Page 70 of Under the Waves

Golden skin now dulled,

hopeful eyes now sorrowed.

Pools of darknesslaid beneath them,

swallowing me whole.

I looked in the mirror and saw everything I hated.

Each scar was a reminder of whose genes I wore.

The greenness of my eyes was nothing but a curse.

How could I look back at the girl staring at me through the lens and feel anythingbutemptiness?

I was just a number on a scale.

A number on a scoreboard.

A number on a test paper.

Just a number.

Always a number.

What else was there to me but that?

27

Poppy Wells

Iwas sitting alone on the beach watching myfakeboyfriend and his best friends compete in a sport I was slowly losing after I had purposefully ignored them all for the past few days.Great.

At least it was better than being at home.

I’d do anything to not be there right now.

Even pretend to be Jasper’s fake girlfriend, apparently.

Did that make me selfish or…yeah, definitely selfish.

I wasn’tonlythere just because I had nowhere else to go…I just—I didn’t know.

I didn’t know anything anymore.

Sometimes, I found myself looking around for him, searching for that familiar pull. It was stupid,Iknew, but it was also…comforting. He was like a Harry Styles song playing through tangled headphones at maximum volume justpast midnight when the only light came from moonlight filtering through the blinds.

What he had—thefriendshiphe had with Lia and Jakson…I wished I had something like that. I fuckingwished. I knew it was ugly to be jealous, but I was—I was jealous of Jasper Ridge for having friends who would go to the ends of the earth for him. I was jealous because he had them and I hadno one.

For fuck sake, I didn’t even have amotherwholovedme.

If even she couldn’t, how could anyone else?

Hell, how could I even love myself?

The only person I could rely on was myself but evenIlet myself down, so what did that say about me?

“Oh my god, is that Poppy Wells?”