WHO: Hope and Jeremiah WHERE: Shipwreck Cove. WHEN: It starts on Day 1 and then transitions them both to Day 2, morning. SUMMARY: Hope confronts Jeremiah about whether he had anything to do with the girls waking up on the beach. They might subconsciously be trying to tell each other something that they’re both in too much denial to face yet. WARNINGS Some spooky images. Blood.
Talking to Sally had not given Hope the answers she was looking for, but it had pointed her in a new direction. As soon as the blonde moved away, Hope decided to track down a frat boy. Hope didn’t know where the rest of her friends were right then, but she was determined to return with answers. Something was wrong and Hope needed to figure out what it was so that she could protect her friends.
She stood there for a moment, trying to compose herself before she turned. Seeing a bunch of boys sift around the beach looking for skulls made Hope cringe at the sand under her toes. Hope looked down at her feet and noticed that the shoes she was wearing weren’t the same ones she’d been wearing the night before. It was like her brain froze for a moment at that discrepancy. So did Hope.
Her feet disappeared, but in the next blink they were back. Hope looked around. The warmth of the sun hit a different side of her face than it had a moment ago, but Hope was more preoccupied wondering what she was doing on the beach. It took a few seconds to remember that she’d been there before. Hope started to ask herself what was wrong with her, but then she saw Jeremiah and remembered what Sally had said.
She hadn’t realized he was only a few feet away
“Hey!” There was a force to her voice as she stormed up to him. She squared up in front of him, so close her toes were almost touching as she faced him, forcing his attention to her. “I heard the Kappas are the ones who put a bunch of us on the beach. Is that true?”
Jeremiah flinched, jerking his hand instinctively up to his temple. He didn’t know why. It didn’t register at first. He flinched because of the voice, or maybe the voice called out because he flinched? His head hurt. Jer lowered his hand, and in the sunlight, his fingers looked red. When he blinked, the sun shifted. They were back to their normal tan. The voice was there again, calling for his attention. His brow furrowed. He turned as Hope approached him. His awareness seemed to stretch in that moment, opening into a wider picture. He thought he already left the beach but…
He blinked a few times, rapidly, until she came into proper focus. She looked angry. Why was everybody so angry all of a sudden? The last time he saw her, she wasn’t angry. Though...maybe that was why she was angry? The whole grotto thing? But hadn’t she kissed him? And...no, okay, the beach. She was blaming them for the beach. Him. It was hard for him to focus on what she was saying. His head hurt. Jer glanced down at his hand again, and he swore they looked red. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t a red sunrise.
“No,” he said, crossing his arms. It was a defensive stance, but mostly Jer just didn’t want to look at his hands anymore. He didn’t like how the light was playing tricks on him. “Look, I woke up here confused, same as everybody else. And I don’t think it was Jude, because he was too mad to be the one pulling a prank. Maybe it was one of the other guys, but I don’t know who. I just know it wasn’t me.”
Jude had definitely stormed off. Jer remembered confronting him. And then he stormed away from the beach as well… right? What was going on?
Hope stared at him while he talked, her eyes scanning every tick of his expression for any sign of a smirk or disingenuity. His tone was sincere. Her shoulders relaxed a little toward him, even though the tension she was feeling kept the rest of her muscles taut.
“Something is weird.” She took a step back from him, and her eyes darted around. Hope wrung her hands and looked back at him, her head shaking. “We’re on this beautiful beach and everything looks normal. But it doesn’t feel like it’s where I’m supposed to be and every time I try to think about where I’m supposed to be, I can’t figure it out. I just...I can’t….” Eyes that had been roving suddenly stopped on him like she was noticing him for the first time again and zeroed in.
“What’s wrong with you?” But her voice was questioning, rather than accusatory. He looked hungover. He was folding his arms weird. One of his eyes kept squinting. Something was going on.
Maybe her intensity should’ve bothered him. She was staring hard enough to burn a hole through his face. But after his interaction with Jude, Jeremiah felt like he needed to prove something. Not just to his friend, but in general. And it was kind of like making Hope believe him brought him a step closer to getting Jude to do the same. It made no sense, but not a lot was making sense at the moment. Maybe he just needed to know that people could still believe him. Maybe that was the first step.
