“And you want to really know what’s beautiful?” Kavya pulls out her phone and opens up all kinds of social media apps. Videos of Ross at the Hollywood Walk of Fame are everywhere, their fin flopping uselessly on so many different accounts.

“How in the Blue could you think that’s beautiful?” Ross asks. “Not only do I look like a complete fool with my tail flapping everywhere, but it’s just me, alone. How is anyone going to think I’m some superhero wannabe now?”

“That’s just it,” Kavya explains. “You were in the right place at the right time. It didn’t matter who was around you; people think you were doing that for attention.” She scrolls through the comments. Some say it’s hilarious, others think it’s irresponsible, a few even wonder if the crash was staged just so Ross could have their moment. But no one mentions Ross being a real live merperson. “In fact, you’ve started a trend.”

She clicks on a hashtag and there’s video after video of people in merfins flopping around in their sprinkler systems, at water parks, at their own busted fire hydrants in city streets.

“They’re calling it #Fishing,” Kavya says, flipping to TikTok, Twitter, Instagram. #Fishing everywhere. “It doesn’t matter when, how, or if your fin ever comes out again. People are just going to think you’re a desperate social media whore.”

“And that’s a good thing?” Ross asks.

Kavya’s never looked more sure of anything in her life. “Absolutely.”

     Ross     

“Oh my god, I can’t believe you’re real!”

“So do you just, like, keep that fin in the trunk of your car, or what?”

“But where do you put, you know, it when you’ve got that on? You’ve got to tuck, right?”

Sean glares at the guy who asked that one. “Okay, that’s a little personal, don’t you think, Dale?”

I am bombarded by people. They are just as nosy and intrusive as I always thought they’d be. There’s literally a line of people down the bleachers waiting to talk to me and take selfies and figure out how we got that Trojan truck to crash at exactly the right time and make sure nobody got hurt, including the driver, who some classmate insists must have been a stunt driver.

This #Fishing thing has taken off. Sean says it’s all anyone’s been talking about at school, that they think it was some trick he pulled for his film class, and that other people are bringing their own merfins ranging from cardboard and bedsheets to full-on prosthetic scales to random spaces. And not just at his school either, but all over the country. Apparently the various videos of the crash and me flopping on the Walk of Fame have been viewed thousands of times. Some even hundreds of thousands.