Blue Read Free

why anyone in their right mind would choose to do yoga wearing a bikini top.
    I didn’t have socks or a sweater, but I didn’t care because, lying next to Zeke, I was red hot.
    The teacher lit an incense stick and a candle, and then she turned off the lights.
    For a moment the room was absolutely silent, and then people began to breathe deeply as the teacher went through every area of our bodies, getting us to focus on the muscles that she wanted us to relax. Zeke was breathing really loudly next to me, much louder than I was. All of the boys were. Did boys have bigger, stronger lungs than girls? Or was that totally crazy? Yep, I had gone crazy. Fantasizing about a boy’s lungs was a new low.
    Just relax, Iris, relax , I told myself.
    “Breathe into any areas of tension. Breathe out any stress. Be at one with the universe.”
    I messed this up totally. I was incapable of being at one with the universe. I wasn’t even capable of being at one with my yoga mat. I kept shifting, wriggling to get comfortable. All I could concentrate on was the fact that the first boy I had liked in ages was lying next to me. When do you get to lie on the floor, in the dark, with a cute boy?
    When it counts, that’s when.
    Kelly skipped out in the middle of the relaxation segment of the class, as she always had a cleaning shift on Friday evenings, but she made the phone sign, so I knew I’d be hearing from her before too long. Seeing Kelly get up, another girl also took the opportunity to leave early. That girl had seriously long legs, red hair tied in a bun at the nape of her neck like a ballet dancer and the sort of curves that Daniel would call “pure filth.” I didn’t get a look at her face from my position sprawled on the floor but, as she padded quietly past me, I heard her whisper, “Bye, Zeke. See you tomorrow, darling.” Even from her whisper I could tell she was posh. She had that confident public-schoolgirl drawl, like Liz Hurley chatting up Nate Archibald in Gossip Girl . Uggh.
    Who was she? More important, who was she to Zeke?
    Finally the class ended and I started to roll up my mat, keeping my eyes firmly on the ground in case Zeke caught me staring, but also because it was hard to look straight at him: something about him was a bit blinding. I was just putting the mat in the big cardboard box at the back of the ballroom when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
    “You surf?” he said.

Chapter Two
    The Earth is constantly battered by waves. Sound waves, light waves, heat waves, radio waves, but the waves of the ocean are the only ones I care about. When you step into the ocean you are stepping off the everyday solid world and entering something that has way more power than anything you will ever encounter on land, and it is awesome.
    Yeah, I surfed, but I was so startled by his question that it took me a moment to answer. There’s surfing for fun, which I did, and then there’s radical skills surfing, which I didn’t do. So I went with, “Um, a bit.”
    “Knew it.”
    “Sure you did,” I said, smiling.
    “You’ve totally got the surfer shoulders.”
    “Oh,” I said, not sure if I liked the sound of that.
    “And, y’know the incredible poise,” he added, trying to dig himself out of the hole. He caught my gaze and looked at me dead-on, making my mind go totally blank again. “There’s a big swell coming in. Sets building at the north end of the beach. Wanna go catch a few?”
    “Haven’t you already been out today?” I said, looking up at his still-damp hair.
    “Yeah, but only like four or five hours. Can fit in another two hours, easy, before sundown.”
    After five hours of surfing I would be dead, that much I knew. This boy surfed seven hours a day? That was insane. Or at least a serious addiction. No wonder he was a pro at yoga. He must have been all muscle.
    All these thoughts flooded through my head in a split second, but my brain caught on the image of Zeke in scorpion pose and his T-shirt riding up