Piles of dirty clothes covered the floor. She couldn’t even see the carpet underneath. Stray toys were strewn through them, just waiting for her to step on them and injure her foot. She started searching through the clothes, but there was no sign of the shell. She tried his closet, but it was so stuffed with toys it was impossible to make headway. The second she opened the door, they all spilled out. No way had he hidden it in the closet. There wasn’t space.
She tried under the bed. On his desk. In the drawers. The bedside table.
Still nothing.
“Where are you?” she muttered, wiping sweat from her forehead. Her eyes darted to his clock and widened. It was almost ten o’clock. She didn’t have much time to find it and return to Ursula’s lair. Could Dawson have taken the shell with him to their dad’s house? If he had, she was done for. Or what if . . . ?
Suddenly, a thought took the breath from her: if Dawson had found the shell, maybe it had transported him into the treacherous undersea lair.
Just as the panic of that possibility set in, her eyes darted to Dawson’s bookshelf, where Mr. Bubbles’s dirty aquarium now sat on the top shelf. She dashed over, reached up, and pulled it down—and sure enough, there it was. The nautilus sat at the bottom of the filthy tank.
“Thank goodness! There you are!” she said, fishing the shell out of the filmy water. But nothing happened at her touch. “You said it would bring me back!” she yelled, feeling silly. “Well, I found it! I’m ready to make my wish!” She clutched the shell tightly in her fist.
She tried yelling again and waving the shell in the air.
Fear rippled through her.
Was she too late?
No—she thought back to her dream. Shelly had asked for one more day—and the sea witch had agreed. It hadn’t been a whole day yet. She had a few minutes left. She was sure of it.
“Come on, why aren’t you working?” she muttered to the shell. Now she felt even sillier for standing in Dawson’s room. Anyone who saw her would think she had completely lost it.
“Fine, I give up,” she said dejectedly. “All I wanted was to be the fastest swimmer—”
As soon as the words left her mouth, the seashell started to pulse with its eerie yellow light.
Then, in a flash, she was plunging through the ocean, down, down, down. Water flooded her mouth, rushed down her throat, filled her lungs. She was choking, gasping for breath. Shelly felt like she was about to pass out, and then, suddenly, as if someone had flipped a switch, it was over and she could breathe again.
Shelly coughed and glanced around. She was trapped once more in the dry hollow of the crystal ball, which meant she was back in Ursula’s lair. She could see that something large swam around in the shadows, just like before.
“I’m here. . . . I—came back!” she gasped to the darkness, pushing back against her fear, which made her want to scream. “I want to sign the contract. I want to be the fastest swimmer.”
A moment of silence. Just the shifting of shadows and the strange tentacles.
Ursula’s voice echoed out. “Are you sure, my child? It’s binding. There’s no going back.”
Shelly took a deep breath. “I’m sure. I want to be the fastest swimmer on my team,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “I need to be the fastest swimmer. You promised to help.”
Again it was quiet except for the soft hum of the ocean current swirling through the lair.
Then: “As you wish, my child.”
Suddenly, the contract materialized in the crystal ball above her. In another flash, the fish-bone pen appeared in her hand. The pen shimmered with a golden light. The tip glowed with golden ink. She raised it over the contract.
I HEREBY GRANT UNTO URSULA, THE WITCH OF THE SEA, ONE FAVOR TO BE NAMED AT A LATER DATE, IN EXCHANGE FOR BECOMING THE FASTEST SWIMMER, FOR ALL ETERNITY.
The current picked up, swirling through the underwater lair. Then she heard shrill voices rising from the water. She couldn’t tell where they were coming from, which made them that much eerier.
“Don’t do it!”
“. . . you’ll regret it—”
“. . . can’t trust her—”
“. . . she only takes!”
“I’m sorry, but I need this,” Shelly said softly, more to herself than to the warning voices. She gripped the pen and pressed it to the parchment. “I don’t have a choice.”
She scrawled her name—Shelly—across the signature line.
The whole contract flashed with light. It rolled up into a scroll, then vanished in another flash and reappeared outside the crystal ball. A black tentacle reached up, encircled the parchment, and unrolled it, then scrawled a name onto the other signature line below Shelly’s:
Ursula
“Oh, you’ll be the fastest swimmer,” she said, cackling. “You’ll swim like a fish!”
Emerald light flashed through the lair, followed by a deep rumble of thunder. The ocean currents whipped up. The walls of the crystal ball dissolved, and once again the ocean claimed Shelly, choking her and expelling her from the underwater lair. As she felt the ocean sweep her away, a deep cackle made Shelly shiver with fear.
“Just remember our deal. After you win your race, you have to come back here. You owe me a favor. I gave you something, so now you have to give me something I want in return.”
Shelly had a sinking feeling about what she had just done.
But she pushed it away.
I had to sign it, she reminded herself. I didn’t have a choice.
She couldn’t afford to lose her next race. Otherwise, she risked losing her friends and going back to that horrible new-kid-in-school purgatory, where she had to eat lunch alone and walk to class alone and do everything alone. Having no friends was the worst, the absolute worst.
Or was it?
Shelly woke up clawing at her throat
