Blink of an Eye Read Free

quietly begged her friend to come to her senses so that she could enter her new life with joy.

chapter 2
    i t was three o’clock in the afternoon and Seth Border, although arguably the most popular man on campus, was lonely. Popular, because he possessed both the sharpest mind the university had seen since its inception and the kind of all-American face the media loved. Lonely, because he felt oddly disconnected from that popularity.
    If he’d learned anything at Berkeley, it was that when academia put you on a pedestal, it expected you to perform as advertised. If it wanted you to grow green skin, you’d better paint your skin green, because if you came out onstage with blue skin, it would resent you. Ironic, considering the freedom preached by those in this neck of the woods.
    Seth stared out the small windows that ran along the high wall of the lecture hall, thinking he was a blue person in a green person’s world. Blue, like the sky outside—another cloudless California day. He ran a hand through his shaggy blond mop and released a barely audible sigh. He glanced at the complex equation on the whiteboard behind the professor, solved it before he finished reading it, and let his mind drift again.
    He was twenty-six, and his whole life had felt like a long string of abandonments. Sitting here listening to graduate lectures on quantum physics by Dr. Gregory Baaron with forty other students only seemed to reinforce the feeling. He should be doing something to lift himself out of this valley. Something like surfing.
    Surfing had always been his one escape from a world gone mad, but the last time he’d seen the really good side of a wave was three years ago, back at Point Loma in San Diego, during a freak storm that deposited fifteen-foot swells along the coast from Malibu to Tijuana. There was nothing quite like catching the right wave and riding in its belly until it decided to dump you off.
    Seth first experienced the freedom of surfing when he was six, when his mom bought him a board and took him to the beach—her way of helping them both escape his father’s abuse.
    Paul loved three things in life and, as far as Seth saw, three things only: Pabst Blue Ribbon. Baseball. Himself. In no particular order. The fact that he’d married a woman named Rachel and had a kid they’d named Seth barely mattered to him.
    His mom, on the other hand, did love her son. They had, in fact, saved each other’s lives on more than one occasion, most memorably when his dad confused their bodies for baseballs.
    It was during the worst of those times when Seth asked his mom if she would take him to the library. She took him the very next day in the Rust Bucket, as she called their Vega. From age six on, Seth’s life comprised a strange brew of surfing, reading, and being kicked around the house by his dad.
    â€œYou’re special, Seth,” his mom used to say. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you any different, you hear? You ignore what your father says.”
    Her words filled him with more warmth than the California sun. “I love you, Mom.”
    She would always swallow, pull him close, and wipe at the tears in her eyes when he said that.
    As it turned out, Seth was more than special. He was a genius.
    In any other setting his unique gift would have been discovered and nurtured from the time he was two or three. Unfortunately —or fortunately, depending on your point of view—no one really understood what an exceptional young boy Seth was until he was older.
    His mother was a hairdresser, not a schoolteacher, and although she made sure all the other beauticians knew about her boy’s quick wit, she wasn’t equipped to recognize genius. And because Rachel would just as soon take him to the beach or the library as to the school, his reputation as a student languished.
    He was nine before anyone in the academic world even noticed Seth’s brilliance. A surfer named