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Shoving off from the bottom, I exploded into the evening and looked down at the girl in my terrified embrace.
I buckled beneath images of her dead.
Of yet another girl gone because I hadn’t been good enough, quick enough, strong enough to save her.
But Neri’s intelligent, all-seeing stare met mine.
She didn’t try to untangle herself from me.
She didn’t try to stand.
She merely floated in my arms, hair swaying around us like seaweed, water raining over her lips as she parted them and sucked in a delicate breath.
For a moment, I couldn’t separate fact from fiction.
I couldn’t stop seeing the nightmare of dead things and fallen families, but then Neri reached up and placed her small hand on my sodden t-shirt, pressing her fingers directly over my thundering heart.
I lost it.
With a groan, I dropped her back in the water and waded to the sandy shore. My ankle screamed as I rolled it a little on the uneven bottom; the weight of my shorts and clinginess of my t-shirt felt claustrophobic as hell.
“Wait.”
I froze, but I didn’t turn around.
“Aslan, are you...are you okay?”
That word no longer affected me, but her voice did.
Her innocence did.
Everything she represented and everything that I’d lost.
My chin dropped and a wash of pure rage worked through me, tainting my grief, blotting out my fears. I should keep walking. I should get as far away from her as possible but...
I found myself turning.
I found myself hurting.
So.
Fucking.
Much.
And I couldn’t stop myself.
“Am I okay?” My lips twisted into a snarl. “You’re asking if I’m okay. Of course, I’m not fucking okay. I agreed to watch you. I made a promise to your parents—parents who hold my very life in their hands—and what did I do? I almost let their fucking daughter drown.”
“I wasn’t drowning—”
“What sort of fucked-up twelve-year-old decides to swim on her own, at midnight, the moment her parents leave?”
“It’s not midnight. It’s only ten—”
“What sort of girl likes to swim beneath the sea with no air supply? What sort of girl doesn’t care that there are sharks and jellyfish and stonefish and poisonous fucking coral just waiting to end her life? What sort of girl is so oblivious and carefree when living in a goddamn country where everything is trying to kill you?! You have no survival instinct. None. You’re going to get yourself killed before you’re my age and—”
“I was improving my breath hold.” Neri stood to her full height, her balled hands just beneath the surface. “That’s all. And Australia might be dangerous, but I know your home was far worse if you ran from it.” Her voice hardened even while her cheeks pinked with apology. “I should’ve told you I was swimming. I know that. But...after your refusal to swim today and the way you got so angry with me, I...” She shrugged, choosing an easier excuse. “I thought you might be sleeping. I didn’t want to annoy you again, and I practice every night, so it’s not like I did anything wrong.”
“Everything you do is wrong!” I roared. “Everything you say to me is wrong.”
Her forehead scrunched. True pain sliced through her gaze. “I...I don’t understand.”
I didn’t, either.
I had no idea where that had come from or any explanation why I felt that way.
She’d been nothing but sweet and welcoming and...young.
Yet...she saw me like no one else did.
She saw what I hid from, what I wasn’t brave enough to face, and it made me hate her, because while I lived with her, I could never just brush my grief beneath a rug and forget about it because she wouldn’t fucking let me.
Sighing heavily, all my fight evaporated.
I felt sick for yelling at her.
I felt wrung out from all the emotions I still couldn’t process.
Pressing knuckles into my eyes, I wished I could squeeze out the mess inside me. My wrist sent a small spasm of pain, but it was my heart that was absolutely shattered.
How long would it be until I felt sane again?
Before my heart would return to keeping me alive instead of making me wish I was dead?
Neri waded silently through the pool.
I dropped my hands and glowered at her as she came to a stop before me. The water lapped her knees, her baby-blue bathing suit almost navy in the night. “Come swim with me.”
Everything stilled.
The cicadas in the garden quietened.
The waves down the road seemed to crash gentler on the shore.
“W-What?”
She hugged herself. “I’m so sorry, Aslan. I hate it when you’re cross with me. I...I told myself to give you space these past few weeks, so you could become my friend on your terms, but...you don’t seem to want to be my friend. And...if you don’t want to be my friend, then I have nothing to lose by making you even more angry with me.”
She trembled but bravely held my stare. “You need to start grieving. I know you think I’m a kid who knows nothing, but I lost someone when I was young and—
