“The Unseen Shore” by Amy Lin (fiction ’17)
An excerpt from “The Unseen Shore” by Amy Lin (fiction ’17), published on Failbetter.
The Unseen Shore
Brie and Sarah were twins, and Brie looked like Sarah but then again she didn’t. Brie had the same dark brown eyes and full cheeks, but she was more muscular and stood straighter. Brie’s nails were bare but carefully shaped. Those were the little things. What everyone saw was the limp, or that Brie did not have one and Sarah did. She never masked the scars ribboning her leg. The marks were almost two decades old, ripped into her right leg when she was fourteen.
She and her sister had attended water ski camp about eighty miles north of San Francisco. Sarah dragged Brie along after hours as she, and a group of other teenagers at the camp, loosed a ski boat from its moorings. At first, it was enough to heist the boat and drive it as fast as possible but then the girl steering slowed the engine to idling. In the quiet, someone suggested truth or dare. When it was Sarah’s turn, she picked dare, and it only took a few taunts—“you scared?”—before she agreed to ski. Silver flew everywhere from the moonlit water, and there was a flood of adrenaline when she cut the dark skin of the lake. Calm, suspended and flattening, folded over her when she raised her fists in the air and dropped the towrope, sinking into the water. The boat looped to pick her up, and it moved so slowly that she saw her sister, her hand outstretched. Brie’s face warped and sagged as she realized the boat was too close, the propeller already tugging Sarah towards it.
