Bella tapped her fingers anxiously on her desk, holding her iPhone to her ear.
“Bella? I was just about to call you, actually. What’s up?” her boyfriend, Will Benjamin, answered.
“Nothing much, I just got back from a swim. Classes are going to start soon. How’s diving?”
Will had gotten a prestigious scholarship to dive at the University of Sydney. They were going to try making a long distance relationship work, but already it was hard. She had no idea how Cleo and Lewis did it.
“It’s great, we’re learning some new breath-holding techniques and my coach is impressed with my mono fin.” Will told her. “What’s the ocean like up there?”
“It’s beautiful.” Bella gushed. “There are so many colors, fish I’ve never seen…and the reef. I found some really cool shells I think you might like.”
Will told her a few more stories about his classes (which had started the week before) and complained about Sydney traffic. Bella shared her college life so far, only excluding the lagoon, Charlotte and Sophie. But she had to tell him about it. Sophie was his sister, after all.
“When you come up to visit I have to show you this place I found. We were swimming around the reef and I found this cave. It was lined with coral all the way through. It opens up into this lagoon…Will, the lagoon is just like the moon pool.” She tried to explain the magical quality of it. “There are crystals everywhere, in the rocks, in the sand. And one end has a waterfall.”
“Wow.” Will said. “That’s crazy. And it’s like the moon pool, it can transform people?”
Bella knew she had to bring up the Sophie thing now. “Yes…”
“How do you know?” he asked.
“It kind of happened already.” She blurted out.
“What?!” Will exclaimed.
Bella explained everything, about how the other girls had gone off and Bella went exploring. She came back and couldn’t stop Charlotte and Sophie from entering the lagoon. She could imagine Will’s shocked expression in his head.
“My sister is a mermaid? Bella, you know how much she loves power. She’ll go crazy for it.” Will said. “She doesn’t have any powers, does she? Oh God, please let her not have Rikki’s…there’ll be bushfires every night if she has fire power.”
“We tested that today. The other girl, Charlotte, can grow plants, and Sophie can control rocks.” Bella told him, clutching the phone to her cheek. She sat down on her small bed. The conversation was longer than she had expected.
“Great, so there will be earthquakes because of her.” Bella was 90% sure Will was being sarcastic, so she laughed. “I’m coming over, right now.”
Bella laughed again. “Will, it’s more than a twenty hour drive.”
“What if you and Sophie swim while I drive? You girls have to swim faster than the traffic. We can meet up by my old boatshed. It’ll be, what, three hours for me and less than an hour for you two?”
Bella considered it. She really did want to see Will again, and she had been on long-distance swims before…
Bella agreed before she could really think it over. They worked out that Bella and Sophie could start swimming in two hours, so they’d both arrive around the same time.
Bella ate lunch and texted Sophie about the plan. Her and Sophie had never gotten along in the past, but now that they were both mermaids she was hoping to change that. She hated not being on good terms with her boyfriend’s family. If Sophie would give her a chance, Bella could do the same.
Sophie agreed to the plan and they started swimming on schedule. Sophie was quite a fast swimmer, despite the fact that she had only been a mermaid for a day. She kept up with Bella really well and the girls swam to the Gold Coast easily. She wasn’t even tired.
They surfaced, Sophie’s red hair pushed back from her face. Bella wondered what color her hair had been before she dyed it. There were a lot of little things about Sophie Bella had never taken the time to notice; now she could.
“The boatshed is this way.” Sophie said. Bella nodded and they dived back under.
Will was sitting on the dock, waiting for them and studying something. He knew Sophie was a mermaid but that didn’t stop him from looking shocked at seeing her in a tail. Sophie grinned from ear to ear.
“Soph…wow!” was all Will could say. “I’ll get some towels.”
Will helped the girls dry off and poured them some lemonade back in the boatshed (with straws, of course). They filled Sophie in on a lot of things she hadn’t understood before. Now she knew why Will wouldn’t dive for the coach she had flown in, because Bella was in the pool, and how Rikki saved Will during the diving competition.
Bella noticed Sophie’s angry expression when Rikki was mentioned, and realized that she still held a grudge against Bella’s blonde friend. Some rifts ran too deep to mend, and she had a feeling Sophie and Rikki would never be friends.
Sophie didn’t seem to think being a mermaid was bad. Bella remembered when she was little and had first transformed in Ireland. The first few days she thought it was cool, until she found out that she couldn’t go to pool parties, or take showers in gym class, and she had miss out on a lot of cool things to keep the secret. She was happy that Sophie was positive about it, but being a mermaid was a lot harder than it appeared.
Bella tried to tell Sophie this, but Sophie brushed off her warnings.
“I can help you train now, Will!” she told her brother with a huge smile.
Bella and Will smiled back tightly, but deep inside her Bella wondered if someone so reckless was good at keeping a secret like this—or if Sophie would be the one to expose them all.
