dad, for Pox, for all those guys, it’s not about any of that. For them, it’s about competition and winning and making new surfers feel like shit. It’s about ruling the break, being royalty, the prince. They miss the point.”
Everything he says meshes with what Alix feels about surfing and how Stephanie relates to nature, and what I felt during my short surfing experience. “No one can be prince of the waves,” I say. “The ocean can’t be ruled by puny people. It doesn’t even know we exist. We’re lucky it lets us hang out in it sometimes.”
He laughs again, though I wasn’t trying to be funny. “Exactly. You get it. But if my dad or any of the Plagues heard me talking like this … It’s hard to go against your friends and your family, against who they think you are and who they expect you to be. Sometimes I feel like I’m living a secret life. Prince of the Waves on the outside. Somebody else—I don’t even know who yet—on the inside. But I want to stop pretending.”
“So stop, then.”
“It’s not so easy for me. Not like for you. You say exactly what you feel.”
“Me?” My voice goes up an octave.
“You stood up in class and said you hated everyone.”
“Oh God, not that!” I try to hide my face in my hands, but that puts me off balance and I almost fall into the tide pool below our feet. Brendon saves me by wrapping his arm around my waist.
“It was weird as hell, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how you said exactly what you felt. I can’t stop thinking about you. Meg, do you hate me, too? Please don’t hate me.”
I can’t speak. I can only feel his hands.
“Is this okay? That I’m holding you like this?”
I nod approval and manage words, the right words, I hope. “Let the real you out. People will like that person. I really like him.”
He’s so close and I feel him wanting to get even closer. I want to confess my biggest secret to him, too: I’m not what I appear to be on the surface, either. But I stop myself. I don’t dare. I can’t.
With his free hand he takes my face by the chin, turns it in his direction. We are nose to nose, belly to belly. He kisses me, and he tastes of salt water and apples and a taste that’s uniquely him. We kiss and kiss again, moving only our mouths so that we can stay on the rock.
Then who cares about getting wet? Not me, not us. We make the decision together silently, and stumble into six inches of freezing-cold water, hardly feeling a change in temperature, and we keep kissing with the sea stars overhead and the barnacles and mussels hunkered down on the walls and hermit crabs scurrying around.
It feels like we’ll never stop kissing. Neither of us wants to. And maybe we wouldn’t have, except for the big wave breaking through the barrier of the cave. Water surges to our knees before being sucked away again. This time we can’t ignore the cold or the danger of the rising surf. We laugh and kiss again and hop around splashing each other. Brendon checks his watch. He sounds slightly drunk, and that’s the way I feel, too. Drunk and shivering and happy.
“Tide is coming back in hard. We should have left five minutes ago. We need to scramble.”
He leads me away by the hand. In my mind I say good-bye to the crabs, the barnacles, the urchins and anemones, and to the seal’s-eye view of the Prince of the Waves.
I wonder: will I ever return to this dangerous, magical spot that exists for only a few precious moments at a time?
22
I can’t help myself. I have no control. The next morning, as soon as I spot Alix, Stephanie, and Ambrosia—the people in the world who mean everything to me—I spill the whole story. About the boardwalk, the cave, the kissing. We’re in the parking lot before school, and I rest my backpack at my feet so I can use my hands to demonstrate how we balanced together on the rock.
“Just how far did this lustfest go?” Alix asks.
“Lustfest? It was just light kissing.”
The same skeptical look passes over all three faces. “Okay, okay! Tongues got involved,” I admit. “And hands. But we remained perfectly vertical.”
Alix wipes some crusty sleep from her eyes. “Bad taste in guys. Plan on getting it on with Gnat, too?