Page 41 of Bullied Pretend Mate
Valerie snorts. “Tara didn’t really know how to be gentle, huh?”
“It was kind of refreshing,” Phina says. “Maybe if she weren’t so forthright with everything, we never would have formed the group in the first place.”
We sit in that for a moment. If we’d never formed the group, we never would have been on the ridge that night. Never would have been tied to the fire.
“The first time I saw her, she caught me and Xeran together,” Phina admits, proceeding to recount the experience. Tara walking down the hallway toward her, a lollipop hanging from the corner of her mouth. Her hair dyed several shades of blue, much cooler than anything I’d ever be brave enough to do. It was darkest at the roots, almost like it grew that way. No matter what Tara wore, she was never sent to the office. We were convinced she used magic to do that, but we never found out how.
She was the strongest of us. Or, maybe it was Aurela. They were always going head-to-head, stretching their abilities.
“She said she saw us,” Phina says, recounting the moment. “I tried to bluff with her, say she didn’t see anything. She was offended that I didn’t recognize her.”
“That same thing happened with me,” I admit. “It’s like—well, I feel bad. It doesn’t make sense that a girl like her would blend into the background.”
“I’m pretty sure she used magic,” Valerie says. “It’s the only way she got away with that stuff.”
“She told me about the club. And when I got there, Aurela was already there. I remember Tara saying she always told the truth.”
“I remember that,” I say. It was something Tara said a lot. I’d read somewhere that truly honest people didn’t feel the need to start their sentences withhonestly. Maybe it was something like that. Maybe Tara just wanted to be accepted.
“Do you remember the thing with the fish?” Valerie asks after we’ve all been quiet for a moment.
We’ve been meeting for the past two weeks, and this is the most we’ve actually managed to talk about what happened back then. It feels scary and thrilling all at once, like we might walk into something we can’t backpedal on.
“Fish?” Phina asks, but the memory is already snapping back into focus for me. Like I’d shoved it down for too long, and I’m finally bringing it up again. Like an old video I’d buried in the back of the attic, only to find the picture in perfect quality the first time I watched it.
That night, all those years ago, I woke up to a gentle tapping on my window, and when I opened it, I found the other girls standing in my yard. Tara was at the front of the group, her finger held to her lips.
“Come on,” she’d whispered, those eyes bright and focused on me. “We’re going to the lake, remember?”
A thrill ran through me. I didn’t have any friends before that group; I had never been a part of something like sneaking out together.
The other girls and I thought there might be more people at the lake, other teenagers, but when we showed up, standing in the inky black night together, it was just the five of us.
“Go on,” Tara said, prodding Aurela, the two of them communicating in a different way. Always something they’d already discussed, a thousand inside jokes between the two of them. “Try it.”
Leveling a challenging look at Tara, Aurela stepped up to the edge of the water, raised her hands, and flicked her wrist.
At first, I thought she’d failed at whatever she was trying to do. That she was trying to draw the water up out of the lake, or freeze it. But for a few ticking seconds, nothing happened.
Then, all at once, a loud, swishing, slithering sound filled the air. The water writhed with a reflective, squirming mass. With every fish in the lake, fighting with the other to swim as close to Aurela as they could.
At first, it was magical, watching her control them like that. Then, even the massive sturgeons arrived from the bottom of the lake, their bodies looming dark under the surface, their backs rising to the top and forcing the smaller fish up into the cool night air.
Their squirming bodies started to pile atop one another, flopping and suffocating, their wet, smacking sounds filling the air, which was already growing thick with a fishiness so pungent, you could taste it.
“Send them back,” Valerie said, looking between Aurela and the fish, her voice rising to be heard over the cacophonyof fish sounds. A thousand gaping mouths, gasping, choking. Their bodies fighting to get back into the water, even as they were still pulled up by Aurela’s magic. “Put them back!”
“I don’t know how,” Aurela said, her voice light and breathy. She was transfixed by the sight of them.
“Help me,” Valerie said to me, tugging my hand, and she, Phina, and I stumbled to the edge of the water, working together to push the mass of bone and scale and flesh back out into the water.
When it was over, we stood there for a moment, breathing hard, waiting for them to turn and swim back out the way they came.
But most of them didn’t move.
The next morning, my father sat at the table, reading theSilverville Times.The headline read “A Thousand Dead Fish Found in Silverville Lake, Fishermen Confused.”
He’d apparently not noticed how guilty I felt because he read aloud from the article, detailing the smell and the sheer number of fish found in the lakes. How they’d fished them out in swaths, their nets clogged with already-decaying bodies.
