And how could the shutters of the Old House possibly have any effect on the local sailing conditions?
Still, I was confident the answers to all these questions would come—along with the rest of the chapter and the remaining twenty-nine other chapters I planned to write—just as soon as I got to Honolulu. All I had to do was keep my job at Project Icon for a few more months, so I could afford the ticket to get there.
It was tough in LA without Brock, though. I missed his stupid jokes, his refusal to think about anything too deeply. “He lightens you up,” as Mom once said. “You need that, dear. Especially after what you’ve been through with your father.”
In fact, Brock and I wouldn’t have started dating if it hadn’t been for Dad’s funeral: He just happened to be working behind the bar at Billy McQuiffy’s when we all piled in there after the service. (It’s a King family traditional to get drunk after—or during—most significant occasions.) I already knew Brock Spencer Daniels from Babylon High, of course. He’d practically been a celebrity when I was there: too slight for football, but a huge track and field star. Oh, and his girlfriend was Jenny Baker—who kept having to take days off for modeling shoots in Manhattan. Brock and Jenny were a couple of such impossible glamour, kids had posters of them pinned up on their bedroom walls.
Brock lost his way after senior year, though. He got into college—an athletic scholarship—but dropped out for some vague reason after a few months. Then Jenny dumped him for a police officer: a female police officer. He’d been in limbo ever since. Working for his dad during the week. Chasing waves in Montauk at the weekend. His plan, he told me, was to make surfing a career. He’d already won a few championships, and his next goal was to get an endorsement deal. That’s why he wanted to go to Hawaii, where most of the board makers were based.
When I saw Brock that afternoon in Billy McQuiffy’s, he was just as absurdly handsome as I remembered. Same shaggy dark hair. Same outdoorsy tan. Same blue-gray eyes. I wasn’t exactly in the mood for romance after the funeral, of course. And maybe Brock wasn’t interested, either. But he did make the first move.
“Hey, wanna go skydiving tomorrow?” he asked, pouring my fourth refill. (By then we’d already been through the don’t-I-know-you-from-somewhere conversation, which basically established that no, he didn’t remember me at all.)
“Skydiving?”
“I’m going with Pete Mitchell,” Brock elaborated. “You remember Pete, doncha?”
“Crazy Pete who got a pencil sharpener stuck up his nose in seventh grade?”
“Yeah, Crazy Pete. A buddy of his has got a jump school down near the Keys. He’s offered us some free rides, as long as we gas up the plane ourselves.”
“Wow, Florida,” I said, now even more surprised by the invitation. “How are you getting there?”
“My mom’s SUV.”
“Where are you staying?”
“My mom’s SUV.”
I laughed. “Thanks for the offer, Brock. I’d really love to. But I’m not going to be much fun. I’m going to be the opposite of fun, actually. Now isn’t a good time.”
“You kidding me?” said Brock. “The day after your dad’s funeral is the best time.”
Brock was right: I needed a distraction. And as I found out when we got to Florida, it was impossible to think about Dad—anything, really—while falling from a plane at 115 mph. Especially given that I was strapped to a man named Crazy Pete.
Nothing happened between Brock and me on that trip, I should add. Nothing physical, anyway. But when we went back to the Keys a few weeks later—this time, no Pete—we got through two bottles of wine on the first night and woke up in an embrace so close, it took a day for the circulation to return to my left arm.
All that was two years ago—and we barely spent a day apart until I left for LA.
Being separated from Brock wasn’t the only difficult thing about living out West, of course: I was also broke—a result of trying to put at least half of every paycheck into my Hawaii fund. Hence my crappy Little Russia basement apartment, which received precisely three minutes of sunlight a day through its single half-pane window, and the fact that I commuted to work on a sit-up-and-beg bicycle, which had somehow become stuck permanently in seventh gear.
“I don’t get it, Meess Sasha,” as my Siberian super kept telling me. “You say you work with