“Do you remember me?” Chanyeol said, pointing to his chest and getting closer to the mermaid’s face. “I’m the one who rescued you, remember?”

The mermaid held onto the supports of the chair that the other two humans put her in. It had circular wheels at the bottom that allowed them to transport her easily, until she could learn to walk on her own. The human in front of her was another male. Males were so scarce under the sea that it was a bit strange to see so many in one dwelling. Perhaps human males were more common than mer-males. This one was taller than the one who put her in the wheelchair, and he smiled more often, and his voice was louder. She couldn’t help but mimic his grin.

“Chanyeol,” the boy said, referring to himself. “My name is Chanyeol. I’m the one who found you and rescued you.” The boy let out a grunt of pain as he was suddenly hit in the face with a pillow. Another boy, the shorter one with the pillow, suddenly came into view.

“He didn’t save you, don’t listen to him,” the other boy said. Then, he smiled sweetly. “My name is Kyungsoo, nice to meet you. Actually, I rescued you, with the help of Yixing and Chanyeol, but I was the one who did most of the carrying.”

Chanyeol pushed Kyungsoo out of the way: “Yeah, but I’m the one who brought the wire-cutters that saved her life.”

Kyungsoo scoffed: “Yixing was the one who cut her loose.”

“Ha!” Chanyeol said, raising his voice so much that the mermaid jumped a bit, startled at how loud he was. “So you admit that you didn’t rescue her!”

“Well, neither did you!” Kyungsoo said, raising his own voice. Victoria walked over and smacked the both of them with a rolled up magazine.

“Would you two numb-skulls quiet down!” she said, pulling the wheelchair back to put more distance between the mermaid and the boys. “You’re gonna scare her with all your yelling.”

The mermaid watched their interactions carefully. They were rough with one another, for sure, but she could still sense the feelings of fraternity between the humans. They all seemed to live together in one dwelling. Perhaps they were a family, and the thought reminded the mermaid of her own family in the ocean. She quickly cleared the thoughts from her head, knowing that homesick feelings would only slow her down. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder at how different human families were. The oldest female exerted the most authority. The two boys who were talking to her just now were spirited young men, and the other boy from before seemed quieter. There was a younger female, too, but the mermaid didn’t know her quite as well.

“So, what did you find out about her?” Chanyeol asked Victoria, who proudly turned to a page in her binder.

“Quite a lot of things,” she said. “I took an x-ray while she was unconscious and I discovered that she has a collapsible rib cage. It’s common in aquatic animals that do a lot of deep sea diving. It helps accommodate to the changes in pressure. Like dolphins. Her tail is made of a similar substance, too, but has a thinner layer of fat on the inside and a thicker exodermal layer. Her blood is red, so she’s got hemoglobin. She can stomach human food; Yixing gave her a cookie earlier. There are still a lot of things I want to check on, though, but we’ll get to it later.”

“So how long is this does this last?” Kyungsoo asked, gesturing to the mermaid’s legs. Victoria shrugged.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe a week, maybe a month, maybe forever.”

“But if it lasts forever,” Chanyeol said. “What are we going to do with her?”

“Beats me,” Victoria said. “But I still say that we have to consider reporting her to the Institute of Science. This is a historical discovery, for God’s sake, a mythical creature proved real! And think of everything we could learn from her!”

“Would you shut up about science for one minute,” Yixing said. Victoria had always been a science enthusiast, but he figured there were better plans for their mermaid. “We’d have to rehabilitate her, of course,” he said. “If she really is going to be here for a long time, we have to teach her to survive and adapt to life on land. She’s helpless without us. The Institute isn’t going to give her the same chance that we can give her.”

“She survived a whole night crushed under bicycles during an oil spill,” Victoria said. “If we can figure out how she did that, imagine the chance that she could give us.”

Yixing clenched his fists against the back of the couch. “Sometimes life isn’t always about what we can get.”

He turned his head to look at the mermaid. She was looking at everyone in the room intently, and he wondered if she actually could understand them. The way her eyes shifted with wisdom hinted that she was listening to their conversation. Was she liking what she was hearing?

“She’ll need a place to sleep,” Kyungsoo said, breaking the silence.

“Victoria?” Chanyeol asked, but the intern shook her head.

“My apartment is packed,” she said. “I was thinking we could keep her here at Yixing’s place. This is where we’ve been keeping her for the past week, anyway. Yixing?”

Yixing pursed his lips, trying to think of a solution. It was easy to hide her while his parents were away helping with the oil spill, but now that it was becoming more contained they would be returning home soon. They would need an excuse to keep her there.

“What about my parents?” Yixing asked.

“Just… tell them she’s a relative of mine,” Victoria said. “Or you hired a babysitter for Mei.”

