And Then I Turned Into a Mermaid. Laura Kirkpatrick

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СКАЧАТЬ chip shop where Molly and her sisters were forced to help out. And sometimes, to attract those paying customers, she had to dress up as a giant haddock. With fins and everything.

      She also hated the sea because her bonkers mum was partial to skinny-dipping, which the kids at school absolutely loved to make fun of. Every single lunchtime, without fail, Miranda Seabrook dived into the sea. Naked. And every single lunchtime, without fail, Molly was so ashamed that she wanted to roll around in flour and toss herself in the deep-fat fryer just to avoid the pointing and staring.

      So again, obvious reasons.

      Today, even though it was the end of October half-term, the haddock suit was still hotter than the sun. Trapped in a tomb of polyester scales, Molly was essentially one enormous sweat gland. Salt crystals dripped from her eyebrows and into her stinging eyes. It was nearly the end of her shift, so she looked around for somewhere to ditch her remaining flyers.

      She soon found her target. Molly thrust a wodge of leaflets into a snooty old lady’s canvas shopping bag as she went past. Ordinarily she would feel bad for reverse pickpocketing, but that same snooty old lady had called the police last week and reported Molly’s mum’s skinny-dipping. Really, Molly wanted to put an end to her mother’s naked antics more than anyone, but having to watch a seaweed-covered Miranda Seabrook being lectured by an angry police officer? While dressed as an oversized fish? Surely it was more humiliation than any normal human being could handle.

      The sun-dappled pier was rammed with tourists sucking on seamarbles – Little Marmouth’s famous boiled sweets. Seamarbles were sweet and tangy and blue, with miniature candy fish inside. Molly hated them on principle.

      In fact, right now she hated most things. She hated the crying toddlers shoving sticky hands into her remaining stash of leaflets. She hated the seagulls cawing overhead in constant poop-threat. She hated the gaggle of popular kids from school daring each other to wade waist deep into the freezing North Sea, squealing and splashing and shrieking, stifling laughs whenever they looked her haddocky way. Most of all, she hated how she wanted to be one of them.

      But the Seabrooks had never been popular. After all, popularity isn’t easy when you’re loud and brash and always smell like stale chip grease.

      Molly lived in a wonky old lighthouse with her four sisters, each more embarrassing than the last, and a mum who liked to feel the sea breeze on her privates. Try as she might to fix those things, Molly knew with heart-aching certainty that she would never fit in.

      Just as she was contemplating hurling her stack of flyers into the sea and abandoning the Good Ship Haddock, her youngest sister Minnie darted out of the shop and yanked her by the hand. Well, fin.

      ‘Molly-macaroni!’ she squeaked, tugging too hard and sending leaflets fluttering all over the promenade.

      ‘That nickname makes no sense. It’s like me calling you Minnie-lasagne,’ Molly grumbled, attempting to bend down to retrieve the scattered flyers.

      Nobody stopped to help her. Not even Fit Steve, who worked at the ice cream parlour a few doors down. Two years above Molly, he was the most popular guy in school. And, as the name suggested, devastatingly fit. In fairness, at that moment he was busy scooping mint choc chip into a cookie cone for a foot-stomping five-year-old. Molly, who had a bit of a thing for Fit Steve, couldn’t help but be jealous of the ice cream cone. And the scoop. And the bratty child.

      However, Fit Steve barely knew she existed. Considering the lunacy of her family, this was probably for the best.

      ‘Was you being barcastic?’ Minnie frowned. ‘Mum told you not to be barcastic.’

      ‘Yes. Barcastic is precisely what I’m being,’ Molly snapped. ‘That is absolutely, one hundred per cent a word.’

      She was already annoyed at herself for getting annoyed. Her little sister was irritating, which is a serious design flaw in most siblings, but Molly was pretty much Minnie’s favourite person in the whole world. The curly-haired littlest Seabrook was the most bonkers of the lot, and yet Molly had always had a soft spot for her.

      ‘I thought you was,’ Minnie sniggered. She had Seabrook’s famous garlic sauce smeared in her hair like the world’s worst glitter gel. ‘Barcastic barracuda – ha ha ha!’

      Honestly, barracuda? Molly’s sister had an unreasonably thorough knowledge of sea creatures for a five-year-old. Could she spell her own name? No, but she could tell you about the carpet shark in A LOT of detail.

      Molly ruffled Minnie’s unruly black hair with her fin. ‘Whaddaya want, scampi?’

      ‘It’s your birfday tomorrow,’ Minnie said, squirming excitedly in her silver jelly shoes, which Molly noticed were on the wrong feet.

      ‘I am aware, yes. But no fuss, remember? And definitely no fish.’

      ‘De-fin-ertly no fish,’ Minnie confirmed. ‘De-fin-ertly.’

      In most families, you probably would not have to say ‘no fish’ when talking about thirteenth birthday plans, but the Seabrooks were not most families.

      Not even close.

       CHAPTER TWO

       A Fishy Birthday

      Molly awoke on her thirteenth birthday in the bedroom she shared with her sister Melissa in Kittiwake Keep, the wonky converted lighthouse at the end of Little Marmouth pier.

      Melissa was fourteen and closest to Molly in age, but Molly got on far better with Margot, who was fifteen and the most gifted practical joker in the northern hemisphere. Molly sometimes wished she could bunk with Margot, but then realised she’d probably wake up with a shaved head and a mouthful of gunpowder, because Margot really liked turning things into cannons.

      But back to her birthday. Molly felt both completely different and completely unchanged. The difference was in the crispness of the fresh start: maybe this would be the year she finally grew out of her mood swings. The year she finally found popularity. The year she finally learned how to spell Egypt.

      The unchangedness was in the fish.

      Because of course there were fish, despite Minnie’s sincere assurances. Every birthday morning in the Seabrook household started with three dozen fish balloons and a giant whale piñata, which the blindfolded birthday girl had to thwack with a sea serpent carved out of driftwood, until finally the whale burst, and confetti and seamarbles rained down from above.

      What was the confetti shaped like?

      Fish.

      Obviously.

      Some birthday traditions were mercifully forgotten. The cardboard conch hat, for example. The spike of the shell had nearly taken Mrs Figgenhall’s eye out last year, which is not how anyone saw the assembly on Noah’s Ark ending. Mrs Figgenhall, their religious studies teacher, СКАЧАТЬ