How to be a Mermaid (The Cotton Candy Quintet #1)(30)

Now that I finally had a bit of privacy, I could check to see what was happening.

I started peeling myself out of the tail.

“Oh my god, what are you doing?” Ponce screeched, swimming into my view. “Why are you tearing your skin off?”

I waved him away. “It’s a fake tail, remember?”

“Oh,” Ponce said, although he didn’t sound convinced. “Does it hurt?”

“No,” I said, tugging it down over my hips. Now it was a matter of sliding out of it. “It’s just itching and...”

At first, I couldn’t quite understand what I was looking at. I mean, I’d already pulled off the tail, so why was there another tail under it?

I screamed, kicking my way backwards. I hit the wall with a thump, banging my head. My fake mermaid tail floated away, forgotten.

“What? What?”

I covered my mouth, trying to keep from screaming more. “I...I...”

I gingerly touched the surface of my right thigh. Scales. Even though I still had two legs, they were covered in magenta scales. My eyes trailed down my scaly legs to my swimsuit bottom, then to my feet and toes. Except that my toes weren’t there. The base of each toe was still apparent and long, gossamer fins unfurled from them, like I was in the middle of growing my own mermaid fin.

“What’s wrong?” Ponce asked.

“I’m…I’m turning into a mermaid,” I mumbled, stating the obvious. “I didn’t have scales before all this.”

As an experiment to see if those fins were actually my toes, I wiggled them. They really were mine.

Tears threatened to start up again. I rubbed my eyes, trying to stopper the tear ducts with pressure.

“Well, you look fine now,” Ponce said.

I chuckled bitterly, clenching my hands into fists. “Thanks.”

I took a deep breath through my new gills. Was this going to be my new reality? Being stuck in a palace prison, living as a mermaid with rules that I didn’t understand?

Now that my legs were out of the mermaid tail, I realized that the itching wasn’t just from fish scales sprouting; my legs were actually trying to merge together to create one long tail. Before my eyes, my inner thighs tried to suction to each other. I felt like I was going to be sick.

“Do all humans have skin?”

“Most of us,” I said, using humor as a defense against my anxiety.

I forced my legs apart, not wanting to see them zipper together. Inevitably, it was going to happen, and the longer I was in the sea, the more I’d have to fight my legs from sticking together.

I was going to have to let my legs fully transform into my tail and I was still wearing my bikini bottom. It would suck if my legs fused together while I still had it on.

I’d have to take it off and let nature—or whatever it was—run its course.

“Can you turn around, Ponce?” I asked, self-conscious about what I was going to be doing. He looked blankly at me. “I, uh, need to take this off.” I plucked at bikini bottom to illustrate my point.

The fish’s eyes went wide as well. “That’s not a part of your skin too?”

I stifled a laugh, a real one now. “No, this is something that human women wear when they go swimming.”

Actually, thinking about it, Ponce had no idea what was underneath it, nor would he recognize my private parts. I was eventually going to have to go around without anything there anyways, so I might as well start now.

I slipped the material off, grimacing as I felt the scales again. I wasn’t going to freak out. This was going to be reversed.

I let go of the piece of clothing and it floated towards the ceiling to join my discarded mermaid tail. If I was going to have a real tail now, I had no idea how I was going to retrieve that tail for my next performance. If I ever wanted to do another performance.

“Whoa, that’s cool,” Ponce exclaimed.

At first, I thought he meant my swimsuit floating the top of the room. No, he meant my legs fusing together. As if they sensed that there was nothing blocking them from becoming one fin, they immediately began to combine and become one long, magenta tail. I felt my bones split and rearrange to extend my spine into the tail with loud crunching noises. I shuddered at the sensation, turning away as I became a full mermaid for the very first time.

Wasn’t this what I had wanted for all these years? Fantasy dreams like this didn’t come true for most people. I didn’t know what to think about it. I did know that I wanted it to be my choice though.

“Is it over?” I asked after the clicking and the movement of my bones stopped. I no longer felt two appendages, just one tail that felt strange and alien in the water.

“I guess so?” Ponce said. “How do I tell?”

I looked down at the entire magenta tail where my legs used to be. The sheen of each scale glittered like a thousand sequins, reflecting even the dim light in the room. My fins looked like the wings of a dragonfly.

Despite everything, I was entranced, if only for a second. My fear was gone. Only some curiosity at my new body remained.

The door to the room opened unexpectedly. As a reflex, I tried reaching for something, anything to cover up the lower part of my body. My old mermaid tail and my swimsuit bottom were up on the ceiling, so the only thing within reach was Ponce. I grabbed him and covered up where my lady bits normally were.