Blue (13 page)

My mom took one look at me, scowled, but said nothing. She took off my shoes, helped me up the stairs and into a nightshirt and then brought me a glass of water and some aspirin.

“Thanks, Mom. You're the best,” I murmured, before swallowing the tablets and passing out.

The next day I had a shift at Billabong, but thankfully I didn't have to start until eleven, and even then I managed to be five minutes late as I just couldn't face running to work when my head was throbbing and my mouth was parched. Late nights, I was starting to think, were just not worth the hassle. But, every half-hour or so, I let myself think about the party: the one second of Zeke's lips on mine; the shock of seeing Wes kiss Elijah; the sight of Kelly dancing with Garrett; Sephy telling me to be gentle with Zeke; Nanna wowing everyone with her total coolness. And Zeke, again; always back to Zeke. How much did he like me? Did he want me to be his actual girlfriend? Was that possible, or was I just being pathetically optimistic? It seemed crazy on paper, but when we hung out together, Zeke made me feel like he was into me.

Luckily work was crazy, which helped limit my obsessing. The “King of the Groms” contest for surfers under ten years old was being held at the north end of the beach, so there were a lot of people around and tons of families coming into the shop, dropping big bucks on the new line of T-shirts and sneakers for their wonder kids.

I had just bagged up some clothes for one family and charged the dad's Visa to the tune of $480, which seemed ridiculous to me, when I saw that the next person waiting in line was Wes.

He had a nice blue-and-yellow beaded necklace in his hand that I'd been eyeing up for weeks.

“Hi, Iris,” he said.

“Hi.”

“I didn't think you'd be so busy.”

“Neither did I. Forgot about the grom contest. That always gets a bit crazy.”

I scanned the necklace and said, “That's twenty-seven dollars, please.”

He stuck his card into the reader, entered his pin and I said, “I bet Sephy will love that.”

“It's not for my mom.”

“Oh,” I said, handing him the bag.

He handed it back to me. “It's for you. I'm super-sorry about what happened last night. I don't know what I was thinking. Peace offering?”

“Don't be silly. You don't have to get me a present. No peace offering required. It was just a stupid game.”

“I've paid for it now, so you gotta take it.”

“You sure? I can refund it for you.”

“It's yours.”

“That's really sweet. Thanks.”

“No problem.”

“Have you seen Zeke today?”

“Yeah, he was pissy with me over breakfast, but Pa took us all for a round of golf and after Zeke broke the course junior record, and I'd come in last, he seemed to buck up.”

I laughed and then caught the eye of my boss. Billy was gesturing to the line of restless people behind Wes. Wes turned and saw Billy's stressfest.

“I should bounce before I get you in trouble. See ya later, Iris.”

“Thanks again, and have a nice day.”

I told Billy that one of the customers had bought me a gift, and although he raised his eyebrows as if there was something deeply sketchy about that, he let me take off the tags and wear the necklace over my Billabong T-shirt.

I didn't get home until eight, as my mom had texted me a long shopping list of groceries to pick up from Sainsbury's. By the time I had lugged it all home and packed everything into the kitchen cupboards, I could barely keep my eyes open.

I stretched out on my bed and replied to a few “Hope ur OK”-type texts from Kelly, and a really apologetic one from Zeke saying Anders had sprung some last-minute Ireland trip on him, but that he'd be back in a day or two.

Zeke being out of town for a little while maybe wouldn't be such a bad thing, as it would give me a chance to work out how I was going to deal with the Wes situation.

Yawning every three seconds, I put down my phone and watched a bit of the local news. A blond chick was reporting
from Fistral on the contest, which was apparently won by a five-year-old boy from Perranporth. A future Zeke there.

I pulled my dressing gown over my cold legs and figured I'd just close my eyes for five minutes before having a shower, brushing my teeth and changing into my pajamas.

I woke up, ten hours later, to Kelly tickling my nose with a gull feather.

“Take me surfing,” she said.

“Aaargh.”

“Do you have plans with Zeke or something?”

“Nah, he's away for a couple of days at some big wave spot in Ireland for a Billabong party.”

“Come on then! I wanna stand up on a real surfboard.”

Kelly liked to kayak and bodyboard, but I'd been dying to get her on to a real surfboard for years.

I sat up and looked at my alarm clock: six thirty.

“Right this second?”

She gave me a big hopeful grin.

“Well, I s'pose you do have the same first name as the greatest surfer ever.”

“Do I? Who's she then?”

“You
are
joking?
He
is eleven-time World Surfing Champion, Mr. Kelly Slater.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot him. To be fair, that is a girls' name.”

