So there it was. You can’t know what you don’t know.

Mid-plunge into whatever blackness awaited me below, I felt many of the things you’d expect a person to feel in that situation. But I felt one thing that really surprised me: empathy for Duncan. I’d been so judgy with him. I’d rolled my eyes at his suits and his color schemes and his rules. But would I give every single one of those moments back for one chance to find myself standing safely back up on the pier with him?

Hell, yes.

This was what it felt like to be truly scared. This was what it felt like to feel like you might really, truly die.

Duncan knew that feeling, and he remembered it, and he carried it around with him every day.

I regretted it all—everything about this foolish, insensitive, self-satisfied moment—with utter vehemence.

And then I hit the water.

Or more like it hit me.

I’d tilted a bit on the way down—and so I smacked the surface pretty hard on my side. It felt like a weird combination of plunging into water and getting smacked by a wooden board.

I could have anticipated that, if I’d thought to anticipate anything.

I hit the surface, then plunged below it, then continued downward and downward, knowing, very clearly, in my wide-awake brain, that I needed to stop that downward momentum and start kicking my legs and pumping my arms to fight my way back up to the surface.

But I couldn’t.

I couldn’t move.

It made no sense. I knew I had to kick. I knew I had to swim up toward the surface, where all that air was waiting for me. But for longer than I could possibly believe, I let myself sink farther and farther down into the black ocean.

How long can you go without breathing? A minute? Five? I had no idea. I was still frozen, still sinking, when my lungs started screaming for me to breathe.

Underwater.

And it was the desperate act of stopping them—of ordering my diaphragm to stop—that put me back in motion. Your lungs are balloons, I remember thinking. And balloons float.

It was a wildly unscientific notion. But it turned out to be exactly the encouragement I needed. My beautiful, air-filled lungs were going to float me back up to the surface. All my arms and legs had to do was help.

I kicked and pulled and fought my way toward the surface while my diaphragm cramped and stung. Everything stung, actually—like the oxygen deprivation was individually hurting every cell in my body.

I had no idea how far it was up to the surface. It wasn’t like I could see a finish line. It could be five feet up or half a mile. I had no clue, and I was just starting to think it was hopeless, that I was too deep to ever get there, that I was going to drown before I reached the surface, when I broke through.

Hitting the air was just as surprising to me as hitting the water had been.

But this time my body knew what to do. The second I touched air, my lungs drank it in, panting and coughing in desperate heaves.

Before I had my bearings, I heard Duncan’s voice somewhere nearby at the surface of the water. “I’ve got you,” he said.

I felt his arm wrap around my rib cage.

Duncan said, “Lie back. Be still. Keep breathing.”

He leaned us both back so we were floating faceup. Then he started kicking us back toward the beach.

All I could do was stare up at the stars and breathe like crazy until he got us back to the shore.

I had salt water in my eyes—in my mouth—stinging the back of my nose.

In the shallows, he left me kneeling, breathing hard, in part just because I could, knees digging into the wet sand and waves rolling over my thighs, as he rose from the water and paced away. As my breathing returned to normal, I looked up and watched him.

It’s hard to describe what I saw, but let’s just say that the version of Duncan that had found me in the water and kicked us back to shore had been patient and calm. Almost peaceful, in a way.

But the version of Duncan now pacing the shore as the waves crashed against his calves?

That guy was pissed.

“Are you bleeding?” he shouted at me from ten feet away.

It sounded more like an insult than a question, but I answered it, anyway. “No.”

“Are you hurt in any way?”

There were a lot of ways to answer that question, but I went with, “No.”

Then, as a kind of grand finale of his questioning: “Are you fucking kidding me?”

At that, I stood up. My legs were shaking—and so was pretty much everything else—but I did it, anyway. We faced each other in the surf. Duncan was hunched over, like he was clenching every abdominal muscle. His hands looked clenched, and so did his arms and shoulders for that matter. He wasn’t looking directly at me, just near me, as if he were so mad, he couldn’t even see.

“What”—he demanded, his voice tight with rage—“in the hell were you thinking?”

It didn’t sound like a question that wanted an answer.

“What the hell”—he said again, this time louder—“could you possibly have been thinking?”

“Not my best decision,” I said.

But Duncan was now telling himself the story of what had just happened, every word incredulous, as if every single moment of what I’d just done had been impossible. “You took off running down the pier—and then you flung yourself off the end of it.”

“I regret that last part,” I said.

He wasn’t listening. “Was it idiocy? Was it a suicide attempt? Are you on some kind of drugs I don’t know about?”

These were all rhetorical questions.

“I can’t even believe what just happened. I can’t even believe you just did that. Is this a nightmare? Am I trapped in a nightmare right now? That was, hands down—with only one horrific exception—the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen anybody do.”

I didn’t argue.

“You could have died. You should have died! Do you have any idea how many pilings are down in that water? How much debris floats up under those piers? Logs and construction boards and crap from offshore rigs? There could have been barbed wire! There could have been fencing! People perish jumping off this pier!”

“People jump off this pier all the time!”

“Crazy people! And even if you weren’t killed on impact, do you have any idea how close we are to the port? There are riptides all along here!”

I raised my hand a little. “I wasn’t thinking about riptides—okay? I wasn’t thinking at all.”

“You sure as hell weren’t!” he shouted. “You could have been swept out to sea in minutes—at night—so far I would never have been able to find you!”

I’ll grant that he was pretty much right about most of this stuff—and maybe this is just a quirk of my personality—but I can only get yelled at for so long, even by someone who’s right, before I start yelling back.

“I wasn’t thinking, okay?” I yelled back. “I was trying to be brave. I was trying to help!”

I sloshed my way closer to him in the water. Now he was watching me—the first time I’d seen his eyes since we made it to shore.

“Don’t help!” he shouted. “I don’t want you to help!”

But I charged after him. “Somebody has to!”

I’d forgotten how good it could feel to really yell. How satisfying it could feel to let yourself burn clean with anger like a flame. Duncan turned away, but I came after him and edged around to get up in his face. “You’re living some kind of half life, and you’re dragging a whole school full of terrified kids with you. You said I didn’t know what fear was, and I thought maybe you were right—but I’ll tell you something! I almost killed myself just then—but I still think I was right all along. You need to wake up and live.”

He was breathing hard. “Every morning, I get up and go to school. I shower and put vitamin E on my scars and shave and get dressed and shine my damn shoes and I walk into that place and spend all day every day watching out for those kids and keeping them safe and not curling up in the fetal position on the floor of the men’s room. I keep it together! I meet all my responsibilities! How the hell is that not enough?”

He turned away—like that was some kind of argument-winning rhetorical question.

But it wasn’t rhetorical. I ran after him. “Because it isn’t!” Great point. “I want you to be alive. I want you to feel something!”

“I feel something!” he shouted. “I feel everything!”

But then, it was like in the wake of that declaration, he could suddenly see clearly. It was like, for the first time since we hit the water, he really saw me there, just feet away from him, drenched and shivering and defiant in the water, my hair in wet strings against my neck.

I was still staring at him with burning, self-righteous eyes.

But whatever he saw in that moment seemed to break his anger. He sighed—almost deflated—and his posture shifted, and then he started sloshing back toward me through the waves. “I feel things,” he said, his voice hoarse and quieter now, a little breathless from all the shouting, his gaze unwavering on mine.

He kept pushing toward me. His pace didn’t slow—just step after step through the water in his sopping wet clothes like he might not stop at all.