“They’d let her go,” Yixing said. “They’d never let me hire a sitter. I’ll try the relative thing. But you two don’t look anything alike.”

“Mermaid’s prettier,” Chanyeol whispered under his breath and Victoria turned to him, raising the rolled-up newspaper again. Victoria rolled her eyes and turned back to Yixing.

“Well, you have to find a way to keep her here,” Victoria said. “There are more tests that I want to run for my own research. Your parents’ lab is the best place to do it, too, so having her here would be preferable. You’ll take care of her, right?”

The mermaid looked over at Yixing and the two met each other’s gaze. Yixing swallowed and looked back to Victoria. “Yeah, of course,” he said. “But we should get our stories straight for when my parents get here. So work on that. I need to get dinner on the table, Mei’s complaining.”

“Alright, then,” Victoria said. “Any questions?”

Kyungsoo, humoring her, raised his hand and waited to be called on before voicing his query: “So, what’s her name?”

Everyone froze. “Well,” Yixing called from the kitchen. “We actually don’t know. She didn’t tell us.”

Victoria nodded.

“So, as of right now, she has no name?” Kyungsoo asked, and Victoria nodded. “Ah, I see. Well, I’ve been making a list of names, you see – ”

“You made a list of names?” Chanyeol asked. Kyungsoo reached into his back pocket and took out his cell phone. Opening up a notepad application, he began to talk.

“I decided to look up popular mermaid names. Doubtless, the most popular is ‘Ariel’ but she doesn’t really look like an Ariel. So, I made a list of the cooler names. Now,” Kyungsoo turned to the mermaid who still sat in the wheelchair looking confused.

“How do you feel about ‘Lorelei’?” Chanyeol snickered and Victoria just raised an eyebrow at the name. Kyungsoo repeated it and the mermaid just stared blankly at him.

“No?” he said. “No matter, I got more here, just let me know when you hear one that you like: Ondine? Thessalonike? Melusina? Aquatica? Shelly? – ”

“Shelly?” Victoria repeated incredulously. “Now, that’s a little too punny.”

“What about… Goldilocks?” Chanyeol suggested and even Yixing started laughing in the kitchen. “What? She had a gold tail!”

“Jinyu,” Mei suggested from her perch on the couch. She was reading a girly magazine that didn’t match her tomboyish appearance. “It just means ‘goldfish’,” she explained.

Everyone looked at her, including the mermaid. Victoria and Chanyeol nodded to each other, liking the sound of the name. They waited for Kyungsoo, who cleared his throat and pushed his phone back into his pockets.

“It’ll do,” he said. “Until I think of something better.”

Yixing played the name in his head. Jinyu. He looked over at the mermaid in her wheelchair, who was already beginning to respond to her name as Chanyeol and Mei taught it to her. It’s perfect for her, Yixing thought. He shut off the heat on the stove and began preparing the table. Victoria ushered the others to the table.

Heeding Victoria’s advice, Kyungsoo, Mei, and Chanyeol excused themselves for a moment. Victoria pushed the wheelchair so that it was closer to where the kitchen was so Jinyu could see them. Yixing stepped out of the kitchen with a pot of stew for everyone. Mei looked over and stared at Jinyu as she ate.

Jinyu stared back at her. The younger female human resembled the boy from earlier. After a few hours of listening, she gathered that his name was Yixing. The taller boy was Chanyeol. The shorter one was Kyungsoo. And the woman who took care of her was Victoria. The younger girl must have been related to Yixing somehow, a sister perhaps. The humans all sat at the raised platform while seated on shorter platforms. She watched as they reached into the big pot with a giant ladle and scooped the watery food into their bowls of white grain. They ate so vigorously with two sticks in their hands, sloshing the grain and the soup into their mouths and picking up other foods from the table. It was like a dance, she thought.

“Why isn’t she sitting at the table?” Chanyeol asked, and Victoria looked up, narrowing her eyes as she remembered the water glass incident. If they gave her a bowl of soup, she might dump that over her head as well. Chanyeol put down his chopsticks and wheeled the mermaid closer to the empty chair by his side. He patted the empty seat and then lifted her up to sit in it.

Yixing and Victoria both eyed one another, both expecting a similar disaster from earlier that day. But Chanyeol sat her down between himself and Mei and even handed her a pair of chopsticks. With a sigh, Yixing filled another bowl with rice and poured the stew over it and handed the dish to her. For a long time, the mermaid just stared at the bowl in his hand, and Yixing finally just set it down in front of her.

Jinyu felt slightly panicked. Obviously, this was food. Human food. But how did they expect her to eat it? How did it taste? What were these two thin sticks for? She looked around at her companions, who all ate with vigorous gusto, and she spotted the younger girl beside her holding up her own two sticks. She placed them in the space between her thumb and index finger, and Jinyu mimicked her movements. Then, she gripped the other stick with the same two fingers. Jinyu tried to follow as best as she could.

