The Blackberry Bush (14 page)

I come out of the water with my Quiet Flite shortboard (how I ended up on a board from Florida is another story—but it’s a sweet ride) and look up at the stands, set up like a NASCAR race, and pull my neon-colored competition vest off. South African prodigy Jordy Smith comes over and fist-bumps me, and the crowd stands and cheers as he holds his board over his head after a hard-fought victory. Autograph seekers mob him at the waterline. There may be a couple of days of tough competition ahead of him if he wants to win this thing.

There is a high wave advisory out today; they needed jet skis to get us out to the lineup. The biggest waves are almost lapping the deck of the pier and occasionally spraying the crowd watching from the guardrail. The big waves were to my advantage, since my home break in France is the legendary
La Graviere.
I hope all the tourists stay out of the water. It’s deadly dangerous.

The judges have punched in their numbers, and my name is at the bottom on the JumboTron. That shouldn’t bother me, but it does. My dad was obsessed with scores. Most adults carry around numbers their whole lives. Social Security numbers. Credit ratings. Passwords. Net worth. You name it. And when this stuff gets stolen, they call it “identity theft.” Like someone can steal your identity.

They list me as
FRA
(French) up on the big scoreboard, even though I’m an American citizen. I came up through the ranks at Hossegor, and they want to make this thing look like some global World Cup or something.

My bros are gathered at the waterline. What a crew: Max. Sam. The rest. Max greets me with a French obscenity—his usual. Sam yells out “J-Bro!” Oma Adri is with them. She kisses me on both cheeks and insists on about ten pictures of all of us—even making me put my neon-colored competition vest back on. When Adri commands, everyone obeys. Max, coming from a wealthy family, can travel without worrying about it—he never thought twice about flying all the way from France to watch me.

Oma’s three times older than anyone else in the whole U.S. Open crowd but somehow fits in, wearing cooler sunglasses than anyone else. Oma Adri, in a trait she got from her mother, Nellie, owns any group she’s in or any room she enters. She insists on treating us all to lunch across the Pacific Coast Highway at TK Burger, but we have to swim upstream through the massive festival crowd on the beach to get there.

The sand is biting hot on our feet, and bikini-clad promo girls hand everyone huge, shiny-canned, free-sample energy drinks out of ice-filled barrels.

A typical blond California girl about my age I’ve never, ever seen before bolts in from my left, apparently seeing my competition vest and board, and plants a huge wet kiss on my lips; she tastes and smells heavily of beer, even before lunch. She messes up my hair and runs off to her friends. I don’t even have time to react. Oma teases me by messing up my hair again and making fun of the girl’s running gait. This gets a huge laugh from my friends, of course.

We work our way through the dozens of promo booths—it’s kind of like a state fair on steroids. We have to move out of the way for a pack of young women heading for the water. The exotic dark-skinned one in the front is simply breathtakingly magnetic and flashes a perfect smile at us. She turns and says something to a vaguely familiar skinny friend with a big nose behind her, who laughs in response.

I brush shoulders with the skinny one in the crush of the crowd, and something tingles in the pit of my stomach. Is she really wearing a fedora hat and a large men’s watch? Odd. The pack squeezes past us, and I strain to get another look at the attractive one, who looks like she’s from India or something.

Too late.

Oma looks troubled.

“The crowds bothering you?” I ask her in Dutch, so as not to embarrass her.

“No,” she says, “there’s just something…something…I don’t know what it is.”

I put my arm around her, and we continue making our way to lunch.

2011
The Cliffs
Huntington Beach, California

Kati

W
ELL
, I’
VE WALKED FAR ENOUGH
, and my eyes are still stinging. My throat is burning with anger, disappointment, grief, jealousy, and a healthy dose of depression. It’s so hard to keep from looking like a fool with beet-red eyes when you’re walking north along the beach where so many people can see you. Most of the time, no one is looking at you, but a day like today is
all about
looking.

I’ve never figured out how to have a non-awkward walk, and the more I think about it, the more awkward my gait becomes. When Zara walks, boys just start following. She just sort of swings and smiles as she goes.

I give up.

Not only can’t I compete, I can’t even suit up for the game. My head is hot. I remove my fedora and toss it to a teenage boy walking the opposite direction, smiling tentatively at him.

He catches it and looks puzzled. “Whatever, lady,” he snarls at me.

Great.
He discards it on the ground next to him and moves on.

I just want to do something meaningful in life and have a better family than the one in which I grew up. Is that too much to ask?

Zara has no idea where I am. She was having so much fun basking in all the attention that she didn’t even notice my leaving. An hour from now, she’ll think,
Where’s Kati?

