Blue (14 page)

Kelly wanted me to call her asap. She had news. Big news.

“You were just on the radio.”

“Um, no I wasn't.”

“Not
you
you. But your name. They played an interview with Anders.”

“Tell me everything.”

Part of Anders's interview had been to drum up publicity for the new British female surfer that Billabong was going to sponsor. He was on Pirate FM talking about how the final show-down would be in September at North Fistral for Wavemasters. Ed Sheeran was going to be gigging the festival and he would be the one to present the Billabong contest winner with a $7,500 check.

“Ed Sheeran, Iris!
Seven grand
!”

I took a deep breath.

“Can you come over?” I said, collapsing back on to my bed.

“Dead right I'm coming over,” she said. “And I'm bringing strawberry cupcakes from the Little Cake Shop.”

“I don't know if I can eat that,” I said. “I already had ice cream and I'm supposed to be in training.”

“Yeah, and you've been burning like ten million calories a day. You're eating some cupcakes.”

By the time she arrived, I was starving. Or “ravenous,” as Saskia would say. I smiled as I thought about Saskia, and then wondered why on earth I was smiling at the thought of the girl who was standing between me and Ed Sheeran.

Kelly arrived with the cupcakes, but I was in the en-suite shower, thinking about Zeke and singing Carly Rae Jepsen's insanely catchy “Call Me Maybe” at the top of my lungs, and I didn't hear her come in. I stepped out of the shower, looking for a new bottle of conditioner, which my mom had annoyingly left in the bathroom cabinet.

Kelly popped her head around the door and said, “Damn, Iris, you've lost weight.”

“Stop checking me out, perv,” I said, laughing and quickly stepping back behind the frosted glass of the shower stall.

She sat down on the towel hamper and tucked into her cupcake, demolishing it in record time. “You need to eat at least three,” she said.

“I haven't lost much weight. Least, I don't think so.”

“Have you been on the bathroom scales?”

“No. But I guess I have been doing a lot of exercise lately.”

“And have you been eating?”

I thought about it. When was the last time I'd had a real meal? I'd gone from scoffing everything in sight, morose about
Daniel, to hardly eating a thing. Every time I thought about Zeke, my stomach clenched, a feeling like butterflies but worse, and I lost my appetite.

Was this more than crazy infatuation? Love was supposed to make you feel like this. New love, anyway. The long-term love I'd had with Daniel was a different thing altogether. We were part of each other. Two sides of the same person. At least until he'd gone postal. But Zeke was totally new and totally exciting. What would it be like to spend the night with him? Cry in front of him? Listen to him talk about his past, his previous relationships, the girls from his phone?

I couldn't imagine it. Not really. It was too much to start again with someone new. But how could I feel that way already? I was sixteen, not sixty.

Kelly was giving me a sharp look. “Tell me exactly what you're thinking. Right now.”

“Um . . .”

“Tell me.”

“Er, just wondering if I'm tough enough to start a real relationship with someone new.”

She properly rolled her eyes and handed me a cupcake, which I devoured.

“Get dressed.”

“Wasn't planning on knocking around naked.”

“So hurry up already.”

“Where are we going?”

“You'll see. Just wear something skimpy.”

I put on a denim miniskirt and a white strappy cami, and then a fleecy Sea Shepherd sweater over the whole thing, as if
an advertisement for saving the whales could save my trashy outfit.

Kelly changed into a yellow sundress of mine that I hadn't worn since I was thirteen. It was short on me then. It was positively obscene on all five-foot-seven of Kelly.

She shoveled on as much make-up as our faces could take, which included bronzer, liquid eyeliner, lip liner and gloss, and then she handed me a fake ID from her reliable vendor.

“We are going out drinking,” she said.

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“We'll never get in anywhere. We're blatantly underage.”

“Let the doormen be the judge of that.”

“It's 12:45.”

“Well then, the sun is over the yardarm, as my mom says.”

“Are you sure about this?”

