Kavya shrugs. “My whole life, I guess. Well, probably not technically, but for as long as I can remember. I first heard about it when my mom was teaching me how to swim. She’d take me to the pool at the club, and she’d whisper stories to me about being mer. She was always open about it, but made me promise not to tell anybody. It felt like a game. But then I remember in third grade, Erica Carlsbad came to class and told me the Tooth Fairy wasn’t real, and everybody trashed all these things I believed in. No Tooth Fairy, no Easter Bunny, no Santa. And I figured that Mom’s stories must have been part of that. Just make-believe. The next time we went to the pool and she told me another story about the Blue, I told her to stop. I told her I wasn’t a baby anymore and that I didn’t need her to tell me stories. But she said she’d prove it to me.

“It took about a year until she could, the day after the next Journey Moon.” On my confused look she says, “That’s the full moon before a Blue Moon. So Mom took me to the beach and told me to wait. If we watched closely, we’d see somebody float ashore, that they’d have a fin, but the second their body hit the beach it would vanish in the blink of an eye. We waited for hours. My eyes were so sore from keeping them wide open, not wanting to blink in case I missed it. But soon enough, she was right. A mer with long, flowing black hair washed onshore, and the second their brown skin hit the sand, legs appeared. Clothes too. The beach was so busy nobody even noticed. They got up, wobbled a bit, dusted themself off, then walked away. I wanted to run after them, but Mom stopped me. She told me that a mer needed to go on this trip alone, to make some life choices on their own. So I watched them walk away, and with each step they took it was solidified in my heart that all this is real. That magic is real. You just have to know where to look for it.”

I think we may have found it right here. Kavya’s words have totally put a spell on me and, by the way their mouth is hanging open, Ross too. I feel like I was there with her through all of it.

“That’s . . .” Ross searches for the right word. “Beautiful,” they finally whisper.

Kavya hooks an elbow around Ross’s neck and gives him a noogie. “Ah, come on, don’t get all sappy on me.”

The death glare Ross gives Kavya when she releases them is priceless.