Sabella-June Cordova hated her name- JJ Maybank was the one to nickname her Belli. JJ didn't like to open his eyes beneath the waves- Belli taught him how to surf on his hands. The two were the highlighted bookmark the Outer Banks had folded into its back pocket. Even though Belli only visited during the summer, she and JJ melted into each other like a perfect puzzle and called it friendship, while everyone else called it love. Whatever you called it- they had it, but they couldn't stay that way forever.
Despite the no-bullshit rule coating their beating bond, Belli was keeping a secret in her mouth. What are you supposed to do when the hand that's held yours since the comfort of childhood is ripped from your arms and your golden eyes begin to rust from the pearl tears you cry? More of a question if anything, but it ate at her insides all the same. What do you do when you find your older sister washed up on the shore like a broken doll, skin a pearly translucent, and new sundress now soiled silk? What do you do when not even an hour has passed since the shock of seeing Bryony Cordova's glass body unmoving, and an imposter's unconscious body has already been named your comatose sister?
You hold onto the fickle hope that the fake would wake up and tell you that your sister wasn't really dead and you weren't really dying inside. Because that girl in a coma was not Sabella's sister.
There was gold on the line but Belli was dulled, her skin still polished but dented. Her golden girl softness hardened into a shell of who she once was, and JJ Maybank seemed to be the only one who saw through her mask. The playing fields were no longer level and the two halves were divided. One half had hung her life on the line that snapped her pearly teeth shut, the princess smile, she'd named it. Her only goal was to go to the ends of the earth to find her sister. The other had made it his mission to find his best friend whose smile had him high as a kite in a summer haze for weeks on end. Seashells, camera flash on her skin, her, her and her. I want to live like this forever, he'd think. By the end of the summer would he say the same? Or would he have lost her to the game they played?
Belli Cordova had always had everyone on their knees for her, but by the end of the summer, she just might be on her back...
...Six feet under the Summerlands.
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