Chapter 1: In with the tide

He didn't seemed shocked by his find in the tide pool that cool autumn morning. Billy Cooper had cut his first period class again, and like so many times before, headed to the beach to help straighten out the events of the previous night. In the last six months his world went from ordinary and predictable to a place where you never knew what was going to come charging out of the shadows at you next. After a particularily bad night, walking the empty beach in the early morning was just about the only thing that helped him hold on. It sometimes seemed that he had died inside and was just waiting for his body to realize it and do the same.

The tide had gone out and the beach seemed like it stretched almost to the horizon. The marine haze was just starting to lift and the cool salty breeze gently brushing against his face was helping him focus. Maybe the fighting and the implied threat of violence the night before hadn't been as bad as he thought. More importantly he was starting to convince himself that he wasn't totally to blame. Others were involved. He wasn't alone in all this. But it was still bad all the same. His mind was racing back and forth replaying everything that had happened. Trying to understand all the anger and his role in it. That's when he saw the body. In a tide pool tangled up in a crazy combination of seaweed and fishing net that still had it's big glass ball floaters attached to it. The type that the Japanese fisherman use. It was the body of a woman. She was naked except for the strange gown the ocean had dressed her in. Almost as though it was restoring some dignity to her before it deposited her on the beach. As he approached he saw that her skin, hanging loosely from her bones, was grayish blue and what seemed to once be a fairly petite figure had become something like a bloated rag doll. Billy looked at her glazed over empty eyes staring blankly at the beach and knew that he should feel something, shock, sadness, fear. But he just felt empty like he had felt for the last six months. Billy knew he should feel for her. She was his age. Billy knew that any right minded person should be running for help. But he couldn't move his feet. Billy stood there studying her laying in that tide pool surrounded by starfish and sea annenomea because Billy knew her.