Prologue
I’ve always heard everything happens for a reason. There is a part of me that wants to believe that good things awaits for those who deserve it, but reality can be cruel sometimes.
We rented a house by the beach to enjoy the end of the summer, so for the first time the six of us were able to spend ten full days together, drinking, eating good food and mostly enjoying good time together. Nobody told me growing up that when you become an adult, everybody is so concerned with their own jobs that making everyone have time off at the same time is as hard as getting a man to Mars and you basically need NASA involved.
The guys were surfing together while I pretended to read a book, but the reality was all I could do was focus on Jake on his surfboard enjoying the water and laughing about something I couldn’t imagine. I saw the guys saying he should catch the big wave that was coming, and I looked with anticipation, knowing that he would look like a professional surfer by the end of it, while my heart skipped a beat.
It all felt like a blink of an eye. One second, he was there and the other he was gone.
The wave had already crashed, and I couldn’t see him. I dropped my book and started walking toward the water with a weird feeling, our friends had already started swimming closer to shore when I finally saw his board, but it was broken in half. My heart sunk. Patrick was diving in looking for Jake and when he finally resurfaced, he seemed like a block of dead weight. I kept walking in the water to help him, but the fact that he had his eyes closed freaked me out and I just started yelling his name. When we all got him by the sand, giving him space to breath, I held his head in between my hands making him look at me.
-Stupid of me to think I could breathe under water. — He finally said, trying to make fun of the situation, which was so like him.
While everybody seemed to laugh and take it all just as a bad scare, I felt something weird on my hands. When I finally looked at it, there was a dark blood dripping from the back of his head to his neck.
-Jake, you’re bleeding!
-No, I’m okay. I must have hit something but I’m fine, it’s just a little blood. — he said trying to sit down, making a point he was indeed fine.
That weird feeling, I had before was now making me nauseous. I knew he would refuse help. He was always the one helping people, whatever we needed he was the one to fix it and obviously he had to be the most stubborn person on the planet. Once he got up, the second step he took, he collapsed right into me while I tried to hold his entire weight with my weak arms. He looked right into me and as I saw him dosing off, I was screaming on top of my lungs:
-Somebody call 911!
If everything happens for a reason, the moment I saw him on the ground, not moving, my first thought was “this can’t be happening. He’s gonna be fine”.
