“She’s your cousin?” he said to the girls. “I’ve never seen anyone like her before.”

“That’s because she isn’t like anyone else. She’s special,” Hailey told Raymond. “And she’s had an accident, sort of, so don’t ask her to dance.”

Hailey and Claire waited outside on the patio. They pulled up lounge chairs and listened to the murmur of voices and the beautiful sound of Aquamarine’s watery laughter. Up in the summer sky, there were so many stars a person would never be able to count them all. Claire wondered if there would be the exact same stars in Florida, and if when she gazed out her window she’d still be looking at the same constellations that Hailey saw.

“That new girl with the red hair isn’t so horrible,” Claire said. “Her name is Susanna. Susie Q. You get it?” The new people had come back again, and Claire had showed Susanna the room that would soon be hers. “She’s actually nice.”

“I don’t care,” Hailey said. “It doesn’t really matter to me if she’s nice or not. I’m never talking to her.”

“Unless there’s a fire,” Claire reminded her friend.

“Or an earthquake,” Hailey said grudgingly.

“You’d have to,” Claire said. “You’d have no choice.”

“But I’d never call her on the phone with our code.”

“No. You never would.”

Sometimes it was a comfort to say the thing you were most afraid of aloud. Tonight, Claire felt certain that stars would shine as brightly, no matter where a person was when she watched them. Even if someone was at the bottom of the deepest sea, the light would find her.

When it was nearly nine o’clock, the girls went to retrieve Aquamarine. Silvery moonlight was spilling into the cafeteria. Raymond looked a little stunned when the girls said he’d better say good-bye to their cousin. Time had a habit of moving too fast. Anyone could see that from the expression on Raymond’s face.

“Already?” he said mournfully. All last night he had dreamed of the ocean, and now it seemed to him that he might be dreaming still.

“It’s not time,” Aquamarine insisted. “It can’t be over.”

But it was. Beneath the wheelchair a circle of fish scales the color of moonlight had collected. Each one was now evaporating into fine, green dust.

“Can I have your phone number?” Raymond asked the mermaid as the girls hurried to wheel her out the door. “Your address?”

“No,” Hailey and Claire said at the same time. “She’s going away.”

“I’m going away, too,” Raymond said, confused.

“Well, she’s going farther,” Claire told him.

“She’s going someplace you can’t ever get to,” Hailey added.