Between the Land and the Sea - By Derrolyn Anderson Page 0,88
cursed, and started to adopt a fatalistic attitude. I remembered that Evie always said that even if fate means for you to lose, you should put up a good fight anyway.
The next few days came and went, and I kept waking to find myself standing by the door, knob in hand. I started moving the desk against the door too. I was beginning to feel increasingly spacy, as though I were disengaging from daily life. My dreams began to seem more and more real, and I escaped into them to avoid Ethan’s terrible indifference. I felt horrible, like I was being punished for something I had no control over.
Cruz was in his own little world and didn’t pay much attention, but Megan pulled me aside at lunch on Friday, “What happened between you and Ethan?”
“I don’t know,” I said, fidgeting. I had made the same promise to Megan and Cruz about not going mermaid hunting. I didn’t want to disappoint her too.
“Should I go ask him?” she looked at me with playful exasperation.
“Oh Megan,” I broke down, my eyes filling up with tears. She put her arm around my shoulders and sat me down at a bench. I hadn’t slept more than a few hours at a time for a week and I lost control, shuddering with suppressed sobs. “Sorry,” I choked, trying to pull it together. I looked up to see Ethan watching us.
“Oh God,” I said, trying to hide my face. Megan looked up to see him.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. I passed a surprised looking Cruz the Jag keys and we hurried out to Megan’s car. “Girl stuff,” Megan said to Cruz over her shoulder. We drove to a coffee shop and sat in a corner booth, ordering coffee and fiddling with little paper packets of sugar.
“So,” she said frankly, “Spill the beans.”
My first impulse was to lie, to keep it to myself and gloss over the facts. I hated to be weak, to see pity in people’s eyes. Being brought up a motherless child, I was all too familiar with that look, and I hated it.
“Well...” I started to equivocate, dancing around the edges of the story. Then I met Megan’s skeptical eyes and something inside me surrendered. I told her all the secrets I’d been keeping in a flood of cathartic truth telling. She listened carefully while I told her about my mother, my dreams, and even the sleepwalking.
“That explains a lot,” she said, and I was grateful for her analytical nature. We discussed what everything meant, taking into account my hybrid status. When the waitress came to take our order she looked at me thoughtfully and asked, “Would it be cannibalistic of you to eat tuna salad?” We broke into hysterical laughter and the waitress looked at us like we had just broken out of the lunatic asylum.
“We should probably tell Cruz,” I said, “But do you mind if we wait until he gets Evie’s dress done?”
“Good idea,” Megan said with a knowing look, “He’s a total stressmobile already!” It felt so good to sit and laugh, to be honest. I felt like a ton of weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
“Thanks, Megan,” I said sincerely. “I guess I really needed to talk about everything.”
“Do you know what your problem is?” she asked, looking up at me over her coffee.
I knew this was a rhetorical question, and that she was going to tell me whether or not I wanted to hear it.
“You mean besides the obvious?” I replied sarcastically.
“Seriously,” she said, “You keep too much to yourself. You seem to think you have to do everything alone.”
I couldn’t argue, for I knew that was one of the reasons my father gave for sending me here in the first place. I thought self-sufficiency was a virtue; how could one possibly be too independent?
“It does feel better to let it out,” I said.
“Do you want to tell me what happened with Ethan?” she asked.
I told her that Ethan knew everything, and that I’d broken a promise to him by seeking out Lorelei on my own.
“You can see I had no choice... right?” I said with indignation.
“If you say so,” she met my gaze levelly, ruining my justification with her eyes.
I looked down, “I suppose I should have said something... but he gets so freaked out about everything. He wouldn’t have wanted me to do anything.”
“I noticed he’s been avoiding you like the plague,” she said.