Don't Tell Him I'm a Mermaid. Laura Steven

Molly’s painfully earnest fourteen-year-old roommate, was lecturing Mum on the importance of hiring professionals.

      Minnie, who was six, sat at the sodden kitchen table and laughed like a hyena for around twenty minutes.

      Unfortunately, the room was becoming so wet that the inevitable was surely about to happen. They were about to transform into mermaids, as they did whenever they got too close to a body of water. Or puddles. Or broken toilets.

      They were about to transform, and Minnie did not know their secret.

      ‘Minnie, can you please go and fetch the house phone?’ Mum asked in a strangled voice, as she accidentally swallowed another mouthful of manky dishwater.

      ‘Are you phoning the water police?’ Minnie cackled.

      ‘Yes,’ Melissa sighed. ‘Exactly. The water police.’

      ‘They have special handcuffs,’ Margot added seriously.

      ‘Can you go now, please?’ Mum asked through gritted teeth.

      As she felt her legs begin to tingle, Molly gripped the edge of the kitchen counter. Minnie splashed happily out into the corridor mere seconds before Molly’s stark white tail pinged into place.

      ‘Barricade,’ Mum barked. ‘Now.’

      Right as she was about to transform, Margot charged at a dining chair like a rugby player, shoving it along the floor until it slammed into the door. Unfortunately, her tail materialised right at the last minute, and she faceplanted the wet floor with a splosh and an oooft.

      ‘Do. Not. Let. Her. In.’ Melissa panted with the effort of holding herself upright on her buttercup-yellow tail. ‘Under any circumstances!’

      This may have seemed like an extreme reaction, but it was absolutely paramount that Minnie did not uncover the truth too soon. The mermaids had an agreement with the human government that they were allowed to live on land as long as they kept their true identities hidden. If the secret got out, they’d be banished back to Meire: the old mermaid queendom. Meire was now too dirty and dangerous to live in, thanks to pollution and . . . poop. A lot of human poop.

      There’s no way Minnie would be able to hold her tongue if she found out her mum and sisters were mermaids – and that she too would become one on her thirteenth birthday. For instance, after Mum gave her the talk about how she had a different dad, she went around telling the entire town that her dad was the ‘Predisent’ of the United States, but that her sisters were peasants. So there was no way something of this magnitude would stay schtum.

      ‘Heyyyy!’ Minnie yelled, pounding on the closed door with her tiny – and probably sticky – fist. ‘Let me in! Not fair!’

      ‘We’re having a grown-up chat, Minnie,’ Melissa called. ‘We’ll be out in a moment.’

      The door began to budge with the weight of a six-year-old flinging her full force against it, but Margot launched herself up with her pillarbox-red tail and plonked down into the barricade chair just in time. Minnie wailed in frustration.

      Just then, the doorbell rang. Mum exchanged worried glances with Myla.

      ‘The courier,’ Myla groaned, wriggling her emerald-green tail. Her wet hair was plastered to her forehead, and her glasses were covered in spray. ‘I ordered all those second-hand textbooks to be delivered today.’

      ‘They’ll go away in a minute, don’t worry,’ Mum said, dutifully ignoring the fact she was being squirted in the face by a spiteful appliance. ‘They’ll just leave one of those slips saying it’s with a neighbour or something.’

      ‘Or Minnie will go and let him in,’ Myla whispered in horror.

      ‘Quick! Knock her out with your tail!’ Margot said to Molly, knowing how much her sister enjoyed using her tail as a weapon.

      ‘Right, can we all just –’

      Mum’s words were cut off by a fresh spray of water to the face, and a nervous tap on the kitchen window.

      It was the courier, peering right in to a room full of mermaids.

      Ever the quick thinker, Margot dived towards the dishwasher and whirled it around to face the window, so the gushing cascade of water sprayed straight into the glass and obscured the courier’s vision. Such a feat would normally be impossible, but Margot’s merpower – for each mermaid has a special gift – was superhuman strength. Myla’s was being able to read mythical sea languages without ever having to study, while Melissa’s was being a know-it-all, i.e. being able to tell whenever someone was lying.

      ‘I’ll come back later then,’ the courier called meekly through the glass.

      ‘Do you think he saw?’ Melissa gasped. ‘Oh god, oh god, oh god. What if he saw, Mum?’

      ‘Was it the courier? I didn’t see,’ Mum said, but she was chewing her bottom lip, and Molly could tell she was genuinely worried about being banished.

      Molly’s stomach twisted. She hadn’t exactly done a fantastic job of keeping the whole tail thing under wraps.

      She’d only found out about her life as a half-mermaid on her thirteenth birthday, a mere two months ago, and yet she’d already accidentally transformed in front of Felicity Davison, the most popular girl in school. There was a whole fandango which involved taking a penguin hostage, but Felicity had eventually agreed not to tell anyone Molly’s secret – as long as Molly promised not to spread the word about Felicity’s mum’s cancer. Molly only knew about Mrs Davison’s illness thanks to her own merpower: reading people’s emotions. She would never have told anyone something so personal, especially having been through it with her own mum, but Felicity didn’t trust her. Their truce was a shaky one, and Molly lived in fear of Felicity going back on her word.

      ‘Can I come in yet?’ Minnie asked. ‘I need a poo.’

CHAPTER TWO

       Like, Super-Hot in a Totally Fit Way

      The next morning at school, Molly was convinced she smelled of ancient dishwasher fluid. All through double maths, she kept quietly sniffing at herself as if trying to figure out whether she’d remembered to apply deodorant. Her best friend Ada stared at her as though she might have contracted leprosy in the night. Ada was very glamorous and cool, and had probably never smelled like an old dishwasher in her life.

      Ms Stavros was really trying her very hardest to make pre-algebra interesting. The Sterling Secondary School for Promising Little Marmouthians (SPLUM to its pupils) was one of those ‘outstanding’ places where the teachers all care very deeply, which Molly found quite irritating because it meant you were supposed to care too.

      It wasn’t that she hated school for no reason. It was just that everything they learned was boring, and she could never hold her concentration for more than five seconds, and it seemed like everyone had a special interest except her.

      Lately, whenever her attention drifted in class, she invariably began to think about mermaid life. While she’d initially been absolutely mortified by the entire thing – and to be honest, having a fish tail was still vaguely gross – now curiosity itched at her like a woolly jumper. Her mind kept meandering down to Meire, wondering what the magical queendom had been like in its heyday, before the pollution and the poop. Mermaids used to live there by choice, after all, and if Clamdunk – the bonkers national sport – was anything to go by, it was all rather magical and strange.

      As humiliating as the spontaneous transformations were, Molly found herself wanting to know more about this other side of her life. She wanted to experiment with her merpower, and try out Clamdunk for herself, and maybe even