Fathom by L. Standage (spanish books to read .TXT) 📕

“Didn’t even say thank you. Just ate everything,” she muttered.

“How about a trip to the grocery store?” I asked. Her dishes clattered into the sink. She came out of the kitchen without looking at me.

“Okay. I’m not buying waffles though.”

An hour later, Sam and I strolled down a grocery store aisle, our cart full. She’d gone straight to the ice cream aisle first and dumped four cartons into the shopping cart. I put two back. She gathered six pizzas. I put back three. Marshmallow cereal, chocolate milk, easy cheese—half of it I put back and replaced it with some eggs, regular milk, bread, and cheese. I left the box of marshmallow cereal in the cart. A girl can have her indulgences once in a while.

“So, anything else we need?" Sam asked.

“Let’s get some bacon. I want a good bacon, egg, and cheese burrito,” I said as I pushed the grocery cart toward the produce section. “And water. I haven’t had hardly anything to drink all day. The tap water at Aunt Shannon’s tastes like a hotel swimming pool.”

Samantha laughed. “I’ve never been grocery shopping on my own before. This is so fun. It’s like we’re college roommates or something.”

I grinned. “Yeah, only we don’t have to pay for any of it.”

“I know!”

Both of us laughed this time.

After picking up a few more things, we turned down the aisle toward the cash registers and found a place in the shortest line. I sidled around the cart and reached in to put our food on the conveyer belt.

“Ooh, let’s get some yummies,” said Sam. She went for the candy bars, then gasped and grabbed my arm. Her fingernails pinched me.

“Ouch, what?”

“Look,” she whispered, pointing a finger at one of the magazines on display next to the candy. I looked and dropped the box of frozen pizza.

One of the tabloids had a picture on it. My picture.

I snatched the magazine up, examining the picture up close. It was definitely me. The hair, the tail, the seaweed—identical to the scene Samantha had set up yesterday morning. The bold caption read Stranded Mermaid Found on the Shores of San Diego.

“Sam,” I hissed. “Did you send this in?”

“No.”

“Then how…” I stopped. There I was, lying on the beach in the exact way I remembered before Brock Mallory came. I gasped. “That Brock Mallory guy! He must have done it!”

“Ugh, what a shmuck.”

“How did it get into a magazine so fast?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I wonder if it’s online.”

I reached for my phone but remembered again what had happened to it. I growled in frustration. Sam typed on her phone, snorted, and turned the screen to me. There was the picture, with a similar headline, on the magazine’s website. I took phone and looked at the post. It had been shared thousands of times.

“What am I going to do?” I gripped the hair near my scalp with one hand. Sam, on the other hand, laughed again.

“Psh…nothing. You can’t tell it’s you.” She stared at the magazine. “Come on, it’s cool. You’re famous, mermaid girl.”

“Shut up. People are starting to stare.” I looked to the line next to us, where a thin woman with long red hair stood, holding two huge bottles of water and watching me with a wrinkle to her brow.

“I’m going to buy this.” Sam threw the magazine with my picture onto the conveyer belt.

“Let’s hurry up and go.” I lobbed the rest of our stuff onto the conveyer and waited with my foot tapping and my mouth dry. The pack of water moved up the conveyer, but I grabbed it and pulled one out. “Sorry,” I said to the clerk scanning the groceries. “I’m dying of thirst.”

The store clerk nodded. I opened the bottle and chugged half of it out of a combination of nerves and thirst while she scanned the groceries. Was she staring? I felt like a spotlight shone over me—the girl stupid enough to dress up like a mermaid and go lay on the beach like some Comic-Con freak. And then I was stupid enough to get caught!

We hurried—or at least, I hurried—with buying our food. After loading our bags, I made a hasty exit. Sam trailed behind, her nose stuck in the pages of the tabloid.

“Olivia, this stuff is so great. These people think the end of the world is going to be next year on the autumn equinox.”

“Yeah, I’ll make a note of that,” I said as I paused to let traffic clear and then pushed the shopping cart into the parking lot. I popped the trunk of my car and loaded the groceries, while Sam continued cracking up over the stories in the tabloid. I stuffed the last bag into the trunk, slammed it closed, and pushed the cart away, not caring where it stopped.

“Let’s go.”

“Right,” Sam said, distracted by the bogus yet somehow compelling articles as she climbed into the passenger seat. In the rearview mirror, the same red-haired woman from the checkout line stood at the entrance to the grocery store, watching the car as we pulled away.

Creepy.

Sam laughed yet again. It made me jump. “You have to read this when we get back. It’s fantastic.”

“Does it say who gave them the photo?”

“No. Keeps it anonymous. Good thing too. If he’d taken credit, I’d have to kick his—”

“That jerk,” I said through gritted teeth. “I better not have any trouble from this.”

Samantha sighed. “Olivia, you need to relax. This tabloid is just a bunch of sleaze-and-cheese people make up. And no one is going to know it’s you in the picture. Stuff like this gets passed around, then forgotten after two days. Chill.”

I felt stupid for getting anxious, but I couldn’t help it. What if my parents saw it? I felt like a victim of some weird kind of identity theft, only instead of having my social security number stolen, I had my face unwillingly plastered all over the front of thousands of magazines, and possibly all over