That night Claire was thinking about what might happen if there ever really was a fire; how Hailey would run over in her nightgown and pound her fists on the door to wake everyone and save them, and how the red-haired girl would always be grateful, and how no one would even remember that Claire had ever lived in that same house. Claire was so wrapped up in trying to forecast the future, that she wasn’t her usual problem-solving self. Frankly, she wasn’t herself at all. She nearly jumped out of her chair when the phone rang. It was the friends’ special signal: one ring, then hang up, then call right back again.

Claire went into the kitchen to answer the phone. She looked through the window and across the yard to where Hailey was, in her own kitchen. All night, Claire had been wondering who she would be without Hailey to take up her plans and turn them into actions. In case of a fire, would Claire be courageous enough to knock on the door of a burning house?

Hailey waved across the yard. “I found an encyclopedia of mythical creatures.” Hailey held a red book up to the window for Claire to see.

“She’s not mythological,” Claire reminded her friend.

“Well, whatever she is, this book says that no mermaid can remain on land. The longest survival on record was one week in a circus and on the seventh day that mermaid dried up from head to tail. Nothing was left but a pile of green dust.”

“What can we do?” Claire said. “She won’t listen to us.”

Unless Hailey was mistaken, Claire was actually asking for advice. Now that the responsibility rested with her, there was really no choice but for Hailey to come up with a plan, and that’s exactly what she did.

“All we need to do is get her what she wants,” Hailey decided. “Then she’ll have to listen.”

3

RAYMOND WAS PACKING HIS BOOKS when they found him. He had worked at the Capri for four summers, and although he still hadn’t figured out how to cook a hamburger without burning the meat, he’d read one hundred and twenty-two books during his time at the beach. All the same, he wasn’t sure he’d read quite enough to go to college. The future seemed like a cloud that day, the black, stormy kind it was impossible to see through, the sort that could make a person believe that blue skies would never again return.

But Raymond’s worrying was interrupted when the girls ran to the snack counter to tell him they needed his help. They had a cousin visiting, they told him, from overseas, which wasn’t so far from the truth. To make certain their cousin wouldn’t be bored, the girls wanted Raymond to have dinner with her the following night.