Cursed Waters

16

wow I'm sucky at updating... but here it is! Comment AND vote and I might be talked into providing a free graphic for everyone who does ;) love yall! 

Even though he didn't know it, Millie saw Sam before he ever saw her.

Millie had always had an amazing memory, and could remember things from childhood that she shouldn't have been able to recall.

Before her parents died, when she was just a normal kid, she could remember her dad taking her to the park every Sunday. With six little girls, her parents found it hard to devote time to each of them individually, so they created a system. Every Sunday, their dad would take one of them out for a special father-daughter date (their mother got Thursday).

It was on this Sunday that Millie, four years old and curious as ever, was at the park with her father. He held her hand as he walked her around the grass, let her pet the dogs in the dog park, and got her ice cream.

She saw Sam on the slides.

Her father had walked her over to the bench and had lifted her up and onto his lap, and he was saying something to her, but she was watching the boy that stood at the bottom of the slides. He was tiny, but bigger than the other boys their age, and stood with his hands on his hips.

He watched as the kids came whizzing down the slides, and every time one of them would wipe out in the soft wood chips beneath the slides, he'd scream, "Time out!" and then point his finger away from the slides. The kid would hobble off, looking chastised, and then Sam would go back to watching the other kids on the slide like a hawk.

Millie was fascinated by the boy. Even so young, she understood that what he was doing meant something, meant that he was different. She didn't know any other kid that would stand there, risk getting kicked in the face or getting beat up by a bigger kid, just to make sure everyone was safe.

That was the beginning of Millie's quiet fascination with Sam White.

---

"So . . . the curse isn't about love," Angel finally said.

After explaining everything to her siblings and uncle, every one of the Clearwaters had remained silent as they stood in the dining room, trading nervous glances.

Millie thought that none of them knew what to say. The curse that they thought they'd understood their entire lives was something entirely different, something foreign and mysterious and terrifying. The curse that they'd been preparing Millie for was pretty much nonexistent, and it left Millie wondering what exactly she'd been getting ready for.

"It's about your happiness," Daphne put in, nodding at Millie.

"It all started the moment I felt pure happiness." Millie couldn't resist the urge to roll her eyes.

Clea did the same, and she reached for Millie's hand. They twisted their fingers in sarcastic solidarity.

"I don't get it," Angel said, shaking her head. "You've been happy before, Mills. The other night couldn't have been the first time you were happy, could it?"

"It makes sense, actually," one of the twins said.

"How?" the other one asked.

Daphne was the one who answered. "Think about it. Until Millie was cursed, she was a pretty happy kid, but everything before that was null and void. The curse couldn't take her for being happy in the past. Ever since finding out she's probably going to die, she's been all sad and closed off. When would she ever have had time to be truly happy?"

"When you say it like that," Millie said, "it makes me sound kinda pathetic."

All her sisters looked at her.

"Not pathetic, just sad," Drew said, and the duh was evident in his voice.

Millie blew out a breath.

She thought about her life. Daphne was right about one thing. The second she'd found out she was cursed, she'd changed. Once a fun-loving, free girl, she'd transformed into a surly, antisocial kid that turned into an isolated and lonely teenager.

She'd barely had any time to love her parents before they were gone, and even though it had been over ten years since the accident took them form her, she still wasn't over it. None of her sisters were.

And it got especially worse every time Millie realized the memory of her parents was fading from her mind. She couldn't exactly remember the color of her fathers' eyes, or the sound of her mother's voice. All she had were little snippets, things that she maybe remembered, but were probably just stories her older sisters told her.

Not to mention, Millie was going to die soon, if she didn't come up with a way to stop this curse.

She'd never really taken the time to think about it, but yeah. She was sad.  

So freaking sad.

It was weird that Sam White, of all people, had brought upon this curse. She'd lived across the street from him since she was eight. She'd sat next to him in English all year. And yet it was just now, the summer before she was finally free of this suffocating town, that she had hung out with him.

What would have happened if Millie had talked to him before? Would the curse still have come about?

And then Millie had to wonder if she could've prevented this. She and her sisters had been training for drowning, for accepting the water, for an untimely death. They'd taught her to stay away from boys she could like, to keep her head down and not make too many friends.

But maybe they should've been teaching her all along how to stay away from happiness.

Or, better yet, maybe if she'd embraced life before this, her threshold for happiness wouldn't have been so low, and one stupid night with one stupid boy wouldn't have triggered the even stupider curse.

"What are we supposed to do now?" Angel's voice interrupted Millie's thoughts. "Does knowing the true meaning of the curse help us at all?"

"I don't know," Millie said, shifting on her feet. She pulled her hand out of Clea's grip and crossed her arms over her chest. "In theory, this is better. The more the know, the more prepared we are, right?"

"I guess," Drew said uncertainly.

"Prepared for what? Your death?" One of the twins asked. She pursed her lips and looked around her family. Millie was ninety percent sure she was Luce . . . although she could've been Leni. It was so hard to to tell. She suddenly felt very guilty that she had never bothered to figure out which twin was which, and she probably wouldn't have time to now. "We were already prepared for the curse to kill you."

"Thanks," Millie said.

The other twin shrugged. "She's right. You know it."

Millie sighed. "Fine. You're both right. But I wasn't talking about you guys being prepared for my death, and thanks for that by the way,  I was talking about us being prepared to stop this curse."

The pause after Millie's statement was awkward.

Daphne broke the silence. "How do you expect to do that, exactly?"

"I don't really have a plan, honestly." Millie looked around the loose circle her family made. "We're going to go talk to Brandon's mom. Apparently, she knows a lot more about this curse than anyone else. I'm hoping that she will be able to shed some kind of light on the situation."

"You want her to help you stop the curse," Drew reiterated.

"Yes." Millie nodded.

Angel frowned. "But what if she can't?"

Millie didn't have a reply to that.

It wasn't that she hadn't already thought of that, because she definitely had. It was just hard to talk to her family about that. 

If she couldn't break the curse, she was going to die...and so was Sam.