Surge - Maya Nicole Page 0,1

water and cried out for my mom. All around me was water as far as the eye could see. I had just been on the shore building a sandcastle, and now I was in the middle of the ocean.

"Hold on, baby!"

A man in an orange jumpsuit jumped into the ocean and swam toward me. He grabbed onto the side of the buoy with one hand and handed me a life jacket with the other. "Put this on, sweetie. I'm going to get you off this thing."

I did as he asked, my arms feeling like jelly as I lifted them to put on the life jacket. Once it was on, he hooked a rope on the front of it. "You're going to have to scoot to the edge and jump off into my arms."

"I'm scared." My chin trembled as I put my legs over the side. The metal was still hot on my skin and my side burned like I had stepped into a shower that was too hot.

"I know it's scary, but I'm right here, and all the other people on the boat are here to help too. You are such a brave girl."

I took a deep breath and pushed off the side. Like he said he would, he caught me as soon as my body hit the water and immediately swam back toward the boat.

A man and woman dressed in the same orange as the man who had gotten me off the buoy pulled me onto the boat.

The woman handed me to my mom, who wrapped me in her arms. She was sobbing and saying how it was all her fault.

"Ow!" Her arm brushed against my side and it felt like it was on fire.

My mom set me down on a bench and took off the life jacket so they could look at my injury. I hid my face against my mom's arm.

"It's a miracle she was pulled this far out and survived." One of the men opened a bag next to me and wiped something that stung on my wound. "We need to get her to the hospital to have these burns from the metal checked out. I'm going to start an IV to get some fluids in her."

The boat engine revved, and I peeked out from where my face was buried as the boat began pulling away. I couldn't even see the shore from where we were.

"How long was she missing?" The man who had cleaned my burn was wrapping gauze around my torso.

"No more than half an hour." My mom rubbed my back. "Sweetie, do you know what happened?"

I shook my head and shut my eyes. I was exhausted. All I remembered was a flash of blue and arms pulling me.

But that couldn't be right. Could it?

Chapter One

"This is Brittany Aspen coming to you live, fifty miles off the Monterey coast, where last night an oil well explosion shook the biggest oil platform in the world. At this hour, we are being told that the explosion cracked the sea floor and engineers are concerned other wells may soon follow. It's unclear at this hour if oil has spilled into the Pacific. We will keep you updated as this story unfolds."

Silent observers.

We were the ones that sat back, soaked in the information, and stayed out of trouble and drama.

I'd always been an observer in school and in life. Quietly doing my job of being an honor student and staying out of the way of those that make school hell. It was enough of a task to keep up with the ins and outs of social hierarchy, without being stuck in the middle of juicy gossip.

It wasn't worth the time and effort to stay on a gilded pedestal when high school was such a short blip in the grand scheme of things. Four years came and four years went. If I lived to be one-hundred, it was merely four percent of my time on Earth.

Yet somehow, a simple book documenting the high school experience had almost a hundred-percent buy rate and took permanent residence on shelves. There was something powerful about producing a yearbook that would be looked at for decades.

"What are you looking at?" I was snapped out of my thoughts by a voice dripping in honey. There was a flutter in my stomach and my neck heated.

I knew exactly who it was without even looking up. But I wanted to look up because Jax West was the most attractive man at Salinity Cove High School. He