Blue (17 page)

“Appreciate it, but I don't wanna drag anyone else into this jam, and it'd suck if I messed up their friendship, especially as Elijah doesn't have so many chick friends.”

I nodded.

“Besides,” he said, “you have your own problems.”

I looked into Wes's eyes, which were so similar to Zeke's, and my gut clenched. How could I tell Zeke that I still had feelings for Daniel? That I'd gone out to sea with him and let him kiss me?

A shadow came across Wes's face, as if he was deciding whether or not to say something he was supposed to keep to himself.

“Zeke's been through a lot.”

Had he? It seemed to me like Zeke had practically walked on water for the past two years. Win after win, culminating in his epic storming of the Pipe Masters contest in Hawaii, and zillions of girls and sponsors wanting a piece of him. But maybe it was more complicated than that.

Zeke looked up, saw us and jogged over.

Zeke and Wes did their usual forearm-to-forearm handshake and Wes walked back to the others to rejoin the game.

“Wes OK?” he said.

“Yeah, just saying hey.”

“Glad it's not awkward for you guys after that whole Spin-the-Bottle thing.”

“We're fine now.”

“So, you wanna play some ball?” he said.

There were no other girls playing, but any other day I would've given it a shot.

I shook my head. “But when you're finished, can we go for a dip?”

We walked down to the swimmers' section of the beach, which tended to be less busy in the evenings as it wasn't as good for surfing, and Zeke slung his T-shirt on the sand above the tideline and we piled our shoes on top of it. I already had my bikini on under my boardshorts, so once I ditched my flip-flops, I was good to go.

We swam out in the channel between sandbanks, letting the weak rip take us into the deeper, calmer water.

“Part of my training has been underwater work,” Zeke said. “Anders has me grab a rock so that I don't cork back up to the surface, and then I walk with it a little way across the ocean floor. Not too deep, just say fifteen or twenty feet down. But it's really helping with the wipeouts. I figure if I can hold my breath for longer, then the risks get smaller.”

“Wow, that's hardcore.”

“It's working. I'm definitely not freaking out as much when I'm held down.”

“Do you think that you should maybe move into surfing normal-sized waves?”

“There's nothing like the endorphin rush of riding the heavies. If you win the contest, you'll get to ride some of the big wave spots and you'll see what I mean.”

“Come on, Zeke. Be real.”

“That's OK. You don't believe yet. But you will.”

Before I could answer, he grinned at me and said, “Race ya.” He took off, swimming really fast overarm.

He was quick, but he wasn't quicker than me. I was right on his tail and within a minute, I was able to grab his foot. He swung round, smiling, and I released him. He grabbed me around the waist and kissed me lightly on the mouth. My lips tingled. I knew he was about to go in for another, deeper kiss and I had to stop him. We'd waited this long, and our first real kiss couldn't be messed up by my incredibly crappy judgment.

“I want you to know something,” I said.

Bad choice of words. I could see by his embarrassed expression that he thought I was going for the “I love you.” Shit. I'd screwed this up on top of all the other screw-ups.

“I'm so sorry. I've really messed up,” I said. “When you didn't turn up the other day, and after that horrible conversation we had, I went out on a boat with Daniel and he, aah, kissed me.”

He flinched. He'd had no idea. I could tell I'd totally shocked him. He spat some sea snot over his shoulder. When he looked back at me, his eyes had a look I hadn't seen there before. Confusion.

“What do you mean, ‘kissed you'? Like a peck on the cheek?”

“More than that.” This was torture. I wanted a wave to come and wash me to the moon. “I sort of let him get off with me.”

“
Get off
with you? What the hell does that mean?”

“You know, a, um, French kiss.”

“This is fucking bullshit,” he said. “Why would you do that? Just because I banged some chicks before I even knew you?”

I shrugged, which in hindsight was not the best thing to do.

“I haven't been with
anyone
since I met you, Iris. And there've been tons of girls throwing themselves at me the past few weeks. We haven't even said what we are yet. But OK, I like you, so I've been waiting to figure out what this is. Then you go running back to your scumbag ex?”

Zeke shook his head like he couldn't believe what I was telling him, and then he said, “I'm outta here,” and he dived down under the water and disappeared. He swam underwater all the way to shore. I was still bobbing in the calm waters beyond the break when I saw him reappear out of the surf and walk up the beach. I followed him, my face burning with every slow stroke of my arms.

