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Prologue Part II


"You cannot tell anybody what I am about to tell you. Not ever. Do you understand me?"

The words echoed in my head... colors spun around me like being in a life-size kalidaescope... spinning, spinning... People came in and out of focus and the lights glowed off the surface of the water, the bubbles of the champagne danced in my vision, popping and hissing between faces and lights. I stumbled and caught hold of one of the dolphin shaped statues as a person rushed by me and cannon-balled into the pool.

I remember throwing up in the bushes.

"It's time you went home," said a voice, a familiar voice, though I never could figure out who it was. Someone that I'd met during the course of the night, perhaps, but I was tucked into a cab and the blurry mosaic of the party faded away into the hokah of the city of Los Angeles until I was home.

I landed on the bed face-down, the world still feeling as though it were spinning, everything fake and far off and dream like. I was haunted by the words he'd spoken in my ear, and I'd spent the night trying to best them, trying to rinse them from my mind. But I couldn't unhear what he'd said... couldn't undo what had already been done.

The headlines the next day were big and bold and proclaimed exactly what Nick had whispered in my ear.

I sat in bed, my head throbbing, staring down at the photograph until the image on the front page was burned into my mind, like staring at the sun for too long. When I closed my eyes, it still swam in front of me in a dozen different colors, spinning and swirling in my vision. Even then, when I couldn't escape it, I still couldn't believe it, still couldn't wrap my mind around what it was proclaiming. Surely, I thought, it had to be a mistake, surely they were wrong.

But the photograph was there to prove it...