* * *
He showed up again on the dock when she was a teenager and had almost drowned at the beach. She was trying to learn how to swim with her father and brother and she was standing on the dock yelling if she could jump in. Her dad said, "Go ahead!" but he was kidding. She jumped in anyway and immediately she was way over her head and sank to the bottom like a rock. She had her eyes opened and she held her last breath. There was a fish on the bottom and a horseshoe crab lumbering along. It was so peaceful. She stifled the urge to breathe and that was when she saw her friend again.
He yanked her arm towards the shallower area. It seemed like a mile away. She was starting to black out, but not before she saw something glistening in the sunlight; a gold coin, she had concluded when she looked back at this memory. She remembered her father pulling her out of the water, yelling at her and looking more terrified than angered. What she doesn't recall was the boy and what he looked like. The waters were too murky for her to remember clearly.
* * *
She didn't see her friend again until years later. She found that this little friend of hers never aged as she did; he was there looking very real and not nebulous or ethereal at all like a spirit would, nor did he have the wings of an angel.
She was in a car accident with her family when they decided to go on a road trip before she's sent away for college. She had an operation on her left leg and her brother had suffered shoulder muscle damage and her father had been knocked out by the impact and had stitches in his head. They had all survived but she had post traumatic stress for the years following and she thinks she still have some repressed fears somewhere.
Her friend would sit and talk to her when she slept and dreamed. He never spoke to her; not with words, not even with sounds, but more with movements and emotions. He had given her the coin again and as she traced her fingertips against the gold, he told her not to fret and not to worry. Fear was for him to take away.
She went to nursing school when she was seventeen. She wanted get away from her parents. She wanted to be on her own. It was fun for a couple of months but then it got very lonely. Everyone went home on the weekends and she was stuck in the dorm.
At night the dorm wasn't quiet. There were knocks, banging sounds, and footsteps down the hall or above her on the upper floors. They were so noisy, it was impossible to think straight. They were pretty wild. She thought maybe the dorm had some hauntings going on or maybe the 'unseen' visitors are actually her dorm mates' spiritual guides, trying to get their attention but are being ignored out of ignorance or fear or both.
She was doing horrible in class, failing tests and exams, and eventually she was told she should just go home. She'd never be a nurse. She cried her eyes out and called her parents in shame and they said it was okay, that she can go to the community college and learn something near home but no matter what they said, it still didn't change a thing.
Independence was what she had aimed for and failure was what she had found.
* * *
Her friend sat in the shadows of her bedroom and told her not to worry. He said that for every disappointment a person goes through, it becomes a way of making them stronger and better as a person. She told him she wanted to be well-known and respected and adored. He laughed and said she should get out the make-believe world; they all wanted that.
She listened to him, all the while wondering when he will hand her the coin. It was expected that whenever they meet she would get to see the coin. It was a childish thing-at least, that's what she'd thought-to find so much entertainment in a simple object, but at twenty years old, she found herself waiting patiently on her bedside window. She had always been curious as to what the coin really looked like in the bright sunlight. She wondered about the pictures engraved on the surface. For some reason, she remembered the shape of a skull.
She drifted to sleep, hearing his words weave a lullaby in the night air. When she sleeps, nothing can wake her and when she opened her eyes again, he was already gone.
That was the last time she saw him.