Chapter 1#CVUNewSharks
The End of Everything
PUBLIC POST|PUBLISHED: AUGUST 23, 10:15 AM
The best summer of my life evaporated as fast as it had appeared. Those long sunlit days were like smoke, barely there and yet somehow managing to leave a lingering aroma that clung to everything, asserting its presence.
Today is the end of everything and tomorrow is the start of the next thing. I know that when I wake up, I have to learn to be Sydney Ciara, the Coastal Virginia University Shark, but today is the last day I get to be something other than a student.
Even though I know I filled each day, each hour, each minute with as much post–high school, pre-college joy as I could muster, sometimes I wonder if one summer of near responsibility-less memories will be enough to sustain me for four years. It was, after all, two months of perfection: old enough to make my own decisions about where I would go, who I would go there with, and for how long, but young enough to not have too much weight on me yet.
Fortunately for my parents, my decisions about where I would go and who I would go there with were easy: You didn’t have to look much further for me than my best friend, Malcolm.
Unfortunately for me, the responsibilities—which I had dutifully ignored for the better part of June, July, and August while I spent my days on the beach or journaling on the lumpy tan couch in Malcolm’s garage while he painted—were crashing back.
It’s also the first day I’ve not been one half of Malcolm-and-Sydney in recent memory. We’ve pretty much been attached at the hip since he moved from Norfolk to Chesapeake right before our sophomore year.
The friend who I could spend all day with in near silence while we watched TV and movies, then spend four hours texting about what we wanted our lives to look like, until my eyes felt like they were filled with sand, was now three hours away, and I worry what that distance will do to our three years of friendship.
On our last beach day together, a couple days ago, I sat hunched over a magazine I had long since stopped reading. Malcolm lay next to me, asleep on his stomach with most of his long body on a towel but a good portion of his lower legs and feet resting on hot sand. He is arguably the worst person to go to the beach with; within moments of getting situated, the rhythm of the ocean soothes him to sleep.
“Stop worrying.” The words were muffled, my friend’s face buried in terrycloth and hidden under long tight spirals of hair.
“Won’t you miss this?” As I looked out to the ocean, I couldn’t figure out how to encapsulate what all “this” meant.
This: the beach, the summer, the blissful in-between space of being done with high school and not yet in college, the sandwiches from that place we love two blocks from the boardwalk, the sandcastles … our friendship that in some ways had just settled into the best version of itself.
“You might grow so much that in two weeks you might not need salt water,” Malcolm replied, not lifting his head from the towel. I wrapped my arms around my knees and drew them in to my chest, resting my cheek on top of them.
“Impossible,” I told him softly. “You know I’m part mermaid.”
Malcolm chuckled, then his breathing evened out again, his back rising and falling gently as he drifted away to sleep.
I studied the tail of his new mermaid tattoo that wrapped around his bicep—which he told me memorializes home for him—thinking that if this was the end of everything, at least it ended like this.
Move-In Day
PUBLIC POST|PUBLISHED: AUGUST 24, 1:45 PM
I’m not sure how I managed to oversleep on the day I was supposed to move into my freshman dorm at Coastal Virginia University, but I did.
Which is how I ended up wedged between the car door and the mountain of boxes that contained all my worldly possessions, with my kinky hair un-fluffed and smashed to my head.
It was not a good look.
I’m normally overprepared for everything. In fact, me, Mom, and Dad might have gotten on the road to CVU even later than we did had I not already picked out my Moving Day outfit the night before.
I had spent the evening slipping into look after look and modeling them for Malcolm, who was already chilling in his dorm at Piedmont University. He was slouched in his desk chair in a tank top and cargo shorts, rocking himself back and forth, his red knit beanie pulled low over the top of his gingerbread-colored face. The beanie hid a mass of tight spirals that were still just barely auburn, an odd result of the summer sun that somehow matched his personality perfectly.
“Syd,” Malcolm had said after what might have been my twelfth outfit change, “you’re moving in. It’s August in Virginia. You’re going to be hot and sweaty and gross. Just wear a T-shirt and some shorts.” He grabbed the pencil he’d been balancing between his upper lip and nose and waved it around to accentuate his words.
“Okay, but which T-shirt?” I’d immediately shot back, holding up a plain black tee and a very worn Captain America tee. Neither of them were especially fashion forward, but Malcolm had a point.
I had just barely caught the look of exasperation he’d shot me before he fixed his face at the sight of mine.
“The Captain America shirt,” he’d said gently, his eyebrows—which had been furrowed together in mild annoyance—smoothing back out. “I bet you’ll make some new nerd friends.”
“And who wants to bet you’ll be in a relationship by the end of the first week?”
Malcolm had grimaced and clutched his heart dramatically. I rolled my eyes. It was a wonder the kid was never in theater.
“Am I that bad?” He batted his long eyelashes at me, and there it was: his irresistible goofball charm. Made to love and, in my case, make fun of.
“Worse,” I’d said. I thought I’d caught another look, but before I could decipher what it meant, Malcolm had already turned away. His attention was on a tall, lean figure who had just walked through the door behind him—his roommate, Jayden, who’d flashed a shy smile at me when he saw Malc’s screen. “Hey, I’ll let you go. Text you when I get to CVU tomorrow.”
Malcolm gave me a quirky smile, with just one corner of his mouth turned up. I had always liked the way his full face of freckles stretched across his cheeks when he smiled; it was the kind of infectious smile you had to match.
“All right,” he said. “You got this, Syd the Kid.”
And with that it was just me and my Captain America shirt.
I must have tossed and turned all night, anxiously playing out every possible Infinity War–level crisis that could happen on my first day. The last time I checked my phone, it was around 4 A.M. I think sometime after that I must have drifted off into a fitful sleep.
Then woke to the smell of bacon frying. Two hours after I’d planned to be up.
I sat upright in the bed and flew out of the room, running down the stairs so fast my feet barely touched the steps.
Dad was standing with his back to me, leaning away from the stove as bacon popped in the pan, when I barreled into the kitchen.
“Hey, CC!” he said, emphasizing my family nickname so it matched the energy of his grin. My dad pushed his boxy black glasses back up the bridge of his nose before returning to the bacon. “Ready for your big day?”
“Um, no,” I said frantically. “I was supposed to be awake hours ago. We were supposed to already be on the road!”
Copyright © 2025 by Ravynn K. Stringfield
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