I let a wave carry me through the last of the impact zone, and when I stood up on unsteady legs I saw Zeke sitting cross-legged on the sand, watching for me. When he saw I'd swum back to shore safely, he got to his feet and walked away. I saw him go past his brothers, but his head was down and he didn't answer their calls.

Garrett put down his baseball bat and followed him. Wes and Nils were right behind. The game went on without them. I saw Garrett catch up with Zeke and put his arm across the shoulders of his younger brother. Then Garrett looked back at me with this surprised look on his face. Wes caught up with them, turned to nod at me and together they disappeared into Fistral Blu Beach Bar, a swarm of starstruck girls following.

I'd really, truly blown it.

OK, so I'd blown it, but that didn't mean I had to be silent for evermore. There were things I had to say to Zeke. Even if I never saw him again, there was stuff I needed to get off my chest. I texted him.

“I am so, so sorry.”

My phone began to ring, belting out the special ringtone I'd picked for Zeke, which was “Fly” by Rihanna and Nicki Minaj. It just seemed right for him. What he did, racing down the curl of a wave, was pretty close to flying. For Daniel I had the chorus of Radiohead's “Creep.”

I answered, but the line was silent and at first I thought he'd hung up. I spoke, in case.

“Daniel is damaged. I know that. I know I can't fix him. But I feel bad for him. Something happened with his dad and it messed him up.”

“Like what?”

“Daniel's dad was an alcoholic who went on a drinking spree one day and drove home. He ran over two boys. They both died.”

“No way. That's horrible.”

“Yeah, and that's not even all of it. A few years after that, his dad got drunk again and committed suicide. Daniel was with his mom when she found the body. Daniel blames himself. Thinks he drove his dad to drink because he was such a naughty little kid.”

“He really believes that?”

“Yeah. Obviously it isn't his fault, but he thinks it is. His dad's death affected him in all kinds of ways. Plus, it's the reason he won't let anyone call him Dan anymore. That's what his old man used to call him. I don't think Daniel will ever be OK again. But for a long time I thought I could help him, and even though I realize now I was wrong about that, I'll always care about him.”

“OK, I get it,” he said.

“You do?”

“Yeah, and I'm coming over.”

We'd been here before.

“In the morning, yeah?”

“Now.”

“All right.”

I used the light from my phone to put on some dark-red lipstick and black eyeliner and I picked out the clothes I'd worn to the bars with Kelly and redressed in them. Cold or not, I wasn't going down to see Zeke looking like a slob. Not this time. He'd seen enough of me looking a state. Let him see me in a miniskirt for a change.

I waited in the garden for two minutes in that denim miniskirt before I went in to get my parka and some jeans. It was damn freezing, worse than the rookie mistake I used to make of winter surfing in a summer wetsuit, when it takes your feet forever to feel warm again, and you can't even speak without slurring because your lips are so frozen and numb.

When Zeke appeared, he was carrying a bunch of wilted flowers that looked as if he'd torn them from some hedgerow. It was a nice gesture though.

“My mom says wildflowers are the prettiest,” he said, looking up at the window of my mom's bedroom.

He took my hand, and without saying anything more we walked out of the dark garden and toward the esplanade. Even blindfolded, we could have found our way. The pound of the waves was a constant, getting louder and louder as we got closer.

Zeke and I sat down with the wildflowers between us.

“It's not all your fault,” he said. “I know I've been giving you mixed signals.”

“So where were you the other morning? I know you apologized, but you never actually told me why you stood me up.”

“I'm really sorry. I choked.”

“So you just left me hanging? Like all day?”

“I got myself all worked up and I choked. It happened to me in the Waikiki Pro. And once at Pipeline too.”

“You choked?”

“I know, I know. But it was like a panic attack or something. I let myself really feel it, you know? What was going on between us? I let myself feel what you mean to me. Suddenly I couldn't breathe and I didn't know what to do.”

“You could have maybe called. Saved me from waiting for you all morning.”

“I couldn't speak to you.”

“Text message, Facebook, Twitter?”

“But what would I say? I didn't know how to explain it. I thought it would come to me, but it didn't. I called you that night a bunch of times, but you never picked up.”

“Yeah, I wasn't in a great place either.” I thought about the long, horrible night of shame after my boat trip with Daniel.

