Ripple

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The first boy I ever loved, Steven Goode, was really into cars. He received a junky ’72 Chevelle for his sixteenth birthday and spent six months rebuilding it. Everyone in school knew about it because Steven worked on it during shop class, and half the guys at Cedar Cove High helped him, wrenching and sanding and polishing until every piece was as good as new.

After it was complete, Steven cruised up and down the streets near the boardwalk, one arm hanging out the window, that adorable lopsided grin never leaving his face.

Then I killed him. I drowned him in the ocean just a few hundred yards from my own sweet-sixteen party.

I don’t swim in the ocean anymore. After Steven, I began driving up into the mountains. I found a small, isolated lake, all but hidden by the dense forest. It’s glacier-fed and cold as ice, but I swim in it every night anyway, emerging with blue lips and stiff joints.

It’s who I am. After that birthday . . . everything changed. I don’t sleep anymore; I simply swim, night after night after night. Up here, no one dies. For two years, I haven’t killed.

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