteen minutes of sifting, mixing, crumbling, and spreading later—with Prithi circling my feet the entire time—the bars are in the oven and Aunt Rachel and I are settled in at the kitchen table with plates full of ravioli and breadsticks. Bread, by the way, is one of my favorite land foods. We can’t exactly bake up a loaf in the ocean. Lots of water. No fire. No bread. And on the scale of breads, Italian breadsticks—all soft and warm and drowning in garlic and butter—are at the very top.

  I’m just sighing into my third one when Aunt Rachel asks, “Anything interesting happen at school today?”

  She forks a bite of mushroom ravioli into her mouth.

  I swallow my bite of breadstick. “You mean besides the earthquake?”

  “Heavens.” Aunt Rachel practically chokes. “The studio was so busy tonight I’d forgotten. Is the school all right?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I reply. I push a chunk of breadstick around in the sauce. “News team had to make a special announcement for Monday’s homeroom broadcast.”

  “It’s so strange,” Aunt Rachel says. “They were interviewing a seismologist on the radio, and he said the apparent epicenter is not near any known fault line.”

  “Did they say where?” I ask. Not that I’ll know anything. Despite a full year of earth science with Miss Molina, I’m still pretty clueless when it comes to land-based geology.

  “Yes.” Aunt Rachel swirls ravioli through her sauce. “About forty miles off the coast. Just west of Bimini.”

  “What?” I choke.

  “Bimini,” she repeats. “It’s the westernmost island of the Bahamas.”

  “I know what Bimini is,” I explain. “It’s in the eastern part of my kingdom.”

  “Really?” Aunt Rachel takes a sip of her iced tea. “Are earthquakes common in Thalassinia?”

  “No,” I reply, confused. “Not really.”

  Most of the underwater quakes in the region hit farther south, around the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Tremors in Thalassinia are more like the once-every-few-centuries kind of thing. The last one recorded by our people was about two hundred years ago.

  And even then, the quakes aren’t strong enough to be felt on the mainland.

  “Do you need to send a messenger gull to the palace?” she asks. “To make sure everyone’s all right?”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I shake my head. “We’re not anywhere near a fault line, so I don’t see how the epicenter could be so close.”

  Abandoning my ravioli, I head to the window above the sink and slide it open. I make a gull sound into the night, knowing that no ordinary gull would ever respond to my sad excuse for a call. Moments later, a big gray-and-white seagull flies into the kitchen and lands on the counter.

  I pull open the junk drawer and grab the pad of kelpaper I keep there just in case. As I scribble a quick note, just asking Daddy if everything is okay and whether he knows anything about the quake, the gull notices the dinner on the table.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Aunt Rachel warns, waving her fork at the hungry bird.

  I snip a piece of twine and tie the note to the gull’s leg before he gets himself forked for going after our dinner. “Take this to King Whelk of Thalassinia, please.”

  The gull gives one last longing look to the table full of food before flying back into the night. Daddy will have my note within the hour, and hopefully I’ll have an answer shortly after that.

  I sit down and resume chewing my ravioli in silence, thinking about all the consequences that might have swept our way on land as a result of this huge earthquake. Tsunamis. Mud slides. Whole stretches of the south Florida coast sucked into the sea.

  Thankfully, none of this happened.

  If huddling in a doorway with Quince and filming a special news report were the worst of the damages, then it was hardly a blip on the disaster scale. Plus I found out about the internship.

  “You know Miss Molina?” I ask.

  “Wasn’t she your earth science teacher?”

  “Yep,” I say, pushing away my empty plate and grabbing for a fourth breadstick. “After we finished the special report, she told me about an internship program at Seaview Community. She thinks I might be able to get in.”

  “That’s wonderful, Lily,” she says, patting my hand. “What kind of internship?”

  I give her a quick rundown of what I know—which isn’t much, I guess, but I’ll know more after I study the website and then meet with the director next Saturday. “I might be able to get a scholar
ship, too,” I add. “Which would be nice, since my grades are garbage and my SAT scores aren’t going to be much better.”

  “You’re working on that,” Aunt Rachel says. “Between your test-prep classes and your extra study hours with Shannen, I’m sure you’ll do far better than you expect.”

  I hope so.

  After I decided to come back to Seaview, to pursue a life on land, I met with the school counselor for the first time. She pulled up my records, read through my grades, and then gave me a very concerned look. With a GPA in the barely 2.0 range, she’d explained, I would have to do extremely well on the SATs or ACT to get into college.

  Tests are not my best stroke. I’m far better in the water than I’ll ever be in front of a book. But if I want to be anything more than a janitor at the aquarium, then I need college. My life on land needs to be at least as meaningful as my life as queen would have been. I don’t think I’d make a great leader, but I do think I could make a decent marine biologist. I know the oceans better than any human, and I am personally invested in protecting and preserving them. If I can make the waters better and safer for my merkin, then my life on land will have served a valuable purpose. What more could a soon-to-be-former princess want?

  A sharp knock on the kitchen door washes away my thoughts. I jump up, thrilled. Quince!

  Prithi chases after me, batting at my bare feet.

  It’s not until I’m pulling the door open that I wonder why Quince is knocking when he usually just walks right in. The huge smile on my face disappears as soon as I see who’s standing on the other side.

  Chapter 2

  “What are you doing here?” I demand.

  “Nice to see you too, Lily,” Dosinia says. “Miss me?”

  Not hardly.

  First of all, I left Thalassinia only a few days ago. I haven’t had time to miss anyone.

  Second of all, my bratty baby cousin hates me and is generally horrid whenever we’re in the same place at the same time. Even if I’d been gone a decade, I couldn’t miss her. That would imply I actually like being with her. Very much not the case.

  “Why are you here, Doe?” I repeat, not bothering to hide the irritation in my voice.