Teach Me How to Fly

It’s night and I’m sitting outside at the beach. The air is comfortable now and the wind even makes it a little chilly. But I brought my jacket.

I can’t go back inside, not yet. Not with how my parents looked at me at dinner, every time they thought I wouldn’t notice. Not with how I’m scared to look at the mirror because I don’t know when the first changes are going to appear. Have there already been some? It’s only been a few days, but what do I know? It definitely feels like my hair’s already growing slower everywhere aside of the back of my head. Somewhere, I read that the skin’s the first part to change. It grows softer, smoother. And your smell changes, too.

I don’t smell my armpits, though. That’d be dumb.

The sky is clear, mostly, and the almost full moon is shining brightly. It looks peaceful, the way the light reflects in the water, waves lazily washing ashore.

I hate it. I know it’s objectively beautiful, but I can’t get myself to like the view. Everything is going wrong. I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong family and soon, I’m also going to be in the wrong body. This is comically messed up.

“Mind if I sit with you?” a voice asks from next to me and I jump.

It’s Sadie, standing a few metres away, hands in the pockets of a dark-blue hoodie.

I really ought to pay a little more attention to my surroundings when I’m outside. I can’t make a habit of getting caught off-guard like this.

“Sure,” I say, even though I don’t really feel like having company. Especially not the kind that doesn’t know what’s really going on inside my head. I can’t tell her. Okay, fair, I wouldn’t tell Henry either, but that’s a different story.

She sits down next to me, leans back and stretches her legs. I’m sitting with my knees hugged to my chest.

“Enjoying the view?” she asks then, glancing in my direction with a smile.

A single laugh escapes my throat. It sounds more like a cough. “I wish.”

“Don’t like it?”

I shrug. “I know it’s pretty but… I’d rather be virtually anywhere else.”

Now she laughs. “You don’t mean that.”

“Maybe.” She’s probably right. She’s seen enough places to know that sorta thing. “I’d rather be in some city. I can’t wait to move to, like, London or Berlin or….”

“Amsterdam is nice,” she offers. “If you’re looking to move to a European capital, I can recommend Amsterdam. Well, if you have the money. I liked it much better than Berlin or Paris.” She says it with a scoff.

“Don’t like Paris?” I ask with a raised eyebrow, stretching my legs to mirror her.

She shrugs. “Never figured out how to tell whether a puddle there is just water or piss. Hard to tell if you’re walking fast.”

I laugh. Actually, genuinely laugh. “The city of love…”

“City of piss, more like,” she grins. “Well, to be fair, there are a lot of beautiful places. Lovely little bookshops, huge, glamorous shopping malls, bridges, parks. A great city to get lost in.” She pauses, then corrects herself. “Except it’s not because you’ll probably get mugged.”

“And that wouldn’t happen in Amsterdam?”

She shrugs. “Probably? But… I don’t know, Amsterdam is just a whole different vibe, I feel like….”

Her voice trails off and we both sit in silence for a while.

I think I have to rectify my statement from earlier. I prefer her company to being alone right now. She’s a nice distraction.

“If you’re not here for the view, though, why are you here then?” she asks suddenly and I feel her eyes watch me as I try not to show the hole that just opened in my stomach.

Right. So much for good company.

“Didn’t wanna be inside,” I mumble. “With my parents.” And it’s the truth, isn’t it? She doesn’t need to know the reasons for that.

She laughs, short and without humour. “I can relate,” she says then and gives me a tired smile. “What did your parents do?”

I should really stop jinxing it.

I shrug. What is it my parents did? Some people would probably say that they simply care about me. But isn’t that the problem? “They won’t leave me alone. They’re always in my face about how worried they are, it’s suffocating.”

She waits a moment before talking herself, making sure that I’m done talking. Her voice is different now, more sober. “Mine are the opposite. It’s so weird that they’re around now. There’s always this slight tension in the air. They’re missing the action of being out and about.”

“Action?”

She nods. “When Mum said they’re wanted criminals in some countries that wasn’t entirely wrong. I don’t know exactly why, I never asked and honestly I don’t want to know, but when I was eight, they woke me up in the middle of the night because we had to leave the country as fast as we could.” She shrugs. “And even if they’re not criminals, I don’t doubt that they have lots of enemies all across the world. I still remember when I was, like, thirteen, I once snooped around my parents’ room when they weren’t around and I found a gun in Dad’s bedside drawer. That was the last time I ever did that, obviously.”

Huh. Her parents are really the opposites of mine. Mine are so boring.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” I say a little lamely. I do think I get it. Constantly moving, never being able to settle down, having to adapt to a new environment every few months, not being sure if your parents are going to return from their next trip…. Choosing a life like that is one thing, being forced to live it is a completely different story.

She laughs again. “It’s the life I know.”

“And they miss that now?”

She nods.

“No offence, but your parents sound like irresponsible assholes.”

