Total pages in book: 46
Estimated words: 43197 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 216(@200wpm)___ 173(@250wpm)___ 144(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43197 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 216(@200wpm)___ 173(@250wpm)___ 144(@300wpm)
I was beginning to believe she was correct.
Follow your dreams, everybody had told me when I was younger, back when my life vaguely resembled some sort of normalcy. My first dream had been to be an Olympic swimmer. I had dedicated my life back then to being the best of the best. That dream blew up in my face when my dad died—it had been more his dream than mine anyway, really, and once he was gone, I didn’t really have the heart for it anymore.
This certainly wasn’t where I’d thought I’d be at this stage of my life. My own health problems began soon after my mother and I returned from Tybee Island. We had taken that trip in the first place to try to get away from the memories of my dad, not long after his untimely death. Then after my near drowning, my own health began to fail.
Not long after we returned from Tybee, I woke up one morning feeling really ill, and worse than usual. I was like really sick, throwing up everywhere and running a high fever. I got my stepmother to drive me to the emergency room, where they ran a bunch of tests on me, but really found nothing conclusive. The best they could come up with was some kind of virus making the rounds. They treated me for dehydration and sent me home, telling me I’d feel better soon.
Except I never did.
The nausea and vomiting went on and on. It even got worse. I was eating almost nothing and drinking just enough water to keep me from landing back in Emergency. Of course, I went back to the doctors, who ran about every test in their considerable arsenal until my stepmom’s money ran out. We had no insurance and had nearly depleted her bank account.
I began losing weight and grew paler every day over the next few months. All the color began to fade from my hair, leaving it a stark white. Even my eyes, which normally people remarked on for their unusual color—an odd kind of aquamarine—now just looked pale and sunken and an ugly shade of dull green. Like with swimming, my dreams began to shatter into more pieces than Humpty Dumpty after he’d fallen from the wall.
My father had been a single parent—originally from Greece, but after he met my stepmom, he moved to America for a better life. Funny, but I didn’t remember my mother or much of anything about living in Greece or the Greek Isles, just brief flashes of white sands and an achingly blue sky. My father said I was probably traumatized by my mother’s death. Our name, Theos, was Greek, or so I believed.
My dad was good to me, if a little distant, though he always saw to it I had everything I needed. Like for instance, after he moved us to America, he bought a pool. It was one of those above ground pools, and I’d been just a kid. We really couldn’t afford it. I remembered swimming in that thing every day, though, as a kid. The neighbors said we were “putting on airs.” Another strike against my dad, who wasn’t popular in the little narrow-minded town where we lived. I think it was because we were both so different.
My dad was really handsome and exotic looking, with black hair and green eyes. His eyes were like mine, only not with that weird shade of blue mixed in. He kind of stood out from everybody else in this small town like a sore thumb, and never really fit in. My stepmom went to church on Sunday, but she could never get him to go with her, another strike against him in that Bible Belt town.
Then when I was not quite twenty-one years old, my dad was killed in a weird car accident. He’d fallen asleep coming home one night from a late shift and hit a tree, and the police said he had died instantly. The weird part was that he was on the phone to my stepmom at the time of the crash. He had been talking to her and was wide awake, even joking about taking a long hot shower as soon as he got home. His death had been a terrible shock and it left a huge hole in our lives.
The next thing I knew, my stepmom started acting scared, and she pulled me out of the classes I’d been taking at the local junior college and took off with me in the new car we bought to go to Knoxville, Tennessee, a much larger city a few hundred miles away. She had relatives there and said she needed a change. We got a small apartment, and I started getting sick not long after.
My stepmom was nervous and said maybe it was because I wasn’t swimming every day, like my father insisted I needed to. She kept at me to go to the Y and continue my swimming—even got upset when I refused. She said she thought it would help me, but that was crazy. How could swimming every day possibly help? This was just after our trip to Tybee and I had become afraid of the water, even after a lifetime swimming. I didn’t feel well enough to go in the water anyway.