“What were we gonna do that morning, anyway?” I said. “What was the big plan?”

“Garrett's bought stakes in a couple local businesses. One of them is this insane Tough Mudder-style, SAS-designed obstacle course, which is like eight miles long and has electric shocks and fire. It looks awesome, but don't worry, it wasn't that! Not exactly first-date stuff. But he also bought into this other local business and he talked me into booking one of their rides. It cost like six hundred bucks, but when I thought about it, I worried you might think it was corny.”

“Er, what kind of ride costs six hundred bucks?” I said.

“Hot-air balloon. They go out at sunrise and sunset, and travel real low along the coast. They've seen whales and dolphins out there, and I thought we could look for some new surf breaks.”

“That sounds awesome,” I said. “I would have loved that.”

“Sorry I messed up,” he said.

I sighed.

Then he said something that brought a small smile to my face:

“So you want to date me, right?”

This was not exactly the way I'd have put it. For one thing, it would have been a lot nicer if he'd phrased it like it was something he wanted too.

He followed it with, “Because I really want to date you.”

I looked at him and he was looking at me really earnestly, but there was a sadness in his eyes.

“Sounds like there's a ‘but' coming up.”

“There is.”

“Don't tell me, you have a girlfriend in every stop on the surf circuit?”

“No.” He laughed, as if he found the idea genuinely funny. “No, definitely not that. But I can't stay in Newquay forever.”

“You have contests abroad. I know that.”

“Yeah, I do. Indo, Hawaii, Chopes, Huntington Beach. And I have training weeks lined up in Dungeons in South Africa, Belharra in France, Puerto Escondido in Mexico, Outer Reef in Australia, El Buey in Chile. More tow-in big-wave training at Peahi in Maui. Anders wants me to settle on one specialism, but I can't seem to do that: I'm on the QS, but I also take off whenever I can to ride the code-red swells with the big-wave surfers. And I wanna keep making surf movies, so their publicity tours will take me pretty much everywhere else in the world. I'm gonna be homeless for the next five years at least.”

He pulled out a cigarette but put it away when he saw the look on my face and said, “I'm quitting.”

“OK,” I said. “So this thing has an expiry date. I can live with that. I knew that it wouldn't last forever the moment I found out who you were.”

An expiry date. Gross.

“It doesn't have to.”

“You're totally not going to give up your career for me. You're too talented. People would think you were crazy. You're winning pretty much every contest you enter, and you stop? For a girl? You'd be sent to the loony bin. Plus, the last thing I want is a boyfriend who hates me for standing in the way of his dreams.”

He nodded and looked me straight in the eyes. “I couldn't give up pro-surfing, even if I wanted to. I'm tied into contracts with my sponsors, and it's the only thing I've ever been any good at. I could never work in an office or something, and I'd be hopeless at college. I'd ditch my exams if the surf was good. So this is it for me. It's not just what I do. It's who I am. There's something else too, and it's bad.”

“I promise I won't judge,” I said, thinking guiltily about the last time Zeke had confided in me.

“That night at the surfboard launch party? When Anders asked me if I'd taken anything?”

“Yeah.”

“He wasn't worried about some marijuana joint.”

“OK. So why did he ask you that?”

“Because this time last year I was pumped up on meth.”

“Huh?” I said, completely shocked. “You can't surf and do drugs.”

“Yeah, you can. There's a reason the contests don't screen for drugs: too many guys would fail. Crystal meth gave me more energy, more stamina and more confidence. And it almost ruined my life.”

“Seriously? You were a juice-head?”

He nodded. “At first it was small stuff. I got high and made an ass of myself in a few interviews: bragging about how I was
gonna be World Champ by the time I was twenty, bitching about contest judges, throwing shade on the other guys on tour. One time a reporter asked me this super-obnoxious question about Andy Irons on the anniversary of Andy's death, and I pushed the guy into a pool. He had to be rescued by his photographer, 'cause he couldn't swim.”

Andy Irons was a really popular pro-surfer from Kauai in Hawaii. He was a contest machine, the star of the Billabong team and he'd won three World Championships. Everyone thought he'd keep winning forever, because as well as being a really nice guy, he was unbelievably talented and massively driven. Andy died in a hotel room from a heart attack. He had drugs in his system.

