The Cold

Nova stifled a yawn and tied her shoelace, her muscles still aching from last night's swim.
"Nova! Are you going swimming AGAIN?!" Nova's mum calls from downstairs. It's just the two of them now. All that's left of their broken family. Nova's eyes travel to the photograph on her nightstand that's crowded with a small tower of finished novels, dried out pens, half-blank notebooks, and empty glasses of water. Her mother, father, and older brother smile at her from their place behind the glass. The glass itself is cracked in a spiderweb at the bottom left corner from when she threw it in a grief-fueled rage last year.
"It's just for a few hours, mum!" Nova calls back, swallowing back the lump in her throat. She can hear her mother grumble something softly as Nova makes her way downstairs. Her eyes slide past Alex's old room, she has yet to look at it properly. Every time she gets close, her eyes avoid it like it's just another bit of robin-egg blue wall.
"At least stay away from Box Beach! That's where they found that man!"
"Okay, mum!" Nova of course had no intention of that, Box Beach was her favorite, and the man didn't actually die there, he probably floated from the cove just South of Box Beach, where they found his beer bottle.
She leaves through the back door and takes her usual footpath through the scraggy woods behind her house. The night is warm, but there's a slight breeze that makes the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Her hair is shoulder-length now, the car accident had left her so angry, so lonely she had sheared it off herself. It used to be long and the color of rich, melted chocolate. But it's grown back as a pearl-grey. She tells everyone it's dyed, including her mum.
The soft, grayish dirt grows sandy and pale, and Nova is quite suddenly free from the trees. She stands on the shore of a turquoise ocean of water. In the night, the water looks as if it's ink, and tonight it's eerily still, the water a perfect reflection of the starry sky. Nova takes off her shoes and sets out her towel, taking off her outer sundress and revealing her sunflower-yellow swimsuit. Before entering the water, her eyes travel to the edge of the cove. A cave stands there, unreachable by land, at the bottom of a tall cliff, thick with the forest that surrounds this coastal town. Last night she had thought she had seen lights in that cave, though that was impossible. Too rocky for boats, the currents too strong to swim.
Nova steps into the water, and lets the inky ocean overtake her.

Here's the thing. Nova had a secret. It wasn't a huge one, nor was it especially dangerous. But it was the main reason she went out to swim at night.
The sharks.
There were two sharks that always hung around Box Beach. They had been tagged by biologists and the locals knew they weren't aggressive. Of course whenever the tourists saw them they would freak out and the lifeguards would be forced to close the beach. But the sharks knew Nova came out every night. During the summer they were more scarce, the crowded beaches making them nervous, but they knew Nova didn't like crowds either.
So every night, they would wait beyond where the waves break. It took almost a year for them to get used to her. While they never attacked people, they didn't like them either. But two weeks ago, the sharks, which she had named; 'Seth' and 'Asher', had let her touch them, and had rubbed their sides against her calves like begging puppies.
They were small, not big enough to kill her, which is why she knew they weren't the culprit to that man, 'Cyrus'' death. Sure, they could perhaps take a hand or foot off her, but so could a dog. Looking at the fins that playfully swam round her, sometimes brushing against her, she wondered why so many people feared sharks. They were scavengers. Many of the smaller species were harmless.
But in her heart, she knew why.
People hated sharks the same way they hated her.
They just didn't understand.