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Luckily, my parents are out of town for another couple of weeks, so they won't find out. I'm glad that that Shanghai cardiology conference is almost a week long, and then they go to Beijing, Hong Kong, and Singapore. They are leading researchers and will test some new robot-surgeon who will replace humans in places that are difficult to get to, like war zones. They wouldn’t miss it, even though they're probably going to be gone for my nineteenth birthday. But who cares, right? I'm not as important as robots who perform surgery.
The anger I felt when they told me ached inside of me for days, and I knew the only way to get rid of it was to jump. I discovered the first week we moved here when I was twelve years old that jumping from the cliff calms me down. My parents pissed me off by saying they wanted me to attend some fancy Beverly Hills Academy instead of a boarding school for swimmers, which I’d dreamt of. That's when I walked to the cliff, checked to see where the underwater rocks were, and jumped from the safest spot I could find.
My parents were furious when they found out. They said we'd move away if I did that again. But I have, many, many times. And each time, I’ve gone a little higher. My parents have threatened to stop paying for my swimming lessons, but they never did because they knew that it would've killed me.
The moment I feel my body finally start to relax, someone grabs me by the ankle, and I scream loudly in fear, flopping on the water as if I am drowning.
"Are you alive? Have you broken something?" I hear a low male voice and realize that a stranger is talking to me.
"Get your hands off me!" I yell at the maniac, trying to push him off, but his grip on my ankle is tight.
I can't see him clearly because of the water in my eyes, but I know that he's unshaven and dark-haired.
"You're in shock because you're hurt," he continues in a calmer tone, and that's when I realize that he's trying to hold me as if I'm drowning for real. That's a unique grip I've been taught in my swim lessons.
"Let go of me. I'm not drowning!" I keep yelling, rubbing my blurry eyes, trying to escape, but he doesn't let me.
"You're bleeding," he insists, and I look down at the water.
"That's not my blood," I say calmly, looking at the massive cut on his arm.
He finally lets me go, and I rub my eyes, looking at him in frustration.
He's not as old as I thought in the first place. He's about thirty, maybe older. I can't say precisely because of the dark beard.
He looks at his arm and the blood oozing out of it, and he is overcome with bewilderment, almost as much as I was just a minute before.
After a moment of silence, he looks back at me. "Why the hell were you jumping from my cliff?" he barks angrily.
And that's when I really become afraid of him.
"Fromyourcliff? But that's Mr. Styles' house, and I was just..." I begin, but he cuts me off.
"I’ve rented this house for the next year." He keeps raising his voice, becoming even more furious with each word.
Okay, I get it. My cliff is on my new neighbor's property. The best thing he might do is tell my parents, and they'll ground me for ages, so long as they think I will not jump anymore.
The worst thing he can do is call the police, and I'll be suspended not only from the academy but also from my swim team...
"Were you trying to commit suicide?" he continues, not giving me a chance to continue that thought. He's holding his injured arm higher from the cut, knowing exactly how to stop the bleeding.
He must be a doctor, just like my parents. He knows how to hold a drowning person and what to do when your arm is bleeding.
"No, of course not!" I raise my voice again at how ridiculous it sounds. "I’ve jumped from that cliff a hundred times!"
"You’ve done this more than once?" he barks again, even louder this time, like a homeless dog defending a bone. "Are you crazy? You could've died!"
I realize that yelling and arguing with him won't help me avoid punishment. It can only make it worse.
That's when I say, "You need to rinse that wound as soon as possible so it doesn’t get infected..."
"I know what I need to do!" He turns away and starts to swim toward the beach.
For about a minute, we swim silently, but as we get closer to the shore, I try to talk to him again.
"Please, please don't call the police. I promise I will never..." I started pleading.
"Do you have a first aid kit?" he interrupts without giving me a chance to finish.
