It was two in the morning and I’d found her at the end of the dock with her feet in the water. I sat down next to her and put my feet in as well, submerging my shoes. She just looked out at the lake.
Three months ago she’d been dumped, and every part of her that I knew had gone away. It was as if she had been hung on a clothes line in an electrical storm. She had begun to crackle and pop, in and out of states of giddiness, stillness, and violence.
Friends had given up trying to help her one by one, and after three months I was the only one still trying.
“Yeeeeah.” I whispered, for no real reason. It was so dark I could hardly see her.
I put my hands in the pockets of my hoodie and took them out again, rubbed my face and sniffed. “So…” I said and looked at her profile, sighed, and looked back out into the dark. She started picking splinters out of the dock.
“So, how are things?” I asked.
She snorted so loud that I wasn’t sure how to take it. Either what I said was genuinely funny, or I had pissed her off and was about to be shoved into the lake.
Down the shore our friends were just shapes in the distance, blocking and then not blocking neighbor’s porch lights. The cold started sinking in and I didn’t want to be there anymore. I felt like an asshole.
When I turned back to her my eyes must have adjusted to the dark a bit because, suddenly, I remembered the tremendous crush I had on her when we first met. Two years ago, whenever I was near her I was in a constant state of feeling like I had just jumped out of a full speed golf cart. (Shit! Faster than I thought!)
Suddenly, don’t ask me why, I knew what I had to do. I had to tell her, right then, about those feelings. I was relatively certain that they had faded a long time ago, and telling her could screw up our present friendship, but instantly it was all clear. She had to know, and I needed to tell her now. This would solve everything.
“You know…” I croaked, and cleared my throat. “Remember when we first started hanging out?” She turned to look at me. “That first day, when we rode together to rehearsal, which I think was first time I ever talked to you,…”
Suddenly, a great SPLOOSH broke the quiet about ten feet in front of us, as if someone had thrown a rock the size of my head into the water. We narrowed our eyes at where the sound had come from.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon lurched it’s gill ridden torso out of the lake and stuck a wrinkled hand up for our knees.
We shot up out of the water, up the dock, through the sand, over the dunes, and through the side door of the house. I tripped and fell forward, tangling our arms, and collapsed us in the downstairs hall. We rolled onto our backs to see if we had been followed into the house.
Anyway, thank God for all that, because nothing I was about to say was going to her feel any better.
Recent comments