Page 26 of Vitamin Sea
Her hands slid across the rock, slick with ocean slime and salt water, as she desperately tried to find something to hold onto to.
She was smarter than this, she cursed herself. She knew better than this. How could she have been so stupid?
She thought of Lala waking up to find her friend missing and the entire resort sending out a search party. And what they would find? Her flip-flops or her body,ifthey managed to find any evidence of her at all.
A shiver went through her.
“HELP!” she yelled, hoping against hell that someone around would hear her. Once she had walked past the resort, she had found it to be pretty secluded. She hadn’t seen anyone else around, but she didn’t have many options at this point.
With her eyes squinted shut because of the salt, she tried to climb her way closer to the rocks she had been dragged from. It wasn’t easy going and her body throbbed as she slipped, tripped, and stumbled while waves broke around her.
“HELP!” she yelled again, taking refuge on a rock she thought she had a good grip on. Her heart was in her throat and she yelled another cry for help that was suddenly cut off by a huge wave that smashed into her and pulled her back into the ocean.
No!she thought to herself, panicking.No!This could not be happening. This could not be how she died.
She cried as she tried to tread water and keep her head above the water, which felt like an impossibility with all the waves.
Would it be worse to die from the blunt-force trauma of being repeatedly smashed into rocks or from being dragged out to sea and drowning?
Terror gripped her as she sobbed and a wave crashed over her head and dragged her under the ocean. Her arms flailed about as she tried to navigate her way to the surface, but she was sodisoriented she couldn’t tell which way was up. She thrashed wildly as the current dragged her this way and that and her final thought before she gave up the fight was of her mom and dad. How heartbroken they would be when they were told that their only daughter drowned.
And then, just like in the movies, a montage of her life flashed before her eyes. Her school birthdays, vacations with her parents, high school graduation, her internship, meeting Liam, sleepovers with her girlfriends, Liam breaking up with her, and finally, her elation at being in Costa Rica with her best friend.
The irony.
Suddenly she felt something grab onto her arm and pull her downwards. Or was that upwards? Underwater, she couldn’t tell.
Oh no,she thought,even worse than drowning or blunt-force head trauma—I’m going to get eaten by a shark.
The thought paralyzed her with fear and suddenly everything went black.
???
Chloe’s eyes were closed but it seemed she was no longer in the water. In fact, it felt like she was on solid land. Hard, ocean-free, solid land.
But that was impossible.
Unless shehadactually died, and heaven was a place with solid ground. That really would fly in the face of all the cartooncloud depictions she had seen.
Still, it had to be heaven—the absence of burning hot fires told her that, despite jokes she and her friends had sometimes made, she definitely wasn’t roasting in the pits of hell.
Her entire body ached, and her eyes still stung; her skin felt sticky, and her lips were parched. Suddenly, she felt a hand on her arm and, what felt like, hair, brush her neck.
“Hey!” a low male voice said urgently.
Chloe moaned softly, and the male voice urged her again.
“Hey! Wake up!”
She felt a hand on the side of her face.
“Are you okay?” the voice asked urgently again.
Chloe groaned and felt the rim of a plastic water bottle being gently pressed against her lips.
She lifted her head a bit and the bottle tilted so a trickle of liquid dribbled into her mouth.
“My friend has gone to get a medic.” The voice sounded concerned. “Stay with me.”
