"Eighteen" by Shannon Linden

​Warning: This story contains graphic language.

What do you know at eighteen? A year short of official adulthood (if you mark that milestone with the legal ordering of a drink) you've barely dipped your foot beneath the surface of experience, but you're brazen enough to swim in any water.

You live for the moment. Yesterday disappears behind you like wave spray from your jet ski absorbed into the lake; mixing, sinking with all the other particles of your past. Tomorrow, like the open stretch of summer sky, beckons before you, yet still so far away. You are eighteen but your sister is half your age. Too small to operate her own machine on open water, she doesn't mind sharing your ride. Her skinny arms are surprisingly strong, wrapped around your waist, squeezing you tight. Leaning into your back, her squeals of joy tickle your ear, rising above the roar of the engine as you hit it, pushing that bad boy to the max. How fast can you go? Turning on a dime, roaring back across the horizon, the machine bouncing and banging on the lake's pristine waters, splashing your muscled calves with warm spray.

This, you think, is what it's all about. Speed and sunshine, love and laughter. You feel young and powerful. You feel alive.

Your parents, watching dutifully from the dock, shield their eyes, smile and wave. Of course they read you the riot act before they agreed to let you go, but you're capable of handling a personal watercraft. Hell, you passed your driver's license with only one demerit. The lifejacket is a bit of a pain in the ass, riding up around your shoulders like a bulky scarf around your neck.

You wish your girlfriend was here to see you turning up the water. Yah, the only thing that could make this day better would be Kristina waiting, her skin warm and suntan lotioned up, her yellow bikini with the tiny, white polka-dots just barely covering anything. God, it would be great if she could've come. Family trip, though.

"Who knows how long we can do this?" your mom had asked, two months earlier, standing at the kitchen island, her knife smoothly slicing through carrots while you sat at your stool across from her, struggling to make sense of your calculus. "We'll be working around two kids with two completely different schedules. You'll probably only be home for reading breaks and Christmas."

You put down your pencil. "Seriously, mom? It's not like I'm moving to another country. Besides, you guys can fly out to see me too, you know."

"Because we're made of money, right?"

"Jesus, mom. Why do you have to turn everything into a reminder of how much I'm going to cost you next year? I just asked if Kristina could come on vacation, okay?"

Your mom took a deep, measured breath, in and slowly out. Yoga shit.

"I'm sorry." She put the knife down and picked up her wine. "It's only a week, but I was eighteen once, I get it." She winked at you over her glass of Merlot but you waved her off. She was seventeen once, too, last year when you wanted to bring Brooke camping. Only a week? That's like forever when you're stuck in a cabin with your tag-along sister and your parents who insist on turning out board games while they tell you to turn off your phone.

A week is forever but a moment is all it takes for your world to implode.

So fun to spin the machine around, your sister nearly flying off, you crank it so hard. You laugh, pushing the speed for one more run before you get the watch-tap signal from your dad. Time to come in.

The lake is crowded, boats and Sea-Doos and wakeboarders competing for space. You slow it right down, easing in toward the dock, checking your surroundings. The vessel chugging out of the boat launch sees you...right? You ease completely off the throttle but, holy fuck, the guy guns it and suddenly it's right there! There's no time to think! A wrong turn, a slight slip of someone else's wheel, disappearing sun, falling darkness. Fun collides with forever.

Getting grounded used to feel like forever. It seemed like forever before you grew taller than your mom, fell in love, finished exams, got to grad. But this is different. This is a never-going-to-recover from forever. This is the stuff of innocence lost and endless therapy and please, God, turn back time - just a few seconds!

You crank the handle bars, turn, turn! The Sea-Doo slides sideways and there's the boat's bow and smash! The sound explodes in your ear like a bomb blast, throwing you off and sending your sister flying like shrapnel before the lights go out on your world.

People are screaming in faraway voices. Someone in the red-rippled water, pushing you; another set of arms reaching down, furiously grasping your forearms and hauling you upward, scraping your legs against the side of the boat.

The light is hazy, the air thick and hot when they lay you down on the dock. A curious and concerned crowd gathers as some off-duty doctors who happen to be enjoying an evening out, leave their meals to cool like their frosty beers, sprinting down the wooden boardwalk. A soothing voice — you recognize the South African accent because Stephen Bester on your soccer team, his dad's from there — encourages you to stay calm, pushes you gently back down as you struggle to sit up. You can't stay awake to see the other doctor bent before your sister, madly pressing, pumping, barking orders at bystanders.

But she is the setting sun, already slipped away, leaving her spirit in soft shades of red and pink and purple and orange; whispers of beauty, blending into the evening sky.

Your head was hit hard and you are rushed to the emergency department, confused, concussed, and continuing to ask over and over again, "Where's my sister?"

Tears in his eyes, for a moment the on-call trauma doctor will see himself in you: a sturdy young man, the kiss of sunshine on his smooth skin, his whole life stretched before him like a lazy summer day. Fresh, fearless, he has sisters too, and sometimes he drives too fast, takes sharp turns, races across choppy waters, not knowing what lies ahead...

It is tearing his heart out, gently gripping your shoulder, looking into your blank eyes, but he has no choice.

"I'm sorry, son. Your sister died."

Medication and time — terrible time — and the concussion eases, the confusion slowly lifts as the pain of reality presses down. Everything will work again, your body is only slightly broken. But how can you be breathing when you are suffocating?

You are eighteen. You deserve to love and laugh and live for right now, racing toward the rising sun, climbing across a blue and endlessly open sky. But now you know too much.

The trauma doctor will go home and hug his children fiercely to his chest and his wife will write about you; a boy she never knew. From the news coverage she will sense your family's deep and enduring love for one another and she will imagine you now, a young man, slowly healing, seeing a new kind of beauty in a summer sunset, making the most of every moment.