Dark Waters

Prologue

I spent every day of my summer, from the day after school let out to the day before school began, in a ramshackle beach house that had been built by my great-grandfather. I'd always spent the warmest months of the year in that run-down little bungalow. Nothing had changed about it in sixteen years. My sheets were still blue and patterned with criss-crossed lines. My comforter was still a quilt featuring various deep sea creatures in bright colors. There were still fish decals on my wall and around my mirror. There was still some collection of choice shells on almost every flat surface in the house. I loved the dingy old place, but I hated the people who lived in it with me.

Yes, my family. They were a difficult bunch. In fact, the only member of my family that I had a genuine affection for was my kid brother, Tyler. He was born when I was twelve, and I loved him instantly. He ate tomatoes like apples, made small cars out of seashells and glue, and followed me around like a little shadow. No one else in my family held any love for Tyler. He was something of a mistake baby, so my father regretted him and never hesitated to backhand him if he said something a kid would say or tracked sand into the house. My mother, who was never particularly loving before she'd had Tyler, sank into postpartum depression after his arrival and could hardly bear to look at the kid nowadays. My older sister was usually too drunk or too hung over to care what happened to Tyler. From the time he was born, I made him my special charge and practically raised him.

So, yeah, I guess I had a rough life. My father beat. My sister drank. My mother moped. In the end, it was often me and a little baby boy against the world. Still, I can't complain. I had good days and bad days, and on my bad days, I had a single escape.

The best thing about the beach is definetly beach bikes. They have low, swooping handlebars, wide, comfortable seats, fat tires, and enormous baskets on them. I've had a blue one since I was six and it is my prized possession.

On my street, you can stand by the bay and look straight up the road to see the beach in perfect detail, and I live in the wide part of town. You can walk from one body of water clear to the other in maybe five minutes. So when something horrid was happening in my shack of a house, you could probably find me on the wide, padded seat of my beach bike, peddling my way down to the ocean to sit and think. Sometimes I sat at the very edge of the surf, sometimes I perched like a seagull on the wooden pilings that jutted out of the water a good ways away from shore. Those were the places I went to escape the world.

Once, when I was seven, my sister came home at two in the morning when we were all asleep, hammered drunk (which is nothing too unusual). She staggered into the house and thought my room was hers, and my bed was her bed. She removed me, a sleeping child, from my bed, and left me curled up on a kitchen chair, still sleeping. Then she took every one of my favorite and most loved stuffed animals and dumped them in the trash. She then crawled into my bed, shoes on, to smear black makeup on my pillows and piss and vomit on my sheets. I woke up an hour later, having fallen from the hard kitchen chair to the hard kitchen floor, and found her reeking in my room. I knew, even at seven, the circumstances of the situation, but was quite sure that she would have done it again sober of she felt like it. So I hopped on my bike and rode five blocks to my sandy haven, sitting with my toes in the surf for hours until dawn.

When I was eleven, nearly twelve, it became regular for me to cook all the meals and take them to everyone on trays in their rooms (my family never ate together) as my mother was six months pregnant with Tyler. I had burned a piece of chicken, but couldn't cook another one because we only had enough for one meal. So I drowned the cutlet in gravy and said a prayer that my father wouldn't notice. He did. When he cut into the chicken and found the skin blackened, he threw the nearest object on his desk at me, which happened to be an encyclopedia. I'm sure the incident earned me a concussion, but it was never checked out. I collapsed on the floor, which provided him the opportunity to pour his evening cup of coffee across my back, scalding hot. It left angry red welts that mingled with the cigarette burns down my spine and ribs. I was thrown out of my father's study by my hair. It took me three minutes to get to the beach, and I spent the evening on the wooden pilings in the ocean, letting the salt water heal my burns as I swam.

When Tyler was very young, maybe five months old, my mother took him to the grocery store with her one day in the height of July. I assume the trip passed without incident, but when she returned home and unloaded the groceries from the car she left one of her parcels in the backseat- her infant son. I was the one who found Tyler and rescued him from his oven-like prison nearly forty minutes later. That day I took Tyler with me when I took off to the beach, carrying him on my back in a baby carrier. I sat with him in my lap and let the water rush over his tiny, soft feet, and I kissed the top of his head over and over again, as if that would help him to feel better about the fact that he had been forgotten and left to bake to death in my mother's station wagon.

I spent more time on that little stretch of beach than anyone I knew, sometimes with my baby brother, but most often alone with my thoughts.

Or at least, I'd thought I was alone.

A/N: Hello, everyone! So this story isn't really even a complete thought yet, to be honest, I just wanted to get it out there before I lost it. I'd love any feedback, especially let me know if you are interested in reading on with this story! I'm not quite sure how many installments I'll be able to get out of this before it stops writing itself and I have to consciously make a storyline, but we'll see what happens. Thanks for reading!