The fun thing about having rich friends is that you’ll probably be able to experience things that wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. But there’s also a downside. Your rich friends will meet a lot of people. They may also befriend these people and invite them to the same parties they invite you to.
Now, it’s not like I’m antisocial or anything. I’m alright with meeting new people. But not every person you meet will be one that you’ll want to see again. Some people are too different personality-wise. Some people are straight up dangerous. And sometimes, very rarely, but sometimes… you’ll question if they’re even a ‘person’ at all.
My friend Jason’s dad does… something related to real estate in Florida. He’s a big deal over there. So big that Jason could effectively act with impunity regarding funds. But he doesn’t. Jason’s not a troublemaker, nor is he a complete dick. He studies hard and drives a Toyota Camry. A model son for a rich guy, so to speak.
A model son except for one thing. His partying habits. Twice a month, he’ll go ballistic, throwing insane parties in hotel suites, renting out luxury air bnb’s for a night, and since we live in Miami, taking out his dad’s yacht for a few days.
I was invited to his most recent yacht party. At first, he didn’t tell us how many people were coming, but he made it sound like there weren’t many. I suppose that 16 isn’t quite a lot, but I was still a bit surprised when we showed up. It isn’t a tiny yacht by any means, but 16 people put it into borderline crowded territory. Plus, I knew there were only 8 beds.
He justified this by saying, “8 beds and 8 girls. You can’t fuck this up.”
Consequently, there were 8 guys as well. Besides Jason, I was only familiar with 2 others. Mike – one of my closer friends, and Chad, who I kinda knew through various connections but never really talked to for extended periods of time.
We left at 4 PM on a Friday, planning to dock again on Sunday morning. 2 full nights of partying. If I said that I wasn’t excited, that would’ve been a blatant lie. Right as we were about to leave, one of the girls tried to convince Jason to bring along 2 of her friends with them. Jason agreed, but probably only because they were hot.
And then he told me something concerning. That he only directly knew 8 of the people who were coming. The rest were just tagalongs. But again, since most of them were girls, he just decided to allow it. Not the smartest move on his part, but I’m sure he thought that this meant a 3 way was in the works for him. In any case, we finally set out. We weren’t going very far and Jason was pretty much an expert in piloting this thing, so I wasn’t incredibly worried in that regard. But there were probably 240 beers, 5 bottles of rum and 12 grams of weed on the boat, which probably meant trouble down the line. I wish we ran into that kind of trouble as opposed to what actually happened.
There were now 18 people and it was a bit crowded. But that didn’t stop it from being a fucking blast. We went deep into the night, and I think I saw some cocaine coming out right before I blacked out. Admittedly, I probably went too hard, because my memories after 10 PM were pretty fuzzy.
I guess I blew my chance at getting laid as well, because I was literally in the bathtub when I woke up. I pulled myself up and began scavenging for some cold juice. I noticed that all the bedroom doors were closed, and there were only 4 other people in a similar position to me, still passed out in obscure places. Neither Jason, Mike nor Chad were amongst them.
I finally found some juice and decided to sit on the deck, soaking in the 75 Fahrenheit Miami weather. I noticed a girl lying on a lawn chair across from me, reading a book. I didn’t recognize her. But along with passing out early, I didn’t really get acquainted with everybody to begin with, so that was to be expected.
I made my way over to the chair beside her and introduced myself.
“Eric” I said, as I shook her hand. “Don’t think we’ve met yet.”
She smiled. “Sara. And no, we haven’t. Didn’t really have a chance, since you died so early last night.”
Slightly embarrassed, I just chuckled back. “Yeah. I’ll probably tone it down tonight.”
We sat and talked for a bit before everybody else started waking up. Or… finishing up their morning routines.
After that, we all just hung out, playing pool, darts, taking dips in the ocean, and just having a good time. Somebody pointed out the fact that we couldn’t see the shore anymore, even though we definitely could last night. Jason just laughed it off.
“Don’t worry about it.” He said. “I know what I’m doing.”
Truth be told, I really wasn’t worried about it. We’d gone out farther before and he never had trouble getting us back.
Problem is, things got truly concerning once we decided to set up a beer pong tourney. There should’ve been 9 even teams, given that there were 18 of us on the boat.
And there were 9 teams… plus 1 extra person. There was no need to recount it or anything. 19 people. The anomaly was right there in front of us.
Most of us just wrote it off as nothing, but Jason looked worried.
“No.” He said. “I made a list of everybody who was coming, even Lacey’s two friends who got on just before. There should be 18 exactly.”
There were a few more protests trying to convince him that this meant nothing, but they were sparse. If you took just a second to think about it, there was obviously something wrong here.
“Alright.” Somebody called out. “Who’s the stowaway?"
Nobody stepped up, of course. I asked Jason if he had everybody’s names written down. He said that he did, but couldn’t match each name to each face, since most of them were strangers to him.
“If you somehow snuck onto this yacht, step up.” Jason called out. “Look, I’m not mad, it’s pretty impressive how you did that. I’ll let you stay. I just wanna know.”
Nobody still.
“Well, you had your chance. If I find you now, I’m throwing you off right here. I’m calling out everybody’s names.”
Jason took out the list of people who were supposed to be here and began reading them off. About five in, he calls out a name and nobody answers. I saw him squint down at the paper before letting out an exasperated exhale.
“This is not my list.” He said. “Somebody fucked with my list.”
I looked and confirmed it for myself. My name wasn’t even on it. We had to try something else. What followed next was a painful process of going through each person and trying to figure out who-knew-who. As expected, it became a messy process trying to narrow down the culprit.
