Get Happy (8 page)

The girl whispered something to her mom.

“No, not yet,” the mother whispered. “We can turn it back on later. This is going to be fun.”

“Wow!” the dad said. “A real mermaid! Why did the mermaid cross the road?”

Cavernous silence.

“To get to the other tide!” The dad laughed. “Are you from the Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific Ocean, Miss Mermaid?”

Not knowing what else to do, I kept going with the script. “How many of you know the Get Happy song?”

No hands.

“It’s easy. I’ll sing and you can join in. I have some instruments.…”

“Oooh, instruments!” the dad said.

There’s this fake voice that grown-ups use with kids that should be against the law. Gosh, kids, isn’t this fun? The answer is no. People who use this voice should be locked up. Samantha’s parents were
world-class fakers, and I was committing the crime right along with them.

I passed out the plastic maracas and sang through the song and announced the game.

“Mom,” Samantha whispered again into her mother’s ear. The girl’s face was turning a brighter shade of red every second.

“Just start the game,” the dad said. “I’m sure Sammy will join in. Sammy, your mom went to a lot of trouble for this.”

“John, that is not the point,” the mom snapped.

I was supposed to do this whole intro to the game, but I set out the props and cut straight to the rules. “So you get a starfish and you try to throw it into the empty bucket. If you get one in, you’ll get a prize.”

“What do we get?” a girl asked.

The prize — a cheap necklace of fake beads — wasn’t going to win them over, so I told them that I’d hand out the prizes after everybody played.

“This will be fun. Who wants to go first?” the mom asked.

Amazingly, a round-faced girl closest to me raised her hand. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to take her home with me. I wanted to hire that tweeny-bopper
boy band to lift her up in their arms and sing a pop song about her.

One by one, each girl stood up and played the game, Samantha last. The girls took the gold, silver, and green necklaces from me as if they were strands of rotten sea kelp.

“Put them on! We’ll take a picture. We’ll post it on Facebook so all your cousins can see it.”

The girls put on the rotten kelp, and the mom made them gather around me.

“Smile and say, ‘
Mermaid
’!” the dad said.

I imagined how my orange face was going to look, captured for all time, and posted online.

“Mermaid,” I said.

Snap.

“S
O … HOW
was it, Minerva?” Joy asked.

Hayes was already in the van. He tipped his cowboy hat and said, “Howdy,” in an adorkable way.

“It was great,” I said, and then mouthed the word
terrible
to Hayes as I passed him on my way to the backseat.

“Well, that’s good,” Joy said.

Hayes smiled. “Mine was actually okay.”

“Two for two,” Joy said.

My mom had left seven messages on my phone, asking how the first gig went. I texted back:
Great
.

Cassie was next.

The temperature had warmed up, and none of the snow had stuck. As Joy pulled up to the house, the sun burst through the clouds.

“Hallelujah,” Joy said, turning off the engine. She glanced at her watch. “She should be done any minute.”

My stomach growled and I was seriously considering asking Joy if she might have packed any snacks for a hardworking mermaid, when the front door of the house opened and Cassie floated out, surrounded by five-year-olds. The mother tried to get the girls back into the house, but they followed without their coats on.

“It’s okay,” Cassie said to the mom. “We’ll have one last good-bye.” Quickly, she lined up the girls and waltzed down the line, giving each child a hug and a tap on the head with her wand.

“Thank the Lord.” Joy sighed. “Look at that. She’s a natural.”

Cassie daintily pulled up her gown, ran to the van, turned, blew kisses, and got inside.

“Wait!” The dad came running out the front door with a pink cupcake and a ten-dollar bill and handed them through the window to Cassie before waving good-bye.

Joy was beaming. “They loved you.”

Cassie handed the tip to Joy.

“No. Tips are yours to keep.”

Cassie smiled. “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.” She turned to Hayes and me, her face glowing. “Isn’t it great?”

