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Kate says a silent prayer before she approaches the woman sitting on the beach. She suspects that Chloe’s not the praying kind, and given the way people in Blackwell and around town never seem to have a kind word to say about her she’d be surprised if anybody else spoke to God on her behalf. And maybe Chloe prefers it that way. They haven’t talked about religion much in the few weeks of their budding friendship, but she’s pretty sure that Chloe is an atheist. “What kind of God would take my dad away when I was only fourteen?” For some people, tragedy brings them closer to God. For others, it pushes them away. But Chloe doesn’t make fun of her for being religious (unlike most people at Blackwell) and Kate doesn’t try to dissuade her from her own beliefs, so they get along beautifully. Everyone has their own path to walk in life, after all.
Kate’s path leads her toward Chloe’s slumped back and bowed head as she sits in the cooling sand and the fading light.
Chloe’s head doesn’t turn as Kate approaches, even though Kate’s footsteps in the sand aren’t exactly silent. It does raise slightly in acknowledgement, however, and Kate assumes that’s as close as she’s going to get to a greeting tonight.
Kate’s not sure how long Chloe’s been sitting there, staring out at the slow waters of the bay. Chloe had texted her three times after midnight, which Kate of course didn’t see until she woke up at eight. Kate’s texted her five times since then at careful intervals so as to not seem too concerned, and Chloe hasn’t responded to a single one of them. She even tried calling Chloe despite phone calls not being a standard part of their friendship at this point, but she didn’t try again after it went immediately to voicemail.
Kate’s never regretted not learning to drive so much before. It’s been sort of nice, actually, since Chloe’s got her truck and loves driving. Kate not wanting to ride the bus everywhere has been a good excuse for both of them to advance their friendship beyond “casual but amiable acquaintance” to “person I actively go out of my way to spend time with.” Today, however, not being able to drive has been a serious hindrance. It’s hard to search for someone when you’re reliant on small town bus routes and schedules. Once she started to really worry about Chloe’s silence and start looking for her, it took her nearly three hours to track her down at the beach.
She stops and stands next to where Chloe’s sitting in the sand. “Hey,” she says evenly, as if she hasn’t been clawing her hair out trying to find this woman half the day.
“Hey,” Chloe answers without looking at her.
“…I got your texts.” Chloe doesn’t respond, so Kate continues, “I didn’t see them until I woke up; I’m sorry. I wasn’t ignoring you.”
Chloe nods thoughtfully, processing this. “My battery died. Didn’t want to go home to charge it.”
Kate can’t blame her for that. “Is it okay if I sit with you?”
Chloe turns to her then and looks at her with those clear blue eyes. It doesn’t seem fair that such beautiful eyes should have to hold such sadness. The light isn’t great, but Kate’s pretty sure she sees a smudge of a bruise beneath one, and that makes her stomach twist all the tighter. “Sure, whatever.” Chloe trains her eyes on the bay once more, but Kate can still feel them piercing her heart.
Kate tucks her skirt around her legs carefully as she settles by Chloe’s side. The sand is damp and the warmth of the day is mostly gone from it. She looks at the woman beside her. She’s not wearing her beanie for once. She’s wearing short sleeves and her pale, too-thin arms are covered with goosebumps. Without even thinking, Kate removes her cardigan and drapes it over Chloe’s bare shoulders. Chloe glances at her in barely masked surprise. Kate thinks for a moment she’s going to object, but she just wraps her arms around herself and tugs the borrowed cardigan a little tighter around her shoulders.
Kate feels like she should say something, but Chloe breaks the heavy silence while she’s still trying to piece her words together. “Kinda late to come to the beach. Sun’s almost down. ‘Most everyone’s gone home.”
“I didn’t come for the beach. I came for you.”
Chloe’s brows lift then furrow. “Why.”
Because when she woke up to Chloe’s texts and saw how long ago she’d sent them, Kate had almost immediately gone into a panic spiral. Because Kate had texted and called and couldn’t reach her. Because Kate was terrified that Chloe was hurt and had nowhere to go and no one to talk to. “I wanted to make sure you were okay. You weren’t at the junkyard or the diner, so I thought you might be here or maybe the lighthouse.”
“Not a whole lot of places to go in this town,” Chloe says, and maybe it’s a trick of the non-light but Kate would swear that her expression softened when Kate told her she’d been looking for her. “I used to come here all the time,” Chloe continues. “My dad used to take me and my friend Max here every weekend in the summer. When we got old enough, we’d take the bus by ourselves and stay here all day. We practically lived in the bay.” She chuckles softly to herself. “She - Max - used to tease me I was going to turn into a mermaid because I spent more time in the water than on the land.”
Kate can picture that. Chloe’s got long arms and longer legs, built for swimming. Her hair wouldn’t have been blue when she was a child, Kate assumes, but Kate can imagine how it would look now: blue and purple locks flowing with the waves, fanning out around her head like a soft halo. The vivid reds and greens and blues of her tattoo extra bright against the pale of her skin, all shimmering under the water and glittering with reflected light. Long fingers cupping brackish water, lean body moving through the bay like she was born to do nothing else. “Punk rock mermaid,” Kate says a bit dreamily, already picturing how she would draw her.
