But Elder Kelp just gives a knowing smile and slowly shakes their head. “You know I cannot do that, Crest. It is my responsibility as the Elder of Journeys to accompany you through the Blue until I bid you farewell, legs in place, and your feet firmly in the sand. You will not trick me again, you rotten fiendfish.” They say it with a playfully scolding fin wag, like they’ve caught a merbabe trying to grab a fistful of seaweed before it’s their turn to eat. The last thing I want to do before I’m stranded to live on my own for a month is be treated like a baby.

“Okay, okay, I get it.”

Elder Kelp places a hand on my shoulder, that knowing yet condescending look back in their eyes, which does nothing to dampen my frustration. “This Journey is your rite of passage,” they say. “It’s tradition for all merfolk of Pacifica.”

“Yet you just broke tradition! Fiendfish? Merfolk? Elder Pearl says no mer-isms around us until after our return. Human sayings only.”

“Very good,” Elder Kelp says, a smirk of satisfaction creeping up their wrinkly skin. “That was a test. And it appears you’ve been paying attention in your lessons, my child of Pacifica.”

I hate that word. If I’m such a child, why make me leave my home and live among humans all by myself?

I flick my fin in irritation, an angry orange blur, and nearly whack a passing tortoise. “My bad!” After a year of human-speech therapy, their sayings are starting to stick. Which is exactly what I don’t want. “I know you’ve explained it a thousand times, but I’m just not buying the reason for this whole Journey. I mean, yes, I’ve got to help a human, but after that, I just swim back to Pacifica and Joe Blowhole or whoever forgets I even existed.”

“Which is precisely the point,” Elder Kelp says. “Truly selfless help, like the Blue gave our ancestors. Or have you not been paying as much attention in your classes as I thought? The tradition began millennia ago—”

I curl up my fin to stop him. Every merbabe—I mean child, or kid—knows this story. Thousands of years ago, during the Blue Moon, when the magic of the Blue (ugh, the ocean) saved a band of shipwrecked humans drowning and crying for help by transforming them into the first merfolk. Our ancestors pledged their lives and the existence of all mer to protecting the waters that saved them. We’d also live our lives by the example of the Blue, which led to the creation of the Journey: One full moon cycle on land when we have to help a human, a totally selfless act like the Blue did for the first merfolk all those years ago.