Chapter Text
“‘Nay, I don’t know if I am really up for this,” Isabelle, a young girl of 11 years, looks so uncertain about the decision to spend the summer at the beach house that a friend of her parents lets them to stay at while the movers are bringing in stuff to their new home in Monterey, California following her mother getting a new job to teach at a well-known university.
“Sabel, my dear, it would be a good change of setting to help you in recovering from the stress of what’s going in our lives,” her mother, Rebecca, tries to be optimistic as she puts her hands onto those of her daughter, “Anak, I know that we’re dealing with a ton of things with Serena’s death, me getting a new job offer, and the move to the US, but in the long run, I do hope that you can adapt to your new surroundings and not spending most of the time moping about things you can’t control.”
“Don’t worry, Sabel, my love, I’m sure that you’ll find some friends in your new school real soon. Now just try not to mope too much and look at the move as a motivation to, um, turn a new leaf as the Americans put it,” her father, Gonzalo, also speaks up as he puts away the groceries for the 3 month long trip.
As much as she hates to admit, young Sabel knows deep down how right Rebecca and Gonzalo really are: she wasn’t feeling like herself ever since she helplessly saw Serena’s life slowly slipped away by leukemia and the complications that came with it until her untimely death a few days before Christmas and it has damped her mood for months. She barely has friends outside of Samuel, Mona and her older sister Lupe and her boyfriend and she feels like an outcast in her old school for being so headstrong and very opinionated on things. Then Rebecca got a new job to teach sociology as an Associate Professor in the Monterey campus of California State University at the nearby city of Seaside while getting to work hard on her Doctorate Degree, which she has put on a back burner for some time, in said university.
“Anyway, Anak. You might want to bring your stuff and your bahage up to the room you get to stay in on the second floor so you won’t get super tired out by the end of the day when dinner is ready, it is quite roomy and has plenty of space for you to play in,” Gonzalo patiently informs his daughter as he finishes putting away the last of the groceries.
“Well, I suppose that you’re right, ‘Tay. I better get started on that right away,” she finally relents as she walks to get her luggage and backpack with her to bring up to the second floor, leaving Gonzalo with a sigh of relief, hoping that it will make her feel more productive than depressed over Serena’s death and the move.
Carrying the weight of her backpack, luggage (a medium size purple Samsonite four wheel luggage), and her heavy heart as she climbs up the staircase leading to the second floor, Sabel manages to get to her temporary room for the summer and drops off her stuff on the soft carpeted floor. In addition to said room, the second floor has 2 bedrooms (one of which has a set of bunk beds instead of the full size number that her room has), a loft, two bathrooms, and a balcony with the view of the beach
She soon begins to unpack most, if not all, of her things from the luggage and backpack and put them to where they would be normally at: clothes in either the dresser or the closet, toiletries still in the wash bag at the bathroom, and her most used items either on a side table or the desk, just to name a few.
After the packing is done, she quietly slips out of the room and goes down the stairs while avoiding her parents for now and exits through the back porch to the beach to hopefully clear her mind and solemnly watches the sea roaring in front of her. With her flip-flops now in her hands rather than wearing them on her feet, she slowly makes her way to the shoreline and lets the waves wash them as she stares at it with a blank face, her future in California looking uncertain. For minutes, she stood there wistfully and yearning to be anywhere but the beach house. She must have imagined her remaining cousins and her friends are having more fun back home in the Philippines than she is right now, life is just not the same anymore.
With one long heavy sigh, she soon makes her way back to the house when she accidentally steps on something both smooth and rough on her bare feet. Sabel takes a step back to see that there is a bracelet made of larimars, moonstones, and lava stones on the shore: there are also silver colored stoppers in between the stones. Curious and confused as to why would anyone leave jewelry on the beach so carelessly, she picks up it from the sand and gets a closer look at it when she begins to hear a voice ringing by, asking her for help.
“Excuse me, Miss!” the voice cries out to her.
Stunned by the voice’s presence, she turns around to see a young boy in water waving back at her. Now what is he doing in water? Actually, the question should have been how did he got there? As far as she is aware, the house and this part of the beach is owned by her family friends; nobody should be trespassing on the water without permission. Being overly cautious, Sabel drops her flip-flops on the sand and steps into the water, being careful enough to reach to the length where the hem of her white floral sundress won’t get soaked.
