Top Bunk

DAY 25

⌚ 5:08 AM

When El woke up an hour earlier and couldn't for the life of her fall back asleep (is this what she gets for falling asleep easily last night?), she decided to hop out of bed, get her flipflops on and head out.

The air, albeit slightly humid, is cooler than the searing heat El has grown to tolerate. She heads to that one spot by the lake, the one with the cursed poison ivy, and sits - checking for poison ivy beforehand, of course. She doesn't have shorts or anything on her bottom half so she's extra careful. The huge The Lion King tee shirt she has on is enough to separate her bottom from the moist grass.

El doesn't know why she's out here, really, but she's glad she decided to be. The sky is slowly growing to be a more orangey pink, brightness slowly spilling onto the dark canvas. The sun is peeking from behind Ashwood Hill - its reluctance just like El's when it comes to Grace. The pier, still adorned with ripped streamers and dim fairy lights looks like it's seconds away from collapsing on itself. Her eyes follow the utter stillness of the lake...until it isn't still anymore. Ripples appear seemingly out of nowhere and El thinks it's the wind but it obviously isn't, it's S.S. Taylor.

Oh, joy.

And there's Finn, rowing about. It's as if he's bringing the sunlight along with him - the closer he gets to El, the brighter the sky grows. El contemplates leaving, but the prospect of returning to the same cabin that Grace is sleeping in makes her anxious. Staying, it is.

Finn drags the oar across the water with a certain finesse that El most certainly lacks, he's all muscle and angles. (Grace is all fluidity and curves, not like that's of any relevance.) Eventually, he gets to her, when the sun is almost halfway out of its hiding place. He grins at her. "Up for a ride?" He pets the old wood of the boat.

Boats. El really hates boats. She shakes her head. The motion makes her a bit woozy.

"You sure?" Finn lets S.S. Taylor touch the shore.

Then again, El hated a lot of things that she doesn't anymore. (See: Grace, Isaac, singing, among others.) Maybe this will be healthy for her. "Why not," she mutters, rising.

It takes a lot of steadying and grabbing onto Finn's stupidly firm arms for El to get into the boat, sit across from Finn, and calm her nerves. She must look like a lost, mangy puppy. Finn really sucks at stifling his laughter. El glares at him.

"Hi," he says when he finally gets his shit together and pushes off the shore.

"Are you going to whisk me away to some far off castle now?" El asks, sarcasm dripping into her raspy morning voice.

"And let you escape from your 'problems'? No way."

"Why the quotation marks around 'problems'?" El raises two fingers on each hand and does the standard air-quotes gesture.

"Why'd you say there's quotation marks?"

"I just hear that kind of thing. So...why the quotation marks?"

"It's really just one problem, though, and not even a huge one," Finn says. "Grace...that's it."

El is about to object, tell him that she has way more problems than Grace. Then she realizes - no, she doesn't. Her parents? Lionel? Totally blown out of proportion. Not problems at all. Half-solved already. It dawns on her at that moment: Grace is the biggest problem she's facing right now. And she isn't lying when she says she still wants to get whisked away to some far-off castle.

The way Grace has made El feel scares her. It scares her enough to want to run off to a castle that doesn't exist. Or does it?

"The only castle I know about is the one my uncle owns in Norway." Finn turns the boat around. "I'd bring you there, but I'm too broke."