Lost at Sea

Ch. 1

Thirteen Years Later

Sally hunched forward in the tattered folding chair, furiously scribbling into a notebook as her toes dug into the sand. Though it was summer, it was an overcast, windy day. She had to keep brushing her long, chestnut brown hair from her eyes, but she didn't mind that much. The imperfect weather meant that the beach was nearly deserted, and her writing could go relatively uninterrupted. This was the first time she'd been able to get some serious writing time in months. And it still wasn't much; between her shifts at the local diner and serving as a part time lifeguard, she barely had time to sleep. But today was her day off, and she wasn't going to milk every second of it.

She'd been at it for at least an hour, maybe more, when her pencil suddenly came to a halt. The hair on her arms stood on end. There'd been a sort of shift; not of the clouds, or the wind, but something else, something nearly imperceptible. It took all of Sally's self control not to immediately snap her head up. She was massively curious, but didn't want to show that she knew anything was amiss. Instead, she began to tap the eraser end of her pencil against her bottom lip, feigning writer's block, and leaned back into her chair so that her gaze naturally lifted.

There. A few others like herself had braved the overcast weather to enjoy the beach a ways down. While she hadn't payed much mind to them before, she was entirely certain that the young man now walking along the water's edge hadn't been among them earlier. He was tanned, with thick, curly black hair that fell around his ears. With his broad shoulders, defined abs and blue swimming trunks, he looked like the poster boy of a surf shop. Attractive, but just a man. Yet there was some unquantifiable quality that made Sally absolutely certain, beyond a shadow of doubt, that he wasn't human.

Sally Jackson had always noticed what others did not. She was fairly perceptive, sure, but it went beyond that. She'd seen tall, elegant women who moved between the trees in Central Park and vanished in an instant. Young men who appeared to be completely normal until she caught sight of cloven hooves. A large, hulking figure in an alleyway whose single eye, positioned squarely in the middle of its forehead, glared back at her malevolently. When she was younger, she'd been quick to point these out to whoever was around. If it was an adult, they'd likely tell her to stop goofing off and pay attention to where she was stepping. If it was a child, they'd say they could see it, too, and then start play acting as an adventurer or knight or other hero, come to vanquish the monster. By the time she was seven years old, Sally was acutely aware (or as acutely aware as a seven year old could be, at any rate) that no one else could actually see what she did. By the time she was nine, she'd completely given up on talking about it at all after several stern lectures from her uncle telling her to either shut up or grow up.

And so Sally turned her attention away from trying to fruitlessly convince others and instead put her energy into storytelling. When her teachers first read her stories, they were perplexed; what was a such a young child doing writing about monsters like this? It was usual for children to have over-active imaginations, of course, but not in such vivid, graphic detail. Many of them worried that she'd been allowed to watch too much adult television, though there wasn't enough inappropriate material to warrant a conference with her uncle. And besides, all questions of content aside, one thing was clear: her stories were startlingly good. It was one thing to write all the strange things she'd seen down; quite another to weave it all together into compelling narratives. Sally Jackson was a natural storyteller.

It was in the seventh grade, when she was just 12 years old, that her middle school English teacher told her as much. It was the last class of the day, and everyone was packing up their binders to leave when the teacher, Ms. Hollis, passed by Sally's desk. "Sally, can you hang back for a moment, please?" She nodded, finished collecting her things, and made her way to where Ms. Hollis' desk sat at the back of the room.

Ms. Hollis took a seat, rifling through papers while Sally stood uncomfortably. While she wasn't naturally shy, countless years of misunderstanding and harsh words had caused her to dislike direct attention from adults or her peers.

"Ah, there it is." Ms. Hollis pulled out a thin collection of lined paper stapled together, riddled with Sally's handwriting. "I wanted to talk to you about your creative writing assignment."

Sally braced herself: here it came. She was too imaginative; she needed to ground herself in reality, write something more serious or literary. (Sally had already learned to hate literary pretention.)

"Honestly, I couldn't believe what I was reading. From a seventh grader! And a rough draft, at that! Do you have any idea how talented of a writer you are?"

Sally found herself momentarily speechless. "No? It's, it's just a silly story..."

"On the contrary. It's wonderfully imaginative, but aside from that, it's truly beautifully written. Far better than anything else I've read at your level, and even far ahead of many assignments I've seen at the high school level. You really have a gift, you know that? I do have a few notes, but they're all constructive. I want to see you dive in and hone your craft. It might seem silly right now, but I think you could really make something of all this. You can go to college for it, you know." She brushed her bangs to the side and smiled up at Sally, her eyes shining with excitement and pride at her student's success.

Sally's breath had caught in her chest. College. It wasn't something she'd ever really considered before. She lived with her uncle, who was not a rich man and didn't really concern himself with matters of her upbringing and future beyond what was stocked in the kitchen cupboard for the week. And sometimes not even that much. College was a dream she hadn't let herself have.

"Th-thank you," she stammered, taking her story from Ms. Hollis' outstretched hand. She found herself returning the smile.

That night, Sally eagerly studied the notes left in the margins of her story. The next morning, before any classes started, she dropped off a new draft on Ms. Hollis' desk, a spark of hope for the future ignited in her chest for the first time.