We hadn't taken our fake IDs on the town during broad daylight before. Normally we tried to slip into clubs behind groups of older people, so we wouldn't be noticed.

This seemed unnecessarily risky.

“Where are we going? Sailors? Belushi's?”

“The Central.”

I groaned. The Central was the most touristy pub in town. During the summer months in Newquay, guys outnumbered girls twenty to one, so the Central would be heaving with out-of-towners looking to impress the local girls with their flashy watches and fat wallets. With my brain foggy from too much sleep, I didn't think I had the stamina to listen to a load of crap from boys I wasn't interested in.

Kelly gave me the once-over and then said, “You need this. Trust me. You need to remember.”

“Remember what?”

“How to walk in high heels, for one thing.”

She ushered me down the stairs, and I looked for my house keys as she opened the door. To Daniel. Who, for some reason, was wearing multicolored Hyperfreak board shorts which he'd teamed with a T-shirt with a smoking-fox on it.

I was standing right behind Kelly, and I saw her body stiffen. Flying across Daniel's face was a slightly panicky look and then his jaw dropped as he took in my miniskirt and platform shoes.

“Hello, Stabby,” Kelly said, without a hint of a smile.

“What do you want, Daniel?” I said.

“You to kick this Zeke dude to the curb.”

“Good for you.”

“I'm sorry I hurt him. Really sorry. But I still don't like him.”

“Yeah, you've made that plenty clear. Just as well you're not going out with him, huh?”

Kelly grabbed my wrist and pushed past Daniel, giving him a hard stare.

“We're going out,” she said. “So get lost.”

We walked the side streets down into town and I could hear Daniel's footsteps behind us, at a distance, following. Kelly never turned around, so I couldn't either. Finally we crossed into the Central beer garden, and when I looked over my shoulder, Daniel was gone.

We were in the beer garden for all of thirty seconds before the first group of boys approached us: fifteen men in their early twenties dressed as superheroes. A man in a padded Superman
costume came right up to me and said, “Would you like a drink, darlin'?”

“I dunno. No.”

“Come on, why not?”

“OK, well, just a Diet Coke.”

“Nothing in it?”

I shook my head. “Nah, we're detoxing,” I said. “A whole month without booze.”

“Suit yourself.”

“What about my friend?” I said, nodding over to Kelly, who was standing awkwardly and looking through the open double doors toward the bar.

Before he could answer, one of his friends, a boy with blond hair and a Robin outfit, stepped up and said, “I'll get her one.”

My Diet Coke arrived and surprisingly it didn't have a sneaky shot of vodka in it.

“What's your name?” Superman asked me.

“Elena.”

“That's pretty. But, hey, that's to be expected.”

This was something that Kelly and I always did when we were out. We'd fabricate new names, new hobbies and sometimes new accents. Kelly would sometimes go totally crazy and tell boys that she was actually twenty-three with two small children at home and a husband in the navy. I never really got this, but she found it hysterical. I was mostly content with a new name and a few new hobbies. Not bungee-jumping or shark-diving. More snail-collecting and trainspotting. I guess it was a test. To weed out the shallow ones.

These guys weren't creepy or desperate, which couldn't be said for all of the tourists hitting Newquay. They were just out
to have fun and were happy to chat with some girls, with no strings attached. They had no idea we were sixteen. They'd have been mortified. But that was the thing about make-up and tarty clothes: they could totally fool half-drunk men.

We finished our drinks and then moved to another area of the pub, where we got talking to some boys from Manchester who were spending the summer in Newquay. One of them was training to be an airline pilot, another had scored a job as a barman at Walkabout and the third was just bumming around with his indie band and learning to surf. His name was Matt and he had fair spiky hair and an eyebrow ring. There was something about him, this crazy enthusiasm, that I liked. He nodded his head at everything I said, and really listened. He reminded me of Zeke.

