“Hughie?” I say softly, watching the kid take a wave. It’s hard to imagine him addicted to anything but surfing. Right now, he looks like the picture of health. But it would explain the way he lunged at Jas this morning, how desperate he was to get him off the beach and out of his sight.
“And Belle,” Pete adds quietly, a heavy sadness in his voice. “And Belle.”
He stands up suddenly, and I do, too. I know that I’ve just learned something important about this boy, about why he lives and surfs here, why he holds his crew so close, why he feels responsible for them.
“Hey,” I say, grabbing his hand before he can take his board and head into the water. It’s the first time I’ve been the one to take his hand, not the other way around. I pull him close to me and wrap my arms around him in a tight hug. His bare chest is warm against my cheek, and I close my eyes and listen to his heartbeat; this close, it sounds even louder than the waves.
“You’re a good friend,” I say.
“I am?” he asks, his voice so earnest it makes my heart ache.
“You are,” I answer, and I mean it, despite the lies he’s told me. Because I know now that he tries to do the right thing, and that counts for something. It counts for a lot.
“Thank you,” he says, pressing his lips onto the top of my head. I can feel his breath through my hair, warm and steady.
Smiling, I loosen my hold on him. “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything.”
“What were you doing in Newport the night I graduated? Why were you surfing so far from Kensie?”
Pete shrugs. “One thing Jas said this morning was true: you gotta follow the waves. Kensie was a little flat that week. So I had to leave.”
“You had to?” I say, glancing at the ocean, the perfect waves coming one right after the other. “Why, when you knew the waves would come back here eventually?”
“You can’t wait for them to come to you,” he says. “You gotta chase them. Otherwise…”
“Otherwise what?” I ask. I think about my brothers, of the mornings when they were out chasing waves while the rest of the world was still sleeping.
“Otherwise, who knows what chances you might be missing?”
15
The waves that morning grow ever higher, until they’re obviously way too big for me, so I head back up to the house. Alone in my room—strange that I already think of it as mine—I pull out my notebook, ready to write down more about what I’ve learned about Kensington, but instead I find myself writing in it as though it’s a diary, about my frustration at not having found anything, that I can’t say the words “John and Michael Darling” out loud, about the way Jas took on the waves this morning, the way Hughie took on Jas. And finally, I write that I can’t stop thinking about Pete, about my stomach somersaulting every time he comes near.
I must have dozed off because I almost leap out of my skin when there’s a knock on my door. It’s Hughie.
“Sorry I scared ya awake,” he says.
I shake my head, blushing. “No worries,” I say. “What’s up?”
“You left this morning without taking a single wave,” he says.
I nod. “I know. Those waves seemed a little too advanced for me.”
“The waves have calmed down,” he says.
“Come back down to the beach. Everyone’s there.”
I hesitate. I desperately want to get back out on the water, long to recapture that feeling of possibility, of hope, of invincibility, that came when I took a wave with Pete. But doing it on my own, in front of everyone, is something else entirely.
Reading my mind, Hughie says, “I’ll go out there with you. Everyone else is more or less done. They’re just hanging out on the sand.”
I smile and nod. “Okay.”
Hughie paddles out beside me, and once we’re beyond the break of the waves he sits up on his board, so I do the same. “Let’s just watch these babies for a minute,” he says. “You gotta get a feel for ’em before you paddle into one.”
I nod, remembering what Jas said this morning, that the best surfers in the world watch before they take to the water. I look back at the beach; Matt and a few other boys are lying in the sun. Belle is sitting up, watching us. At least Pete isn’t around to see what is sure to be my humiliation. Hughie told me that he took off sometime this morning, headed into town for more supplies.
The roar of the surf is loud but not overwhelming, and I’m suddenly tempted to shout my brothers’ names, like they’re out there on the water right now and even from miles away up the coast they’ll hear me and start paddling back to Kensington, back to me.
“I’m sorry about this morning,” Hughie says.
“What?”
“The way I ran at Jas. I’m a little … I shouldn’t have done that. Not like the guy couldn’t take me if he tried.”
I smile, remembering the way Jas towered over Hughie this morning. “I don’t know,” I say. “You seemed pretty pissed. That always adds at least twenty pounds and six inches worth of strength, right?”
Hughie laughs. “Right,” he agrees.
“What was that all about?” I ask gently. The rhythm of the waves rocks us back and forth, like a mother rocking her baby to sleep.
Hughie doesn’t look at me when he answers. “I used to be a duster,” he says softly.
I have to concentrate to hear him over the surf.
“I crashed at Jas’s place for months, and when I ran out of cash, he put me to work.”
“To work?”
Hughie nods, his fingers tapping the surface of the water. “Yeah. I started selling for him, getting other kids hooked on the shit. And for every new client I brought over, I got my own fresh hit.”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone sound so ashamed. “How did you get away from him?”
“Pete helped me,” he says, gesturing to the beach, to the house on the cliffs. “He saw me surfing one day—not really surfing, just trying to take the smallest baby waves and falling flat on my face. Waves that I used to be able to take in my sleep. The drug zapped all of that out of me. I could barely even paddle anymore.”
“And Pete offered to help?”
Hughie nods. “He said I could stay with him and he’d reteach me to surf. On one condition.”
“What was that?”
“That I never touch the stuff again.”
“And did you?”
Hughie hesitates, his eyes getting cloudy. “I did once. I thought I could wean myself off of it—avoid the withdrawal that way, you know? I thought, ‘I’ll take a half a pill one day, a quarter the next. It’ll be so easy.’ That’s what I thought.”
“But it wasn’t easy?”
Hughie nods. “Course not. Because I had to bring Jas a new client before he’d give me another pill. And it was so much harder to make myself do it, now that I was trying to get off the shit myself, now that I knew just how messed up it had made me. But I did it, and I got my pill. And of course I didn’t take only half. I took the whole thing, wanting to drown everything else out—the guilt, the ache, everything. Pete found me down at the beach, dancing like an asshole. He dragged me upstairs and locked me in one of the bedrooms.”
Hughie flips over on his board so that he’s lying on his back, looking up at the sky. “I don’t know how long it took—a few days, a few weeks—but finally that junk was out of my system. For good. I swore I’d never go back.”
I smile. “Well, that explains why it shook you up to see Jas on this side of the beach.”
Hughie nods, looking out at the water. “Now we just gotta figure out which of these sets has your next wave in it.”
“‘Next’ implies that I’ve already taken one.”