Charlie

Dylan’s cousin was yawning as he showed me to the boat. It looked stable enough, and while I wasn’t a champion swimmer, I was confident that I could get out even if the boat capsized. Not that I thought that would happen. He then wished me good luck and waved me off, telling me to return the boat to this point when I was done.

Now, the question was how I was going to row this while still using my phone. While Dylan’s cousin was fine lending me the boat at night, he sure as hell wasn’t going to actually row for me at this hour. Thankfully I still got reception here. The lake was dark, as expected at this time of night, though I had anticipated that and gotten an accessory camera to connect with my phone that had night vision.

I had to fix the accessory to the opposite seat, and point it in a specific direction while placing my phone in my pocket such that the camera faced outward. I then put a Bluetooth earpiece into my ear.

“Hey Charlotte, can you see this?” I asked. I pushed the boat slightly with the oar and advanced into the water. The air over the lake was cool and quite refreshing in the summer heat.

“...yeah, wait, I can!” she said. “Oh, is that the lake?”

“Yeah,” I told her.

“You know, I did go on a boat once,” she said. “It was a cruise ship for a few days, but that was back when I was seven. I don’t remember much of it, though my parents said it made me sick.” She went into some other details, but ended it all with, “I don’t even know if it was that way or that’s just a book I read once - my mind’s kind of hazy on that.”

The lake was tranquil and there was little motion, so I didn’t think that my equipment going overboard was going to be as much of a problem as I had thought before.

“Also, I heard stories - but are there really alligators in the lake?” Charlotte asked, sounding worried now.

I chuckled. “Nope. Most definitely rumors - but if I change the angle of the camera, I think you can see a flock of geese asleep.”

“Oh, I see,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to wake them up though.”

“Come to think of it,” I told her. “I could take you outside you know, but you would just be in your doll form. I know you couldn’t respond to anything, but you could see it all, couldn’t you…?”

“Yes, but I’d much rather not do that,” Charlotte said. I could hear the pain in her voice, and didn’t press her any further. She barely was ‘awake’ half of the day as it was - I couldn’t imagine how it would feel to have even less time when I had autonomy over my body. Such would happen if she chose to do what I had suggested.

“Well, I guess we should just enjoy this then,” I said, rowing at my own pace.

“Shouldn’t someone be rowing for you?”

“Well, yes, but he’s asleep now and I don’t really need him. I can do this on my own fine enough,” I said.

“Say, Charlie,” Charlotte said, her tone of voice now changed, “Did you perhaps… go on a rowboat like this with someone else in the past?”

“Yes,” I told her. “How did you know?”

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“Oh…” Charlotte said. “It’s just that you were speaking about this as if you had experienced doing it before…” For some reason there was a hint of bitterness and resentment in her voice, which I didn’t understand at all.

“Well, I have experienced it before. This one time, when I was in ninth grade, my parents made me take Suzy to the amusement park with me, and we went on one of these,” I told her.

“...what!? Oh, you mean it was with your sister?” Charlotte asked. For some reason, she seemed pretty shocked at that. I honestly didn’t know what was going on in her head before I had said that to make her this bewildered.

“Yeah, though she took the chance to splash me with a lot of water,” he said. “And then, because she couldn’t sit still, ended up capsizing the rowboat. Both of us got soaked- but Dad only yelled at me, saying ‘I needed to be more responsible as the older one.’” That memory still stung in my mind, though I discarded it quickly enough. I wasn’t going to let something dumb like that ruin my enjoyment of this moment with Charlotte.

“Ah, that uh… I mean, sounds like a fun memory?” Charlotte said, seemingly unaware of what to say in response to the anecdote from my childhood.

“Well, I can certainly laugh about it now,” I said. “Though it wasn’t nearly as funny at the time.”

“I just thought that maybe…” Charlotte began before saying “...forget about it! Let’s just enjoy this for what it is!”

“Well, if you want to ask me something, go ahead,” I said.

“No, like I said it’s nothing,” she said.

I looked up. “The stars are way more visible out here than they are back near my parent’s house.” I couldn’t really show her given what camera resolutions were like, but she could always just look out the window. It was hard to describe, but the night sky just seemed different out here on the surface of the lake somehow.

Quite honestly, the best part about the whole experience was feeling the cold air on your skin, something that Charlotte couldn’t appreciate. I think that Charlotte could still feel it if I brought her here, even if she’d be in ‘standby’ mode so to speak, though once again I could see why she wouldn’t want that. She only had a few hours in which she was really in control of her body, and she would hate to have to give up even more of them just for something like this.

Not to mention there was always that small sliver of risk that something might happen to her - like her falling into the lake. Granted, that could happen to anyone, but being completely immobile and unable to balance herself outside the house, it was almost certain to happen to her on something like this.

“At least there are no mosquitoes,” I said. “And if we did this in the middle of the day, it might get too hot. Right now, the temperature’s perfect. And there are no other annoying boaters on the lake at the time.”

I peered over the edge of the boat, my flashlight could make out the outlines of the small fish that lived in the lake. I saw a turtle floating near the edge as well.

“Are you sure there aren’t crocodiles in it?” Charlotte asked as I showed her all this ‘wildlife.’

“Yes, and weren’t you worried about alligators before?”

“Is there a real difference between the two? Aren’t they like mice and rats, essentially the same?”

“I mean, mice and rats are different… though with that said I have no idea what the difference are,” I said. “Regardless, no, there’s nothing that big in this lake.”

I made it to what I thought was the center of the lake - it was more bean-shaped than perfectly round, so this was slightly subjective, though the water was quite deep here. At this point, my arms started to feel sore, and I thought that I’d row back to the shore now.

“Hey Charlie, is there some way that I could always know where you are?”

“Eh? You mean like a GPS?” I then remembered that she likely had no idea what I was talking about and took the time to explain what a GPS tracker was, and then I had to explain why I wouldn’t want to wear one all the time.

“I just mean,” she said. “What if something happens to you? I know it’s unlikely, but… if something did happen, you do know otherwise I’d just be at home, having no idea where you were or why you weren’t coming home?”

“I get that,” I said. She had no way to reach another person, and couldn’t jolly well call the police either. “But I don’t think me wearing an ankle monitor is going to help. I - I’ll see if there’s something else I can do.” I knew that Charlotte was just genuinely concerned about my well-being and didn’t mean to sound like an obsessed stalker... but that was exactly how she came across in the moment.

“Okay, just… be careful okay?” she said.

“I will,” I said, returning the boat to where I had first gotten it. My arms felt quite sore after all the rowing, and I ended up fumbling with some of my equipment, though thankfully I was on dry land at the time and nothing ended up broken.