Girl Out of Water(2)

I watch the foamy water lap onto the coast as we walk, then notice a glint in the sun. I yelp and drop to my knees, scavenging through the sand.

“What?” Eric asks.

“I think I see one!” I dig, only to find a shard of a beer bottle. “Fail.” I pick it up to throw away later, wondering if it’s from a recent bonfire or washed up with the tide. Eric and I collect sea marbles—smooth, colorful glass orbs the ocean churns out, so rare we only find about one a year. We have a tradition: whenever one of us finds a sea marble, we give it to the other person.

“Bummer,” Eric says.

“Definitely a bummer,” I agree.

We continue down the beach and approach the Shak, with its familiar tin awning coated in green paint and smattering of wooden benches and umbrellas staked in the sand. The majority of the lunch crowd has already dispersed, but our friends are still planted at a table, chowing down on hot dogs slathered in pineapple chunks and hot sauce, fish tacos drizzled with wasabi balsamic vinaigrette, and my personal favorite, watermelon and papaya fruit salad mixed with cayenne pepper and crushed sugar.

“Hey there, strangers,” Tess says. She’s Samoan, and even though it’s still the beginning of summer, her skin is already a deeper shade of bronze than usual. She holds a veggie dog in one hand and an almost-surely-not-virgin strawberry daiquiri in the other. Apparently day drinking during summer is perfectly appropriate and not at all a sign of early onset alcoholism. “How was…surfing?”

“Fine,” I say, then shoot her a look that I hope conveys, I love you, but shut the fuck up.

Tess is my best friend. We’ve been attached at the hip since we could walk the half-mile distance to each other’s house. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of telling her I’ve been thinking about Eric (or more precisely, the perfect planes of Eric’s shoulders as he paddles out to catch a wave) as potentially more than a friend lately.

“Anise Sawyer ate it on a ten-footer,” Eric says.

A chorus of “no ways” and “oh shits” erupts from the table, and I cross my arms and stare at Eric. “Really?” I ask. “You had to tell them?”

“Oh, come on.” He puts an arm around my shoulder and pulls me into a half hug, which leaves me wondering how the hell he smells like spearmint after being soaked in briny water for five hours. “It makes us all feel better to know you’re not infallible. Besides, you should be bragging, not hiding.”

“Can you go into specific detail?” Marie asks. We’ve been buddies ever since we both brought surfboards to first grade show-and-tell. Her arm is wrapped around her girlfriend, Cassie, who makes up for her five-two height with the most impressive set of abs and biceps on the West Coast. They’ll come in handy when she heads off to boot camp for the navy at the end of summer.

“No, I can’t,” I say stiffly. I know I sound like an asshole. I know I should laugh with the rest of them, play off my fail like it’s no big deal. But, well, surfing is the one thing in this world I’m good at. Like really good at. And I love it. So whenever I screw up a ride, it stabs hard, like how an argument with someone you love cuts deeper than an argument with a stranger.

“Okay, okay you guys,” Tess says. “We actually have important details to discuss.”

“We do?” I ask.

“Oh, yes. Surf Break.”

Around the table, everyone cheers with variations of, “Fuck, yeah!”

I say it perhaps loudest of all because Surf Break is fuck, yeah amazing. It’s a festival held at the end of every summer, a giant three-day party posted up right in our backyards. Professional surfers come in droves to perform demos, local bands and a few famous headliners play on temporary stages constructed on the beach, and dozens of food trucks flood the area. Not to mention the thousands of drunk, sunburned festival attendees.

My friends and I have been attending since we could toddle down the beach in plastic orange floaties. And as soon as we were old enough to ditch our parents, the festival got a lot more interesting.

“All right,” Tess continues. She pulls a tattered notepad from her enormous yellow-striped beach bag. Since she prefers sunning over surfing, she always comes to the beach stocked with supplies: sunscreen, novels, her sketchbook, colored pencils, and more. “We have one weekend of nonstop partying to plan. First item on the agenda: Who wants to host the bonfire?”

“I’ll do it,” I say.

“Really?” Tess raises her eyebrows. Most years I keep my Surf Break schedule commitment-free, leaving plenty of time to go off on my own, watch the demos, learn some new moves from the visiting professionals and amateurs alike. But since so many of my friends are leaving for colleges all over the country at the end of summer—or, in Cassie’s case, enlisting—this will be our last Surf Break all together. I don’t want to miss a minute of it.

I nod. “Really.”

“Awesome.” She tips her drink in my direction, takes a sip, and then writes on her notepad while going on to discuss an absurdly long list of other details.

A few minutes into the discussion, I nudge Eric’s shoulder. “Back to the waves?”

We haven’t eaten yet, but I have a couple of power bars that will sustain us for a few more hours. And as much as I love Tess, the idea of surfing with Eric is infinitely more appealing than listening to her discuss the important advantages of Kraft jumbo marshmallows over regular Kraft marshmallows. He nudges me back with a playful smile. “If you insist.”