CLEXA - Revelations

Chapter 1: The Beach House

"There she is again!" I suddenly burst, pointing to a girl sitting in a folding chair by the fire, talking with another group.

"The weird girl that's been following you?" Raven questioned as she sat upright in her creaky lawn chair and scanned the dark coastline.

"She's right there. You don't see her?"

My friend Raven and I had taken the night off from studying for midterms to go to a bonfire that my cousins, Bellamy and Octavia, were throwing at their parents' beach house. I had no idea that, yet again, I'd run into the strange girl that had been seemingly following me everywhere for the past month.

Raven and I had grown up together in Middletown, Connecticut. It was a small, suburban community outside of New Haven. An everybody knows everybody kind of situation. Raven and I had run track together at Middletown High and had stayed close ever since. When we all got into New Haven University last year, we had promised to be each other's guide dogs and have each other's backs. 

So far, we'd kept that promise. We were roommates, we ate at the dining hall together almost every night with the rest of the group, hung out on the grand lawn after class, did homework at the library every Tuesday and Thursday night, and basically went everywhere together, which was the only reason I had agreed to go out tonight. Raven had said she needed a break from studying constitutional law or else she was going to commit a felony, but I wasn't in the mood to go anywhere.

"Can't you just go with Octavia?" I'd asked her earlier that night.

"Remember the pact," she had said.

The pact. She always brought that up when she wanted to guilt trip me into doing something I didn't want to do. Then again, I usually did the same thing to Octavia. Octavia was extremely gullible. Octavia and I met Raven freshman year at Middletown High in World Geography class.  We clicked instantly and spent the next three and a half years avoiding the popular kids and hanging out at Silver Sands Beach. One night, we snuck out for a late-night rendezvous at Silver Sands and spent the night getting drunk off Octavia's mom's--my Aunt Aurora--fino sherry that Octavia had swiped earlier from Aunt Aurora's liquor cabinet. 

We laid there on the beach, watching the stars and listening to the sound of the ocean all night. At one point, Octavia revealed she had presents in her bag for me and Raven. They were matching bracelets. Octavia already had hers on and, after me and Raven had put ours on, we all made a promise, a pact, that we'd always be there for each other no matter what. We promised we'd cross oceans for each other. Even the Long Island Sound. 

In a huff I had given in to Raven's plea to go to Bellamy's obnoxious frat party, not knowing the fateful turn the night would later take. I now found myself staring through the orange glow of the firelight at a face that, although distorted by smoke billows and heat waves, was familiar nonetheless. The girl in question was tall and slender with long, brown curls that seemed to move in waves that matched the ocean in the distance. Her dark eyeliner cast an ominous air over her, an air that both frightened and intrigued me. Every so often I would look over and catch her staring at me intently as if she was waiting for me to come over and talk to her.

"Party time bitches!" came a shrill voice from behind us.

Raven and I turned around in time to see Octavia bounding toward us, kicking up sand in her wake. Her boyfriend Lincoln was stubbornly in tow behind her. The hood of Lincoln's grey jacket was pulled up and he looked more repulsed with the party scene than I did when I'd first arrived several hours ago.

"Hey," Raven and I said in a bleak kind of unison.

"You guys been here long?" Octavia asked, her smiley mood in stark contrast to Lincoln's mopey one.