en

FAKE GIRLFRIEND TO THE MERMAID CAPTAIN

At the party, I hid a love letter in a robe. I picked the wrong one. It was Logan McCallahan's: the Black Sharks captain, the Tide League's most famous face, and the only mermaid there bold enough to read it to the whole lagoon. She read it. Every word. Then she looked at me and said: "Same." It's a lie. Her girlfriend had just ended things with four hundred witnesses watching, and she needed a cover. I'm a waitress with no scholarship and zero heats, and I serve drinks at the reef cafe until midnight. The deal: three months, all fake. She wins back her ex, and I get a shot at the mermaid the letter was really for. Clean and simple. Then her father's plan for her life shows up, scheduled down to the week. And a magazine has decided what I am, and printed it under a photograph of me in my kit. And when her shoulder went, she signed away the only future she had left — so that I could keep mine. We agreed on three months. Nobody agreed on this.