His father’s second cousin once removed Lindy and her husband, Elias, had made it clear that they didn’t want to keep Dorian permanently. They were too old and tired to cope with a teenager. It was just their bad luck that they happened to live right in the town where he’d literally washed up and that his parents had included their phone number on some form they’d filled out. The result was that Dorian had been left with them more or less by default. They reminded him occasionally that this was just a temporary arrangement until something better could be worked out, but since nobody else was exactly clamoring to take over as his guardian, he had the impression that he’d probably be stuck with them for a while. They acted skittish around him, mincing and whispering in a way that made him queasy and impatient. The only good thing he could say for them was that they’d at least followed the psychologist’s advice to keep quiet about his connection to the sinking of the Dear Melissa. No one in his school knew he’d been on the ship, not even the principal, and he liked it that way. If everyone had kept asking him questions about it, he was pretty sure he would have gone insane.

He’d been asked way too many questions already, by a parade of out-of-towners flown in to investigate the ship’s crash. Therapists and cops, insurance agents, and even someone who claimed to be from the FBI. What had happened? Had he noticed anything unusual? And, of course, how on earth had he swum twelve miles alone in less than an hour? Some of them seemed to doubt that he’d been on the ship at all, though his name was right there on the passenger manifest.

He gave the same answers to all of them: he didn’t remember anything. He’d been standing on the deck, and everything had gone black. He’d come to on the shore.

It had turned into a kind of game. They asked the same questions; he gave the same answers. Like some kind of nightmare merry-go-round: I don’t remember, I don’t remember, I don’t remember.

He wasn’t about to tell them that he’d been rescued by a killer mermaid.

His reserve wasn’t only because they wouldn’t believe him or that they might even throw him into an asylum for hopeless lunatics, though those were definitely factors.

It was all just too private: the mermaid girl’s painfully beautiful face, the searing amazement of those voices, the squeezing closeness of death. He wouldn’t have described it even to his best friend, much less to a bunch of pushy, self-important strangers.