Blue Read Free Page A

and I couldn’t think of anything to say except, “The lifeguards will have gone home.”
    “We can take care of each other.”
    “It’s not that,” I said. “The lifeguard flags will be gone, so everyone will be mixed in. These conditions? It’ll be packed out there until the sky turns pitch black. We’ll have to watch out for kooks and speed bumps.”
    Kooks are novice surfers and they are a pain in the ass to more advanced surfers. They get in the way, they don’t know how to handle their boards and what’s worse is that they roam in packs of hundreds, which is why the lifeguards normally cram them into a little space down the south end of the beach, between the black-and-white flags, where they can’t cause too much trouble to real surfers. They’re always injuring each otherthough, because they’re show-off menaces with no proper training and a minimal understanding of the sea’s power.
    “Speed bumps?” he said, frowning.
    “You know—bodyboarders.”
    He smiled. “I never heard that before. Harsh, but kind of accurate, I guess. Back home they call them dick-draggers. Or shark biscuits.”
    You’d think that stand-up surfers and bodyboarders could be friends, but it never seemed to work out like that. There was this rivalry that didn’t go away. It could be funny but it was also a shame, because almost all stand-up surfers started out bodyboarding as kids.
    But why would you stick with a bodyboard when you had the option of a real surfboard? Something that took real skills and paid off with real thrills. I didn’t get it.
    “So you gonna come hang? You can use one of my spare boards if you can’t be assed going to get yours.”
    I looked at my watch, not because I was particularly interested that it was 7:35 p.m., but because I needed a moment to think. He wasn’t actually asking me out, was he? Me, with my ancient shorts and make-up-free face?
    As I told Kelly later, I’d have much rather gone home and watched EastEnders than gone surfing with this gorgeous boy. Even though I really liked him . That was how scared I’d become in the few months since Daniel, suspicious of everything outside my own bedroom.
    But something the yoga teacher had said came back to me. During relaxation she’d been banging on about the importance of being open to new experiences, to new adventures and to newpeople, telling us how saying yes, instead of no, could change our lives for the better. It sounded a million miles away from the boring person I’d become.
    What’s the worst that can happen? I thought.
    “OK. You’re on.”
    I put on my flip-flops, grabbed my skateboard and followed him out of the ballroom, through the hotel’s bar and down to the esplanade.
    “Boards are on my van,” he said, nodding at a retro VW camper which was gleaming silver in the evening sunlight and looked as if it had been refurbed to mint condition. He had his own ride, so he was at least seventeen, then. A year older than me. The same age as Daniel.
    I looked out to the bay and saw set after set lining up; pure corduroy.
    “Definitely OK for me to borrow one?”
    “Sure.”
    “What if I ding it?” Nightmare. Damaged surfboards were tricky and expensive to fix, but if you didn’t bother, the board would get waterlogged and have to be chucked in the bin.
    “You won’t. I trust ya. Even if you do, who cares?”
    He trusted me. I’d known him less than one hour. I didn’t even trust me and I’d known me for sixteen years.
    “Can I leave my skateboard in your van? Don’t want it to get stolen.”
    “No problem. Sling it wherever.”
    I slid it in front of two of his skateboards, a regular-sized one and a much longer carveboard. It made sense. Skateboarding is basically land-surfing, or “sidewalk surfing” as they call it in America.
    He had five surfboards on the roof rack of his van, including two seriously fancy high-performance longboards. Just those two boards alone would have cost him a couple of