incredulous, as if every single moment of what I’d just done had been impossible. “You took off running down the pier—and then you flung yourself off the end of it.”
“I regret that last part,” I said.
He wasn’t listening. “Was it idiocy? Was it a suicide attempt? Are you on some kind of drugs I don’t know about?”
These were all rhetorical questions.
“I can’t even believe what just happened. I can’t even believe you just did that. Is this a nightmare? Am I trapped in a nightmare right now? That was, hands down—with only one horrific exception—the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen anybody do.”
I didn’t argue.
“You could have died. You should have died! Do you have any idea how many pilings are down in that water? How much debris floats up under those piers? Logs and construction boards and crap from offshore rigs? There could have been barbed wire! There could have been fencing! People perish jumping off this pier!”
“People jump off this pier all the time!”
“Crazy people! And even if you weren’t killed on impact, do you have any idea how close we are to the port? There are riptides all along here!”
I raised my hand a little. “I wasn’t thinking about riptides—okay? I wasn’t thinking at all.”
“You sure as hell weren’t!” he shouted. “You could have been swept out to sea in minutes—at night—so far I would never have been able to find you!”
I’ll grant that he was pretty much right about most of this stuff—and maybe this is just a quirk of my personality—but I can only get yelled at for so long, even by someone who’s right, before I start yelling back.
“I wasn’t thinking, okay?” I yelled back. “I was trying to be brave. I was trying to help!”
I sloshed my way closer to him in the water. Now he was watching me—the first time I’d seen his eyes since we made it to shore.
“Don’t help!” he shouted. “I don’t want you to help!”
But I charged after him. “Somebody has to!”
I’d forgotten how good it could feel to really yell. How satisfying it could feel to let yourself burn clean with anger like a flame. Duncan turned away, but I came after him and edged around to get up in his face. “You’re living some kind of half life, and you’re dragging a whole school full of terrified kids with you. You said I didn’t know what fear was, and I thought maybe you were right—but I’ll tell you something! I almost killed myself just then—but I still think I was right all along. You need to wake up and live.”
He was breathing hard. “Every morning, I get up and go to school. I shower and put vitamin E on my scars and shave and get dressed and shine my damn shoes and I walk into that place and spend all day every day watching out for those kids and keeping them safe and not curling up in the fetal position on the floor of the men’s room. I keep it together! I meet all my responsibilities! How the hell is that not enough?”
He turned away—like that was some kind of argument-winning rhetorical question.
But it wasn’t rhetorical. I ran after him. “Because it isn’t!” Great point. “I want you to be alive. I want you to feel something!”
“I feel something!” he shouted. “I feel everything!”
But then, it was like in the wake of that declaration, he could suddenly see clearly. It was like, for the first time since we hit the water, he really saw me there, just feet away from him, drenched and shivering and defiant in the water, my hair in wet strings against my neck.
I was still staring at him with burning, self-righteous eyes.
But whatever he saw in that moment seemed to break his anger. He sighed—almost deflated—and his posture shifted, and then he started sloshing back toward me through the waves. “I feel things,” he said, his voice hoarse and quieter now, a little breathless from all the shouting, his gaze unwavering on mine.
He kept pushing toward me. His pace didn’t slow—just step after step through the water in his sopping wet clothes like he might not stop at all.
I stood my ground.
The anticipation of it was as physical as if it were a gust of wind—impossibly fast but in slow motion at the exact same time, and I held absolutely still—my gaze fastened to his, my whole body alert and humming, seeing him clearly now, too, for what felt like the first time.