a tight ball the size of my fist. My heart is a ball of twisted

rubber-and that’s how every girl wants to make a guy feel, right?

She’s falling behind Elias. Not by much, but enough to keep even

my grandfather at the edge of his throne. She comes up for air, and

that’s the beauty of it: he doesn’t have to. She’s going to lose. And

she’s going to die. And it’s all going to be my fault.

Her arms are like hummingbird wings flitting through the water.

She’s almost a foot away from him. They reach the rocks. He flips

right around, a smile visible when he breaks the surface just for

show. My own gills burn.

“Will you stop pacing?” Marty pulls on my cargo shorts. “It isn’t

going to help.”

Maybe not looking might somehow make this nauseous feeling go

away. I pick the spot directly across from me where the herald tents

are. Alone, while her future husband is racing my best friend, the

Snow White mermaid lies on heaps of blankets. The servants who

surrounded her moments ago are gathered at the edge of the lake. She

leans her cheek on her fist, bored. That’s when I see it. I mean, see

her. In a second, her gray eyes glaze over with a black shadow and her

lips mouth a single word, a word I can’t even begin to guess the

meaning of.

The crowd gasps and squeals as Layla speeds up. One, two, three,

four strokes, and she’s reached the other side of the shore.

Elias is only a second behind her, but it’s clear to everyone

watching that he’s lost.

The court is a mess-girls, kids, fathers- laughing. My grandfather

is still and pulls at the tip of his chin hair. He makes a motion to

reach for something at his right, his trident, and then realizes it

isn’t there anymore.

Elias has lost. He’s lost to a human girl, an intruder, and the

court is laughing at him. I look for his fiancйe, but she isn’t there

anymore, and I can’t find her in the crowds of the court.

In the lake, Layla cries out and cringes. She has a cramp and

grabs on to the rocky ledge. Kurt and Marty are weaving their way

through to help pull her out of the water as Elias turns his bloodshot

eyes on my friend. My Layla.

Brow tight, lips curled in a growl, hands outstretched for her

neck, he is literally a creature rising from the lake to attack her. I

can’t say I do this without thinking. I think he’s going to hurt her.

I don’t think about what this might do to my standing as a champion. I

run and dive into the lake, close enough to him that my splash

distracts him. Elias turns to me full on.

The shift comes naturally. It starts as a tingle in my spine,

right where my tattoo is, and it travels all the way down. In two

strokes I adjust to one tail movement instead of two kicking legs.

One, two, and I have my arms around him. One under the right arm and

one over his left shoulder. I squeeze him and he pushes hard against

me, so we sink into the water.

He’s physically stronger, and we go down, down, down. We hit

against a wall, and I let go of him. He charges at me with arms

outstretched, full speed, Superman underwater. We’re locked in a

wrestler’s grip, forearm to forearm.

Something in me is awakening. I don’t know what to call it.

Instinct is too simple. It’s older, more primal. It’s more than

defending a girl I’m possibly in love with; it’s knowing that I can

beat him. I push as hard as I can through the water. I can feel every

fiber in my body, every bone in my tail, and he cannot overpower me.

Something in me knows nothing can harm me. I am untouchable.

And then there is the darkness. We’re so far from the surface that

the light doesn’t reach us anymore. He breaks my hold and hits me

right on the jaw, sending me slamming against a boulder. His hands

close around my neck so my gills can’t take in water. I hold my

breath, but it isn’t enough. I wrap my tail around his, and even

though I can’t see his face, I can still see the whites of his eyes.

His grip loosens, and his eyes roll back into his head. He lets go

completely, falling down into the pitch-black. Did I do that? I

couldn’t have. I wouldn’t know how.

My stomach contracts and there’s that nauseous feeling again. My

head feels like it’s splitting open. I reach for Elias’s hand and try

to pull him up to the surface, but he’s as heavy as he looks, and my

muscles feel like elastic that’s given out and snapped.

I shut my eyes against the throbbing pain in my head, and I know

this is all happening because of her. I can see her face again.

Smiling, waiting in the black coldness of my dreams, the silver

mermaid. Waiting for a moment like this.

It’s daylight.

I’m drooling all over my arm in Ancient History. The teacher, Mr.

Van Oppen, leans his Hugh-Grant-looking self against the chalkboard.

He has a funny accent I can’t ever guess right and the kind of hair

that flops everywhere when he runs his fingers through it.

The girls are crazy about him. I’m talking Indiana-Jones-writing-o

n-their-eyelids-and-hanging-around-after-class-washing-the-eraser-boar

d-for-him kind of crazy.

“And what year did Alexander the Great conquer all? Come on, now,

it’s not like it’s in front of you on the reading assignment from last

night, hmm?”

Silence.

A sliver of light peers through the blinds and hits me right in

the eyes. Mr. Van Oppen pulls on the string to make the shutters stay

shut, and my eyes are unblinded. The lights in the classroom are so

bright that I can’t imagine how I fell asleep in the first place.

He taps my desk with his long, skinny index finger.

“Mr. Hart?” He never calls anyone by their first name.

“‘At the age of nineteen / He became the Macedon King / And he

swore to free all of Asia Minor / By the Aegean Sea / In 334 B.C. / He

utterly beat the armies of Persia’?”

“Very good, Mr. Hart. I see you’ve been listening to your Iron

Maiden, hmm?”

The class snickers.

“What made him a good king? Ms. Shea?”

Maddy sits with her legs up on the chair. She’s wearing a tiara

from her Sweet Sixteen party, which was really just me, her, Layla,

and some of her drama club nerds at Ruby’s on the boardwalk, because

her mom wouldn’t let her have a party. The tiara was my

will-you-be-my-girlfriend gift, along with a few other things I fished

out of my mom’s junk trunk.

Maddy pops a big, green bubble-gum ball and rolls her eyes. “Down

with kings! Alexander the Great was such a poser. Did he even fight?

No. He just got people killed, and killed a whole bunch of other

people who didn’t even want to be ruled. He killed them right there

and then-dead. Dead, dead.”

My head pounds at the temples.

There’s a knock on the door. Everyone looks at me, then at the

door. Then me again.

I stand and bump into the desk next to mine. It’s Layla’s. She

sits with her hands tied and propped on the desk. She has her head

down like she doesn’t want anyone to look at her face. “This is all

your fault, Tristan. All your fault,” she says.

“What the-” I grab her hands and start trying to undo the ropes,

but every time I get one knot undone, another one pops up in its

place.

Maddy gets up and out of her desk, and everyone goes, “ Oooooooh.

”

She stands over me and says, “You always picked Layla over me. Now

you got her dead. All you do is hurt people, Tristan Hart.”

“The door , Mr. Hart. The door. ” Mr. Van Oppen walks around and

sits on his desk. “Everyone else turn to page 1001, the future-the