39. Jace
Jace
What the fuck just happened? The water closes over my head, warm, chlorinated. My toes touch the bottom and I push off toward the surface.
I almost kissed Summer Hayes.
I swim to the middle of the pool. The lights turn the water pink. My T-shirt sticks to my chest. When I leaned toward Summer, I got hard. Instant, impossible to hide. I jumped in fully dressed. Otherwise everyone would’ve seen it.
Nobody saw it. I repeat it to myself for two laps.
My shorts stay plastered to my thighs—right where they need to stay. Because that’s the real problem. The scar.
Wide. Thick. Ragged. A streak of raised, puckered flesh that starts high on my left thigh and runs almost to the knee. Six years, and it’s still just as ugly.
Nobody sees it. Ever. Mom, Noah, and Miles caught glimpses of it a few times, early on. Even Avery has never seen it. I wear long shorts, full wetsuits, jeans. I’m always careful.
Six years since anyone’s seen what’s under these shorts. Six years since I’ve been with a woman.
Once, I tried. A tourist, at the lodge bar. Brunette, a little older than me, funny. We’d been drinking. We went back to the trailer. And when she pulled off my shorts, her face changed. Disgust. She said something—I don’t even remember what—and she left.
I haven’t tried since.
Not just because of the scar. And because the only girl I’ve ever loved blocked my number, abandoned me, and never came back.
Damaged body. Girl gone. End of story.
Luke pulls up next to me after a sloppy crawl. He spits out water, shakes his curls.
“You see Summer’s face? She looks like a wet golden retriever. Swear to God. Same look.”
He laughs. I laugh too—or I try. It comes out wrong, but Luke doesn’t notice, or pretends not to.
“Yumi’s gonna kill you for the clothes,” he adds.
He does another lap, grabs the edge, and pulls himself out in one motion. He heads straight for Noah, who’s sitting on a lounge chair next to Harper. Luke shakes off like a wet dog a foot from Noah’s head and splashes him.
“Fuck off, DeLuca,” Noah says, his face closed off.
“You’ll thank me when you figure out you were overheating,” Luke says, already walking off.
Noah wipes his cheeks with the flat of his hand. Harper laughs. He doesn’t.
I let myself float on my back. The T-shirt billows around my stomach like a white jellyfish.
The LED lights shift to green, then blue.
“I Wanna Be Yours” by Arctic Monkeys comes through the speakers, slow bass, almost too heavy.
At the far end of the pool, kids shove each other around.
A couple of tourists splash near the ladder.
Two girls I’ve never seen take selfies, phones held above the water.
Too many people, too much noise. I wish I were alone.
But I stay.
Because if I get out now, I’ll run into Summer. She’s up there, somewhere at the edge of the pool, and I’ve got nothing to say to her.
The second she looks away, I’m gone.
I swim a few laps. The chlorine burns my eyes. I swim, I breathe, I think about nothing.
Or I try.
My mind drifts to Summer—again. Her cotton dress rumpled over her hips. Her perfume, which she didn’t wear six years ago. Her long lashes. Her lips near mine, and the way they tasted that morning, on the yellow board.
Stop, Jace.
I duck my head under and shut my eyes. The noise vanishes. All that’s left is the dull hum of the filter, the kids’ voices warped by the water.
I come up, open my eyes... and freeze.
A fin. Gray. Triangular. Coming straight at me.
The LEDs change color and the water goes red—a dark, deep red.
Blood.
The flash hits. The shark’s teeth closing on my thigh. The monstrous pressure. My own scream, muffled, swallowed by the water. Flesh torn away. The black water around me going red. A metallic taste in my mouth.
There’s no blood in this pool. I know that. But the taste is there, in my throat, like I’m still in that water.
I break the surface and try to breathe. The air won’t come.
I suck in harder. Nothing. My lungs are empty and they refuse to fill.
My breathing speeds up. The more I breathe, the less oxygen I get. My ribs clamp down. There’s a block of concrete on my chest crushing my rib cage, pressing, pressing...
I swallow water.
I cough. Water goes up my nose, into my throat. I cough again, swallow more, take in a mouthful.
I don’t know which way is up anymore.
The red is everywhere. Above, below, all around me. My hands beat at the water, but my fingers are numb, stiff, frozen. I’m not swimming anymore. I’m thrashing. My legs won’t work.
I’m sinking.
The water swallows me. A low drone fills my skull: my temples pound, the bass of the music warps underwater.
The pressure comes back in my thigh. The twisting motion when the shark shook its head. My screams.
I’m still under the cliffs. Day’s barely breaking. The water is black, and red too, and I...
Arms wrap around me and pull.
The surface. The air, the noise, the music, the voices, the light above the water—it all hits me at once. I cough. I spit. I don’t understand where I am.
“Miles!”
Summer’s voice, high, breaking. She’s in the water with me. I feel her hands on my shoulders, her fingers gripping my soaked T-shirt.
She jumped in.
A splash. Someone dove in. Other arms, stronger, hook under my armpits and pull me backward. Miles. His voice, somewhere above my head:
“I’ve got you, Jace. Hang on.”
The edge of the pool scrapes my back, my elbows. They haul me out of the water—Miles on one side, Summer on the other, and other hands I don’t recognize. The wet tile under my shoulder blades. The night air on my soaked skin. The cold.
I’m shaking all over—my hands, my legs. My teeth chatter.
“Move along, nothing to see here!”
Evan’s firm voice, somewhere to my right. His cop tone, even in flip-flops on a Friday night by a pool.
“Come on, back up. Give him some room.”
Noah’s there.