That was when it dawned on me. I hadn't thought about Zeke, or Daniel, in a whole hour. That was definitely a record. Maybe Kelly had been right to bring me out. Cheesy as it sounded, it had given me a bit of space from the constant worrying.

Matt and his friends walked with us to the next pub, just ten steps away from the Central, a place that had been aptly named Help.

Matt was telling me all about his band, which was called “White Side of the Moon” and he was stoked because they'd been booked for a couple of small gigs around town. He played bass guitar.

“I can teach you, if you like,” he said, handing me a glass of Malibu and Coke. Malibu reeked so strongly of coconut that even if my mom smelled it, I could blame it on my shampoo or sunscreen.

“To play the guitar?”

“Why not? It's easy.”

“Sure it is.”

“And maybe you could give me a surf lesson? Quid pro quo, Clarice.”

I laughed. Quoting Hannibal Lecter was a debatable strategy thirty minutes after meeting a girl, but with the huge grin on his face, I wasn't too worried.

I hesitated.

“What, do you have a boyfriend or something?” he said, still smiling.

“Ummm . . .”

“Uh-oh.”

He looked really crestfallen. Had I been flirting with him? I hadn't meant to. I was just having fun and trying to be nice.

“Well,” I said, “there is someone I really like.”

Kelly butted in, dropping the conversation she'd been having about her future career visiting Neptune as an astronaut for NASA.

“She has a thing for a guy, but he hasn't even kissed her properly yet.”

“Brutal, friend,” I said, giving her the stink eye.

“What's he waiting for?” Matt asked casually.

“Don't ask me,” I said, flustered.

And that was when Matt swept in and gave me the most full-on first kiss from a boy that I'd ever experienced. It was as if the pub went silent in response to that mega-watt kiss. I opened my eyes and Kelly was looking really surprised. Matt was grinning like all his Christmases had come at once, which was crazy. It was the second time in a week that a boy had kissed me and I hadn't been able to kiss him back. It seemed like I'd never get the chance to kiss the person I actually wanted to be with.

“I have to go to the ladies' room,” I said.

Kelly was hot on my heels. “Iris! Oh my God. What are you like? That boy is totally crazy for you.”

“It's this new pheromone perfume,” I said, wafting my wrist around, like it had special powers.

“Seriously though. I mean, he's hot, don't get me wrong, but what about the current Junior Men's Surf Champ of Hawaii?”

“It was a one-way kiss, Kel.”

“Nice lips. I noticed that right away about Mr. White Moony, or whatever his band is called.”

Talking of lips reminded me to take care of my severely sun-chapped mouth. I got out my lipgloss and had a quick dab. Screw being stressed. I'd be young, dumb and full of fun, and for one afternoon I'd forget all the boys that were messing with my head.

Kelly and I teetered back to the bar.

Matt and his friends were gone, which spared us the awkwardness of having to ditch them.

“Let's take a walk,” Kelly said. Help had really emptied out, with a mass exodus to the next pub, which was starting a dollar-fifty-a-shot afternoon happy hour.

“Bangarang” by Skrillex slammed through the massive speakers and Kelly wouldn't let me leave the dance floor.

“One song,” she said, and then, “Just one more.”

I danced with her, and for an hour I felt totally light and free.

Help was our last bar. We took the cliff path home, slinging our shoes in our handbags and walking barefoot. About halfway, Kelly sat down on the dewy grass and stretched out, arms waving above her head like she was making a snow angel.

“What are you doing?” I asked her, laughing.

“It's my being-drunk policy. Conservation of energy.
Never stand up when you can sit down. Never sit down when you can lie down
. Winston Churchill.”

“Winston Churchill did not say that.”

“He did actually, but I don't think he'd been doing Jägerbombs.”

It was good to be spending real time with Kelly. She was so much fun and I knew I would always be able to rely on her. In the fresh sea air, I lay down beside her and closed my eyes.

I was woken at midnight by my phone vibrating on my bedside table. I picked up.

“Hey, sweets.”

Zeke.

“You're back!”

