Five identical Blonde bombshells bounced into the family car, well, it was a pink convertible just like Sarah's but it was currently being used by what used to be Jon's family so it sort of was the family car. It joined the exodus of identical pink super-cars on their journey towards the beach. Jon tried to act like she was engaged with the blonde babble that Sarah/Gibsons were bombarding her with, at least, she thought, they weren't judging her, it was almost nice to feel familial approval for a change.
She was still trying to make sense of things and wasn't paying much attention to her surroundings, so, when the car pulled to a halt she was not quite prepared to see an army of green-bikini'd Sarahs laying out blankets and rubbing sunblock on themselves. It was surreal. Identical Sarahs for as far as the eye could see. And Jon was about to join that great flock.
The Gibsons piled out of their convertible, and for a brief moment Jon was in a familiar space. The image of family trips to the beach flashed in her head, as tangled limbs pushed against each other, racing to be the first one out of the car, grabbing for the things in the trunk, racing out to the sand. And if he hadn't been one of five identical bikini-clad teenyboppers as he did this, it almost would have been like any other family trip to the beach.
One of them, Jon thought it might have been her mom, managed to find an open space to set their things and lay down. A small tile in a mosaic of identical girls that stretched for acres.
Jon found herself laying down on her back next to her family, sinking into the pattern that was slowly overtaking an entire beach full of Sarahs on blankets.
No. She had to keep exerting her own free will. Or at least trying to. If everyone was lying down, Jon would do something else. She propped herself up on her elbows and made her declaration: "I think I'm going for a swim."
Four nearly-identical groans greeted that statement.
"Really, Jon?" Jon was pretty sure this was Mikey, "Only dorks go to the beach to swim. Stay here with us and be normal for once."
That pronouncement only steeled Jon's resolve. If swimming at the beach was something that Sarah thought only a dork would do, then Jon doing it, herself, would prove that she wasn't just another bee in Sarah's hive. He stood up, ignoring the eye-rolls he got from his family, and made here way carefully through the ocean of Sarahs, on her way to the actual ocean.
But she never made it.
Whether it was coincidence, fate, something subconsciously inside of Jon looking for a reason not to swim, the reluctant blonde would debate that question in her head endlessly later on that day. But the moment she saw one particular Sarah, lying on the beach, wearing a necklace, and made sure to check to make sure that no other Sarah had anything around her neck, Jon changed course, and changed her mind.
