The Lies We Tell

Chapter 12: Any Way the Waves Roll

That night when the girls got back they slipped on their swimsuits and hit the beach. Finch, who had never been to the beach before, dipped her toes in but, finding the water frightfully cold, she went up to the heated pool a floor below the girls' room. Laurel, on the other hand, had practically been born on the beach. She had a summer birthday and her family owned a beach house at which they spent most of their summers, so that wasn't even that much of an exaggeration. She was quickly in to her shoulders while the rest of the band stood ankle-deep, shivering and trying to force their way forward.

When finally the rest of the group joined her, she found herself quickly separated from the amateurs and calling back to them to swim up shore against the current. Few, if any of them had ever spent as much time in the ocean as she and she knew it. In the moonlight, the waves shimmered, but they were small and calm and Laurel became bored with standing around parenting the less experienced teens, so she too headed inside to catch up with Finch.

If it had been strange how many students had simultaneously yet individually decided to take on the waves that night, it was even more strange how many were left in the hotel's pool and hot tub. Of course, there was pizza, a fool-proof way of catching any teen's attention. Laurel personally couldn't stand pizza, but a pizza party in a rooftop pool was a different matter. On arriving at the pool, she found it empty, except for Finch, who was pushing back and forth between the walls, looking awfully lonely. The rest of the band, those who weren't swimming in the ocean below, anyway, were crowded into the hot tube or wrapped up in towels feasting on the various junk foods along the pool deck.

Laurel slid gracefully feet-first into the deep end of the pool, which was marked as being five feet but stood only a few inches above four. The water here was much warmer than that of the ocean, and Laurel pulled off the stretchy swim shirt she had had on before and tossed it to the side of the pool. Her hair was tangled from the waves, so she submerged herself into the muffled, light-distorting, underwater world, wincing at the taste of chlorine in her nose and mouth and swallowing hard to release the ever-increasing pressure in her ears. Her short hair spread out in all directions as the girl sunk to the bottom and then sprung back into its perfectly straight place as she rocketed off the floor back to the surface for a breath. Her eyes snapped closed the moment before she penetrated the surface and she breathed the soft, warm, ocean air in calmly. through her nose.

What was most interesting about the connection between Finch and Laurel was that talking seemed an unnecessary annoyance. The two played together instead in complete silence, except for the noise of the water as it bent around their constantly moving bodies. And yet, there was a certain non-verbal communication between the two such that they had no need to talk to understand each other perfectly. One could perhaps play it off as body language and the acute abilities of both girls to detect it, but to any who knew them personally there was something more than that. Indeed, the two were so similar, and now so close, that they could almost sense the other's thoughts and desires. A sort of realistic telepathic bond, like that between siblings or soul mates or story book heroes who depended so much on each other and knew each other as well as they knew themselves. It was with such non-verbal communication that as the hot tube teens filed into the pool for a break from the heat the two left the pool without a word exchanged between them, perfectly aware that the other was anxious to leave what had quickly become a social situation.

Back in the room after both girls had showered and their roommates stayed out with the girls of the other dorms, Laurel walked out in her pajamas to find Finch sitting on the deck. "Do you know," she inquired, "the way to tell how the current is pushing?" Finch said no. "The angle of the waves as they hit the shore. See over there how all the waves are angled to the right? That's the way the current is moving." It was now Finch's turn to share something. She got a mischievous grin on her face and her eyes lit up.

"You know if you dropped a penny on someone's head from up here it'd kill them?"

"Yeah, but you'd have to have a real good aim."

"Sure you would, but no one could call it murder. They can't prove you dropped a penny on purpose."

"Yeah, but there are too many factors. It's not reliable. Easier to get the person up here. Hitting the water in that lazy river from way up here would be like hitting cement." And so the two continued a most natural conversation about the least natural of subjects. They laughed and talked until their roommates came back and then they climbed into their separate beds and slept, eager for the adventures of the next morning.