We sat there, not looking at one another for a while. Over the years, I would come to realize that it was a no-brainer of a choice for too many reasons to run through. But at that moment, my second-place finish filled me with unfettered bitterness.
I stood up and shoved my hands into the pockets of my shorts. “You gotta go to Princeton.”
“I don’t have to,” she said, trying to hold the sobs in her chest. “I could figure out another way to go, without their help.”
We both knew that wasn’t true, not at that point in our lives. And I knew, somewhere in my mind, that Kate wanted to go to Princeton. She wouldn’t say it and I couldn’t admit it, but even then, I think, I knew it was true.
“It’s okay,” I told her, turning to her. “You need to go.”
She looked at me, the rims of her eyes red. “We don’t have to tell them. We can still be together. Call each other, you can come visit, I’ll see you when I come home.”
I shrugged. “We can’t hide from them forever. They’ll know. They always do.” I shook my head. “And what if they did find out? You come home for a break or something and they won’t send you back.” I shook my head again. “Not worth it, Kate.”
She looked at me, frustrated, upset, knowing I was right. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just…I don’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say to you.”
My chest felt like it was being squeezed. “You said it fine. I get it.”
“I’m sorry, Noah,” she said, her tears spilling onto the concrete of the sidewalk.
“Me, too,” I said.
I turned and headed up the walk. I heard her call behind me, probably wondering where I was going, since we’d planned to spend the night. But it was easy to lose her voice in the commotion of the evening revelers. I was heading to the dock to catch the last ferry. I didn’t turn around because I couldn’t look at her, couldn’t spend one more minute with her if we couldn’t be together the way I wanted to be together.
And she didn’t come after me.
If I’d known that was the last time I’d see her alive, I would’ve turned around. Maybe I would’ve even taken on her parents. But I didn’t know that. You can’t ever know that. So I kept walking, hoping that the feeling in my chest that was squeezing tears out of my eyes would eventually go away.
10
I opened the sliding screen door to my place just before one in the morning, the smell of jalapenos and nacho cheese immediately burning into my nostrils.
“Honey, you’re home,” Carter Hamm said from the sofa amidst a pile of beer cans, plastic wrap, and tortilla chips.
“How did you ever convince me to give you a key?” I asked, shutting the door behind me.
“I didn’t,” he said, wiggling his enormous frame into a sitting position. “I stole one.”
“Ah.”
He grinned, looking like a humongous Cheshire cat. “Ah.”
Carter had played center to my small forward in high school, pulling guard to my fullback and juvenile delinquent to my better judgment. Despite our differences-the main one being that I thought the law should be obeyed and he thought the law was a pain in his ass-we had remained surfing buddies, occasional coworkers, and good friends.
He stretched out his legs, the bottom half of his six-foot-nine body unfurling like a damp straw wrapper. His bleached white hair glowed in the dark room, his black eyes shining against his tan skin. The white T-shirt said DO ME in big black letters, and long red shorts hung loosely to his knees. His size-sixteen feet were bare, his sandals most likely buried somewhere beneath the tornado of crap he had created on my sofa.
He lifted a paper plate in my direction. “Nachos?”
“No thanks,” I said, tossing my keys on the kitchen counter. I walked to the fridge, pulled out a Red Trolley, ripped the cap off, and drank half of it.
Carter let out a low whistle. “Dude, if I had known we were gonna be drinking, I would’ve waited for you.”
“We’re not drinking,” I mumbled, staring out the back door. The whitecaps in the ocean did nosedives under the moonlight.
I felt Carter’s eyes on my back. “You alright?”
“No, not really.”
“Gonna tell me?”
“Not now.”
“Cool. You wanna hit the water?”
I watched the ocean shiver and shake a hundred yards away, empty and navy blue in the dark. I knew that some time on my board trying to decipher and outsmart the waves might temporarily salve my wounds.
I finished the beer and set the empty bottle on the counter.
I turned to Carter. “Let’s go.”
11
There is something mystical about surfing between the darkness of the ocean and the glow of the evening moonlight. It isn’t just that you feel dwarfed by the planet in the quiet of the night, but more like you have found the edge of the world and could dive off if you wanted to.
That edge was where I learned to hide when I was growing up.
When I was nine years old, a family down the street was moving out of town and they gave me an eight-foot board that was dinged up and otherwise headed for the trash. I took it down to Mission Bay that afternoon and spent three hours learning to stand on it in the calm, flat water. The next afternoon I took the bus down to Law Street and watched the locals tear up the waves, sucking in their movements and committing to memory how they maneuvered their boards so easily through the water. I waited until about sunset, when everyone else had gone, and paddled out.
On the ninth try, I managed to get myself up long enough to feel like a surfer.
After that ninth try in my ninth year, the ocean became my real home, much calmer than the house in Bay Park. There was no drunken mother passed out on the shoreline, no unknown father haunting me below the surface of the water. I grew up on three-foot, left-breaking sets that you could bounce all the way in to the shore.
The ocean and its waves raised me and I was better for it.
Carter and I rode for forty-five minutes, carving our boards into the black mass of the waves as they rhythmically approached and then left us. In the quiet darkness, the noise of the boards cutting the water was magnified, like the sound of two large hands rubbing together.
We were straddling our boards out beyond the break. People who don’t surf tend to look at this act as some sort of Zen-like activity that surfers do, trying to become one with the ocean or something like that. In actuality, we sit on our boards because we are too exhausted to paddle in.
“So,” Carter said, running his hands through his soaked hair. “You gonna tell me what the problemo is?”
He looked like a giant buoy sticking straight out of the ocean.
I wiped the water from my eyes. “Remember Kate Crier?”
He pretended to think about it. “Vaguely. She was that girl that you wasted an entire year on, dumped your ass right before she left for college because her parents thought you were trash, and you’ve pined intermittently for over the years.” He paused. “Yeah, Noah. I remember Kate.”
“I found her today. Dead.”
