Deep, Deep Down

   Alana was so excited for her first homecoming dance tonight that she wanted to scream. She was going with her best friends, and afterwards they were going to lie on the beach and look at the stars, since her high school was in California right behind a beach. So far, freshman year had been all she hoped and dreamed for, and she had all of her classes and extracurriculars all planned out so that nothing that year could go wrong. Her life was perfect, and she was happy.
After the dance, Alana and her friends walked out onto the beach, nervously giggling since what they were doing wasn’t allowed. They told their parents that the dance ended a lot later than it really did. It was dark, and it had cooled off fast. Alana had an eerie feeling in her chest. She ignored it, and lay down on the cold sand with her four friends in her white, lace dress.
Once it got late, Alana’s friends started to go home, but Alana decided to stay at the beach alone for a while, since she could walk home and her parents weren’t that protective. The cool breeze felt sharp against her cheeks, as Alana breathed in and out slowly. Closing her eyes, she tried to doze off for a couple minutes to enjoy the calmness of the moment.
Alana was woken by freezing water splashing at her feet. She gasped, realizing she was several feet closer to the shore than where she had lay down before. Her ankles for some reason felt sore. She was freezing, and felt scared and alone. As she tried to crawl back to dry sand, cold hands grabbed her by the ankles and dragged her into the freezing, salty water. The hands were cold and slimy, and the nails were digging into her skin. She couldn’t breathe, the sand was scraping her skin, and she kept going down, deeper, into the black ocean. Alana kept trying to wake herself up from the nightmare that she made herself believe she was in. She wasn’t even thinking about how her rented 100-dollar dress would be ruined, she was just in shock and drowning, and focused on staying alive.
All of a sudden, even underwater, she started hearing a piercing sound in her ears. It had an evil, menacing tune. Though she was about to pass out, as the cold, evil hands kept dragging her down into the depth of the sea, the piercing tune was drowning out all her thoughts, and she calmed down, realizing she could hold her breath for much longer.
Once she was out of her demonic trance, Alana remembered what was happening, and started kicking with all her might. The final kick that set her free from the creature’s hands was when her foot hit a face, knocking the head back. She felt long, sharp teeth against the sole of her foot. She panicked, but managed to swim back up to the surface and catch her breath. Finally, she could breathe; however, she knew that she had little time, that the creature wasn’t far behind her. She could barely see the land at her school in the night, and she was cold, frightened and tired, but she was not going to die that young, no matter what, so she gathered up all her strength and swam as fast as she could. As she was swimming, she felt her legs start to be pulled together, not by something, but just herself, something she couldn’t control. Soon her legs were completely stuck together and she couldn’t swim, and she started to fall behind, the creature catching up to her. Suddenly, she saw an image in her head of a fish, of a dolphin, and how it swam with one tail, not two. So, Alana swam back to shore with one tail. Faster than she had ever swum before.
Once she dragged herself far enough onto shore that the monster couldn’t reach her, she looked at her legs. She screamed at what she saw. A tail, covered in black scales, black slime, and her nails long, and black. She lay there and shivered, and closed her eyes until she felt warm again, and realized she was dry and dressed back up in her homecoming dress. It seemed like she had never touched the water. She checked the time. It was ten o’clock--the same exact time that it was when she closed her eyes on the dry sand earlier.
Confused, she went back home, and straight to sleep, her parents unsuspicious of anything since she looked the same as she had gone to the dance.
The next morning at school, she was happy. Everything, was fine, and she accepted the fact that all she had experienced was a nightmare. Alana ate lunch with her friends, and everything was normal, Alana felt normal … until her friends noticed how she added salt to her water bottle that she drank, and ordered two pounds of fish sticks to eat all by herself for lunch.