‘You’re the most amazing woman I ever met,’ Bel cheered, jumping up and down on the spot. Once a cheerleader … ‘It’s gonna be fun, really not work. Now tell me, how’s your breaststroke?’
‘Do you still get paid if I drown?’
‘I think so, but I’d have to check the contract.’
‘Then it’s good enough,’ I pulled off my T-shirt and picked up a pair of purple seashells with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. ‘Let’s get this over with before I change my mind.’
‘It’s official,’ Bel declared as I lay on the floor of the tiny pool house, thrashing around like a beached whale. ‘You’re the cutest merperson ever.’
Lots of little girls grew up wishing they could be a Disney princess. Not me. Suzanne was the wannabe Ariel in our house; I couldn’t think of anything less appealing than risking my life for love when I had exactly zero successful models of it at home. I always preferred the first fifteen minutes, little town, quiet village, nose stuck in a book. Give me an underwater cave full of stuff over a life on land any day. Which was probably one of the main reasons I was less than thrilled to be forcing my unwilling lower half into a latex mermaid tail on Thursday afternoon. I’d only beenin LA since Monday and had already packed more into the last three days than the last three years at home, but when Bel called, distraught, I remembered what Suzanne said about her having a hard year and couldn’t bring myself to say no.
Naturally, she slipped effortlessly into her tail without the help of baby oil or baby powder, both of which I had slathered all over my legs at her suggestion, only for them to mingle together and congeal into some kind of clumpy baby slop. There was a reason neither Johnson nor Johnson had ever thought to combine the two.
‘I can’t believe I said yes to this,’ I grunted as the tail finally snapped into place around my soft stomach. ‘How long is the party?’
‘We do two forty-minute shifts then we’re done.’ Bel, who looked as though she had been born with a tail, sat a few feet away, weaving strands of silver glitter through her long brunette braid. ‘We have a ten-minute break in the middle in case you need to pee or eat or something.’
‘Eat? Solid food?’ I looked down at the tail, cutting deep into the tender flesh of my midriff. ‘I don’t think so. And if I have to go to the loo, it’ll be sloshing around inside the tail until I take it off.’
‘You wouldn’t be the first person to pee in a tail,’ she chuckled before seeing my eyebrows shoot up my forehead. ‘But not in that one. That one has definitely never been peed in.’
I stared at myself in the mirror. How did someone go from writing St Patrick’s Day limericks to dressing up as a mermaid to entertain a bunch of kids at a birthday party in the space of a week?
‘This is the stupidest thing I have ever done,’ I declared.
And given my recent behaviour, that was really saying something.
‘Wish I could say the same,’ Bel replied. ‘Trust me, it’s going to be the easiest five hundred bucks you ever made. My first time, I was so nervous, but the children are always so sweet. They want to believe you’re a mermaid, all you have to do is let them.’
‘If they believe this, they’ll believe anything,’ I said, rolling over and resting my sweaty head on the cool tiles. The tail was so tight I hardly dared breathe out all the way for fear of splitting it wide open and exposing said children to an untimely lesson about the importance of bikini waxing.
‘Are you ready?’ Bel flexed her flippers and gave her fins a shimmy. ‘We need to be in the pool before the kids arrive.’
‘No, not even a little bit,’ I replied, sitting up with my legs bound tightly together. ‘Wait, how are we supposed to get out to the pool?’
‘Oh, it’s easy.’ She slid down from the sofa and inched elegantly across the floor on her behind. ‘See?’
‘Next time you ask me for a favour, remind me to say no,’ I muttered, flubbing along the pool house floor and following her out the door.
Even if I couldn’t be the world’s most enthusiastic mermaid, I could be enthusiastic about the house where said mermaiding was to take place. It was magnificent. We’d driven high up into the hills, landing in Bel Air, and it felt as though we were on top of the world.Admittedly, I wasn’t West Philadelphia born and raised but I had a sneaking suspicion West Philly wasn’t nearly as fancy as this. The house itself was extremely modern, huge concrete and glass blocks stacked on top of each other with floor-to-ceiling glass walls pointing towards the ocean that would require a small army of cleaners to keep them free of fingerprints. I had no doubt the owners could afford one. The grounds were equally impressive, perfect lawns, tennis courts, obligatory winding driveway and of course, the pool. Or, I should say, pools, plural.
There was one regular rectangular pool, one narrow infinity pool that rolled off the edge of the cliff, and one smaller, curvy pool that hosted an honest-to-God water slide that I was dying to try but preferably not in my mermaid costume.
‘Tell me again,’ Bel said as two men dressed in white slacks and white polo shirts (deeply impractical staff uniforms were always a signifier of the obscenely rich) wordlessly loaded us into little carts like two aquatic sacks of potatoes. ‘Exactly what did Ren say?’
‘That he thinks love letters are the most incredible romantic things ever in the history of the world,’ I replied, paraphrasing just a little. ‘And that he wants to meet you.’
She swooned in her cart and flipped her fins. ‘This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me. He’s everything I ever dreamed of and now I have a chance with him all because of you.’
‘You’re welcome,’ I said. ‘Don’t forget to invite me to the wedding.’
The little nugget of doubt I’d felt the night before had not only lingered but taken root. But there was no needto worry. I was doing a nice thing for a good woman and a hot man. There was no way it could possibly ever come back to bite me in the arse. Even though the last time I thought I was doing a nice thing for a good woman, it didn’t so much bite me in the arse as chomp off a whole cheek.
‘Bel,’ I hissed as the men in white helped us out of the carts by turning them over and dumping us out onto the ground. ‘Is that a unicorn?’
She squinted across the lawn then nodded. ‘But I don’t think it’s a real one.’
‘No, probably not,’ I agreed, not entirely sure whether she was joking or not. ‘I cannot believe this is a party for a seven-year-old.’
