Deep Water [OuterBanks]

01: paradise on earth

Eight and a half years had gone by since the death of Dean Kessler, and though time had managed to perform some version of a Hail Mary, Alana who was only eight at the time remembered the unfavorable occurrence like it happened yesterday. Her mother Raina is who found him. Her grief-stricken cry conveying unimaginable pain as she laid eyes on her husband the following morning, Dean's body cold and defunct from the heart attack he'd suffered sometime throughout the night. Everyone on the string of islands could tell that Raina, simply wasn't all there after that. When the middle-aged woman wasn't obsessively engulfed in her work, she was easing her ailing at the local bar. And that went on for two years, before her inability to cope elicited a train ticket to God knows where. Thus, casting her two daughters aside in exchange for a life of solitude far away from her broken pieces and the sweltering temperatures of the Outer Banks.

Mia, Alana's older sister had just teetered onto the edge of adulthood that January. The eighteen year old's plans for college in the fall were instantaneously derailed, forcing her to trade in her aspirations for a serving booklet and a Crawdad's Bar & Grill t-shirt. Mia made a decent amount of money considering the circumstances, but her two checks a month weren't nearly enough to make ends meet while living in their childhood home. Options slim, the Kessler sisters were given no choice but to move deeper into The Cut, settling into a two bedroom bungalow with creaky floorboards, only a mile and a half from the salty sea. Now sixteen, Alana could only view their move as a blessing in disguise for it's where she found her crew. Her family. Though she'd be lying if she said there weren't days when she longed to be in the arms of her estranged mother.

The metal railing Alana was sitting on top of rattled underneath the force of the midday breeze. Her unruly blonde curls were swept from her back, dancing in the wind as she took a sip from her almost empty can of beer. She and her friends often hung-out in places they probably shouldn't have, but the construction site was by far her favorite for it sat right in front of vast Atlantic. Alana could practically smell the salt from the ocean along with the melodic song of the waves thrashing against one another.

"That's what, a three story fall to the deck?" Pope asked in his usual know-it-all tone of voice. The boy was a brainiac to say the least, already up for a scholarship at the mere age of sixteen. "I give you about a one-in-three chance of survival." He calculated.

Alana looked up at John B. Routledge as he balanced himself on the apex of the unfinished house, shaking her head as he stuck his finger into his mouth before holding it up to the breeze, a silly gesture to test his odds. "Should I do it?" He challenged, his signature gray bandana around his neck, and white converse on his feet.

"Yeah, you should jump. I'll shoot you on the way down." Pope nodded while jokingly pointing a cordless screw gun at John B.

Alana leaned back, dangling upside down from the deck's railing like a child on the monkey bars. "You're gonna puke." JJ Maybank called out to her from his place on the metal scaffolding tower, his blonde locks sticking out from underneath his backwards red cap.