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home. Make that: Jonah and I should spend the day searching the palace grounds.
    I find my brother playing Ping-Pong with Russell outside. “Jonah, I need your help. We have to find the portal home.” I whisper the last part so Russell doesn’t hear. I don’t knowanything about the kid — I’m not going to trust him with our situation yet.
    “Let me just finish this game.” Jonah leans over the table and tries to return a shot.
    “Jonah! Now!”
    “Okay, okay,” he grumbles. “Sorry, Russell. Wanna come help us knock on all the furniture to find our way home?”
    I purse my lips. I guess we’re not keeping our situation a secret.
    Russell wrinkles his nose. “Not really. My mom doesn’t like when I touch the furniture.”
    I lead Jonah back inside.
    “How great is it that Russell gets to live in the palace?” he asks. “Imagine getting to be here every day.”
    “Don’t get too comfy,” I say. “We need to go home eventually. And remember: The portal can be anything. Any object .”
    We step into the main hallway and Jonah looks around. “So it could be a — door?” he asks.
    I nod. “Or a mirror. Or a fireplace. Or a table. How are we supposed to know?”
    Jonah motions to all the frames on the wall. “Maybe it’s a painting.”
    “Maybe,” I say. “Let’s try knocking on them to see if any of them make any sounds or start spinning. But don’t let them take you yet, ’kay? Stand back.”
    I start with the full-body portrait of Prince Mortimer. He’s wearing his crown and a yellow wet suit. It’s really lifelike. His eyes seem to follow me around the room. I knock on the painting three times. It’s creepy, but I don’t think it’s enchanted.
    It takes about an hour, but we knock on at least a hundred portraits and paintings.
    “Guess it’s not the paintings,” I say.
    “Are we done?” Jonah asks eagerly. “Can I go windsurfing?”
    “No, Jonah! We have to check the doors and mirrors.”
    We hurry around the palace knocking on all of them. We are almost done when —
    “Come in!” Vivian yells when we knock on one of the spare bedroom doors.
    Oops. “Hi,” I say. Inside, I head to the mirror over the dresser and knock three times.
    “What in the world are you doing?” Vivian asks, putting down her duster.
    I give a small smile. “Um, knocking? See, the way we got here was through a mirror, so a mirror might be our portal home.”
    “Well, stop it!” she barks. “You’re making the frames uneven. Go play outside!”
    “I agree,” says Jonah.
    “Sorry, Vivian,” I say. I pull Jonah back downstairs. We’re never going to be able to knock on every object in the house. The palace has a lot of stuff. And Vivian is going to kill us.
    “What we need,” Jonah says, sitting down on a marble step, “is a fairy.”
    “This story doesn’t have a fairy!” I cry. “The only magical person in this story is the sea witch, and we can’t go see her since she lives underwater. And I don’t happen to have any mermaid spit on me.”
    “We should try a bat signal.”
    “Huh?”
    “You know how in Batman they put up a signal in the sky when they need Batman? That’s what we need. A bat signal. But in our case, a mermaid signal.”
    I’m confused. “For the sea witch?”
    “No, for the Little Mermaid. Something to get her to come faster.”
    “But what would draw the Little Mermaid to us?”
    “There’s only one thing,” Jonah says.
    We look at each other and both say it: “Prince Mortimer.”

W e try to convince Prince Mortimer to hang out on the beach that night, but he says he’s too tired from his day of windsurfing. So we use the next best thing we can find.
    Prince Mortimer’s wet-suit portrait.
    We wait until the middle of the night.
    Then we sneak downstairs and very, very, very carefully lift Prince Mortimer’s portrait up and off the wall.
    “Careful!” I whisper as it leans toward Jonah and almost turns my brother into a pancake.
    It’s a good thing