The young boy then swims closer to her and she soon gets a much better look at him. He looks rather cute, she has to admit, and he is right around her age, though she wouldn’t be 12 until the 27th of September. With sparkling bright blue eyes, drenched dark brown locks, and an adorable smile, he could easily look like a cute boy porcelain doll. Except that the way he is moving on the water is strange and she couldn’t put her finger on it.
It wasn’t until he gets close enough and is front of her that she gasps upon making a big discovery: instead of a pair of legs to stand, he actually has a shimmering, iridescent blue scaled tail with a short dorsal fin running along the back tail from the waist to more than halfway down the tail and a flared fluke at the end of it. Additionally, his ears are more pointy than a normal person’s ears, gills on the sides of his neck, his nails are sharp like steel, and there is webbing between his fingers which she didn’t see clearly when she first saw him moments ago. Despite the shock she is going through, the young boy still keeps on smiling at her.
“I am so sorry, Miss. I didn’t mean to scare you.” he apologizes to her profusely.
“Oh okay,” she lets out a sigh of relief, “That is good to know, but where are your friends and why are you all alone by yourself?”
“Well, you see,” the boy tells her, his clipped English accent clearly indicating that he is not from the Western Pacific Ocean, “Nobody in my pod don’t usually come this close to the shore that easily when it comes to visiting other regions of the world out of caution. We don’t want to risk drawing too much attention onto us.”
“Ah, that explains everything,” Sabel finally knows before another question begins to poke her head, “But you don’t sound like you’re from the Californian shores.”
“That’s because my pod usually lives near the shores of the British Isles on the Northern Atlantic Ocean,” his face beams up as he replies.
“Oh, so you live in British waters, I get it now,” she understands him more, “Now if I may ask you, what is your name by the way?”
“Hehehe, I’m glad that you asked, Miss,” he smirks in delight, “My name is Harry, I’m just a little merboy. And what is your name, Miss?”
“Isabelle Miravelez, but everyone on land just calls me Sabel,” she introduces herself.
“Isabelle, that is a really beautiful name,” the merboy, Harry, compliments her name which earns her an amused blush.
Then Harry realizes something very important and it is just embarrassing to lose the piece of jewelry that every merboy and mergirl often receives for their 10th birthday that he asks Sabel while searching for his bracelet in the water, “Hey, um, Sabel, have you seen a larimar, moonstone, and lava stone bracelet around here?”
Sabel then brings out the bracelet in question and has her hand reaching out for him to reclaim said item, “Oh, is this bracelet yours, Harry?”
The young merboy’s blue wide eyes closes in to the bracelet in her hands. Relieved and happy that a human was able to find it, he happily takes it back from her and puts it on his left wrist, glad to be reunited with it. Sabel couldn’t help but to feel really good that she did took the time to find someone’s precious belonging that she nearly forgets that she is in the middle of mourning.
“My bracelet!” Harry gleefully cheers, “Thank you. You’re able to find it, Sabel. I have been looking for it ever since I accidentally misplaced it days ago. We often receive our bracelets on our tenth birthday and they are often among the most precious things we own.”
“Anyway, I should be going now: the council of elders will be worrying about young merpeople like myself going off on our own for that long,” he then informs as he is about to return to his pod under the waves of the Pacific Ocean.
But as he is about to turn his tail and swim away, he could hear her saying “Wait!” He soon finds himself staring at her completely dumbfounded and even Sabel herself is quite shocked by her actions at this moment. But regardless, she continues on.
“Um, maybe y-y-you can come near the beach shore again, around sunrise tomorrow? Is that okay with you, Harry? That way, nobody with unsavory intentions can try to catch you,” she proposes an idea to him.
She gets even more nervous when he didn’t answer her immediately as he takes his time trying to find an answer: sweat-dropping in anxiety, she begins to fidget with her fingers and bit her lower lip hard when he finally replies with “Why yes, I can do that.”
“I will admit that I don’t have that many interactions with humans before, but I wouldn’t mind spending time learning more about you and your culture, Sabel,” he tells her, “See you tomorrow then?”
“Yes, tomorrow it is,” Sabel smiles in return.
Happy that they finally settle on a meeting, Harry finally dives in and swims away back to the waters where he belongs while Sabel watches on and waves him goodbye for now. Soon enough, she could hear her mother calling for her that they’ll be having dinner in a little bit, so the young girl grabs her flip-flops from where she had dropped them and rushes back to the beach house as quickly as she can as she doesn’t want to miss out on what they will be cooking for that night.
Maybe that change of scenery her parents have been telling her about is starting to pay off after all…