“No, it's not, and anyway that's his middle name. His actual first name is Robert, but Kelly's cooler.”

“Wow, I totally have a classic surfer name. Come on, let's go get wet.”

“Is this so you can go surfing with Garrett?”

“Yep. So you have to teach me,” she said, grinning and pulling me out of bed.

“All right, all right. So, what have you two been up to anyway?”

“We've hung out, and that's all I'm saying,” she said, zipping her lips. I knew she'd tell me more when she was ready, but she was superstitious about new relationships and wouldn't say much until she was sure.

The beach was busy, and one of the lifeguards was bombing around on a jet ski, really close to shore and causing huge wakes. Seemed like he was playing more than lifeguarding, bouncing the jet ski over the breakers and only just missing kids, dogs and tourists by the skin of his teeth.

A swell was due in, but the surf was still pretty small. Nice waist-high crumbling waves that were perfect to learn on. I got Kelly a foam swell board, which she couldn't hurt herself on, and I tried to explain to her about good paddling, the importance of arching your back and keeping your shoulders still while relaxing the muscles. Getting a nice plane through the water was the main thing. Paddling was a skill that took years to master properly, but I figured I could give her a decent head start by pointing out her errors.

“You need to move back a bit,” I said. “You're too far up on the board and the nose is going to dig into the sea and send you ass over tit.” She shuffled down the board and the tail began to drag, slowing her down. “Up a notch,” I said.

Eventually she centered her weight so that the board was floating nicely.

“OK, you need to make your hands into cups, dig deep and pull back to your waist. You want the board to maintain a nice steady speed as it glides over the water.”

Since she was a total beginner, there was no way I was taking her out into the line-up. That was the sort of crazy that I'd leave for clueless kooks.

“I wanna go out with the hot surfer dudes!” she moaned.

“First off, if you're not good at moving your board around in the blink of an eye, which you're not as you're just starting out, you'll get in somebody's way. A surfer who is up and riding
always
has the right of way, and if a beginner can't, or won't, get out of the way, and the surfer riding the wave isn't able to bail quickly enough, then that beginner could be dead. Surfboards are a major hazard. Even experienced surfers get hurt. And those fins on the bottom of the board are razor sharp. I've cut my hands and feet more times than I can remember. You will only be riding the whitewater.”

“OK, the whitewater is my friend, got it.”

“When a nice little wave that you like the look of is coming, you turn your board onshore, and then when the wave is ten yards away you start paddling.”

“How will I know when to jump up?”

“You might not be able to pop up properly yet, so when your board's caught the momentum of the wave, you'll feel the bite,
and then you'll straighten your arms in the push-up position, scoot your knees forward, get on one knee, and stand. You want both feet in line, back foot near the tail of the board, front foot halfway up. You'll ride that wave straight to shore, and repeat. OK?”

I could hear the stress in my voice. It was one thing me taking risks for myself, but it suddenly felt like a massive responsibility to be looking after someone else in the ocean. If Kelly died, I would die. She was my girl. My rock. The only person in my life that I knew would still be there in fifty years.

“Iris, you have got to chill out, bird. I'm not going to do anything crazy,” she said, turning to face me.

“Right, well, you never turn your back to the ocean unless you're about to catch the whitewater, OK?”

Just as I said that, I could see a medium set of waves building and coming in fast.

“All right, position your board, now get on it and paddle, paddle, paddle. Faster, or else you'll miss it. Keep the nose up or you're gonna do a headstand and go over the top.”

Kelly caught the wave but she bodysurfed it in to shore. I grabbed the next one so I could catch her up.

“How come you didn't stand up?”

“I don't know. It just felt like I was going really fast and it was over in a flash.”

“You
were
going really fast. That's surfing. As soon as you're on the next wave, get to your feet, OK?”

Kelly gave me the Zeke Francis signature sloppy salute and started wading out again, pushing her board in front of her.

“WHOA! Never put your board between you and a wave, not unless you want your face smashed in. Push it to the side of you.”

My heart was racing. It was like I was looking after Cara or some other little kid. I had turned into Kelly's mother. Luckily she didn't take offense and just hopped the board to one side of her.

“You don't have to worry about this stuff when you're bodyboarding,” she said.

“Yeah, well, bodyboards are made of foam and don't have fins that will slice your ear off. Right, catch this one.”

It wasn't the most elegant pop-up I had ever seen, but she did manage to scramble to her feet. However, she then stood so high that she immediately wiped out backward. I'd forgotten to tell her to keep low with her arms out for balance.

I'd been so busy stressing about her safety that I'd neglected to tell her some of the most important technical things.