“Yep. Party was OK, but the whole time I just felt like I had somewhere to be, y'know? Caught an earlier flight. What ya doin'?”

“Err, sleeping.”

“Oh man, is it late? Sorry, I thought it was like ten.”

“Are you wasted?” I said, instantly regretting it. Who was I to ask about Zeke's blood alcohol level after I'd been out drinking with Kelly?

“A little. Got home and found my family celebrating.”

“Celebrating what?” I said, wondering if Wes had made a certain announcement. Sephy was definitely the type to throw her son a Coming Out party.

“Garrett's been investing his trust-fund money. I'll tell you later.” He went silent for a moment and then he said, “Can I come over?”

“Now?”

“I really wanna see you. I've missed you a lot.”

“It's the middle of the night. I'm dressed for bed.”

“OK, definitely coming over now.”

“I don't think my mom will be happy if I have a boy in my room overnight. I mean, she likes you and all, but even she has her limits. She'd think we were up to . . . all sorts.”

“So meet me in your backyard.”

I turned on my bedside lamp and caught a glimpse of myself in the silver reflective surface of my iPod dock.
Grim
.

“In the morning, yeah?”

“Now.”

“Seriously?”

“How about in, say, twenty minutes?”

“Can't it wait?”

“Nope.”

I caved. He was determined. I'd never heard him like that before. Perhaps this was what he was like when he competed. I hadn't been brave enough to check out the videos of him on YouTube. I'd tried to, but when I saw that the first video to pop up had over half a million views, and was called “
Zeke Francis Smoking the Competition
!” I'd slammed my laptop lid shut. I didn't want to see Zeke the Brand. I didn't want to read the comments
by the haters, or the ones written by the groupie girls who'd give everything they had just to grab a five-minute coffee with him.

“All right, see you in a bit,” I said, slipping out of bed and padding across the carpet to the door.

I put on some tinted lip balm, crunched a couple of Extra Strong Mints from a packet on my dresser and tidied my hair as best as I could without putting my main bedroom light on, and then moved really quietly along the landing, avoiding all the creaks of the old floorboards. The front door was the hardest thing. The frame was swollen with the damp sea air and it always made a popping sound when the door was opened. I did it a millimeter at a time, and my mom's voice didn't break the silence.

It was creepy outside, so gray and still. A huge moon—a supermoon apparently—lit the garden and cast weird shadows of the still-full washing line. The seagulls were soaring through the sky and I wondered if they ever quit their mysterious quests. They were restless spirits. Like Zeke and Daniel, I thought. Like me.

There was no wind and I wasn't cold, with my parka wrapped around my pajamas, and my fleecy socks beneath my UGGs.

I didn't hear him coming—he walked so quietly—not until he was standing at the garden gate. He was silhouetted in the moonlight, his hair lost under a cap I hadn't seen him wear before. He looked different.

As he came through the gate, he staggered a little and it made me feel weird to see him like that. He normally had perfect posture.

Without saying anything, he came and stretched out on the sunlounger next to me and we looked up at the stars.

He sighed loudly and I smelled booze on his breath.

“My bad,” he said. “Sorry for getting you outta bed.” Then he added with a little smile, “So what do you wear in bed?” and then he added another “Sorry,” and laughed.

“Nothing nice,” I said.

“You'd look sexy in anything . . . or nothing.”

What was this? It was embarrassing. You'd have thought a top surfer dude would be better at the come-on. Unless he was just out-of-his-skull drunk, or stoned, both of which were possible.

“What are we doing out here?” I said quietly, so as not to wake my mom. She'd always been able to tune into my voice at a hundred paces—one of her mom witchy powers.

Looking at Zeke there, he seemed so ordinary. You'd never know that in the water he was a superstar, one of the most hardcore surfers on the planet, tackling even the most dangerous waves. My stalkerpants YouTube research had thrown up a list of videos of him surfing Mavericks, Nazaré, Bells Beach, Ours, Cyclops, Teahupo'o, Killers, Jaws and Waimea Bay in Hawaii. Maybe one day I'd watch them, but for now just knowing he'd ridden those breaks was enough. Those were the places that people usually only surfed after decades of experience. Zeke was eighteen and he'd survived them all.

