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Part of me wanted to stay submerged beneath the ocean’s rippling surface forever.

Under the melodic roll of the waves, it was easy to forget the worst parts of life.

Why I had run here.

The water pressed into my eardrums, a weighted, whirring silence that thrummed with the beat of my heart.

It flooded my mouth the second I parted my lips, rushing out with the air bubbles as I screamed.

Something I’d wanted to do since noon that day—when my toes had caught on the unaltered hem of my gown as I walked across the stage at graduation.

With my surfboard pressed beneath me, it was impossible to feel the pangs of humiliation through the sparks of adrenaline.

I was in my element, and I trusted myself, trusted that my knees would press into the buoyancy just enough to catapult me into a seamless carve.

Which they eventually did.

I burst through the water’s glossy surface, sucking down an inhale, shaking bits of algae from my hair like it could also get rid of the image of the hundreds of people staring at me when I’d fallen.

Well, here people still gawked—but that’s because I dove into monster waves and surfed the biggest sets.

Not because I full-on face-planted during my high school’s biggest ceremony.

I unpinned the saggy bun at the nape of my neck, the drenched, golden-brown tresses falling past my shoulders.

Releasing a drawn-out exhale, I headed for the horizon, revived by every stroke of cold water as if I were being reborn.

Salt caked my cheeks, stinging the raw skin under my eyes.

Wiping them was pointless.

The tears burned but not as badly as my arms—those had the pleasure of paddling me two hundred yards and fighting off the slimy strings of kelp.

When I reached the lineup, the moisture enveloping me like a thick blanket, a ghost of a smile touched my lips.

I was home.

And on days like today, when the parents, teachers, and fellow graduates’ gasps merged with the voices woven together by my mind—the invisible ones, the ones that no one else but me heard—I gasped for breath and fought against the current because I needed this .

I needed to fly without wings, needed the silence to speak louder than my thoughts, needed my instincts to beat faster than my heart.

So…I may have paddled out farther than necessary.

Popped up on my board one too many times.

Surfed longer than I meant to, preferring the sounds of the sea far more than the voices waiting to strike once my pruny feet met dry land.

When I finally staggered up the staircase carved into the bluff, my muscles melting into that addictive post-surf soreness, everything hit me all at once.

My shitty morning, the weakness in my legs, the voices I’d been avoiding.

As if their unbodied presence leaned against the iron railing with the other onlookers taking in the Pacific Ocean’s force, and those that rode it—but they didn’t.

Unlike human speech, theirs didn’t have an obvious source.

Or at least one I could locate.

At first all I heard was the wind whipping my ears, the faint drags against sand from my waterlogged leash.

That’s the thing about telepathic voices—mine, at least. They’re nowhere and then, they’re everywhere.

It started with one, weaving indistinct whispers into the crush of the grit beneath my bare feet, so sharp I had to walk on my toes.

Then another, slipping wordless screams into the strained breaths of eager surfers rushing past me, so loud I had to shut my eyes.

And the last, dropping a truly impressive array of inflections into the sighs of the tide, so intense I would’ve covered my ears if my surfboard wasn’t already in my hands.

Ugh. Barging into someone’s life wasn’t the politest thing to do, but if they were going to commit, how about doing it on bus rides, during English homework, or awkward first dates, and not during my favorite activity!

? I may have gotten out of the water, but I hadn’t even had a chance to change out of my wetsuit!

This was still considered my time—they knew that.

But I also knew my particular telepathic voices had a rebellious streak.

Blowing out my mind and my senses and making me trip in front of everyone during the single most important moment of my high school career, had been proof enough of that.

So perhaps it was on brand for them to interject so soon, I figured, as I flipped my damp hair, held my surfboard high and my chin even higher.

As I forged up the steep eroded steps, I tried my best to ignore the sudden tightness of my neoprene, the sudden chafing from the salt I hadn’t yet rinsed from my skin.

My nails were inaccessible, with my arms still being wrapped around my surfboard, so I bit my lip as I trudged up the incline.

At the top of the stairs, I paused, teetering somewhat—pressing the heel of my palm into my forehead, trying to subdue the pounding in my head and the escalating pitch of the Voices—paces away from the footpath that led to the plushy lawn of the lighthouse.

The natural spot to post up after a surf sesh, and a much better place to have an episode, where I wasn’t on display to every jogger, surfer, and sightseer.

If I could just make it a few more yards…

A swift prickle of my senses had them standing on edge like the hairs on the back of my neck.

My brain was spinning like someone had put it in a blender.

I couldn’t make it any farther.

So, I shimmied off to the side, and I anchored myself there, digging my toes into the dirt, all too aware of the harsh indent of my toe rings, while the Voices morphed into the sounds of the world around me.

The first voice tippy tapped across my skull in tune with the hermit crabs that scuttled over the reef.

With what could’ve been a clack of their claws or a click of her tongue, she made her opinion known—as she always did.

“What a silly way to spend one’s time. Do you actually enjoy partaking in these mortal pleasures, Watcher?”

Um, yes.

Yes, I did. Nothing beat riding a wave.

But I wasn’t going to answer that, not when everyone could see me and think I was talking to the air.

I gripped the ground tighter.

Dried mudstone crumbled near my clenched feet.

It set off a slide, so small it should have gone unnoticed, but a second voice cleared her throat, rumbling with the moving debris.

“Watcher, there are matters that need your attention. This is not one of them.”

Quite the contrary.

Surfing was of the utmost importance.

Ignoring them, I glanced back at the lineup just to prove my point.

The break barreled towards the beach, and a third voice caught its momentum, her words crashing into my head harder than the waves pounding the shore.

“She’s spent the last few hours balancing on a piece of foam; what else do you expect of her?”

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.”

“Appreciate the sympathy, bud.” More like the lack of it.

He deserved the playful pinch I gave his arm.

“Ow! There’s the River I know. I was worried I’d lost you again for a sec.”

“Still here.” I shot him a teasing side-eye as he darted across the pathway, towing me behind him.