Blue Water High (35 page)

Deb, Simmo and Andrew had had a long discussion about the conditions. They all knew it was bigger than the kids were used to, but Andrew thought it was fate smiling on them – this was the chance to see what they were really made of. Fly wondered if it was possible to hate someone after only meeting them twice.

They drew names out of Simmo's hat: boys first, then girls. And Heath was the first of the first. He met Fly's eyes and gave her a nod, telling her it was alright, telling her
not to worry. As he bounded down to the water for the most important session to date, the rest of them sat in a row on the sand in front of the judging table, not wanting to see Deb, Simmo and Andrew jotting down scores, pulling interesting faces. For now, they just wanted to see what they were up against.

Fly had pulled the last number. Lucky last to the end. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry. If she'd been on top of her fear she would've seen that there was an advantage to be had by going last, that she had been given the chance to see all the other girls surf, that she had been given the time to really watch how the break was working. But she was too wound up to see sense; all she could think about was the fact that any moment now she was going to be asked to step into the kind of ocean she had managed to avoid for the last two years of her life.

But by not looking at her friends as cold, calculating competitors, not trying to look for strengths and weaknesses, not looking for angles, allowed something beautiful to happen instead. She didn't see a take-off, she didn't see a re-entry, she didn't see a single thing they did with their bodies. What she saw was her friends.

As Heath slid down the face of his first wave she saw his goofy smile, she saw him leaning down to kiss her that first time in the caravan, she saw his vulnerability as Mr Savin flung that coin high in the air.

Then she saw Edge's soft-centred chocolate, in spite of all the aggro. She saw him kind and tender with Bec, she saw him grinning like a circus clown with the shark photo in his hand.

Matt she saw on the stool in the darkened shed, putting in the time with her even though he didn't have to. She
saw his face the day Perri had agreed to go to the formal with him.

As Anna pushed her way down the first gnarly wave Fly saw that hideous mobile bill, flashing its scary green numbers at her. She saw Anna's arm around her in the night. She saw Anna grooving in their bedroom with her German music pounding through her headphones.

Perri was a picture of generosity. She saw her hand in the air when she'd won, and then her hand going straight out to Anna. She saw her gathering up the money they'd all made at the auction and sharing it between them, making sure that Matt got his share, even if he decided to give it to Surfers Against Sewage.

Bec was a hundred shades of loyalty. Sharp teeth at Fly having bumped her, blushing as the pillow fight finally uncovered her heart, straight as an arrow to any question they asked her. As much as Bec had probably pushed her the hardest, Fly only saw her big, pumping heart as she flicked off the back of her last wave.

And then it was time. Fiona Watson, would you please step down and introduce yourself to tropical cyclone Leon? It wasn't really a question. There were ten pairs of eyes, all looking, all waiting to see what a year at the Solar Blue Academy had done for Fly.

She had to fight hard to get out there. When the swell was big the risk was that you used up so much energy getting out that you were too knackered to do much once you got there. Fly was so relieved to have made the break she felt like she could have bounced to the moon, and the truth was she would've felt a lot safer there anyway. Leon was going off. The sheer weight of water swelling up beneath her as she sat out the back was giving Fly the
chills. She could feel all the old habits rising up within her. She could feel the fear scratching at her throat and she could see that old milk can bobbing around on the surface, banging hard into her leg with its rusty metal edge every time a wave passed her by. It wasn't a timed heat this time, it was the best of three waves, but that required you actually taking one, and Fly was starting to wonder whether they wouldn't all be sitting on the beach as dusk feathered down on them, waiting for her to make a move.

While she waited, and tried to kick that milk can away, Fly managed to get it together enough to suss that the last of the three set waves, unlike usual non-cyclonic waves, was actually the mildest. This was the one for her, and, letting the first two pass, she turned and paddled for the third.

Mild by comparison, she should've said, because even this third wave had more than a tonne of water thrashing its way towards shore. Fly's plan was just to get on board and hold on for dear life. If she managed to move this way or that way it was a bonus. After the wave's first initial burst it seemed to lose power and Fly found herself cutting left and right, pulling off some solid but average moves. As she flicked out of the crumbling white water she knew she had caved. After all this work, she had let the fear win. And what was worse, she was going to have to claw and scratch her way out there two more times in order to pull it off … this losing kind of performance.

Somehow it seemed like more effort than it was worth. You didn't get a free ride out there just because you were going to pike on the big stuff. You didn't get waves deciding not to implode on your head, you didn't get any bonuses now that Fly thought about it. Why not just take
Matt at his word, decide what you wanted and do it. She was probably going to get pounded anyway.

Fly felt a spurt of energy and suddenly she turned and paddled hard to the left, looking for the rip. There were two strong ones running out. They were like water escalators running at top speed, and even though every life-preserving force tells you to keep well away from rips, Fly wanted to be in one, she wanted the fast train back out there.

The one she found was sucking hard. She could feel the sand it was churning from the bottom scratching at her legs as she let herself be drawn into the pull. Rips were to be respected, you needed to know how to handle yourself when you stepped on board because all your instincts suddenly started to sing their own song. Fly let herself go for a while, and then she could feel her nerve endings starting to object, she could feel herself wanting to paddle against it. It took all her strength just to go with it, to let it take her until it was time, and then she slowly paddled to the side.

