Message in a Bottle

Chapter Four:
“That’s so sweet,” Emily mouthed, pretending to cry and wiping a fake tear from her eyes. She held the note close to her heart.
“Too bad I don’t know who he is…. It would be so creepy if it was an old man.” I shuddered.
“I don’t think there’s any old man with the name of Carter. Old people have names like Henry… or Alice. Carter sounds kind of hot. I bet he’s hot.”
“I wonder what kind of guy he is. By the looks of it, he’s really down to earth.”
“We can look him up on the internet,” she suggested.
“There must be millions of Carter Richards in the world.”
“…Or you can send out another message,” Emily said with a smile, jumping off my bed and running over to the brown box in the corner of my room. “How about it?”
I thought about it. “Eh, what do I got to loose? Toss me a bottle.” She dug in the box and tossed a clear glass bottle. “A Vodka bottle… really, Emily? Really?”
She laughed, tossing me a purple glass bottle. I dug in my drawer for a piece of paper and pen. “How should I start it?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “You’re the old romantic here. You should know.”
“Dear Carter Richards of Boston,” I read aloud while I wrote. “I found your message in the golden bottle while I was looking over the beach in the lighthouse. I thought it was once mine so I dived for it bobbing in the water…. No, that sounds stupid,” I said, shaking my head and crumpling up the paper.
“That was fine, Morgan. Calm down.”
“I’m just so nervous! This Carter guy can either be something special or just a big creeper. Either way, I want to get to know him.”
“Just keep it simple. Let him know you found his message and that you’d want to meet up with him someday if he’d ever want to meet you!”
“Dear Carter Richards of Boston,” I began. “I found your note bobbing in the water. You kind of took me by surprise with what it said. I know that if I don’t write you now I’m going to regret it in the future. So… here I am. Morgan Clarke of Cape Hatteras.” I rolled the paper up, popped it into the bottle and put the cork in, shaking the bottle around.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” She asked.
“What’s going to be hard is waiting for a respond. What if he doesn’t even receive it and someone else does?”
“You never know, Morgan. Let’s go release it into the water. Come on!”
I let Emily drag me down the stairs and out the back door of my house to the beach, the seagulls fluttering around as we ran through them.
“Okay… throw it,” Emily breathed.
“It’s not going to get anywhere. We’d have to be far enough into the water.”
“Don’t you have some boats or something in your shed?”
“There’s my grandmother’s boat but you know I refuse to ever get on that thing again.”
“That leaves us with the kayak,” Emily grumbled. “And the water’s freezing.”
“Then we won’t fall.”
We took the forest green kayak from the shed and carried it out to the water. Before we were able to talk out who had to get in the water and push us out, Emily jumped into the kayak and I slid on the thigh-high rubber boots.
“Stop rocking the boat!” Emily screeched, horrified as I pushed her further and further out into the water.
“It’s the waves, Emily. Calm down.”
“If I fall and die of dyslexia, I’m going to kill you, Morgan. Keep the thing steady.”
“It’s called hypothermia and you aren’t the one in the water right now, are you?”
“Okay, okay, this is far enough. I feel like you’re going to run back to shore without me and leave me here stranded.”
I laughed, hopping into the boat and taking an ore, handing another to Emily. We rowed ourselves farther into the water until we were just in the right spot. The spot that gave me chills.
I picked up the purple glass bottle and looked at it.
“I really do hope it gets to him.”
“So do I…. But if it doesn’t I wouldn’t mind. I never get my hopes too high nowadays.”
“You need love in your life, Morgan. I’m tired of seeing you so lonely.”
“I don’t mind being lonely,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I still have my brother, mom, and you. That’s all I really need. A boy in my life would just ruin it.”
“Would it, Morgan? Is that what you really think?”
“Yes, that’s what I really think.”
“Then why did you write him that message? Why do you have that bottle in your hands? Why did we go all the way out here, a place you fret the most to release that bottle into the ocean in hopes it’ll get to Boston and he’ll find it? Why even bother, Morgan?”
“You pushed me into doing it,” I mumbled.
“Hardly! Usually you’d act all nonchalant but this time it seemed like you really did care as much as you tried not to…. You need to stop hiding behind your walls, Morgan. Let someone besides your family and me in. Let someone love you.”
Her inspiring speech was undisputable. I wanted so hard to deny what she told me but I couldn’t if I didn’t want to lie. There was a part in me that kept telling myself to shut out love, don’t let it get to you ever again because it will just let you down but there was another part that desperately wanted it, that needed it. I just didn’t know what to listen to, my mind or my heart.
I brought my arm back and snapped it forward just like I did when I was a little girl. The bottle flew through the air, plummeting into the water and after a few seconds it came bobbing up.
I exhaled the air I didn’t know I was holding in. I turned around to face Emily and she smiled encouragingly. “I’m so proud of you, Morgan,” she whispered, leaning in to hug me.
Then the boat started to rock back and forth violently, the two of us screaming. When we finally got the boat steady, our eyes were wide with horror of falling into the cold water. “Let’s hug when we’re back on land,” I suggested.
“Agreed.”