Out Of Reach

Chapter One: In the Beginning

Chapter One: In the Beginning

Monday, July 6th, 1:17 pm

Morningrise was absolutely beautiful during the summer. Despite the sun beating down on the lake every day for weeks, the water remained surprisingly cool to the touch. Carter glanced across the canoe at Max and he smiled at her, his hazel eyes glimmering the same murky green-brown of the lake. The lake was their happy place, they were truly in paradise.

Back across the lake at their cabin, Carter saw her older brother Josh, and Max's older brother Thomas sprinting around the lawn with her dog Roadie.

Suddenly, a tap from Max's foot brought her back to the present. She reached down, cupping her hand into the lake, and watched as it squirmed in her palm before tossing the water on Max. Smiling, he shook his head like a wet dog. Then, he began to inch towards her, quickly closing the gap between them. He looked into her eyes and for a second she forgot where she was. He grabbed a hold firmly on the sides of the canoe and shook it violently to the right. His hair whipped across his face and stuck to his sun-kissed cheeks. With a shriek, she was thrown out of the canoe and into the lake.

Carter heard shouting back at shore, probably Thomas making fun of her for getting herself tossed out of the canoe, she thought. Max winked at her and offered out a hand, and she took it without hesitation. He pulled her up and she climbed back into her previous spot. With a glance at her feet, she noticed that one of her toes appeared to be bleeding from her fall out of the canoe. She deemed the injury livable and pushed the hair out of her face. Glancing at Max, she noticed his eyes focused on the cabin.

"What are you looking at?" She asked him loudly, to snap him out of his stare.

"Thomas." He replied, still heavily concentrated. "His mouth is moving but I can't make out what he's saying."

She followed Max's gaze across the water to the shore, just where the tree line broke its curtain around the small lake and cut into the clearing where their large cabin sat as if waiting for something to happen. There she saw Thomas. Just as Max had said, his mouth was moving but he was too far away for them to hear him clearly, they just heard shouting. She couldn't see Josh anymore, he was likely inside the cabin with Roadie, who had also disappeared. They must've chickened out on the previously threatened ass-whooping if they dared to canoe race them.

Carter shrugged her shoulders. "Do you think that we should head in?" She asked.

"I guess. We may as well check in with your mom before we forget." Max replied.

Last week, before they all piled into Josh's prized baby-blue pickup, 'Betsy', their mothers had given the four of them a stern lecture about checking in to inform them that nobody had been eaten by bears and that the cabin was still in one piece. The group was notoriously bad at remembering to check in while they were at the cabin since they all left their cell phones in town and only had the cabin's landline to use. They never checked the messages or missed calls on the landline, so if they weren't there to hear the phone ring, your best bet was to call back later.

The wind whistled quietly and the songbirds seemed to have stopped their singing. Carter looked down through the water but she couldn't see the bottom of the lake. Her father told her that the lake was only about twenty feet deep but when they were little Thomas would tell her and Max that the lake was hundreds of feet deep and home to all kinds of monsters. She believed him for longer than she cared to admit. Sometimes, Carter could still swear that she saw something frightening swimming around below her.

Carter glanced up and noticed that Max was smiling at her. That goofy smile with his crooked teeth. Sometimes it was hard to imagine him as the little boy that she used to play tag with on the walk home from school, but other times, it seemed like he had never changed.