The Girl with the Mermaid Hair Read Online Free Page B

know…” Issy scrunched up her face.
    In Sukie’s opinion only a woman with an excellent bone structure like Isabella’s could scrunch up her face and still look cute. On the face description website, which Sukie had committed to memory, the worst bone structure was called “pudding” and the best was called “landscape.” Issy certainly had “landscape”: a determined line to her chin, sweet curves in her cheeks with hollows under them, a perfectly proportioned nose—“ski slope” made more flatteringly severe by a touch of “Greek.” Sukie sighed over the paleness of Issy’s skin. Only the barest blush of pink in her cheeks indicated that she was not dead, her complexion being nearly as white as the cameo Sukie had inherited from her great-aunt. Issy was small and delicate. “Drop me and I break,” she’d once laughed to Sukie and her dad, which Sukie thought was the cleverest way to talk about oneself. She’d tried the line in the mirror later. Since Sukie was tall and strong with arms and legs muscled from playing tennis, she had to admit that the line worked only if you had the looks to go withit. Isabella’s short hair, currently dyed pink (the color changed frequently), hadn’t been chopped with hedge clippers, but if that had turned out to be true, no one would have been surprised. She stabbed it with clips. It stood up every which way.
    Issy grabbed a lock of hair and reclipped it as she shivered over the memory of picking up a bottle of Coors and uncovering the giant bug. Her hands zigzagged as she recounted the bug’s skitter out of the kitchen and through her living room. Sukie became transfixed by Issy’s tiny wrists.
    Her dad caught one of Isabella’s wrists. With his thumb and index finger he was able to circle it nearly twice. “You’re as tiny as a baby bird,” he said.
    Sukie gasped. “I was just thinking that. That’s so weird. We were having exactly the same thought at the same time.”
    Her dad smiled his famous smile. Sukie called it his famous smile because it was good enough to be on a can of peas or a box of oatmeal or a jar of popcorn, to name a few of the products Sukie had seen where a man’s smiling face assured you that this was the one to buy.
    Isabella, she noticed, remained fixated on her wrist. If she’d been wearing a watch, you’d think shewas having trouble reading the dial. She sure is spacey, thought Sukie. If her wrist confuses her, she might take years figuring out her options.
    Issy slid her wrist free of Sukie’s dad as if she were slipping off a bracelet, and stood up to return to her duties.
    “If you get any more bugs, let me know.” He gave Issy his card. “I’ve got a good guy I can send out.”
    Isabella’s exit and her dad’s carrying his drink to the bar to chat, which Sukie knew was a way to check the score of the Giants game and distribute a few more of his business cards, created a void that Bobo rushed to fill. She started to beat up on herself again about her lame response. She checked her cell. No message.
    I am so unoriginal. Sukie recorded the dreaded feeling in her journal that night while Señor snored next to her, taking up most of the bed. “Do you agree, Señor?”
    Señor twitched, indicating that he was dreaming.
    Unoriginal. She hoped it wasn’t true but despaired that it was.
    She collected stuffed penguins. Was that unoriginal too? Was lining them up in a row on the windowsill a conventional way to display them? They all had names.She’d started with A, Anton, and worked her way down the alphabet to M, Marshmallow, a very small bird with a yellow bow. Sometimes she thought of them as friends, sometimes as audience. Tonight they sat in judgment. Over their furry black heads the moon was bright white, so low in the sky that it might roll off a rooftop, and perfectly round. A storybook moon, she thought. A wishing moon. She wondered if that thought was especially original; probably not. Could she fake being original, or