Without looking at me, Zeke said, “I was watching this space show in my motel room last night. The scientists were saying that asteroids brought the Earth its water.”

“Asteroids are rocks.”

“Yeah, but it's like when the Earth was formed it was this doughball that had been baked for too long in the oven. Just totally dry and barren with no water at all.”

“OK. The Earth was a doughball.”

“But they've just found out that a ton of asteroids carry water and it was these asteroids striking the Earth over millions, or like billions, of years that gave the Earth its water. People are so afraid of asteroids wiping us out, but if it wasn't for asteroid strikes, there'd be no people, no oceans, no surf.”

“That's quite cool.”

I really liked the way that Zeke would talk about stuff that nobody else knew about. Daniel could talk for hours about the Manchester City squad but I don't think I had ever heard him say the word asteroid. Even on the moonless summer nights when the stars were bright in the sky, he would never notice them. He was rooted in his everyday life.

Zeke seemed to have the planet at his fingertips.

“Life came from the ocean,” he went on. “I think that's why people are drawn back to it. It's like our mother, or something.”

In that moment, in the silence there with Zeke, I tried to feel the planet spinning at a thousand miles an hour. Spinning us, spinning the ocean, spinning everything.

“Is that what you came to tell me in the middle of the night?”

“No.”

He took a deep breath and for a few seconds he started muttering what sounded like “Ramaramaramarama” under his breath. I had no idea what it was supposed to mean. Then he looked at me, and said, with that beautiful twang of an accent, “I came to ask how old you are.”

“What? I'm sixteen. You could have texted to ask me that.”

He exhaled through gritted teeth. “Dang. I thought you were my age.”

“Right, so you've had two extra laps around the sun. So what?”

“OK, calm down, lady. There was something else too. I wanted to know what you're doing tomorrow.”

He scratched the back of his neck and shifted in the sunlounger. Was he nervous?

My schedule was wide open except for maybe a bit of yoga and a run, but I didn't want to look too desperate.

“Not much. What do you have in mind?”

“Something amazing.”

“I'm always up for something amazing.”

“You free first thing?”

I wasn't sure I liked the sound of a morning date. “What kind of time are you thinking?”

“Five thirty.”

I sighed. One of the least fun aspects of surfing is that you have to get up early if you want to catch the best, least crowded waves. “Dawn patrol,” they call it. It's not unknown for surfers to get up at 4 a.m. to catch the best summer waves, but it still sucks. Squeezing yourself into a damp, ice-cold wetsuit at dawn is one of the most miserable things to do five minutes after pulling yourself out of a warm bed.

“Six, then. I promise it'll be worth it.”

“It better be. By the way, what does ‘Rama' mean?”

“Huh? You heard that?”

“Yeah.”

“OK, it means ‘
the source of all joy
.' Hindu yoga mantra. I guess it's dumb, but it makes me feel better. Like I'm tapping into something.”

“Cool. I want a mantra too.”

“You'll find yours. Or you can use mine.”

I smiled, and said, “Goodnight, Zeke.”

“
Aloha
,” he said, then reached over and grabbed my hand and kissed my wrist.

In my coat and boots I was warm, but Zeke's hand was freezing. He had such perfect long fingers, pianist's fingers, my mom would have said. And yet these were the hands that had mastered a surfboard when he was a grom of four and the hands that had held trophies for photographs that appeared in the back pages of newspapers the world over. Without thinking, I took his hand in both of mine and blew on his cold fingers. He shot me a bright, hopeful look.

That look in his eyes was something else. I knew then that if I just got up and walked into my house, up the stairs and into my bedroom, he would follow. He couldn't help it. It was like all of these invisible sticky threads were reaching out from each of us and once they touched we'd be tangled together until something violent and painful pulled us apart.