Yixing stopped eating for a moment, suddenly intrigued by Mei trying to give Jinyu a lesson in chopsticks. Stand-by for food disaster #2. The mermaid flexed her fingers, testing out the chopsticks once and then twice. Then, she followed the others’ actions. She lifted the bowl with her other hand and brought it closer to . Then, she used the sticks to scoop up a little bit of the sticky, grainy food. It hovered over for a little bit, and then she ate it. She chewed slowly, savoring the new taste of human food. It was delicious, and she swallowed quickly.

Yixing raised his eyebrows at her, and he smiled a bit to himself. Finally, he thought. A little bit of success.

“Wah, she did it!” Kyungsoo said, pointing at her with his own chopsticks. Chanyeol put his food down and began applauding, and even Victoria had to admit that successfully using chopsticks was quite a feat for a girl having her first dinner on land. The mermaid looked up, not quite sure what to make of all the attention, but she was relieved to see them smiling at her, and so she smiled in return.

A knock on the door and the sound of jingling keys called them back to the dinner. They all turned and looked at the door in time to see Mr. and Mrs. Zhang walking into the house.

“Well, it’s good to see that you all got along fine without us,” Mr. Zhang said, taking off his hat and hanging the keys on a hook by the door. “Dinner smells good!”

Mei turned and looked at her brother, challenging him with the question of what he was going to say about the mermaid, who for now was sitting quietly and eating with her chopsticks. Yixing’s parents talked a bit about their time with the relief effort team, and they walked toward the table. His father greeted Chanyeol and Kyungsoo and thanked them for helping out the other day. His mother greeted Victoria and asked her how management of the teams was coming along. His mother placed a kiss on his forehead and on Mei’s. The both of them finally stopped and noticed the unknown girl sitting at the table.

“Looks like we got a live one, here,” Yixing’s father said. He approached Jinyu, who sat quietly staring up at the larger man. “What’s your name?” he asked.

Victoria and Yixing looked at one another. “Uh, she’s my cousin,” Victoria blurted out. “Yeah, she just moved here and I wanted to introduce her to the guys.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Zhang said, and the mermaid still looked blankly at the couple. “Well, what’s your name, dear?”

 “Jinyu,” Yixing said, and his parents and the mermaid looked to him. “Her name is Jinyu.”

His father smiled politely at their new friend and extended his hand to her for a handshake. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Jinyu,” he said. “Welcome to our home.”

Jinyu stared at the large man’s hand for a long time. He extended it to her, but she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with it. Yixing looked at Victoria and both of them silently panicked together. Jinyu, clueless about what was going on, instead extended the chopsticks out to the man and placed them in his waiting hands.

“She wants you two to join us at the table,” Chanyeol said suddenly, standing up and directing them to sit down to dinner. “See how she even offers you chopsticks? You should try this new stew that Yixing made; it’s really good!”

Victoria stood up as well and asked Mrs. Zhang to take her seat and have a bite of Yixing’s food. “My cousin is still looking around for apartments,” Victoria said. “My own unit is kinda cramped right now, but um… do you think Jinyu can crash on your couch for a couple of nights?”

Yixing’s parents looked to each other, and seeing nothing wrong with the arrangement agreed to let Jinyu sleep on their couch. Besides, they would be gone most of the time helping with the relief efforts anyway. Yixing glared at Victoria; it was one thing to let an unconscious mermaid sleep in their lab, but it was another thing to let a strange girl spend a couple nights on his couch. And now that she was conscious and had legs to get around, she’d be an even bigger responsibility.

Dinner came and went, and his parents excused themselves for the night, saying that they were exhausted from the day’s work. When they were gone, Chanyeol and Kyungsoo said their goodbyes as well and headed on home. Victoria motioned for Yixing to help Jinyu back onto the wheelchair. He approached Jinyu where she sat on the dining chair, experimenting with her chopsticks some more. Yixing knelt down by her side, getting ready to lift her up bridal style to put her in the wheelchair. Jinyu, however, became startled, and she jumped up, she fell to the side instead, landing on her bottom. Mei scoffed.

“She’s so clumsy,” she said. Yixing sighed as well. Falling over just made his job ten times harder. He eventually grabbed her wrists and pulled her up to stand, and she just leaned against his frame for support. Finding the position a little awkward, Yixing bent down and scooped her up. Suddenly startled by the height, Jinyu began to squirm, and Yixing tightened his grip around her knees.

“Stop it! Don’t squirm,” he yelled, and began walking toward the couch, ready to just drop her onto it. When he was finally standing over the sofa, he let go of his grip and she fell onto the plush pads of the couch. Yixing stretched out his back. “You need to learn how to walk,” he said, and then left her there. He came back with a pillow and a blanket and fixed them on the couch for her.