She laughs. “Oh, I suppose they are. They got really lucky with me in the sense that I became independent very quickly.”

Yeah, being alone will teach you to take care of yourself.

“But why did they come with you, then? Isn’t it a little late to feel bad now?”

“I don’t know,” she says and tenses the corners of her lips in a way that resembles a shrug more than a smile. “I guess they didn’t want me to live completely alone when I told them that I wanted a more permanent place? So they just decided to come along. I’m curious to see how long they’re going to last.”

“They’re trying, I guess.”

She scoffs. “For most of my childhood I wished they’d be home more often. And now they are and it’s nothing like I imagined. Because whenever they were around, they were planning their next project and now they’re not and instead they’re trying to live a normal life and failing miserably.”

“We should try to swap parents sometime,” I say with a lazy grin. “You’d get some parental attention and I’d get to see the world.”

She shrugs. “It gets old really quick, especially if you’re not super extroverted. And even if you are, they don’t want you most of the time. Rich kids are the same everywhere, they’re all assholes. But good luck going to a public school in Namibia as a white kid from rich European parents. Or in Thailand without knowing any Thai. Was one of my conditions for moving here, that they’d let me go to a public school.”

My ears perk as a sudden gust of wind blows her hair out of her face. “By the way, why did you move here?”

“I wanted to move to some not too big town in England and they wanted a house by the sea. And then we looked at offers and Dad found the one we just moved into.”

“I’ll never get why you didn’t want to move to a bigger city.”

“I’ve spent pretty much all my life in bigger cities and I’ve grown to hate it.” She says it with a frown, but she’s not looking at me. Her gaze is pointed out at the sea; she’s trying to order her thoughts as she’s giving voice to them. “All the noise and the smell and the people, it felt suffocating. There’s just no real quiet, nowhere to go to be actually, truly alone but your own home and sometimes not even there. There’s no place outside to just sit and stargaze and talk or enjoy the quiet like here.”

Like here. Like this is a perfect place for her.

She felt suffocated in the city and needs all this open space to breathe, all the while I feel like I’m falling free without anything to hold on to.

“It’s so strange that I finally feel like I can hear my own thoughts,” she muses.

I laugh.

She looks at me with confusion in her green eyes and I shake my head.

“It’s just funny how opposite we are.”

“What, you don’t want to hear your own thoughts?”

I feel my face grow hot. Shouldn’t’ve laughed, shouldn’t’ve said anything. “Sometimes?”

Wow, way to go, Wells! Now she thinks you’re a depressed emo or something.

But then again, isn’t that pretty close to the truth? Not that I know what an emo is, really, but depressed definitely fits the bill.

You’re only making everything worse.

I glance in her direction nervously and see that she’s watching me with an amused smile.

“Right now?” she asks then and it takes me a second too long to remember what we were even talking about.

I shrug. At this point it’s better to just shut it. Nobody really cares anyway.

She jumps to her feet and offers me her hand. “So let’s stop thinking then,” she says with a grin.

I frown at her. “How?”

Her grin grows wider and she wags her finger at me. “You’re still thinking. Stop that.”

I want to say something smart to that but my mind is empty. I don’t have a clue what she plans, but isn’t that the whole point?

I take a deep breath. Stop thinking.

I take her hand and she leans back so I can pull myself up on her hand. We almost fall because she loses her balance at the end of the motion, but we don’t because I catch her and she laughs, leaning into me as she regains her footing.

And then she pulls me along, her hand still holding mine, towards the water. She only lets me go when we’re just barely outside of water’s reach, to take off her shoes. She’s so hasty with it that she almost falls again and has to grab for my shoulder to keep her balance.

I know what she wants to do, of course. Go into the water.

It doesn’t take long and I’ve also taken off my shoes. She’s already rolled up her joggers, then, and watches me with a smile that radiates in the moonlight. Then she gets out her phone and asks, “Any music preferences?”

And I look up, confused, and say, “Music?”

“We’re gonna dance, duh,” she says and grins. “So, any good music I should know?”

She ends up setting the playlist on her own. I can’t come up with any good music on the spot, especially since almost all the music I listen to is either edm or rock; not exactly what she’s looking for right now.

Then the music starts playing and she drops her phone in the sand by her shoes and jumps a little.

“All the right moves in all the right places, so yeah, we’re going down,” her phones screams at a surprising volume as she skips into the first shallow wave with a splash.

“Come on!” she beckons, shifting her weight and moving her arms to the beat of the music. It’s fast-paced and happy.

So I follow her, even though it feels forced and weird. In case you haven’t realised, I’m not the kinda person to go, ‘yeah, let’s put on some music so we can dance!’ and then goof off.

Sadie, on the other hand, is very obviously that kinda person.

But honestly, isn’t she right? Isn’t ‘not thinking’ exactly what I want to do right now? And can’t she help me do that?

So I give myself a shove and follow her, my jeans rolled up to my knees.