Chloe huffs a small laugh. “Nah, not when I was a kid. I was a pretty big dweeb if you can believe it. Super into science, major anime nerd, drew comics, all that stuff.”
Kate can believe it, actually, but she keeps that to herself.
The smile that had been growing on Chloe’s lips fades away. “Rach loves swimming, too. After Max left - her family moved to Seattle; same day as my dad’s funeral, can you believe that shit? - I didn’t go swimming for a long time. Probably for the best; I would’ve just drowned myself.” She picks at the cuticles of her chewed up fingernails fretfully and Kate suppresses the powerful urge to pull her into a comforting embrace and stroke her hair like her father has always done for her when she’s upset. “But Rach is a Cali girl, so even though our bay’s nothing compared to the Pacific she just has to go swimming. Like, constantly. Day and night. The girl’s blood is half salt water, I swear.”
Kate’s got this anxious bubbling in her stomach that she doesn’t know how to quell. She knows of Rachel Amber, but she doesn’t know her. She went missing last April, three months before Kate moved into the dorms. Everything she knows about Rachel she knows from the unavoidable gossip in the dorms, the graffiti scattered around town - some of it doting, most of it unrepeatably vile, and Chloe.
She actually met Chloe because of Rachel Amber, oddly enough. Or, more precisely, she met Chloe because Rachel Amber went missing. One day Chloe happened to be hanging up missing person posters around campus while Kate was putting up flyers for the abstinence club, and when Kate saw what Chloe was posting (when she saw Chloe’s eyes) she had offered to help her distribute them. They’d gotten to talking as they worked, and by the time the posters were all hung they’d exchanged numbers.
Kate owes this friendship (this crush) to Rachel. And Rachel’s been missing for five months now. No matter how many posters they hang, no matter how many prayers Kate sends up for this lost girl to be found, she’s been missing for almost half a year. Chloe still talks about her like she expects to see her coming around the corner any minute now sometimes. Kate doesn’t know whether encouraging Chloe’s hope does more good or more harm at this point. Women who go missing for this long, beautiful young women like Rachel Amber… Kate wants to have faith in Rachel’s safety, but her mother’s been telling her horror stories about what happens to girls like her since before Kate was even old enough to understand.
“So we go swimming together a lot. Not now, obviously. But… yeah. Total punk rock mermaids.” She scoffs lightly, but Kate can hear the sorrow in her laugh. “I… I haven’t gone swimming in months. Not since she…” Chloe sighs. She shakes her head and tries to sound annoyed rather than heartbroken. “Missed the whole fucking summer. Now it’s probably too cold to swim. She’s probably been off surfing in Cali all summer, and I’ve just been staring at the bay like she’s coming in on the next boat. How pathetic is that?”
“It’s not pathetic at all. You miss your friend.” Kate reaches out a tentative hand and is relieved when Chloe accepts her touch without so much as a flinch.
“I miss the bay,” Chloe says suddenly. “I miss the way it felt to just run out into the waves and not give a fuck. I miss feeling weightless and small and like if I swam far enough I could step out into a pirate’s treasure cove, or on some forgotten island, and start a new life. I miss feeling free.”
Kate’s never been swimming in the bay. She spent her summer here ingratiating herself with the local parish, learning the bus schedule, breaking in her library card. She stands carefully, dusting the sticky sand off her skirt.
Chloe looks at her askance. “Heading home?”
Kate shakes her head. She reaches out a hand to Chloe. “Join me for a swim?” Kate asks, and her voice hardly trembles even though she’s beyond nervous.
Chloe stares at her like she’s sprouted a second head and then she laughs in disbelief. “Are you for real?”
“Very much so.”
“You got a bathing suit on under your clothes, Kit-Kat?”
“Do you?”
“No.” Chloe tries to leer, but it’s so uncertain it falls apart before it can look properly devious. “You askin’ me to go skinny dipping? I thought you were supposed to be a prude about that stuff.”
“I’m not a prude,” Kate protests, her face reddening. “But no, I’m not asking you to go skinny dipping. Or at least I’m not going skinny dipping; you can do as you please.” She slips off her shoes, and good Lord, this really is a terrible idea, isn’t it. She’s not dressed for swimming in the slightest. Her blouse is white, and her skirt is, well, a skirt, but it’s too late to back out now just because she’s had a sudden attack of logic since Chloe’s already taking her hand (and oh Lord Chloe’s hand is so cold and so strong and so perfect) and hauling herself up to her feet.
“Gonna be a weird ride back to campus,” Chloe says with a grin that’s building in its certainty. “Wet jeans are hell to drive in. You know my heater doesn’t work, right?”
“I’ve ridden in your truck before, haven’t I?”
“True that.” Chloe removes Kate’s cardigan and folds it with surprising politeness by her shoes before tugging off her boots and dropping them haphazardly into the sand. She empties her pockets onto the pile of clothes: a crumpled cigarette pack, some loose change, a parking ticket, a key, a lighter, her phone. Kate places her handbag beside them. “You ready to do this thing?”
Kate nods quickly before she can chicken out. “Are you?”
The smile that lights up Chloe’s face is the most radiant thing that Kate’s ever seen. “Hella ready.” Chloe reaches out her hand again, and Kate takes it.
The water is cold, and swimming in a skirt is just as difficult as Kate feared. It’s completely worth it.