Little White Lie
Chapter 1
By: Jenn
A/N – Well this was supposed to wait a while so I could work on my other neglected stories, but damn I just want to write it so freaking badly… So I’m doing this chapter for now, just to like… start it off and see what you all think of the idea. And if you hate it I’ll go back to my other stories. If you like it, I’ll keep writing. NP – ‘Wondering’ by Good Charlotte.
CHAPTER ONE
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Benji’s POV
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It was just some harmless fun. A way to pass a boring afternoon, a break from the monotony of driving through the day, playing the show at night, crashing in a hotel if we were lucky, and driving all day again. No one was supposed to get hurt. No one was supposed to die.
We’d reached a point where one more long, boring afternoon on the bus and we’d be ripping out each other’s throats before dark, and since we didn’t even have a show until the next night, we convinced Dan, our driver, to pull over by a small lake just off the highway. It was a hot day, we’d managed to successfully break the air conditioning on the bus the day before, and no one was around so we all decided to strip down to our boxers and go for a swim. Billy ran right in and dove under, then came up a split second later splashing and spluttering, cursing the water loudly for being too cold. Paul, Joel, Aaron and I almost died laughing. Gradually though, we followed him, until about 10 minutes later we were all in, splashing each other and goofing around, having chicken fights and doing all the things that usually got us kicked out of public pools for horseplay. All except Aaron. He stood waist-deep in the water, watching us and laughing when Billy screamed like a girl as he fell into the water after Joel successfully dislodged him from Paul’s shoulders.
“C’mon Aaron!” Billy called once he resurfaced. “Get out here!”
“No way dude, it’s too cold,” Aaron replied.
Joel jumped off my shoulders into the water then, and surfaced a few seconds later about five feet from Aaron. Pushing off the muddy bottom for leverage, he lunged at Aaron and tackled him into the water. Cackling evilly, he jumped up and half-ran-half-swam out to where Paul, Billy and I were laughing hysterically as Aaron, coughing and sputtering, regained his composure, and splashed after Joel. The rest of us dove out of his way as he tackled Joel under the water. We all stood in the shallow water laughing. Seconds later, Joel came up about 10 feet from where Aaron was. He saw over to us, and stood with us. It was still a few seconds before Aaron came up again. He splashed around for a while by himself, then went under again. The four of us stood watching. This was something Aaron always did in the shallow end of hotel pools to amuse us. He’d pretend to be drowning; splashing around, going under for almost impossible lengths of time, then coming back up, coughing and gagging and splashing around some more. I’m not too sure why we found it so entertaining. Maybe it was the fact that he did it in the shallow end and the idea of a grown man drowning in 3 feet of water is completely ludicrous. Or maybe it was just because we’re all so immature that the simplest of things amuse us. Whatever it was, it was a common routine that always made us laugh. This time, though, it seemed to go on for longer. It continued to the point that it wasn’t all that funny anymore. And then, Aaron went down again. 10 seconds later he didn’t come up. 20 seconds, he was still down. 30 seconds and still no sign. 40 seconds, the water over the spot he went down began to calm as if nothing happened. A minute passed, and Aaron still hadn’t surfaced. It was then that we realized it. This wasn’t the shallow end of a pool and Aaron wasn’t joking around. Aaron couldn’t swim.