Plunge
Prologue: July
Hannah
The soles of my feet were scorching as I stood on the sun baked cliff looking down at the water below. It looked inviting; a wide, cool expanse that waited to hide me from the blistering summer sun. I folded my arms across my full chest as I watched my best friend, Marley Cooper, fiddle with the back of her bikini to make sure she didn’t have an embarrassing episode as she plunged into the lake below.
I had this feeling churning inside me, mixing up my stomach and turning my veins to ice. I wanted to jump; Jake had already made it to the bottom without incident. Small children were even taking the plunge, their tiny bodies soaring through the air to the lake below. I knew there was no logical reason why I felt so frozen in place. The cliff we were perched on wasn’t even that high, so I couldn’t use a fear of heights as an excuse for chickening out. I didn’t have much to justify the fear that was keeping me frozen to that spot, arms hugging ever tighter around my body like an anaconda paralyzing its prey.
Marley went at it at a run, her feet making wet slapping noises against the stone. Rule number one of swimming is to never run around water, but I guess that kind of goes out the window when you’re about to jump off the side of a mountain. Marley’s cocoa skin seemed to glow in the sun’s glare and take on a golden sheen as her limbs extended. Even if I hadn’t known her since we were little, I would have been able to guess she was a dancer by the graceful way she seemed to float through the air. With my luck, I would look less like I was doing a cannonball and more like I was strapping down two cannonballs.
Marley hit the water with a splash sending ripples across the surface of the lake. After a short pause, she emerged from the water with a smile stretched wide across her face. She looked charged, like the jump had revitalized something inside her. I tiptoed closer to the edge and looked down. My head was swimming even if I wasn’t. With a hard gulp, I reached into the sky to steady myself, but only found fistfuls of air. In a heap, I thudded down, my tailbone smarting from the landing.
I couldn’t do it.
Even as I inched forward, crab walking towards the edge of the landing, my brain felt thinner, like the inside of my mind was somehow being stretched out like taffy. The water below looked welcoming, a calm expanse of sun kissed green. People were dog paddling with their shoulders under the surface of the water and I imagined that their noses were starting to turn pink from the sun’s rays. Stop being such a baby, I willed myself, but I felt paralyzed. I didn’t even want to stand up and climb back down the hillside, so I just sat there with my arm wrapped around my knees as I watched people splashing in the water below.
On the way home, the energy in the car ran high and Marley and Jake sang along to pop songs at the top of their voices. Neither one could sing well, but Jake’s falsetto squeakiness could make a dog attack. No matter how much I wanted to clown them for their pitchiness and put on my most affected Simon Cowell impression, I couldn’t force myself to speak. Even after I got home, an anxious feeling nagged at me the whole day. There was an itch that danced across my chest and it felt like everyone around me was going in full steam while I was stuck in slow motion. The question of why I couldn’t jump wouldn’t let me go no matter how hard I tried to brush it off, no matter how many times I told myself it didn’t matter. For the rest of the day, any time I closed my eyes I was back there, sitting on the stone and dirt, clutching my knees and afraid.
Chapter One: December
Hannah
“Hannah!” My mom called up to me. “I cannot be late for work because you are being poky. Hurry down or you are going to have to walk to school.”
We both knew her threat was an idle one since the road leading up to my school was all hill and basically a mile up the side of the mountain, not to mention right by the interstate and near no residential areas, let alone ours. Still, I didn’t want the consideration lecture on the drive in, so I gave myself a once over in the mirror, fluffed my long, wavy blonde hair, tried my best to pull any last wrinkles out of my mustard yellow flannel, and scanned the room to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. My cornflower blue bedspread was still a rumpled heap at the foot of my bed and the last week’s worth of clothes cluttered my floor. Making a mental note to at least somewhat straighten up my messy little den when I got home, I left the bedroom and walked downstairs. As I made my way into the kitchen, I rummaged in my purse for some essential oil and put a dab of peppermint behind each ear. I’d been fighting off a pre-Christmas cold and I was determined not to let congestion ruin my imminent holiday.
“Morning, Han,” my mom said as she handed me a piece of Nutella toast. She dusted her hands off on her sweater and I rolled my eyes at our seemingly genetic slovenly ways. As usual, I made a wish that there’d be a lint brush at the pediatrician’s office where she works, but I can’t imagine it would do much good either way. She’d never use it. I rolled my eyes again at the toast. I’d been trying to talk to her about this Nutella thing and all the potential for chocolate mouth corner she’s forcing on my little sister and I, but she was dead set on us needing something to consume in the morning, so I jammed an edge into my mouth and chewed as I balanced binders, bags, and books to follow her out to the car.
Before I even crossed the threshold into school that morning—really, before I even left my mom’s car— I was so done. It’s not that I didn’t like school. For the most part, I did. I had friends, I had activities—yearbook and the GSA—and I even had a crush. Not only did I have a crush, but most people knew about my crush and no one gave two thoughts to the fact that my crush was a girl. Not to say it was perfect. I mean, said girl, with her tight black curls and constantly smug smile, didn’t like me back and was decidedly straight, but even that wasn’t a huge deal. It wasn’t like in a tv show where the contrast between my crush and her straightness led to bullying or ostracism. She even still sat beside me in geometry and would occasionally lean over to ask me about a question, which was nice because then I could smell her orchid scented shampoo. So, you know. That was great.
No, the problem wasn’t any big thing or really much of a problem at all: it was kind of the opposite. There weren’t any real complications. Nothing big ever happened and the days, while fun, were starting to blend together. It was eleventh grade and even when I tried to tell myself how early that was in the grand scheme of high school, how young sixteen really was, all I could think was that high school was less than two more years and nothing had ever happened to me other than my parents divorcing and my dad kind of disappearing when I was a little over six, right after my baby sister, Ari, was born. The feeling of being so sheltered, of having experienced so little, made me itchy behind my ears. Then I factored in Christmas and it was like the world’s tinsel was giving me a rash or something. Everywhere I looked things were lit up in anticipation of more celebration. I rolled my eyes at myself as I realized how mopey I was starting to sound. My mom would call it having a case of the morbs, something she read about in a glossary of old-fashioned slang and got way too much joy from.
Last day before break, I reminded myself as I made my way to my first class.