The water is cold against my feet and with every step I feel the sand shift underneath my bare feet.

Where Sadie’s standing, the water is halfway up her shins, dangerously close to hitting her bunched-up joggers on higher waves. But she doesn’t seem to care. She’s grinning, flailing her arms through the air like she’s imitating an airplane.

“Dance!” she laughs. “Come on!”

I give her a pained grin. “This is stupid,” I mumble. I’ve never really danced. Not outside of my own room, anyway, when it was dark outside, when my curtains were drawn close and I was listening to music over my headphones, certain that nobody would come barging in. And even then it’s weird. But now? She is here. There are eyes watching me and yes, they’re laughing but that doesn’t make it any less awkward.

She takes my hands in reply. “Of course it’s stupid. That’s the point!”

She begins to move my hands through the air in random patterns and she laughs at my expression of discomfort.

“Stop! Thinking!”

The moment I realise that I like the way her eyes and teeth shine in the moonlight and that actually, the view isn’t that bad is also the moment I decide that fuck it, if this is what having fun looks like, this is what I want to do.

I begin moving my hands on my own and start to sing along to the music even though I barely know the lyrics.

Sadie sees it and her grin shifts a little but I can’t tell what it means. She doesn’t say anything.

It feels stiff and forced at first, but she still doesn’t say anything and doesn’t give me any weird looks. And after a moment, it becomes normal, moving to the music, and I almost forget that she’s there all together.

A new song comes on, just as happy, just as energetic.

I just need to get it off my chest

Yeah, more than you know

This time around, I know the lyrics and without thinking too much about it, I sing along.

Sadie joins me and together we get louder and louder and when the drop comes, we jump in the water, somehow not even caring that our pants are getting splashed.

Just as I realise that actually, she was right and that I have stopped thinking and weirdly she hasn’t judged me for it, droplets of water hit me in my face and chest.

I turn and see her grinning at me innocently, like she couldn’t hurt a fly.

I splash her back.

She splashes me back, this time using both hands.

The complete frontside of my T-shirt is wet at that point, but I don’t care. I can just go change.

I do care, however, that I’m wetter than her.

I step forward and her eyes go wide. “Don’t you dare!”

But she’s still grinning, so I push her. What I didn’t expect, though, is that she doesn’t just accept defeat and instead charges at me with enough force to make both of us fall over and into the shallow water.

A few minutes later, we’re back on the beach, the music turned down a little. My first instinct had been to return home to change but she’d given me those puppy eyes and asked me to stay.

She’s really strange. Every interaction kinda drives that point home even further. But it’s a fun kinda strange. The kinda strange that seems weird until you’ve tried it and then it’s great.

When we came out of the water, she just flopped down in the sand, still wearing her clothes, seemingly not even caring slightly that her hair got all sandy.

Sadie’s sandy hair.

I take off my shirt and sit down next to her.

“Aren’t you gonna get cold in wet clothes?” I ask, eyeing her from the side.

She has her hands folded over her stomach and she’s looking straight up at the sky.

“Yes?” she says and grins. “But I’m not wearing anything underneath this so….”

She giggles a little as I blush.

For a moment, we’re silent and I listen to the sound of waves that now almost sounds like it’s an intended part of the music.

And you’re singing the songs

Where you gonna sleep tonight?

“Are your parents from Germany?” she asks then.

I glance in her direction but she’s still not looking at me.

“No. Why?”

“Your name, is it German?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Wells is the name of a fish in German.” She raises her head a little and meets my eyes for a moment before letting it sink back down into the sand. “And your surname is German too. Richter means judge.” She makes a sort of hissing sound before the t. It sounds weird.

“Why would I be named after a fish?”

She shrugs again. “I am.”

“What? Sadie is the name of a fish in German?”

She laughs. “Nooo! My Dad loves Sardines and Mum wouldn’t let him name me Sardine. So they settled on Sadie.”

I join her laughter. “You’re named after your dad’s favourite food?”

“What?” She laughs even harder. “Dad studied biology and wrote his master’s thesis about them. My parents are both vegans!” She stops laughing and after a short pause she says, “You should come around once they’re done unpacking and have a look at his room. Looks like a fucking marine biology museum.”

Right. That makes a certain amount of sense. He had to get into the whole climate activism thing somehow, right?

And then I realise something and before I can shut the thought down, I’ve asked, “Did you come along to the zoo to spite your parents?”

Obviously, I immediately want to kick myself for being an insensitive idiot. But Sadie doesn’t seem very offended.

“Probably?” She shrugs. “I’m not entirely sure myself. But it was stupid anyway.”

SeptemberMorgan

A little taste of all the wholesomeness that's to come :))
(Somehow, I find myself living out all the nice wholesome little things through my stories that I don't have the right people to do with in real life XD - if I ever am to get in a relationship I am 100% confident that I'm never going to run out of cool ideas for dates hehe