She bobbed up with her hair plastering her face and seawater bursting out of her nose.

“I was up! I was surfing!”

“You were up,” I said grumpily. “Next time stay low.”

“Iris,” she said, waving away my instruction with one hand, “you have got me surfing on my second wave. Give me a high five!”

It was impossible to be stressed when Kelly was like this. It made me remember how excited I'd been when I caught my first long ride, managing to stay up as other surfers in the water whooped and hollered in congratulation.

Kelly had a long way to go, but she was my friend and she was laughing her head off, and so I just smiled and said, “You're a surfer now, so let's get you another wave.”

We surfed for about an hour and Kelly caught some mellow rides and was buzzing from it, just totally pumped up, like it was the best thing she'd ever done. But after her tenth wipeout
she was starting to look tired and I caught her rubbing her forearms. All the paddling and pushing up on her board had probably wrenched her tendons.

“Let's go get a drink,” I said.

“Not before I sit on the beach, strip off this wetsuit and wax my board,” she said, getting a disk of Sex Wax out of her bag.

“People normally wax their boards before a session,” I said dubiously, “and yours is a foamie which doesn't even really need to be waxed.”

“I have letched at surfers on this beach my whole life and dreamed of being one of those cool surfer girls with a board under her arm. I am milking this moment, Iris Fox, and there's not a thing you can do to stop me.”

I laughed. She was a real kook all right. Funny though.

When she finished her wax job, she took the board back to Denny and I sat cross-legged in the lapping waves at the edge of the sea, just watching the pack. I still loved watching surfers wipeout from the shore, even though I knew how it felt. It looked so comical though, as these little rubber stick figures plunged sideways off their boards.

I felt someone tap me on the shoulder and turned to see Daniel. He sat down next to me on the wet sand. The bruises on his face had finally faded and he looked like his old self.

“How's it going?”

“Can't talk. Kelly'll be back in a minute.”

“Ah, Kelly loves me.”

“She
really
doesn't.”

He smiled and said, “Well, I wanted to tell you I'm not gonna kill myself. In case you was worried.”

“Glad to hear it.” I was relieved he'd come to his senses. For one thing, there'd already been far too much tragedy in his lovely mom's life, without Daniel piling on more.

“Things are looking good for me.”

“Sounds good. Like how?”

“I'm training to be an RNLI lifeguard. I'm gonna join Fistral Lifesaving.”

“Seriously? Congratulations.”

“That's not even all of it. There's something even better, but it's a surprise.”

At that moment, I saw Saskia walking up the beach with a fancy, ten-foot Alaia board under her arm. Alaia boards are wooden, finless and were ridden for centuries in ancient Hawaii. I had never even seen one, except in magazines. It was another thing that emphasized to me just how superior Saskia was in every single way.

She was giving me a hard stare and then my brain engaged. Saskia had found me chatting away to the person who stabbed Zeke.

Daniel chose that second to grab my hand and tell me he had to get back to work since his boss probably had binoculars on him at that very moment.

“Yeah, go,” I said. “Please.”

Saskia was approaching me from one direction and Kelly was coming from the other. Both of them were giving me confused looks, as if to say, “What were you doing with that loser?” I closed my eyes and tried to clear my head.

Saskia reached me first.

“Hanging out with the guy that assaulted Zeke? Really?”

I opened my eyes and stood up to face her. “It's not what it looks like.”

“It never is with you. I'm starting to think you're trouble with a capital T.”

“Thanks.”

“Honestly, is it so very hard to treat Zeke with a bit of respect, and not flirt with the person that stabbed him? You're drifting terribly close to ‘beach skank' territory.”

Kelly arrived then and said, “Whoa there. Don't you dare speak to Iris like that. You don't know her, all right? So butt the hell out.”

Kelly's eyes were blazing, and Saskia put up her hands in a gesture of apology.

“Fine. Point taken.”

“Sorry,” Kelly said, rubbing her forearms. “I didn't mean to get all aggressive there. Long morning of surfing, and my arms are frigging killing me.”

“It's probably tendonitis from poor paddle technique,” Saskia said. “Get some ice on it and the pain should ease off in a day or two.”

“Will do. Thank you,” Kelly said. That was classic Kelly. Furious one minute, and completely over it the next. She put her arm around my waist and dragged me off toward Ben & Jerry's for celebratory ice creams.

As we walked away I looked over my shoulder at Saskia and saw that she was still staring at us. It occurred to me that for all of Saskia's confidence and gorgeousness, I had never seen her with a female friend. Maybe, just maybe, she was lonely.