“What the heck just happened?” Jules said, baffled.

“I have no idea,” I said. My instincts were like strobe lights. Something was going on. It wasn’t what they said, or their verbal rejections. It was what they didn’t say.

* * *

Later that night I saw my aunts and mother in the gazebo, the stars peeking out between the clouds, the purple wisteria in shadow. The roses nearby, in neat rows, were still in the quiet. Their heads were close together, then my aunts put their arms around my mother. They stared toward the ocean in the distance, lights from the fishing boats twinkling.

I had another piece of butterscotch pie as I watched them. Sometimes butterscotch helps me think better. I think. Or something like that.

But it did nothing that night to help me figure out what in the world was going on.

They worried me.

Chapter 20

Chapter 20

“King Koradome, the evil merman, was right. Serafina kept helping people. She held sailors up in the water who had fallen off ships. She rescued her sister from the jaws of a shark. She helped the older mermen and mermaids when they were sick. She was generous with the shells she found in the ocean and gave them away as gifts to mergirls and merboys who needed a smile. She rescued a mermaid with four mermaid children who had been caught in a fisherman’s net.”

“Did she lose her rainbow scales?”

“She did. Every time. The shiny, colorful scales flew off one by one, with each kind deed, through the sea to King Koradome in his black rock home. He laughed in victory when one reached his palm, and he put the scales in a tall glass jar. He liked to stare at them as they shimmered with light and layers of color. He liked knowing that her family, that Serafina, was suffering as they watched her lose her special tail. First it was one row of scales, then another and another.”

“Did she lose all of her scales?”

Chapter 21

Chapter 21

“I don’t like memoirs.”

“What?” I glared at the sulky young woman in front of me with pink- and purple-streaked dreadlocks. She had a serpent tattooed on her arm. A mean serpent. “How can you not like memoirs? It’s a peek into someone’s life, a part of their life that’s tragic or interesting or funny. How do you not want to read about someone else?”

Her eyes widened, surprised at my semi-anger. But, come on. You don’t like memoirs?

“I don’t.”

I wanted to shake her right there in my yellow bookstore by my yellow rose wallpaper. “You have got to be kidding me. How do you learn about how others cope with their lives or the adventures they’ve experienced or their crazy families if you don’t read memoirs?”

“I . . . well . . . I don’t know.” She seemed confused now, as if she was actually considering my question.