I dip my head and squint past the windshield toward the entryway, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing.
A stream seeps from beneath the front door, over my walkway, and into the little yard. Something wet. Something rushing. And it’s coming from within my house.
“Mom.” I swallow, turn my car engine off, and fumble for the door handle. “I have to flow.” I shake my head. “Go. I have to go.”
“Stella.” My mother groans. “We need to talk. Your father and I are in crisis. You need to consider?—”
“I’ll call you back.” I gulp, staring ahead at my haven. “Promise!”
I hurry up to the walk and step into the mess finding its way onto my front step. Water, foamy, soapy water … surging from my closed-up house.
I open the door and a gush of sudsy liquid spills over my work shoes and ankles. “What—” I search the ground. “What is this?”
My toes wiggle with the slosh that’s suddenly seeping through my shoes as I step into the house. Water, water, and more water.
My little house is flooding without a drop of rain in thesky. I wade through ankle-deep water from my entryway into the soaked carpet of my living room. Choking gasps squeak from my lips as I peer around the space just as a horrid sound screeches from the kitchen.
“Nooo,” I cry. “Today! This day. October twenty-fourth can go straight to—” I gasp. That sound, that awful sound. I’ve found the source. “My dishwasher?”
I turned it on this morning, and yes, in my panic of “chatting” with Joan, I might have filled the thing up with liquid dish soap. But that was eight hours ago. And the thing is still running? Okay, not exactly running, it’s officially possessed while drowning my home in a million gallons of water.
Another screech sounds from the thing, and I jolt backward, slipping on the sudsy floor. My arm and hands flare outward, and I catch myself on my work shelf. The unit is normally weighed down with tools and pottery, but the ocean in my kitchen is making it unsteady. The thing sways side to side. I watch it; it’s never going to support me. And then I see it. On top of this teetering shelf—my Spiral Song. My labor of love. My passion project. My possible award winner. I go down, making a splash in the water beneath me, and with the reverberating surge, water rushes, rocking the shelf off balance, and with it my Spiral Song.
“No!” I wail, watching my glossy blue-and-cream piece as it teeters then falls from its safe space on the top shelf. The spirals and swirls etched into the piece whirl as it plummets down, down, down. I watch as if in slow motion, but I’m unable to stop it from happening.
It clunks hard onto the tiled floor, then bobs back up in the lake that is now my kitchen, just before glub, glub, glubbing it’s way to the bottom.
I dive toward my eighty hours of work and love and lift the vase from the drowning depths of my kitchen sea.
The Sierra Clay awards rarely have finalists who are big fat nobodies. And yet, they chose my piece as one of their five finalists.Mine.
However, they didn’t choose this drowned statue.
I gasp, lifting my piece up and inspecting every inch. My throat clenches, and the room seems to spin. A large, rough crack runs down the center of one of my spirals, and a jagged chunk is missing from the rim.
Sitting on my kitchen floor, surrounded by a sudsy ocean, tears brim in my eyes. My wet arms are suddenly much too heavy. So, I lay the piece back onto the surface of this watery grave. A bubble glubs from the mouth of my ceramic baby just before it sinks to the bottom, drowning all of my hopes and dreams with it.
Two
The glasson Coach’s personal MVP award shines with my own reflection. At the moment, a smudge on the thing is making it look as if I have half a handlebar mustache. “Coach,” I say into the empty office, right into that smudge. “I bought a cabin.” I wrinkle my nose and shift one inch to the side of that smear, cutting that half-mustache off completely. With more assertiveness, I try again. “Coach. I have purchased a cabin.”
“You’ve done what?” Jet Jacobson says. My Red Tails coach stands in the doorway of his office, his usual pleasant expression in a tight scowl.
I swallow down my nerves. I am Roman Graves—the Graveyard. I don’t cower. “Hey, Coach. I was just waiting for you. To talk.”
“I see. Because you’ve purchased what?” Jacobson’s brows hitch high on his head. He crosses his arms, looming in the doorway of his office. He isn’t a scary man, and I’m not a fearful human. And yet … something inside of me says I should lie or chicken out of this conversation completely. It’s not going to end in my favor.
But then, I’ve never listened to the fearful side of my brain—which is why I broke my arm cliff jumping at sixteen. But it’s also why Mary Kim accepted my invitation to the prom. She was in college. And out of my league. So, I square my shoulders and look Jacobson dead in the eyes. “Coach, I bought a cabin.”
Jacobson walks by me and that smudged MVP award. He rounds his desk and sits behind it. Leaning back in his office chair, he motions for me to sit in the seat opposite him. But I prefer to stand.
“Why?” he asks.
I clear my throat. That isn’t the response I expected. I’m ready for a fight, for an argument. I’ve done the deed, ready to ask forgiveness, not permission. But why?
I cinch my brows. “Because I want my own place.” I’m only three years away from thirty. Why wouldn’t I want my own place? Do I really need to explain myself to Jacobson, or anyone?
“Where is this cabin?”