“Yep,” I said. “It’s a barrel of monkeys.”

She broke off a piece of cupcake and put it between her ruby lips. “Yum. Want a bite, anyone?”

I was dying for a bite, but I shook my head and lied: “I had, like, ten pieces of cake at Samantha’s house.”

Hayes took a bite. Cassie chattered away, filling us in on all the details of the amazing job she did, and filling up the car with the sugary smell of frosting. Finally, we picked up Fin.

Just seeing his orange face and funny fake dreadlocks as he climbed into the van cheered me up.

“Children are savages,” he said. “That was the most exhausting thing I’ve ever done in my life. CUPCAKE?” He looked at Cassie. “I didn’t get anything.”

“Here.” Cassie handed him her last bite.

“How did it go?” I asked as he stuffed it into his mouth.

“They were horrible. They laughed at my song. So I ditched the script and made them walk the plank.”

Joy’s head snapped around. “YOU WHAT?”

“I picked the two beastliest boys to be crocodiles and told them to lie down. Then, one by one, I made the others jump off the chair, and when they landed on the floor, the crocodiles got to bite their little ankles. They loved it.”

“Son of a freaking biscuit! Do not go off script,” Joy said. “Somebody could get hurt.”

We both started to lose it.

“Whatever you’re laughing at back there, it’s not funny,” Joy said.

10

C
ASSIE
L
OTT’S BLOG
was like a Dead-Sea-salt-induced itch that I had to scratch. I was simply curious, I told myself. Just a bit of harmless, mildly jealous snooping.

She had 2,433 followers and was following 1,112 people and organizations.

She hadn’t posted anything new — perhaps she was too busy with her volunteer work or all her extracurricular activities, I thought — so I resorted to looking
at previous entries, when a photo she had posted in August jumped out to bite me in the jugular: a seahorse.

The entry had seven comments. I should have turned off the computer. I should have listened to that inner voice that said:
You don’t need to see more.
Instead, I scrolled down and saw it.

I stood up and literally yelped — I could because my mom wasn’t home. Then I looked at the screen again.

After calming down, I reasoned that, as weird as it felt, this actually wasn’t weird at all. It made sense. Cassie’s profile said she was volunteering at the Shedd Aquarium, and she was following both the Shedd Aquarium and the SOS Project on Twitter. I clicked a link to the SOS Project, and it was all about encouraging “recreational divers” to document seahorses. Her name was on a long list of “Seahorse Spotters.”

I don’t know why I was surprised. Seahorses live in the sea, and they are very compelling little creatures, and lots of scuba divers must be interested in playing hide-and-seek with them. Keanu Choy probably commented on the blogs of all his followers who
posted pictures of seahorses. They were cyber save-the-seahorse buddies. How cute. How educational. How adorably nauseating.

He had shared six of Cassie’s blog entries with his own followers and had left several comments on other entries.

On and on. The man loves his exclamation points!

I stared at the screen. I got up and paced. Then I sat down and created a new email account. Name? [email protected].

Back on Cassie’s blog.

Yes, I would.

Send.

I imagined how excited Cassie would be to see a comment from a new visitor and then how hurt she’d be to read it. Within seconds, though, I felt sick to my stomach. That’s the thing about being mean: You have this rush, this wicked thrill, but then it fades quickly and you’re left feeling like scum.

I texted Fin. He didn’t answer, and I remembered that he was at a cousin’s wedding or funeral in Mundelein. I have learned from experience that Irish people have way too many relatives. I wasn’t about to tell him that Keanu Choy commented on Cassie Lott’s blog, because he would tell me to immediately find out if he was my dad and I wasn’t ready for that, but I needed to hear Fin’s voice. Even if it was just in a text. I sent him three more messages.

11

N
OTE:
O
VERNIGHT
self-tanning lotion takes days to fade. Rick Rogan, the mean guy in my first-period class, had so much fun with me that week, he should have paid me.