Even though it happened a few years back, the surfing community was still shocked by his death, and I imagined it would have been especially bad for Zeke. As a Hawaiian surfer, he had probably grown up idolizing Andy Irons.

I gave Zeke a hug and could feel that he was shaking.

“Did the reporter press charges?”

“No, but he ran his mouth. Some other surf journalists had seen I was out of it and word got around quick. I lost a couple sponsors. I was lucky I didn't lose them all. Then things got real bad when I was on this surfari at Macaronis in the Mentawais. You ever been out there?”

“Er, no. I think I saw a picture of it once. Indonesia, right?”

“Yeah. I was with Garrett and Wes and one night they found me passed out in the bathroom of the hotel bar. I'd had the sweats all day and my heart had been beating hard, but I thought I could ride it out.”

I absolutely hated to think of Zeke going through that and I wished I'd been there for him.

“I can't believe your brothers didn't notice.”

“They noticed my eyes were messed up, but I told them it was arc-eye from the glare on the water.”

“Arc-eye?” I said, racking my brains but coming up with nothing.

“You know, like snow blindness, except you can get it if you surf too long in tropical places. The UV light from the sun burns your cornea.”

“They believed that?”

“Yeah, Garrett made Wes wash out my eyes with some chick's contact-lens solution and then someone found some local eye drops, which actually turned out to be nasal allergy drops and burned like a
mother
. But that's a whole other story. You gotta remember I was majorly secretive and they were drunk off their asses from too much Bintang Beer most nights. I'd taken some other shit that day as well as smoking meth, and I was ODing bad, but I was in denial. When my bros found me, they said they could barely feel a pulse. Lucky for me, they got to me before it was too late and I was medevaced to a hospital in Padang. Garrett said it was terrible.”

I could feel my throat tightening up and the ache starting behind my eyes.

“Oh my God, Zeke. Your poor brothers.”

“I know, right? I can't even imagine. I hung around the hospital for a day and then discharged myself. There was a thing, but Anders made it go away.”

“A thing?”

“This one surf journalist was gonna run the story. Part of this big ‘drugs in surfing' exposé. Anders stopped him.”

“How'd he manage that?”

“No idea. Anders said it was best I didn't know.”

That sounded like Anders: scheming away behind the scenes.

It was so much to take in. I just couldn't get my head around the idea that Zeke had been a druggie.

“Do you still crave meth?”

“Yes. Every damn day. Yoga and meditation help. I'm not perfect, Iris. You need to know that, because otherwise you're gonna be real disappointed.”

“You don't have to be perfect. Why meth though?
Meth?
”

Meth was such a scary drug, and it seemed crazy that Zeke would risk his life by fooling around with something like that.

“Pro-surfing is a life of putting yourself out there to be judged by strangers. It messes up your head.”

This from Zeke: the most confident, relaxed person I had ever met.

“I thought you loved being a pro-surfer.”

“Sure I do. It's the best job in the world. Surf contests fuel my fire, because I'm super-competitive and, I mean, I love doing the giant-killer thing and beating the older, more experienced guys. The day I beat Kelly Slater in a contest heat was one of the best highs of my life.”

“So what's the problem?”

“It's way hard. They don't call the QS ‘The Grind' for nothing. It's constant travel and stress, and mostly you have no family or friends with you. You move around the world with the same group of surfers and hang out with them over and over and you start to
think they're your friends, but the minute you hit the water for a contest heat, they hate your guts. My last contest in Steamer Lane, Santa Cruz, all the tour surfers were watching from the cliff, which is like thirty feet in the air and twenty yards from the line-up, so you can talk to the people up there if you want, and I could hear the guys on the cliff cheering for the other guy. They're my friends, but he's known them longer so they're cheering for him, hoping he beats me. Stuff like that makes you feel insecure, I guess, which is the last thing you need when your sponsors and team coaches have been hassling you like crazy to win.”

I nodded. I knew I'd be psyched out in that situation.

“And sometimes you have a total shocker and get knocked out in the first round, even though you've done all the right training and followed the strategy. It's the pits. You're like, ‘I'm surfing smart so why am I losing? Why isn't it coming together?' It's constant pressure. When I started winning, the pressure got even heavier. Every contest I surfed, I was being marked out of ten and people wanted to see eights and nines from me on every single wave. Meth just made it feel easier.”