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chapter thirteen / lift your voices
Once upon a time, five teenagers spiraled into a hedonistic maladaptive daydream. Like all dreams with symbiotic machinations of a hive mind, there's a point where the rubberband snaps, and with the full force of life, you are all pulled earthside. To an anticlimactic reality.
Desperate eyes endlessly fixed their gazes as Pope guided the drone to search the remnants of the shipwreck entombed to the sea, the only fragment not yet lost to time being Gabriel the Archangel eternally sounding the trumpet of the last day of judgment. Coral and corrosion worked in tandem to alchemise the structure into a psychedelic paradise teeming with life as fish and ghost crabs climbed beams and retreated within near-invisible cavities, hope lying amongst those ruins by a bare thread as they awaited the gold-flecked moment to reflect off their irises that would never come.
John B balled and released his fist, giving a sigh. "It's not there," he threaded his fingers through his hair, his tone growing more vexed. "Just—just pull the drone up."
"Look, we can do another pass—recharge the battery," Pope attempted to reassure him, "we can go back down."
"We've done it three times, there's nothing there!" JJ yelled from the wheel, inflaming Kie as she bit back at him. "What? It's true!"
Kiara anxiously cried out. "The gold could be buried, we don't know!"
"If it was there, it would've been found on the metal detector!" John B exclaimed, pacing out to the edge of the stern. "Somebody beat us to it."
Ilyshah looked to the fallen gazes of the Pogues as JJ made a passing comment that it was never there to begin with, and turned to John B with pleading eyes. "John B, we still have the museum," he avoided her gaze, clenching his jaw, "it could be a lead to—"
"There was nothing my dad mentioned about the museum, Ilyshah. Nowhere," John B protested hotly, "they won't even let us in, for all we know it's a dead end."
"We could, I don't know . . . sneak in somehow."
Pope tiredly added, "and commit more crimes?"
John B interjected before she could argue, his voice rubbled into gravel. "You guys, I'm calling it off! Just . . . take me home," he sunk down to the floor and retreated into his faded salmon pink hoodie.
Tangaroa carried their weary souls along the fickle offshore waters back to the Outerbanks. Every one of them fell to a dead rest with no words spoken and certainly no golden daydream on the horizon to fall back into as they buried it nine hundred feet below. All the summer misadventure left them with was the thunderous rumble of a displeased nature mirroring their own within, an untraceable greenstone, and a loaded gun.
