Jenny was bored. Her schoolwork was done, and she was free to play until supper, but there wasn't a whole lot to do. She didn't feel like playing with her dolls or reading, and she'd played most of the videogames she owned to death; she'd even tried some of Becky's games, but they were too hard for her. She felt like being outside, but she didn't feel like going over to a friend's house; she'd been finding harder to relate to other girls her age the more she got used to being a boy where it counted.
So she ended up just taking a walk down the street and around the other side. Her house was on a long strip of land that bordered on three streets, with a column of houses along both of the parallel streets. In back of her house lived a friendly old couple she sometimes talked with, but they were on vacation somewhere at the moment. A couple blocks away, however, there was a vacant lot, which she had found was a pretty good place to play.
The vacant lot, her dad had told her, used to have a big, fancy house on it that had been built in the early 1920s. The last owner had died without any living relatives about ten years before she was born, though, and so the government had taken the land back. The house stayed empty for a while, but about a year after Benny was born, it had started to become a hangout for druggies and homeless people, so the city had had it demolished. They'd filled in the basement with dirt, but the outline of the foundation was still faintly visible.
As far as Jenny knew, nobody else ever played there, so she'd done a little customizing, setting up a rope swing from one of the trees and hiding some things of hers in strategic nooks and crannies. She pulled out her sword (a long, thin tree branch she'd peeled the bark off of) and set off on a swashbuckling solo adventure.
Eventually, her imaginary foes had her cornered in the pine tree next to the tree she'd hung the rope swing from. Sword sheathed in her belt-loop, she made a daring leap that would've given her mom a heart attack if she had seen it, grabbing the rope in mid-leap and nearly skinning her hands in process. Laughing defiantly at her enemies, she hung there, higher on the swing than she could recall ever being, when she noticed that the pool building behind the house on the other side of the strip had a skylight.
This probably wouldn't have seemed unusual except that the pool building had no other windows. From the back of the house through the covered walkway to the building itself, it was completely closed off from outside view, except for this skylight. Curious, Jenny shimmied further up the rope, wondering what was so secret about a swimming pool that the people in the house wanted to hide it. Reaching the top of the rope, she looked into the skylight.
Nothing seemed that mysterious; it was just a pool, with someone in it. Looking closer, Jenny saw that it was Michelle, the handicapped girl who lived there. But she wasn't wearing anything, and she had...a fish's tail? The rumors Jenny had heard on the playground were true; Michelle was a mermaid!
And she was also staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at Jenny.
