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“Not on purpose!” I yelled back.
“That doesn’t matter once you’re dead!” Jack yelled.
“People wade into water all the time!” I yelled. “It’s a totally normal thing to do!”
“Not in the Brazos!”
“But I didn’t know that!”
“And if you go under, then I go under—because then I have to go in after you!”
“So don’t go in after me!”
“That’s not how this works! If you die in the river, I die in the river! And I really don’t want to fucking die in the fucking river!”
For a second, I had no response. I didn’t know what to say to that. And in that second, I realized something else: I was shaking. A lot. Hard. From someplace deep in my core.
Most likely, it was fear.
Though it didn’t feel like fear.
But maybe I’d just forgotten what fear felt like.
Usually, the antidote to fear was preparation—but I hadn’t been prepared for anything about this week, from watching my job mutate into something I didn’t even recognize, to moving in with a bunch of strangers, to losing my best friend, to winding up in the middle of some hatefest between Jack and his brother, to being called “ordinary,” to almost drowning, and—now—to getting yelled at like I hadn’t been yelled at in years.
It was a lot.
Suddenly, it was too much.
“What am I?” I demanded then. “Some kind of historian of the Texas waterways? How exactly am I supposed to know that this is a river of death? I’m just living my life in the city, trying to get to London, or Korea, or anywhere at all that’s literally not Texas, and suddenly I’m having to move to a cattle ranch and act in this crazy reality show with you and your family? I didn’t want this job, I didn’t ask for it, and now I’m trapped in it with no escape for weeks on end! So maybe you could give me a heads-up if I’m about to accidentally kill myself or anyone else—”
And right here is where my voice broke.
Right here is where I lost hold of “angry” and my emotions just kind of crumbled. By the time I finished with “instead of just yelling at me out of nowhere like an asshole,” my voice sounded broken, even to me.
I froze, and so did Jack, as we both registered that I’d just called my employer an asshole.
I would have liked to march off right then in a gesture of self-respect, but everything was trembling, including my legs.
Without even really thinking, I reached up to touch my beaded safety pin. I just wanted a quick hit of that tiny sparkle of comfort I always got when I felt the beads.
But it wasn’t there.
My neck was bare. The necklace was gone, too.
“Hey,” I said, looking down. “Where’s my safety pin?”
“Your what?”
I pawed at my collarbones, like I might find it if I kept trying. “My safety pin. With the beads. It’s gone.”
Had it come off in the water? Was it somewhere on the beach?
I started searching the sand.
“That colored safety pin you always wear?” he asked, forgetting we were fighting and starting to look, too.
“It must have fallen off,” I said.