Shit escalated when one of the girls let out a scream. You’d think that this would indicate a distraction attempt, and that the person who didn’t belong had just revealed herself, but she was one of the people that Jason actually knew beforehand, so that wasn’t the case.
“What the fuck, Nikki?” Jason said to her.
Still looking rattled, she pointed to the water below. “There was a person down there!” Once she’d said that, nearly everybody rushed over at once to take a look.
But… there was nobody. We looked for about 10 minutes, but nobody ever came up. Nikki still stuck to her story, claiming that some dude had been treading in the water, staring up at her. But even if she was telling the truth… what were we supposed to do about it? The option that yielded the most peace of mind was simply writing it off as her eyes playing tricks on her. So that’s what we did.
We settled everybody down and went back to the process of elimination. It took a few hours, but we finally managed to come to a conclusion. But it wasn’t one that we were expecting. Everybody had been accounted for. Jason counted to make sure, and there were indeed 18 people now.
Thinking that the stray had ran off when Nikki screamed, Jason told everybody to stay right where they were while him and I searched the boat. Eventually, we found a dude still sleeping in one of the rooms.
This is it. We thought to ourselves. The stray had escaped and was now pretending to sleep. Neither of us recognized him either, so this only put fuel on the fire of suspicion. We woke him up and confronted him. As expected, he defended himself, stating that his friend Lara had invited him.
There was only one way to prove whether or not he was bullshitting. We had to ask Lara ourselves. We marched him out onto the deck and asked if anybody knew him.
Lara and one other girl said yes, putting us back to where we started.
“Hold on.” Jason told everybody, sounding more frustrated than ever. He walked around and did another body count, now including the person who’d been sleeping.
“Still 18.” He said. “Did you guys not see anybody walking off?”
They all shook their heads. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.” He said. “Okay, well now we know that everybody here right now are the ones who were supposed to be here. So stay still while I take a picture of everybody’s face.”
Afterwards, we went around and took one more look through the boat. Nobody. We did another headcount as well. 18. At the very least, things were momentarily stable. Remembering who didn’t belong would’ve been much easier if we hadn’t spent most of our time high and inebriated. Also if half the girls here didn’t look the same. Jason had a type, after all.
By this point, it was around 6 PM and with everything that had happened, nobody was really in the partying mood.
By the time 9 PM had rolled around, more than half of us had decided to just sleep. The ones who remained, including Jason and I, cracked open a few beers to calm our nerves. We put on some low volume music and started playing cards. As it started getting dark, I decided to go over to the front of the boat in order to grab a picture of the sunset. As I was trying to get my phone camera to focus, I heard a thump coming from below me. I looked down and nearly fainted.
One of those smaller, two-person fishing boats was bumping up against the front of the yacht. Nobody inside. I told everybody what I’d seen, but they had no idea how to react to the news.
It all seemed to add up. The extra person in our group, the man in the water, and now the boat. But once you start factoring in the weird-ass details… it starts making less sense. Now on high-alert, we decided to just watch a movie on Jason’s laptop. There was obviously an obscure tension in the air, but we opted to ignore it. We were going home soon.
At this point, it was completely dark outside, and besides the moon, our only source of illumination were the deck lights. Eventually, somebody got up in order to use the washroom. I didn’t see who it was. They seemed to finish up rather quickly, returning only a few minutes later and sitting down beside me.
And then a few more minutes after that… another person came onto the deck.
“Guys?” A familiar voice asked. “Who the hell is that?”
It wasn’t the person beside me who asked. It was the person who had just arrived.
The question made my heart drop. Nobody moved and I didn’t dare to look at whatever was sitting beside me. If they were a real human being, they would’ve spoken up. I could hear it breathing, with this weird staccato rhythm of exhales that made my skin crawl.
I sat there, deathly still for what felt like hours. And then the thing beside me started Cackling, like some fucking demon from another dimension. It was high-pitched and rapid, almost like a chittering of some kind. The cackling quickly devolved into what sounded like gurgling, and that’s when I broke.
I flipped shit and started running. So did everybody else. I began trying to barge into every room, but they were all locked. I ended up just locking myself in a bathroom. Probably a selfish decision, but I was in self-preservation mode.
I could hear them still running around outside, screaming and banging on doors. The worst thing about this was the fact that we didn’t even know what the hell we were running from. I stayed put until things began settling down. Until the scattered screams and rapid footsteps had ceased.
I checked my phone. 3:11 AM. If it was now calm out there, then that meant one of two things. Either everybody found a hiding spot or… well, you know.
Eventually, sleep got the better of me. I remember waking up to somebody banging on the bathroom door. I was startled at first, but then I heard Jason’s voice.
“Whoever’s in there, we’re fucking leaving.”
I checked the time on my phone. 7:35 AM. I opened the door and stumbled out, realizing that we’d docked. We were back on land. Jason was pacing around, still knocking on every door and telling everybody to come out. Apparently, he had locked himself in the cockpit during the confusion, and brought us back during the night.
We ended up doing another headcount. Still 18. After a brief sigh of relief, we all got the hell off the boat, nobody taking a glance back.
As I walked with Jason towards his car, we didn’t say a single word. Even while he was driving me back to my house, we remained silent. But as we pulled up in my driveway and I was about to lock myself in my room forever, he stopped me.
“I memorized everybody’s face last night. Even though I counted 18, I only recognized 16 of them.”
It took my brain a second to process what this meant. But even when it did, I still found it hard to respond.
“I didn’t know what to do.” Was the last thing that he said to me before driving off.
Fuck the ocean.
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Credits
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