SWIM Book 1 (Complete three-hundred pages)

DAY 1 (SIX DAYS BEFORE THE FLOOD)

Sunday, November 19, 2017

I

've always been a rich girl. Never had I noticed that these Starbucks coffees in my hands were a sign of my wealth and utter carelessness. My daddy was a petroleum engineer until he turned CEO. The oil company took a long time to adopt other forms of energy that were more green, but hey, "Follow the money, my dear!" he always said. He also meant that for when I was to look for a suitable husband.

"If he doesn't have a yacht don't even think of getting caught!"

That was a lame rhyme he loved to throw around every time I came home from school in tears about a guy whose father was only a seven-figure senator or an A-list actor with an aging face and a stick up his ass.

"You listen to your father, dear," would exclaim my mother as she always made me a glass of Nesquick chocolate milk to soothe my tears. Little did she know, I wasn't four anymore. "It may seem like it doesn't matter yet, but believe me, all that money's gonna come a long way once your hormones mellow out and the man you married starts to lose his hair. Looks always go, but money lasts forever."

I never thought my parents were terrible people. I just assumed their integrity had been muddled by their overwhelming joy given to them by their friends at the expensive golf clubs. You can never have too many rich friends—Fly high with the eagles, not with the turkeys.

So of course, I stayed with their advice. My current boyfriend was a tall fella, not a sporty, athletic type, but the type of guy who doesn't mind massaging my feet after I hit the gym. The type of guy who writes me poetry and professes his love for me and his loathing for the status quo. He is an artist, all around. Paintings, novels, musical compositions—he was a nerd and I loved him for it. He had the face of an angel and I always wondered if he was the type of young man to use his smarts (he was very smart) to become a doctor, or to blow it all away (if I were to use my father's words) and roam the world carelessly writing books and traveling. Heaven knows I would go with him. And that's just why my father hated him. (Making me like him even more.) On the other hand, my father didn't hate him too much. After all, my boyfriend's father was the head correspondent to Israel. And through old family money, kept up a growing eight-figure salary in stocks and business investments.

My boyfriend often professed to dreaming about living in a cardboard box in the pouring rain in a dark alleyway with only a pencil and infinite scroll of paper so he could write to his heart's desire.

My boyfriend also played the saxophone with me in our school band. His name was Jacob. Jack for short.

Nothing, no plague or stormy weather, could ever break us apart...