When her search is complete, she leans against the wall nearest the door, adjusts her rifle strap so that the gun hangs where her hands can reach it, and then watches us.
“Fun,” Bex mouths as we stare at each other in disbelief. “Hope you don’t have to use the toilet today.”
Bex can always laugh at this stuff, but I hate it, and I hate this woman. She should be ashamed of herself for taking a job where she spies on girls in the bathroom, but my father’s voice rings in my head, keeping me from telling her so. Smile, look respectful, make her believe it. So I do, and the cop smiles.
“So what do you think?” Bex asks.
“About?”
“The new kids. I got really close to the big one. He has spikes on his shoulders,” Bex says.
“He’s a Selkie,” I tell her.
“Selkie, huh? Did you see the little one?”
“Which one? The Nix or the Ceto?”
“Nix, maybe? How do you know the difference?” she asks.
“They’ve been on TV every day for three years, Bex,” I whisper. I know a lot more than what they tell us on TV, but I’m supposed to be playing dumb. Play dumb, Lyric! Okay, Dad.
“Is the Nix the one with all the teeth?” she asks.
The cop chuckles. “Rows and rows of them. Sharp and pointy.”
Bex squeals and hops around like she’s trying to avoid stepping in dog poo.
“Two of the girls are very pretty,” Bex says as she steals the lip gloss from my purse.
“For talking fish,” the cop says.
“One of the boys is pretty too, and he’s a prince,” Bex says. “I call dibs. I’m going to marry him and have a million little fish babies.”
The guard clears her throat and gives us both the kind of hard stare my father gives to murderers and my boyfriends. “That’s sick, kid. Those things aren’t people.”
“It was just a joke,” Bex says defensively.
The cop’s lips curl into a snarl. “Joking about lying with animals isn’t funny. I’m supposed to report stuff like that.”
“I really think it was innocent,” I say, trying to quell the argument, but they both dismiss me.
“You need to watch your mouth, girl. A lot of people might think you were serious,” the guard continues.
“A lot of morons, maybe,” Bex says, standing her ground.
“It’s going to get you hurt . . . like that kid they hung from the Wonder Wheel.”
That kid’s name was Kevin Folkes. When the Alpha arrived, people went down to the beach to ogle them, back when they were a curiosity and not something to fear. Kevin started a friendship with one of them and even helped her pick a name—Madison. She was a vision of hotness, but most Sirena are. They’re the closest to what people think of when you think mermaid—long flowing hair, beautiful face, flawless body—but when they’re on land they lose their tails and at first glance are as human as everyone else. My mom is a Sirena.
Kevin was smitten. He gave Madison little presents: flowers, clothes, shoes. He made her a playlist and fed one end of his headphones through the fence so they could listen to it together. It was puppy love, innocent really, but people talked. A TV preacher said Kevin was committing bestiality, a sin against God, but Kevin ignored him. Then, one morning, soldiers found his body hanging from the Wonder Wheel, fifty feet in the air. Someone had tied a chain around his neck, attached an end to one of the cars, and turned on the ride.
“Well, that won’t happen, because I’ve got you to protect me, even in the bathroom!” Bex crows.
The bell rings.
“Get out of here,” the cop snarls.
I snatch up my things and grab my friend.
“Bex, you can’t do that. She could report you,” I say once we’re in the hall.
“Screw her,” Bex says. “Stupid toilet cop.”
“I’m serious,” I cry.
“Sometimes I don’t get you, Lyric. Are you going to let everyone intimidate you?” she says.
I wish the answer weren’t yes.
Chapter Six
There are schools in New York, even in Brooklyn, that are temples to education. Their walls of glass and stone rise into the sky, beckoning to the city’s elite and affluent. John F. Hylan High School is not one of those schools. Our school is a depressing, hopeless holding cell for future criminals, with outdated books, a staff of misfits drummed out of every other school in the state, and a student body of barely awake degenerates. The Board of Education hasn’t appropriated the funds to wire the entire building for the Internet. Apparently, they think it’s a fad. We haven’t had a full-time librarian in years, but that’s okay, ’cause no one is banging down the doors to check out Someday We Will Go To The Moon. There’s no music department. No art class. No after-school sports. Hylan’s architect must have gone on to a lucrative career designing maximum-security prisons. Built in 1945, it probably would have been demolished years ago if it weren’t in the Zone. Nothing gets knocked down here. Nothing gets built, either, except fences.
But Hylan does have one thing going for it: Mr. Ervin, a kind, passionate guy who really does seem to enjoy his job. He’s waiting outside my homeroom class, smiling and giving our faces his full attention. He’s the first happy person I’ve seen in days, and if I didn’t know him, I’d suspect it was chemically induced. He came up from the middle school, where Bex and I had him for health class (another name for sex education). There he suffered through our endless giggling while he showed us gross-out slides of STDs. I wonder if he remembers us from then.