Maybe making that rip work for her had given her the little boost she needed, because Fly found herself out there, legs astride the board, smiling. A big set was forming up further out and she was starting to stare at the milk can floating at her side and she was remembering everything Matt had told her about fear. She was seeing herself on the podium at Marley beach, she was hearing Simmo's words, telling her that it was a genuine possibility that she could
win this thing. Whether she won or not, it didn't matter now, what mattered most, way down deep in her heart, was that she didn't pike, that she didn't take the last wave of the set because it was safest. No matter how they scored her, the fact that she'd taken on the first, a big churning monster of a thing, that was what mattered.

Halfway down the face she knew it was hers, she could feel her fins digging hard into it, making a path of their own, not running scared, not holding on for dear life. She was deciding what happened here. She gouged and gorged her way along that wall of angry water till it ran out of steam … And she was still standing. If nothing else good ever happened in her life, as she pulled off the back of that wave, Fly felt like she was a winner.

By the time she made it in Fly's heart was on fire. She didn't know if it was from nerves or fear or what. She didn't care. It was making her feel more alive than she had in her whole life. The rest of the crew stood and gave her a round of applause. Maybe, out of all of them there, only Matt really knew what had gone on for her out there.

Simmo, Andrew and Deb stood too and, once the clapping calmed down, there was a long awkward silence. Had it come to this? A small announcement on the beach? A second to catch your breath and then all would be revealed?

Andrew stepped forward.

‘I don't know where to start,' he said. ‘I've been doing this now for six years, and you guys blew me away. I've never had such a hard time scoring. You guys are going to be a very hard act to follow.'

Fly could feel the nervous tension rippling around the group. It was almost as if their hearts were beating in time,
their pulses rising and falling in time like a tree full of cicadas.

‘The truth is, we weren't able to pick it on today's performance,' he said.

All those hearts suddenly stood still.

‘We're going to have to go and nut it out back at the academy. Simmo's suggested we look at overall performance and improvement and a whole heap of things, give them a score and then add it to what we came up with today.'

After all the build-up Fly thought the crew would explode.

‘I know it's going to be hard,' said Andrew, reaching for a bunch of envelopes, ‘but maybe you can all go find something to wear to tonight's party where we'll make the announcement.'

Andrew handed out seven envelopes, each with two hundred dollars inside.

‘We want to see you all at the surf club at five pm sharp, looking … well, looking sharp.'

Fly looked down at her watch. Five o'clock was four hours away. Four hours at fifty dollars an hour … She looked around at the rest of the crew and guessed she wasn't alone thinking that someone would've had to pay her two hundred dollars a minute until the announcement for her to be happy.

Fly couldn't remember ever having two hundred in one go before. Or maybe she had, but it had definitely never been for a dress. It took the rest of the girls a full half-hour to convince her that it was actually okay to go and spend it.

The boys hadn't been so hard to convince. Heath had come up with a grand plan as soon as he'd seen the cold hard cash. Seventy dollars to hire a suit for the night left them with a tidy little bonus.

Perri was in charge of the shopping, and as the girls set off together it was like they'd never been apart. All the tension had disappeared. More than that, it was like they were even closer having had a tiny taste of life without each other.

Fly let them talk her into trying on the most outrageous dresses – violet toilet roll covers with nine-hundred-dollar price tags and green wedding cakes for three hundred dollars. In the end, they decided on an aqua number, on sale and spectacularly reduced to be within her budget, with fifty dollars to spare. Fly stood there looking in the mirror, the blue silk lapping at her ankles, seeing herself as
if for the first time. She pulled up the skirt and smiled at her thongs just to remind herself who she really was, but she smiled at the girl in the fancy dress too. She was a long way from the reflection in the portaloo mirror. So much had changed – but so much was the same, and maybe that was just life. Maybe it was about tinkering around the edges, but keeping the stuff you were dealt, learning to get that all the crunchie bits were okay too.

At 4.35 they gathered in Perri and Bec's room. Perri had marched over to Fly and gone to town on Fly's ponytail, turning it into some kind of elaborate hairdo, then, standing back and looking at them all, she declared them the spunkiest bunch of girls she'd seen in a long time.

The boys were waiting downstairs, all penguined up in their suits, and from the looks on their faces as the girls arrived at the top of the stairs, they thought they were the spunkiest bunch of girls they'd seen in a long time too. Fly stared at Heath, trying to work out what he was thinking.

She made the first couple of stairs, but after that things seemed to go wrong. She didn't know whether the tip of the stupid high-heel she'd let the girls talk her into caught the bottom of her dress first, and that's what caused Heath to start laughing, or whether Heath started to laugh, and that's what caused her shoe to catch, but suddenly she could feel herself falling. As she left the top step she was cursing her dress, her shoes, her weak will for letting Perri ‘do something with that hair'. Maybe that's why Heath had laughed … She could imagine
Darren Crocker of the
Marley Beach Gazette
banging out a story about how one of the Solar Blue finalists had broken their neck falling down the stairs just twenty-five minutes before the announcement.