Chapter Text
The lake is an even sheet of green-blue glass. Sometimes looking at it, Eddie can’t tell which way the sky is. Feels like he could fall in either way.
Manuel whoops, and jumps off the pier, and the lake shatters. He bobs up laughing a second later, hair plastered to his forehead, and swims over to his girlfriend Amanda to dunk her under the water while she giggles.
“What, aren’t you getting in?” Amanda calls. Eddie looks over at her, floating on her back in her string bikini, and then away. He never likes looking at Amanda for too long, two years older with her bee stung lips and soft curves; he doesn’t want to piss off Manuel.
“What, Eddito? Nah, he’s too worried about sea monsters,” Manuel says, before vanishing below the surface again. Amanda squawks as Manuel grabs her ankle and tugs her under for a second, before they both surface laughing. Eddie, sitting on the cooler, rests his arms on his knees and watches them.
“I’ll get in later,” he says. He sips his beer. It’s lukewarm by now, the same temperature as the air around him. Sometimes it’s hard to know where the air ends and the rest of him begins.
There’s a group of other kids on the shore, some of them Eddie barely recognizes from school, but no one he knows all that well. Older boys, broad shoulders, water caught in the hair sprinkled across their chests, everyone’s shoulders gleaming. But now when he looks up, a girl is headed down the pier towards him. Gangly and skinny, a tank top and bikini bottoms, her nose peeling, dark rings of smudgy eyeliner around her eyes. She squints at him in the sun.
“Hey! I- Oh. Sorry,” she says. “I thought you were someone else.”
“Oh,” he says. “No worries.”
She nods at the beer in his hand.
“Mind bumming me one?” she asks.
Manuel, in the water, whistles at Eddie. The girl shifts a little, chewing at her bottom lip. Up closer, she has freckles splattered across her face, and a wide clear gaze.
“Yeah,” Eddie says, getting up off the cooler and immediately tripping over his feet. “Sure, I mean.”
The girl smiles at him, somewhere between amused and teasing.
“I think I’ve seen you around at school,” she says. “I’m Shannon.”
“Oh, cool,” Eddie says. She sighs and rolls her eyes.
“And your name is...?” she says.