chapter fourteen
─── i end up on the fbi's most wanted list
𝔏et me sup up falling for you;
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The river raced toward me too fast for my brain to comprehend. Wind ripped the breath from my lungs. Steeples and skyscrapers and bridges tumbled in and out of my vision, as I cartwheeled like a rag doll through the sky before;
Boom!
A whiteout of bubbles. I sank through the murk, sure that I was about to end up embedded in a hundred feet of mud and lost forever in a watery grave.
But my impact with the water hadn't hurt. I was falling slowly now, bubbles trickling up through my fingers. I settled on the river bottom soundlessly. Clouds of silt and disgusting garbage—beer bottles, old shoes, plastic bags—swirled up all around me and I gagged at the thought.
At that point, I realized a few things: first, I had not been flattened into a pancake. I had not been barbecued. I couldn't even feel the Chimera poison boiling in my veins anymore. I was alive, which was good.
Second realization: I wasn't wet. I mean, I could feel the coolness of the water. I could see where the fire on my clothes had been quenched. But when I touched my own shirt, it felt perfectly dry which was a bizarre feeling.
I looked at the garbage floating by and snatched an old cigarette lighter.
No fucking way, I thought.
I flicked the lighter. It sparked. A tiny flame appeared, right there at the bottom of the Mississippi. I grabbed a soggy hamburger wrapper out of the current and immediately the paper turned dry. I lit it with no problem. As soon as I let it go, the flames sputtered out. The wrapper turned back into a slimy rag.
Ooh, I don't like this.
But the strangest thought occurred to me only last: I was breathing. I was underwater, and I was breathing normally. I stood up, thigh-deep in mud. My legs felt shaky. My hands trembled. I should've been dead. The fact that I wasn't seemed like...well, a miracle. I imagined a woman's voice, a voice that sounded a bit like my mother: Dree, what do you say?
"Um...thanks for not letting me die?" Underwater, I sounded like I did on recordings which was like listening to a much older teenager. "You really helped a girl out?"
No response. Just the dark drift of garbage downriver, an enormous catfish gliding by, the flash of sunset on the water's surface far above, turning everything the colour of butterscotch.
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Another Love ─── L. Castellan
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