Page 10 of Crashing Tides

A man winks at me as I pass him, wrapped maybe a little too modestly in one of Mom’s fraying pink towels. He’s tall, with a sharp jawline and dark eyes, and I look at him just a second too long, clocking the brand of his shoes, his shorts.

Wealthy. A little older. Just my type, and exactly the kind of person I’m trying to stop spending time with. I can’t help grinning back, running my hand through my hair just this side of flirtatious, but I’m gone before he can say anything, around the corner and fumbling with my locker.

He doesn’t follow.

I tell myself I’m not disappointed as I step into my shorts, my shoes.

Water witches, as far as I can tell, only exist on social media. If the fae use social media, they aren’t spilling their secrets or making themselves easily identifiable.

In fact, it’s been pretty much impossible for me to do any research. Mom’s notebooks are by far the best resource I have, but I get frustrated flipping through them, trying to imagine her in class. Why was she doodling water everywhere? In a few notebooks, I find drawings of a pregnant belly, a baby wrapped in blankets and feel a weird sort of embarrassed guilt. I know Mom was pregnant with me when she graduated. Based on these drawings, she must have been excited, or at the very least, not dreading my arrival.

It’s strange to think about. Mom was twenty-four when I was born, a mere forty-six when she died, pale and frail from cancer, her hair thin like an old woman’s. (Like a corpse’s, my brain supplies unhelpfully.)

To distract myself, I dig further into the notebooks, looking for any signs of a possible lover—I know I didn’t spring out of thin air. Instead, I find that strange symbol again, and this time I search until I find something about sigils. I can’t prove that this is a sigil—there are way too many magical symbols out there—but I think it makes the most sense. Someone designed this symbol for a reason. In theory, I might be able to work it out.

Sigils are made from the leftover letters of a word or phrase, once the vowels and repeating letters have been filtered out. I think Mom’s initials are worked into the symbol, the N and M fused into one letter, but there’s something else. A circle, and ocean waves within that don’t look like part of any particular letter. I spend a long time trying to puzzle it out on a separate piece of paper. Part of an S? A G? Maybe a C?

I can’t figure it out.

Gretchen calls when I’m at my most frustrated. It helps, to pretend to be happy for a few minutes, to let her prattle on in my ear. Her daughter, my cousin Nora, is going to be moving into Mom’s house when I’m gone and paying enough rent to cover the mortgage. She’s also going to be taking care of Bruce and Jolene, which I feel ridiculously guilty about. I hate leaving them behind. I trust Nora to keep them safe, to take them to the vet and feed them on time, but a part of me feels like I’m abandoning my obligations. I promised Mom that I wouldn’t let them go to a shelter, no matter what, and it hurts to turn my back on them. They don’t have any idea what happened. They don’t deserve any of this. What if Nora gets frustrated with Bruce? What if Jolene goes outside and gets lost? She’s not an outdoor cat…

Gretchen assures me at least twenty times that everything will be fine. If anything happens, she can take the animals.

I want to throw up. I hate the idea of leaving.

But there’s a huge chunk of my life missing, and I’ve realized that I can’t effectively educate myself at home. If I’m going to learn more about my heritage and what I’m capable of, I have to attend Halea. There’s no other choice.

OK, so maybe I could track down one of the fae and convince them to explain things to me, but then I’d always wonder what might’ve happened if I just gave in and went. Mom survived, so it probably isn’t anything weird, right? No death trials or secret passages or anything else I’ve encountered in fiction.

I leave halfway through August with a backpack full of Mom’s notebooks, two of her matching suitcases stuffed full of the toiletries and clothes she’d bought me, and a heavy heart.

Halea University is nothing like I expected. It’s high up on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Gray, angry waves slap against dark, craggy rocks.

My stomach curdles with a combination of terror and awe. The moment I lay eyes on the sea, I know that it will one day lure me into its waters, and I will go willingly, longingly, lovingly.

I shudder and turn away, but a part of me is already yearning, desperate. I clench my fingers around the strap of my backpack, take deep breaths.

Is this some sort of contrarian reaction to all of Mom’s rules? Or something deeper, pathological? Is this why she banned me from the ocean? Because she knew I wouldn’t be able to resist its call?

Something is wrong with me. I close my eyes and don’t open them until the cab driver puts on the parking brake.

Towering pines encompass a great, emerald lawn. A stone wall surrounds campus, pale and foreboding. Moss crawls between crevices. Wrought iron gates swing open as soon as I step out of the cab.

Magic, or automatic like the doors at the supermarket?

I guess there’s only one way to find out. I tip the driver and haul my luggage inside.

Chapter

Five

Orea meets me at the Administration Office, beaming like the sun, like she’s really, truly happy to see me again. It’s hard to believe anything can go wrong while she’s here.

I’m cynical enough to know that this is probably her role at Halea, convincing the new students, the frightened parents, the uninitiated that it’s going to be all right.

She shows me to my dorm, a little room in a brick building so old that it looks it might crumble beneath a good gust of wind. Nothing fancy, just two narrow beds, pocked desks and chairs, and twin wardrobes as tall and skinny as my high school locker.

For my purposes, it’s fine, but I’m immediately homesick.