Jinyu watched him walked back to the older girl, and she reached a hand out and touched the plush thing the boy had left for her. It was soft and cool to the touch. It was light, too, and Jinyu picked it up, threw it in the air and caught it again. What did humans use this for? Was it a sponge of some kind? No such coral ever grew under the sea.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Victoria said, coming out of the bathroom in her jacket and carrying her purse. “Take care of her, okay?”

“For how long?” Yixing asked, and Victoria looked down at Jinyu, who seemed to be listening to the two of them talk. Victoria shrugged.

“Not sure,” she said. “She might be human forever or for just a little while. But I want to run some tests on her to find out more about her species. Keep her out of trouble. You can do that, right?”

Yixing nodded slowly. “Sure, I guess.”

Victoria nodded and started walking toward the door. “Teach her how to walk,” she said. “And figure out if she can speak.” And with that, the door closed behind her. Yixing looked back at Jinyu; it was the first time he’d really been alone with the mermaid, and he wasn’t quite sure how to act or what to do. He clapped his hands together to get her attention.

“So, this is where you sleep,” he said, and her eyes locked on him. “Don’t move from that spot. And don’t touch anything. Victoria will be back tomorrow. Just go to sleep, and I’ll be right down the hall if you need me. Don’t try to walk, though. We’ll get to that tomorrow. Got it?”

Jinyu tilted her head and shrugged. Yixing took this as a sign meaning that she understood. “Do you talk at all?” he asked. She only stared at him. “Do you understand me when I talk? Do you understand when I talk to Victoria or Chanyeol? Do you know Chanyeol?”

She stared, not blinking for the longest time. But suddenly, registering the name “Chanyeol”, she nodded.

“So you can understand,” Yixing said, nodding as well. “Say something to me, then. Do you have a name? Not ‘Jinyu,’ I mean. What’s your real name?”

At this, she shook her head. Yixing pursed his lips. “No name, then,” he said, and he scratched his head. “Do you like the name we gave you, though? Jinyu? It… it just means ‘goldfish,’ you kind of looked like a goldfish when you had your tail.”

Jinyu thought about the name he gave her. It was a fine name, she thought. None of her sisters had names at all, so she didn’t know what made a good name or what made a bad name. Mermaids were never given names; names were human assignments, not mermaid business. Mermaids thrived in swarms and blended in with each other. No one had use for names. “Jinyu” sounded good, though. So she nodded. Yixing nodded and then put a hand over his chest.

“Yixing,” he said, walking over and taking a seat on the couch. “That’s my name. Now say your name to me. ‘Jinyu’. Can you say that? Jin… Yu.”

Jinyu’s face paled a little. She’d never spoken aloud before. There was little need to under the sea. She sang frequently, but singing was different than speaking. She watched Yixing’s mouth, trying to keep up with the way it moved, studying his tongue and the sounds his voice made. But the feeling of having a voice and actually hearing it was still unfamiliar. Yixing gave up his endeavor and sighed.

“Nevermind,” he said. “We’ll work on that tomorrow.”

Yixing looked over at the mermaid and Jinyu stared back. Looking into the boy’s eyes, Jinyu could see that he was a kind person. He’d been among the first to help her with her first few moments as a human. As of today, she was fully immersed in the human world, an alien place that was the setting of many horror stories that she’d heard as a child. But if the entire human race were anything like this boy or the others who helped her, she couldn’t understand where such stories came from. Jinyu sighed to herself; everything was difficult, now. Everything would have to be re-learned. If she was ever to fulfill her mission, she had to stay close. If she was ever to find her prince, she would need to learn as much as she could.  Her beloved human boy could be anywhere. If she was to search for him, she had to start somewhere.

When Jinyu first started out on this adventure, she hadn’t imagined that she’d feel so afraid and isolated or stupid and helpless. The simple acquisition of a pair of legs altered her entire lifestyle. She felt vulnerable and cowardly, different than her usual adventurous self when she was a mermaid. But looking into the human boy’s eyes was strangely comforting, as though he understood what she was going through.

“Well,” the boy said, stretching out his back again. “It’s been a long day, so I’ll let you get your rest. Sweet dreams.” Yixing stood up and was about to walk back to his room when he felt a sudden grip around his wrist, and when he looked down at his hand, he found Jinyu holding onto him.

It wasn’t a rough grab, but neither was it a gentle touch. It was more a reassuring hold. But what felt strange was the way, for a short moment, the entire world went quiet and all he could hear was a single voice in his head, rising above everything.

I need help, it said. Yixing paused and then looked down at her grip around his wrist again. Then, he looked at her face and let out a long breath. He gulped and blinked at her. Was it her voice? Had she spoken? How did her voice get into his head?

“Need help with what?” he asked.