Above Water ✔️

2 - erick f*ing harrison

Erick wasn't answering his phone.

I tried not to panic. Everything was fine. I was standing in an airport in the middle of Florida, surrounded by strangers excited to get sunburnt at the beach or Disney or wherever the fuck they were going. And Erick wasn't answering his phone.

Everything was fine.

It was a little after five PM after a short delay in Maryland. I didn't want to step outside of the airport because I knew it was going to melt my skin off. So I was just going to grab a coffee and try to ease the sense of sheer manic–

"MEEK!"

I hardly had time to register what was happening before I was tackled to the airport floor, the linoleum smacking against my shoulder hard. I felt my backpack digging into my spine.

Erick fucking Harrison was on top of me.

"You have four seconds to get off of me before I tape you to the wing of the next departing plane," I managed to cough out under his weight. He giggled and scrambled to get up before grabbing my hand and pulling me upright as well. "Fucking hell, man."

I rubbed the shoulder I landed on with a grimace, ignoring the beaming Erick in front of me. "You're here!" he exclaimed, sounding like a child. "Come on, I got the car out front and I'll fight somebody if they try to tow it."

Without pausing to, oh, I don't know, check if I was alright or offer to help with my bags, he took off towards the airport entrance. I muttered some swear words under my breath as I followed, my suitcase wheels creating an echoey rolling noise among the terminal. I thought about how I didn't even get a coffee and got impossibly more irritated.

It was hot. Not even the dry, tolerable hot, but the sticky, muggy hot that I'd expect no less from Florida. I felt a sweat break out on my forehead and under my arms in the minute and a half that it took me to get my bag thrown in the backseat of Erick's SUV and slide into the passengers.

"Almost everybody's here," Erick said as he put the car in Drive and started passing families loading their mini vans up. "Just waiting on some of Phoebe's people. Chris and Carlos are booting up the grill for burgers and dogs. I gotta say, man, everybody is so stoked to see you. Even Gracie."

Grace was Erick's older sister. Since we'd grown up together, I knew Grace almost as well as I knew him. She was our designated 'babysitter' despite only being three years our elder. I knew she preferred me over Chris and Carlos, though, because I was the least troublesome.

While me and Erick had been friends since we were in daycare, we met Chris at the end of elementary school. It was only a few years after that we met Carlos in eighth grade. And thus, the boys group was born. Every social event, every summer, every party, every trip to the skate park. You wouldn't see one of us without the other three.

Time and adulthood reared it's ugly head, of course. I went off to college. Erick met Phoebe and went AWOL until the announcement of Phoebe's pregnancy a few years back. It took a time for Chris to kick the partying habits, but he eventually met his girlfriend Ebony and they had their son, Jeremiah. As for Carlos, he went on a cross-country trip to see his brother in Colorado right after high school and returned with a full beard and a trunk full of weed.

We'd gone separate ways but our group chat stayed up with occasional check-ins and monthly invitations to get together.

Sure, I was excited to see everyone. I liked Phoebe and Grace. I had only met Ebony a handful of times and she seemed nice enough.