He just wished what she said after she seemed to accept his answer wasn’t so...unsettling. Hope was totally right. Jer got what she was saying. He felt like he’d been saying things were weird forever now, and nobody was listening to him, but the way she explained it left him feeling uncomfortable. Off. And then her eyes seemed to focus, way sharper than before, and Jeremiah grimaced. He looked at her, bewildered, arms dropping as he shifted into a shrug.
“Wrong? What do you mean?” He didn’t like how she was looking at him now. Jer wanted to tell her that he didn’t feel like he was supposed to be on the beach either, but the way she was looking at him, the words seemed to turn to ash on his tongue. Was there something wrong with him? What?
“You don’t look…” Hope paused, looking for the words, but then shook her head. “I thought you looked like something was wrong, but if you don't think so.” Her shoulders shrugged down and she raised her hands. “What do I know?”
She wasn't going to argue with a guy she barely knew about whether or not something was wrong. She shook her head again. “Sorry.”
“I don’t look...what?” There was an edge to his voice, not anger but fear. It surprised him. He wasn’t used to his own voice sounding like that, yet the tone resonated, familiar, like something he’d heard not too long ago. For a moment, the waves on the beach sounded like thunder, the water like heavy rain. Jer winced and the waves sounded like waves again. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. Trying to figure it out was making his head throb. Maybe that was what Hope saw when she looked at him. She took the statement back, apologized, but he still needed the answer. He couldn’t even explain why. He just did.
“You don’t look…” Hope studied him, “...well.” There was a little emphasis as she found the right word. He didn’t look well. The more she looked at him, the more uncomfortable she felt. Like she was looking at a completed puzzle but there was a piece missing. Something was wrong.
She exhaled. “So you don't know anything about what's going on?”
“I thought at first Jude did this to me as a prank,” Jer said, “but now I don’t think so. And I wasn’t drinking after, uh...you know, the grotto, so. It’s not like I just stumbled here without remembering.” Jer wasn’t a sleepwalker. Never had been, not even once. The more he thought about it, the less it made sense that he’d be on the beach. And if Hope didn’t know what was going on either…
Hope bit her lip. He couldn’t be hungover if he wasn’t drinking...
His focus had drifted, but thinking her name made him look back at Hope. They were both confused. If he could feel fear prickling the back of his neck, the shadow of uncertainty looming, maybe she could too. He frowned. “Look, we can figure it out.” In an effort to convey confidence, to push back his own concern, Jeremiah reached out to touch her shoulder, just a friendly, reassuring gesture.
He didn’t feel anything. Nothing. When he blinked, confused, he stopped seeing Hope. Or...no, it was still Hope. Her hair was tangled, a mess, waves across her face, and her skin was too pale and too blue. Wet and ruined. Wrong. Jer didn’t know how he’d never noticed her eyes before, how pretty they were, but they changed. Emptied. There was nothing there, and they weren’t pretty anymore. He didn’t know what he was seeing, but his breath caught and he couldn’t blink to cast the image away. The seconds ticked by and this was Hope, it was undeniably Hope, but it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.
Why was he looking at her like that? As Jeremiah’s eyes widened in terror, Hope instinctively pulled away from his touch and took a step back. Her eyes were on him and while she moved, for a second the image of him seemed to shift. Just one second. A blink. But in that blink, his face was red with blood and his eyes had no pupils. In the time it took Hope to open her jaw to scream the horrifying image was gone, leaving her silent and in shock as she stared with the same horror.
“I…” Jer choked out the word and it was like lightning flashed across the sky, blinding him long enough for his entire world to change back. She hadn’t moved. No time had passed. Hope was still Hope. What he saw made no sense, so it couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be. Jeremiah had jerked his hand away without realizing it. He was too scared to see if his fingers were red. “I’m going to find Cassidy. I’ll figure this out.”
He nodded. Then he turned, and took ten careful, slow paces before he broke into a run towards the hotel.