23. Jace
Jace
FRIDAY
I groan, roll onto my side. Flip lifts his head, ears up. He looks at me like I’ve got an explanation.
I do.
I prop myself up on one elbow and glance out the trailer window. Over at the Hayes house, every window downstairs is lit up, and a power sander is going full blast. At 5:30 in the morning.
So she’s got power.
My left thigh protests when I put my foot on the floor. Morning stiffness, same as it’s been for six years. I work the spot without looking at it. It pulls a little, loosens up, it’ll be fine.
I get up. Flip jumps off the bed, shakes himself, and shoves the trailer door open with a paw. Cool air rushes in. Outside, the sky’s still dark blue.
And the sander keeps going.
I open the window, set my Bluetooth speaker on the sill, and switch it on. I scroll for the perfect track.
“abcdefu” by GAYLE, volume maxed out.
Fuck you, Summer Hayes.
The sander stops for three seconds, then starts up again.
I grin. It’s dumb, it’s childish, but it feels so damn good.
This morning the water isn’t freezing, but cold enough to wake me up. Short of breath, I paddle out toward the peak. The neoprene sleeve compresses my left thigh under the wetsuit. In ten minutes I won’t feel it anymore.
Kai’s already out there, sitting on his board, motionless, facing the open water. The tribal tattoo climbing up his neck stands out in the pink-and-gold morning light. He doesn’t turn when I pull up beside him.
Evan shows up right after. He nods at me and settles in a few yards off. Evan surfs the way he lives—no noise, no drama, always there.
And then there’s Miles.
Miles, who paddles like he’s forgotten which way the ocean is. On the first wave, his takeoff looks like an attempt to get up off a too-soft couch. He wobbles, slips, and goes face-first into a foot of whitewater.
He comes up laughing.
“Controlled landing,” he announces.
Maya’s next to him, on the inside. She’s sitting on her board, feet in the water, a smile a little too wide for six in the morning. I drift over to them.
“Ruby and her brownies?” I guess.
Miles gives me two thumbs up. Maya shakes her head, but she’s laughing.
“You’re supposed to be working this morning,” I grumble.
“Sí. I’m good to go. Watch…”
She paddles into a small wave, pops up, carves a clean bottom turn, and kicks out the back. She throws me a look over her shoulder.
“Satisfied, jefe?”
I don’t answer. But yeah—the boss is satisfied.
Miles, meanwhile, blows a second takeoff. Evan watches the whole thing like it’s a nature documentary.
During a lull, I move closer to Kai.
“I need to be free between two and four. Avery’s heat is then. Could you cover me?”
Kai nods.
“Sure. Where’s she surfing?”
“North Shore. Junior Under-18 competition.”
North Shore. Hawaii. Kai’s fingers tighten on the rail of his board. He doesn’t say anything.
“She’s one of the youngest in her division,” I add. “Mom’s with her. She’ll video-call me so I can watch the heat.”
“Your sister’s going to pass you one day…”
“Already has,” I say, smiling.
And I mean it. Avery’s better than me. At sixteen, she carries Dad’s dream on a surfboard—Mom’s, mine—and she doesn’t shake.
Dad would have loved to see her out there.
When Avery surfs, it’s always him I think of.
The Coral Bay cemetery, the summer I was ten.
The red earth. The sun too bright for a funeral.
Beside me, Noah, eight years old, his face shut down, arms at his sides.
And Summer crying. Summer pulling me into her arms, hard, too hard, and I don’t cry because she’s crying for both of us.
A few days later, the paddle out. The tribute.
That morning, the ocean was almost flat.
The Coral Bay surfers formed a circle beyond the waves.
Flowers floated on the water. Noah was on a board for the last time in his life.
He was shaking too hard to let go of the rail.
Summer was on my board, behind me, her hands on my shoulders.
She was there.
So why wasn’t she there after my accident?
A set comes in. I take the first wave and stop thinking about it.
The session wraps up around eight.
“Grab a drink tonight?” I ask.
Miles has water in his ear and tilts his head, hopping on one foot like a kid.
“Can’t. We’re putting something together for Sunday.”
The fundraiser.
“Don’t remind me,” I grumble.
Miles and Maya trade a look. They laugh a little too much. Those damn brownies again.
I peel off the top of my wetsuit, rinse my board, and roll straight into the first lesson of the morning. Six tourists, two who stay on their feet, four who get a mouthful of ocean. The usual.
Around ten, I head back up toward the school. The sun’s already beating down. I’ve got sand in my hair, salt on my arms, and a fierce need for coffee.
I glance over at the Hayes house.
