It sticks in my throat, races down my spine, rushes through my head.
I feel fear.
But at least I feel something.
I don’t even notice the smack of my body as it hits the water and I plunge beneath the surface. For a minute, I don’t know which way is up and which is down. It doesn’t matter though, because I can still hear it. I can hear the howl, even from beneath the water.
It echoes in my ears where for weeks, for over a month, there’s been nothing but silence.
When I resurface in the water, everyone is down at the edge of the embankment. I must have stayed under longer than I realized, even though my lungs don’t burn the way they should. The attendant from the faire takes a cautious look at the rocks around the edge of the river before he jumps in to come and pull me out as Tom just stands there dumbfounded. Behind him, Jess and Aimee look like they’ve been freaking out.
This isn’t the first time they’ve worried they lost me to the river.
The attendant insists on hooking one arm around my waist and dragging me back up onto the ground, even though the currents here aren’t actually strong enough to sweep me away—even with my own poor skills as a swimmer. He wraps me in his jacket and swears as the faire’s manager appears at the edge of the crowd to ask if he needs to file an incident report.
“I’m fine,” I say as I try to brush everyone off me. “I want to do it again.”
“Hell no,” the attendant who dragged me out says. He finally finds a blanket to replace his jacket, which he wraps around me as he starts explaining to his manager how I refused to sign the waiver and then just jumped off without the cord affixed like a crazy woman.
Jess starts crying and laying into the manager about the faire being dangerous and I can see the manager’s headache beginning to form. He pulls a wad of free ride and drink vouchers out of his pocket and hands them to Jess.
“Here,” he says. “Please use these to enjoy yourself at the faire for the rest of the evening.”
“We’re not even old enough to drink,” she says, still looking visibly upset like this wasn’t somehow my own, purposeful doing.
But then why would it be?
It had to have been an accident. It had to have been the attendant’s fault.
He must have explained something wrong. He had to have told me to jump … right?
Right?
Even the boys who were taunting Tom earlier look eager to get away. All that brazen bullying is gone, replaced with worried glances as they slip off into the dispersing crowd.
“No problem,” the manager says, handing Jess another wad of drink tickets and trying to back off himself. “Consider it all on me tonight, so long as you keep your friend away from the cliff.”
Then he looks at me. “Just stay away from here. We can’t have a girl go killing herself at my faire.”
“Cool,” Tom says. Unlike everyone else, he isn’t too fazed by any of what just happened. He’s more focused on the free beer he’s about to drink. “Let’s go check out that rickety roller coaster. Think those guys will still give me two hundred bucks if I convince them to let me ride it?”
Jess and Aimee nod in agreement but they don’t seem too thrilled about the roller coaster. I think they just want to get anywhere that’s not right here by the water’s edge. I get up to my feet and let the blanket drop. I’m drenched to the skin and I can’t get the sound of the howl out of my head.
Just the memory of it brings back the rush of falling.
I know I heard it.
I know it wasn’t just the wind.
“You guys go ahead,” I say. “I’m going to head home so that I can dry off.”
“That sounds like the first sensible thing you’ve said in weeks,” Aimee says, all her nonchalance from earlier swept away in the river water I’ve just been pulled from.
When I get home, my mother is curious about how in the world I got soaking wet in the middle of winter at the faire.
Even then, however, she doesn’t pry too much.
Not when she sees what I’m doing.