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Please, nothing more than chillin’ on the grass at the Santa Cruz lighthouse, listening to music, and waxing my board in peace.

I took a shaky step forward. A challenge. For the briefest of moments, I swore normal life returned and I broke their spell—at least to give myself enough time to bolt down the path, slip on my headphones, and situate myself beneath the tower’s shade, I hoped.

Nope. The harder I fought against them, the more difficult they became, and if anything, they came back tenfold.

One, two, three voices became four. Four became five, and then came more. This many, this loud, they couldn’t be deciphered; they couldn’t even be considered voices. They were like tiny fireworks, exploding in my head. Like a meteor swarm, wiping out my thoughts.

My surfboard smacked the dirt. I tumbled to the ground after it. I was losing it—my grip on reality. I wanted to scream. I think I did. There just wasn’t enough room in my head for this.

The noises. So many overlapping noises. Yet I could pinpoint every sound.

The space. So much empty space. Yet it still felt crowded around me.

The colors. So many vibrant colors. Yet they all melded into one.

Up, down, left, right, land, sea…it was all the same.

My blood turned to lead, heavy enough to drag me down. I lacked the strength to fight it, so I let it. Dipping my neck, I wrapped my arms around my legs and cocooned my head between my knees—the closest thing to a surrender as the Voices captured my mind, my will, my body, and finally my consciousness, as the spinning world curtained to black.

“Hey, you okay?”

A raspy familiarity cut through the dark like a searchlight through the fog. “River? River Harlowww? You in there?”

The gentle wave of his hands had my eyelids fluttering. Bruised concrete finishes and frosted basalt rocks shifted in and out of focus. I imagined I resembled a castaway washed up from sea, limp and choking on the air like it was a mouthful of salt water.

The screams hadn’t left, but at least in this world they came from the overhead gulls, not a group of omniscient voices.

“I—yeah, um…” Words never came easy after these episodes, but especially when the Grateful Dead Bears were walking off my best friend’s t-shirt. With a few lengthy blinks they stopped mid-stride against the tie-dye.

“I thought I’d find you here.”

I squinted towards his melodic voice, at his face haloed by the midday rays. “When’d you…” My clammy fingers slipped to catch hold of his.

“Just in time, apparently.”

My stomach turned as the horizon shifted upright. “Thanks,” I said into the fish-eye lens dangling in front of his chest, not ready to meet his panicked eyes.

He swung his woven camera strap behind his shoulder. “That was a rough one. Rougher than earlier. You good?”

I gulped, attempting to reassure him with frantic head nodding, huffing away the strands of layered hair that fell around my jawline, even though the movement made my head pound.

The Voices had fizzled to nothing but seafoam, but my body tingled from the surge in activity. At least at graduation, to the untrained eye, it looked like I’d just been clumsy as shit. But right now, at the top of this bluff, I was sprawled out like a starfish barely able to speak a coherent sentence—it was super obvious to anyone around that I’d suffered more than a trip and fall. Just thinking about it made my upper lip break into a sweat.

“I’m all good, just need a sec.” I fixed my attention on a super-interesting barnacle at the end of the point—not really, but anything was better than Javi’s crinkled brown eyes. Best friend or not, there was never anything fun about having someone pull you off the ground because voices-that-no-one-else-heard broke your mind harder than the explosives at a demolition site.

Not that he knew about that last part.

I’d share with him my wildest hopes and dreams, my hidden surf breaks, the last slice, anything. Anything…except the Voices. Because the risk of losing him hurt even more than suppressing my juiciest secret: that three other beings occupied my headspace.

Nobody knew about the Voices.

A light pressure to the web between my thumb and palm cut off my spiraling thoughts. I answered the soft pinch with one of my own—a sort of morse code Javi and I had developed to make sure I was still there. It’d become so second nature I probably had his fingerprints imprinted on my skin.

For whatever reason, Javier Ramirez loved my aura of weirdness. I couldn’t understand the draw. When I was eight, dealing with the aftermath of my mom’s death, most of my friends were too freaked out by my trauma and never talked to me again.

But Javi…It’d been almost ten years of that hand squeezing mine, of picking me up off the floor, of wiping tears from my cheeks…He was a keeper.

“Don’t worry, we’ve got all day for you to recover.” He looped his arm through mine, his skin a deep-rooted tan unlike my warm beige complexion that would never achieve that level of glow no matter how often I lay in the sun. Taking my thin smile as permission, he gently guided me away from the cliffs, while so lovingly telling me, “Well, all day until Grad Night. Which is in six hours. So you’ve got six hours.”