I didn’t see him come. But his hands are on my face, he lays me down, he sets my head on his lap and holds me. His fingers in my wet hair, his other hand on my shoulder, firm enough that I feel the pressure through the T-shirt.
“Jace, look at me!”
I can’t. My eyes find the sky between the string lights, the red LED glow staining the faces bent over me—still red, still...
“Jace. Look at me.”
Noah’s brown eyes.
His hands don’t shake. He’s done this before.
“Breathe.”
I can’t. My chest heaves, locks, heaves.
“I’m here,” Noah says. “You’re safe.”
My fingers close on his T-shirt. I grip, because otherwise I’m gone again.
“I saw... I saw...”
The words strangle in my throat, garbled, broken.
Noah leans in and whispers in my ear:
“No. It was just some stupid toy.”
Toy.
“It was a plastic fin,” Noah goes on. “Kids messing around. Calm down, Jace.”
A plastic fin. Kids. A toy.
My thigh throbs—real pain, deep and sharp, the kind that comes back with every episode.
Noah keeps talking to me. Short, reassuring sentences.
“Breathe. There. Like that. Again.”
Summer’s there.
Pale, she watches me over Noah’s shoulder. She’s standing behind him, soaked, hair dripping. Her light dress has gone see-through in places.
I close my eyes.
The shame arrives before the panic’s even gone. Everyone saw me.
The tourists, the kids, the whole crew. They all saw me thrash around in five feet of water over a plastic toy.
I thought I was past this.
Years of therapy. Endless exercises. I went back in the water. I surf every morning. I rebuilt everything.
And one goddamn plastic fin drags me right back.
The anger rises, acid, burning. At the kids and their piece-of-shit toy. At the red LEDs of this shitty pool. At myself, for not being able to tell the difference between the lodge pool and the cliffs at The Last Ride.
Someone covers me with a towel. I open my eyes and push myself up. Noah tries to hold me back.
“I want to go home,” I get out.
“Jace, wait. You shouldn’t—”
“I want to go home!”
My voice comes out too loud, raw. Heads turn. I don’t care.
“With you or without you.”
Noah looks to Evan. They give in.
I get up. My legs wobble. The towel slips and falls onto the wet tile. I don’t pick it up. Water drips off my clothes.
Noah pulls my arm around his shoulders. Evan takes the other side. We cross the deck, take the little gravel path that leads to the surf school. The music fades behind us. The voices die down.
None of the three of us says a word.
It’s a long walk. I left my flip-flops at the lodge. The gravel crunches under our feet.
“Careful,” Noah says halfway there. “There’s a root.”
In front of the trailer, I pull free with a sharp jerk. Noah and Evan let go.
“Thanks,” I say, my voice hoarse.
I open the door, step in, slam it, and lock it behind me.
Locked. No one can get in. I lean back against the door. The metal is cold against my wet shoulder blades. My knees give out and I let myself slide down. I end up sitting on the floor, forehead against my knees.
I breathe. The air comes a little easier. My chest rises, empties, rises. The shaking settles. The pounding in my temples slows.
The sound of paws on the linoleum.
Flip emerges from the shadows at the back of the trailer. He comes toward me, tail low. He sniffs my knees, then turns in a circle and lies down against my thigh.
The left one. The one with the scar.
He rests his muzzle on it. The warmth of his body and his steady breathing calm me.
I don’t move, hand resting on his head, back against the locked door, eyes closed. The episode’s over. The rest of it isn’t.
After a long while, I get up.
Flip looks at me, then sets his muzzle back between his paws.
I go to the shelf and dig behind a stack of old surf magazines. My fingers find the case without looking. It’s there, dried salt in the seams of the waterproof housing.
The GoPro.
I turn it over in my hands. The power button doesn’t respond. Dead battery. Figures.
I grab the cable from the drawer under my bed, plug it in. A little red light comes on.
I sit on the edge of the mattress. Flip comes and lies down beside me. I wait. A long time.
My therapist would tell me to put the goddamn camera down. To call Mom. To breathe. To sleep.
I press it again. This time the screen flickers and lights up, tiny, scratched. The picture’s grainy, the contrast too harsh. The last video file is still there. There’s only one. There’s only ever been one.
I hit play.
The image shakes. The camera’s strapped to my forehead with the GoPro harness Luke lent me the day before.
Day’s starting to break. The cliffs below Star Park stay dark, but the foam shows in white flashes down below. The wind overloads the mic. The swell hits the rock.
Then Miles’s voice, younger, less deep than it is now.
“You know, I’m not sure this is such a good idea after all. The waves are heavy, we can’t see a thing. Come on, let’s head back.”
And my eighteen-year-old voice, light, a little breathless:
“No.”
“Why?”
“For the glory, man!”
The image swings around. The edge of the cliff, the drop, the black water below. The board leaves my hands—I watch it fall, spin, hit the surface in a burst of spray.
“Jace, no!”
And I jump.
I laugh, the laugh of a kid too sure of himself.
The dull shock of my body hitting the water. I go under, come up, spit. The board floats a few yards off, pale on the black water. I swim to it, pull myself up, and straddle it.
My hands tremble with excitement as I work the Velcro on the leash. I fasten it around my ankle. The swell lifts me, sets me back down.
On the left, Miles comes down the path between the rocks, board under his arm. He didn’t jump. He took the path.
My voice on the video, breathless, carried on the wind:
“When I tell her about this, she’s gonna think I’m crazy.”
Summer, waiting for me in her room—and she still hasn’t told me whether she wants to be my girlfriend.
My hand goes still on Flip’s belly. The GoPro screen glows in the dark of the trailer.
Every surfer has a little bit of a death wish, Dad used to say. Maybe. That morning, all I wanted was for her to look at me.