And I had given him that look, that hunger. Me. It was awesome and terrible at the same time to think I could do that to a boy. Daniel had constantly been trying to get into my pants, but always cool and aloof, not really admitting that it was for him. He'd always spun it as something that'd benefit me, but here was Zeke, aching with longing.

It gave me a glimpse of the power I could have over Zeke's heart, the power I could have without even trying. Call it physical attraction, chemicals, lust, whatever, but it was there in Zeke's face and I wanted to see where it would lead, as much as I was totally terrified of it.

I shook my head, like that could clear away my thoughts. “Zeke,” I said, “can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“How many girlfriends have you had?”

“Where'd that come from? What happened to talking about asteroids?”

Instantly cagey. He was being defensive. Could he actually be as inexperienced as me? Was that even possible for one of the dream-crew surfer dudes? Just because he had a lot of numbers in his iPhone, that didn't mean he'd slept with all of those girls. He could have just met them in bars and taken their numbers, or gone on a few dates or whatever. They could even be female competitors on the QS who he hung with as friends.

“It's OK, you can tell me.”

“Depends what you mean by girlfriend.”

Definitely evasive. If he'd had a lot of girlfriends he'd say, because guys were always proud of that. So maybe, just maybe, it was possible that he was also a virgin.

What the hell.

“Are you a virgin?” I said. “Because I am and it's totally OK if you are too. It's all good. In fact, it's cool to wait and be, you know, sure.”

I had messed up. He was embarrassed.

Then it dawned on me. He wasn't embarrassed because the number was zero. He was embarrassed because the number was high.

“I wanna make you happy here and tell you that I've never slept with anyone either, but I'd be lying. I'm really sorry, Iris. But I'm eighteen, and nearly two years of surf touring is pretty lonely.”

Not that lonely, obviously.

“Girls chase the guys on tour, tell them what they wanna hear, offer a bit of human warmth, right?” I said. “Because gee, it's all so stressful.”

“Give me a chance here, OK? Yeah, it's true, hooking up with girls is one of the ways to relax and get your mind off the tour, but it's more than that. Sheesh, this is coming out all wrong.”

I let that sink in. He wasn't even talking about girlfriends. These girls were hook-ups. One-nighters and nothing else.

“So how many girls have you slept with?”

“Can't we just leave history in the past? Start from scratch with each other?”

“I think I'd rather know,” I said. “It's only a number, so just tell me. How many girls are on the list?”

“Nowhere near as many as there could have been. OK, so that sounded bad.”

I had literally no idea what to say to that.

“You don't understand,” he said. “It's crazy hard on tour. Not just having to win every damn time, but being around other dudes who want to win as much as I do. It makes them, and me, real aggressive, and I'm already aggressive enough.”

“You're not aggressive.”

“Wanna bet? Surfing attracts arrogant, competitive guys. You think I do yoga and meditation for the sake of it? I need it. Competitive surfing brings out the worst in me as well as the best, and I have to work real hard to not let the anger get the better of me. Nothing is worse to a pro-surfer than the frustration of missing the perfect A-frame wave and seeing some douchebaggy opponent ace it. It does something to your brain. Eats you
up. Being with chicks is one way I can get away from that. Puts a little nectar in life, you know? Does that make sense?”

It did, but I was angry and I only said, “I guess.”

“Come on. Don't be mad at me. You don't get it yet. But you will. So no judgment, right?”

The moment passed and suddenly Zeke was up on his feet, telling me that he'd meet me outside my house at six sharp and to wear my warmest stuff. Then he was gone and it was just me and the galaxy stretching out over my head, on and on to infinity.

Before I left the garden for my bed, I thought about how I would probably never understand boys, because the ones who seemed like nice guys turned out to be serial womanizers, and the ones who seemed like bad boys could surprise you by telling you that they wanted to settle down with you forever.

And . . . I had to stop obsessing; had to think of something else.