IT

Chapter 4

Sapphire woke up as usual and began to get ready for her training. As she sat drinking her power shake Essence climbed out of bed, looked at her guiltily and scuttled like a crab into the bathroom. At 5:30 Sapphire walked out, grabbed her board and headed for the field. She noticed Essence was following her so she turned around.

"What are you doing?"

Essence looked guilty again. "Going to train,"

"Training starts at 6:30 not 5:30,"

"I know, Jasper invited me to join you guys"

Sapphire groaned, and seeing as she could not avoid Essence waited for her to catch up. 'Well Jasper likes her so I can at least pretend' She thought. Most of her hatred towards Essence had evaporated during the night. They walked the rest of the way in silence.

They got to the field to see Jasper was already there. He smiled.

"Nice to see you to getting along, well not trying to kill each other,"

"It's not going to last if you don't shut up," Sapphire stated blankly as she put her board down and started doing chin ups. They trained until 6 o'clock mostly in silence.

"You'd better go Essence," Sapphire started

"Why? I thought you guys went 'till 6:30,"

"Yeah but I got permission to use the wakeboard lake, and you do not wakeboard,"

"She can come, never to late to learn," Jasper joined, he wanted to find out what Essence had seen.

"Yeah but she needs a board."

"She can use yours," Jasper turned to hide his smile, he knew this would annoy Sapphire but what was the worst that could happen?

Sapphire walked ahead, having only agreed in hope to see Essence fail, and if she was really lucky, hurt herself so she would leave. Jasper and Essence were behind her and she could just make out what they were saying.

"What did you find?" Jasper asked.

"There were a lot of carvings on the tree. Who's Theo?"

Jasper smiled but Essence could see the tears in his eyes "He was Sapphires friend, but he died last year in a freak accident. Sapphire saw the whole thing and is lucky she is not dead. You see that scar on her leg," he pointed to her right leg and Essence nodded,

"She got that when he died,"

Essence felt sad for the girl, she could imagine what it would be like for her if Jasper died.

In front of them, Sapphire held back her tears, as to not let them know she had heard. She could remember that day well. The thing she wanted most in the world was for him to be alive, but that was impossible, she had seen the claw take him.

When they arrived at the lake Sapphire was hesitant to give Essence the wake board after finding out that she had still gone to the tree. But Jasper convinced her. They spent the rest of the training trying to get Essence up, and Sapphire was annoyed that she didn't get to train. Essence managed to get up, with only five minutes left. She was doing well, and went longer than the others had expected. Not thinking she would do so well they had put her on a course with a ramp and Essence went up, and landed wrong snapping Sapphire's board in half. She slowly turned and looked at the others. Sapphire's face looked calm. Strange. When she got back to the others, Sapphire didn't say anything, she just took the pieces of the board and walked away.

"Oh dear, that would happen just when I was using her board. It's weird, she didn't even look angry," Essence gazed at Sapphire's retreating figure.