The Girl Who Pulls the Tides - ONC 2021

chapter 8

By the time I get home, night has settled over Norholm, draping the apartment in light-purple, early-evening shadows. I shut the door behind me and slump against it, glancing around the dusky room.

Everything looks a little different—a few degrees off-center, like the earth tipped on its axis when I met Evyana.

I smell sea salt on my skin and smile to myself.

Maybe I'm the one that's different.

I push off the door and make my way through the kitchen, pulling a leftover piece of flatbread from the fridge and stuffing it in my mouth. As I move around to grab a glass of water, I notice that the sink is empty. Jack must've done the dishes that have been building up all week.

I leave the kitchen and head for my room, glancing at my bed before sitting down at the hard seat of my desk. I pull my journal out of my knapsack and leaf through the pages, holding it up to my nose and taking a deep breath. It smells like the ocean, too, like the ocean and magic. I read through my scribbled notes, tracing the letters with my fingertip, trying to cement the words into my head. Then I type them all up.

A STUDY OF SEA SPIRITS

Chapter 1

Everyone knows about Pemaquid Cove: The little sandy beach on the Northside of Norholm, surrounded on all sides by steep cliffs that shoot up from the shore like blackened glaciers. Thousands of years of battering waves have striped the cliff-face all different shades of black and gray. Everyone goes swimming in the cove on hot summer days, and swoony high-school students go skinny-dipping on warm summer nights. We keep the cove hidden from the few wayfaring tourists who find themselves here in June or July—it's probably the best-kept secret on the whole island. Hidden within the cliffs are sprawling caves, perfect for little kids to play pretend treasure-hunters, finding treasure in clamshells and heart-shaped rocks, or for young lovers to etch their initials into the cave walls with sharpened sea glass. The yawning caves look like something out of a fantasy book; they could be the lairs of sleeping sea dragons who slumber deep within the darkness of the hollows, their wings folded around their snakelike bodies as they drowse, the sound of their snores masked by the pull of the tides.

But no sea dragons live in Pemaquid Cove. However, a Nereid does.

I rowed out to the cove earlier today (facing my bone-deep fear of the ocean, thank you very much). I was optimistic, but I also had realistic expectations; I didn't think I'd find a Nereid on my very first day of research.

But I did! Before going out on the water, I researched sea spirits at the library. I took inspiration from a book called A Comprehensive Guide to Finding Mermaids and threw a few items into the water that were supposed to attract sea spirits. It didn't work precisely the way the book had promised—it wasn't the objects that enticed the Nereid; it was the threat of someone littering in her cove—but still, it worked. Several things happened very quickly after first seeing her: One, I fell off the boat. Two, she saved me from a watery death. Three, in a display of breath-stopping magic, she sucked all the cold seawater off of me like a vacuum and then water-bended it all back into the ocean. Four, we made a deal.

The deal was this: If she teaches me about Nereids, I'll teach her about humans. A simple exchange of information. An equally beneficial deal.

A deal that, according to the people of Norholm, makes me a traitor to my species. A breaker of all the unspoken rules. A chaser of trouble.

If I'm all those things, so is she.

Her full name is Nere Evyana. She said that Nereids use the prefix Nere to indicate their species. When I told her that humans didn't have any such prefix, she suggested we start using Homo as a title for Homo Sapien. "Homo Fionn," she'd said delightedly. "It sounds lovely."

I only had time to ask her surface-level questions today: name, age, pronouns, things like that. I confirmed that Evyana identifies with the pronouns she/her/hers, even though she told me that Nereids don't categorize gender as strictly as humans do. She also revealed that Nereids don't measure their lives as humans do. But, assuming that Nereids and humans age at roughly the same rate, she looks around my age, or maybe a little older—in her late-teen years. She could be any ordinary student at the University if only she didn't move with such unnatural grace or have lightning-strike gray eyes or speak with an accent that sounds as ancient and mysterious as the ocean itself.

We made a plan to meet again tomorrow at Pemaquid Cove.

I really don't know anything about her yet.

Yet!