What Goes Around

PROLOGUE

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On the night of her birth, a tsunami halfway across the world took almost a thousand lives. The day she took her first steps, a man with no clear agenda but a trunkful of his daddy's guns opened fire on a crowd of unsuspecting casualties.

This may not prove any causality, but perhaps those who swallow superstition along with their morning coffee might believe this child was cursed.

Those people would be paranoid fearmongerers. Sometimes bad shit happens to good people and there's not a single logical reason why. The most dangerous people, though, they understand the witches they purport to hunt don't have an ounce of abnormalcy in their veins. Certainly nothing worth opening them over, nothing worth spilling that blood over–but they hack and slash away with a smile and call it God's will.

She was born to a painfully mundane American family: a pastor and his dutiful wife. Painful, truly, for Pastor Hale was not of the paranoid fearmongerer variety. No, this man had an agenda, one that had been passed from his ancestor's uncaloused, beer-stained hands down to his: to do whatever the hell he wanted, because what hell was waiting for a servant of the Lord?

There was nothing amiss about her family, nothing visible to their community, at least. No outstanding debt, hardships, or health concerns; each Sunday morning was best-dressed, polite smiles, interlocked hands for the sermon.

Each Sunday night was shirts thrown in anger for not being starched enough, averted eyes, and locked doors.

Then the child's father stopped bothering to keep up the Outside facade when Inside, and her mother took to drinking herself into an oblivion where she could not hear the child's cries. It was better, safer for her, than thinking of the last time she'd seen her husband: sneaking out when he thought she was asleep to meet a girl nearly half his age.

Upon beginning school, the child had no trouble socializing with her peers. A brightness clung to her like a shroud, kindness she always exuded to make up for her father's lack thereof at home. But making friends? That was just as much a facade as the happy little nuclear family the Hales played for the public. None of the people she chatted with sparked a connection, a meaning beyond faux smiles and small talk. She began to internalize the idea that friends, that real connection, was simply not in the cards for her. There was one kid she gravitated towards though, one who sat at the sole empty cafeteria table and opted to sit in the woodchips, still and silent, rather than play at recess. She was, and would continue to be, drawn to the underdog types, much to her detriment. Underdogs are always hiding something in the deepest recesses of their meek shadows. But he didn't expect a facade from her, and that made her contentment come more genuinely, and that was good.

Then one day, he stopped coming to school.

Then one day, the dreams started.

It was...well, upon awakening, she couldn't be sure it even was a dream. It had felt so strikingly tangible. Starring in it was one single person: a young man, and something about him was terribly familiar. She had never seen him before, but it was as if she knew him from a past life...No, that wasn't it. She was going to know him, many years down the line. All she really knew, every night for twelve years, was the waves crashing over his head and dragging him away from her. Every night he slipped through her fingers like sand.

Still, the kindness wouldn't leave her, even under the pastor's cruelty and teachings. And one day she'd rewrite her nightmares, saving the drowning man from the relentless Manhattan Beach waves.

The problem with drowning is, you can do it in a quarter cup of water, so that beach was the least of their problems.