Keeping Secrets (An Anonymous Novella)

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

"Ian, I swear to God, if you don't get back here—" Cal cut himself off. He chased Ian around the figure eight pool, arms outstretched, trying to get his super soaker water gun out of Ian's hands.

From her spot on the lounge chair, Chloe grinned. Ian kept squirting his friend even as Cal chased him. Impressive.

Chloe had spent almost half of the afternoon hanging out with Ian and his friends in the indoor pool, laughing and joking around with the group. It was fun, but most of all it was relaxing and that was what she truly needed right now. Three days had passed since the whole shooting fiasco at the awards show and the more time that went by, the more she sat and thought about the whole thing.

The room that housed the indoor pool felt more to Chloe like a giant greenhouse than a pool room. Overly tall glass windows surrounded the pool on three sides. The wooden structure weaving through each window and across the ceiling kept the tall clear glass stable. Whoever had designed the indoor pool had made a beautiful decision to line the outer edges of the pool with large grey and brown stones that flattened to create a polished floor. Around the pool in strategically placed outcroppings of stone grew medium sized ferns.

Chloe sat in one of the cushion-covered lounge chairs at the edge of the deep end. She'd plugged in her ear phones and tapped her foot to the quick, sharp beat of one of Ethan's older songs.

Though she'd decided to listen to music, she did keep watch over everyone else. She refused to miss anything that happened.

Ziggy—who'd wrapped his camera in plastic and stood in the center of the pool—spun slowly to catch Ian and Cal with his lens. At the shallow end, Sarah and Havana floated lazily on two different colored rafts.

Something in Ethan's song caught her attention. She stopped, sat up, and grabbed her music player to rewind what she identified as the bridge. Among all the notes in the song, three chords stuck out to her and glowed in her mind as if she'd spray painted them in bright metallic gold. She paused. Rewound again.

Those three chords repeated over and over in her head and she added them to the new melody forming. She hummed the connecting notes while searching frantically for a piece of paper.

If I don't write this down I'll lose it.

She desperately didn't want that to happen, especially as words flung themselves at her out of the blankness of her mind.

After yanking out her head phones, she scrambled over to her little bag she'd brought in. Her leather note book was inside, along with a pen, just for this type of occasion.

She kept humming the one line of melody as she scribbled it down. Then, she placed the words with it. "This glass maze won't ever end. We see the finish but how do we get there?"

Finish didn't seem like the right word. She frowned down at her scribble, crossing the line and rewriting the second part. "This glass maze won't ever end. You see what you want, but truth is, you don't know me at all...at all..."

She sang it. Over and over and over. Until it solidified and felt right, felt like two puzzle pieces connecting in her chest.

"Yes." Chloe grinned down at her paper. "That'll work." Eagerness built up inside her. She couldn't wait to sit down and piece all the words together.

Silence throughout the pool room had her glancing up. It felt much like coming out of a fog cloud and back to the present.

Five pairs of eyes stared at her.