Put a fork in me—I’m done.

It’s just one too many times to have to endure the same thing. Guys congregate around Zara and I disappear. Replayed a bazillion times. What a stupid idea to go with her to the U.S. Open. Thousands of girls our age in swimsuits, and she’s at the top of the hot list. Me? I’m in negative numbers. I had to go for a walk to clear my head, but it feels like the emotional clouds are gathering. And I can’t do anything to stop them.

I’ve been drinking so much this week; at this rate, I’ll never get my driver’s license back. The buzz is keeping me from thinking through what I’m doing right now. It feels unreal somehow. I keep checking my Ziffer watch as evening approaches to keep myself grounded in reality.

Evening is on the way. What if morning never comes?

Now there’s a thought.
Get a grip on yourself, girl,
I tell myself. But I know I’m losing my grip.

The beach is narrowing the farther north I go. The Huntington Beach Cliffs are rising on my right.

Simultaneously
Bolsa Chica Beach
Huntington Beach, California

Josh

I
T
’
S BEEN A CRUISY AFTERNOON AND EVENING
, and the sun is about to set. My surf sponsor, Quiet Flite, arranged a spot up here a few miles north of the competition for some R and R. They have a big advertising-wrapped RV in the parking lot stocked with all kinds of goodies. Oma left a couple of hours ago, and the mood at our celebration is now starting to take off. The party is focusing around a concrete fire pit.

But me? Well, I’m walking south on the beach, alone, along the waterline toward the Cliffs. The setting sun has lit up the rocks with reds and oranges, and the tide is coming in. I have a touch of sunburn sting, but the wind is picking up and cooling things off nicely. No one is in the water; the surf is too heavy. It’s so loud I can barely hear myself think.

And maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. Ever since I betrayed Max, back at Hossegor, my life has felt drained dry, as if that event started a soul bleeding that hasn’t really stopped. I still can’t fathom how—or why—Max stood by me, even after I’d done the unthinkable to him. And he was my
friend.
What if Max had died? What I did was the emotional equivalent of premeditated murder. Max refuses to talk about it…and that makes it even harder for me. His noble reaction is such a contrast to my dark action that I can barely look him in the eyes these days.

The dreams I was having before I betrayed Max have virtually stopped, just when I was so close to mastering them. Now I awaken in the mornings with a blank screen and no dream memories. And a vague sense of being in debt, spiritually and emotionally.

The truth is, I’m taking what God wired into me—special gifts for discerning the present and an almost supernatural sense of balance and focus—and I’m using them to win surf contests. How tacky. It seems like every year, I get more and more entangled in broken responses to impossible demands.

I keep looking at the horizon—can’t keep my eyes off of it. Something is wrong; I can feel it. The rest of the world vanishes as I scan the rough waves with eyes trained for years to spot every tiny fluctuation in the water.

But there’s no one out there.

Since the day I cut Max off, I’ve felt like damaged goods. I’m lost around my father. Clueless around my mother—I don’t seem to be able to access any of her goodness. I don’t have a girlfriend.

Only Adri and Max hang in there with me, willing to go the distance.

Kati

T
HE TIDE IS HIGH
, and it’s blocked my path forward. No more sand beach. Just crashing waves on the left and rocks on the right. It’s getting darker. I should probably climb through the clefts of the moonlit rock on the right to the main path along the Pacific Coast Highway.

Whoa. That wave just rolled past me, and the little remaining sand is crumbling beneath my feet as it washes back. It’s like the water lapping around my legs wants to suck me right out into the dark ocean. Is it only me, or is the wind really whipping up too? There are whitecaps on the huge waves out there.

I’m starting to get cold. After all these years, I still have zero body mass; I can never keep warm. If it wasn’t for the flowered wrap dress I’m wearing, it would still be hard for people to tell my gender…maybe except for my long braid. My swimsuit top, under the beach wrap, is more or less pointless.

Oh, great. My eyes are starting to burn again because of that now.

Well, I can escape the incoming tide if I climb through the rocks up to the path. In any case, I am NOT going back to the party scene behind me. On the other hand, one way or another I have to try to find Zara, eventually, to get home, since I can’t drive. I check my Ziffer 1924 watch; it’s almost too dark to read the dials. Zara decided not to bring a phone, because she and all the other perfect girls are wearing virtually nothing and have no pockets, so I can’t call her. I may have to call her family. Phone in my wrap dress pocket? Yup.

I certainly don’t want to face all of Mutti’s questions about how this day has unraveled.

Talk about epic fail.