Five boxes are lined up along the fence, on the beach side—right where my students cut through to get down to the water. Lamps, dishes, knickknacks… and in the middle, a cardboard sign written in marker:
Help yourself
Summer’s in the yard, hoeing the soil around a flower bed that hasn’t seen anyone in six years. She’s wearing a wide straw hat and gardening gloves too big for her hands.
“You can’t put that there,” I say.
She doesn’t bother to look up.
“Why?”
“It’s in the way of my lessons.”
“The beach belongs to everyone,” she fires back.
“Not the path in front of my school.”
“Technically, it’s in front of my house.”
She’s right. And that pisses me off even more.
I start moving one of the boxes when a guy already fried by the sun comes over, flip-flops on, beach bag over his shoulder.
He digs through one of the boxes, between an ugly vase and an empty picture frame, and pulls out a little cherry-red wooden surfboard, hand-painted: a sun, a palm tree, California in round letters.
I freeze.
Pacific Star Park, the summer I was eighteen.
The shooting gallery. Five shots, three targets, and I hit all three because I needed to show off in front of her.
The guy at the booth handed me the board with a look that said, “That’s all we’ve got, kid.
” I gave it to Summer. She laughed. She used to laugh a lot.
The tourist turns it over in his fingers, examining it like some beach trinket.
I step over and snatch it out of his hands.
“Hands off. That one’s mine.”
“Hey!”
But I’m already turning away, the little board clenched in my fist.
Summer hasn’t seen any of it. She’s still bent over her flower bed, her back to me.
She’s getting rid of it.
I go back into the trailer. Flip follows me, tail low. I toss the board on the bed, sit down, turn it over.
My eighteen-year-old handwriting, in black marker. The ink’s faded, the letters aren’t all straight.
Future Olympic Champion
Flip rests his muzzle on my right thigh.
I put the board away in the drawer under the bed and step back out of the trailer.
The retaliation doesn’t take long.
Around one, while I’m taking inventory of the wetsuits in the storeroom, the music starts up at Summer’s. Loud.
“FU,” by Miley Cyrus.
Fuck you, Jace Walker.
The sound’s too clean to be coming from a phone. I look toward the house. A Bluetooth speaker’s sitting on the living room windowsill.
I recognize the lodge’s backup speaker. Black, cylindrical, scuffed up from use.
Miles.
“Traitor,” I mutter.
Mid-afternoon, everything goes dead.
The fan in the front office. The mini-fridge. The charging light on my phone.
No power.
I already know where it’s coming from. I cross the yard and go through the Hayes’ gate.
An orange extension cord snakes through the grass.
Summer’s standing in the middle of the yard, a corded electric hedge trimmer in her hands.
She’s wearing denim cutoffs and a white spaghetti-strap tank, smudged with paint and dust. As if the tool itself is the problem, she turns it over, pulls the trigger to no effect, lifts it up in front of her to inspect the blade.
The hedge trimmer’s huge compared to her.
I shouldn’t be looking. I look anyway.
Her skin’s gone golden from five days of California sun. One strap of the tank has slipped off her shoulder. Her arms are raised, her back arched under the weight of the machine.
I clear my throat.
“You blew the power.”
She doesn’t look up.
“I’m fixing it.”
“It’s not the tool. You cut the cord.”
She lowers the trimmer and follows my gaze. The orange cord is cut clean through.
“Oh,” Summer sighs.
“That’s why the breaker tripped. Unplug everything. The trimmer, the cord…”
“I’ve got it.”
“Not from the look of that cord.”
She shoots me a glare, but she sets the trimmer down and unplugs the cord from the outdoor outlet.
I turn back toward the old electrical panel the two properties share, mounted on a post between the house and the school.
I open the gray box. The main breaker’s flipped down; I reset it with one motion. The power comes back.
I walk back into the yard.
“It’s a hedge trimmer, not a chainsaw,” I say. “And the blade cuts what’s in front of it, not the cord behind it.”
“Thanks for the lesson. I watched a tutorial on YouTube first.”
“Maybe you should’ve watched the whole thing.”
“You want me to show you what I can do with a hedge trimmer, Walker?”
I raise my hands and turn to go.
“Thanks anyway,” she murmurs.
I stop and turn around. Summer’s got her arms crossed. The tank’s back in place.
“Without you, I’d still be standing here wondering why it stopped working.”
“It’s not help. It’s collective survival.”
I head off, for good this time.
When I open the gate, Flip shoots past me at a gallop.
He crosses the yard, dodges the branches of the half-trimmed hedge, and lies down at Summer’s feet. On his side, front paws stretched out. The same position he takes when he sprawls across my feet at the trailer.
Summer crouches down beside him and starts scratching him between the ears. Flip closes his eyes.
“Traitor,” I grumble.
The dog doesn’t move. I head back to the school.