Ripped - Cassia Leo Page 0,9
the dog to get in, then I round the front of the truck and climb inside. “And I’m almost four thousand points ahead of Carlos Ferreira in the CT rankings now. Did you see that?”
“Yeah, my phone’s been ringing off the hook with interview requests. Every time I’m in the shop, I’ve got kooks on me, asking how many lessons they have to buy to be as good as Adam Parker.” The huge grin on her face as I drive off toward the beach tells me she doesn’t mind the added attention a single bit.
Lena began training me in January, almost nine months ago, when my old trainer, Remy Dufrense, up and moved to Florida without notice. He and his ex-wife got remarried and moved back in together. Lena was supposed to be my interim trainer until I found someone more qualified. Not that Lena isn’t qualified.
She’s been surfing seventeen years and she and Yuri own a surf shop in Carolina Beach, where they also offer surf lessons. She’s been Yuri’s trainer ever since they’ve been together, and he’s made it to every World Surf League qualifying series for the past eleven years. But this year, he didn’t even qualify for that. Everyone knows that once you don’t qualify for a qualifier, you’re pretty much done. Like me, Yuri probably doesn’t want to consider the possibility that his surf career may be over at thirty-two years old.
Once we find a parking spot, Lena grabs my Firewire and I grab my Channel Islands short board. When we’re on the beach, Dioji lies down on the warm sand and watches as Lena and I do some yoga and calisthenics before I head out on the water. When we’re done, she calls the shop to ask Frida to close up, but Yuri answers the phone, surprising both of us.
“I thought you were too stoned to do anything,” Lena says, flashing a look of disgust in the direction of the phone in her hand, then she rolls her eyes and holds the phone out to me. “He wants to talk to you.”
I take the phone and sigh because I know exactly what Yuri’s going to say. “What do you want?”
He chuckles. “Hey, don’t take that tone with me. Just because you’re number one in the league doesn’t mean you can treat us little people like the turds we are.”
“No. The answer is no.”
“Ah, man. You didn’t even let me ask the question and you’re already shooting me down?”
For the past few years, ever since Yuri and Lena opened up the surf shop, Yuri has been begging me to give him my first surfboard. It’s a custom board my uncle Mark made for me when I was eleven. I thought it looked cool, but I didn’t think I’d like surfing that much, until the first time I stood up on that board in the water. There was no feeling quite like it. Three years later, I entered my first surfing competition. Except for the two years I took off during college, I’ve been competing for sixteen years. That may seem like a lot to some, but it feels like a heartbeat to me.
“I told you I’m not giving it to you,” I reply. “You can beg all you want, but when I’m old and gray and it’s time for Lindsay to start pushing me around in a wheelchair, I’m gonna turn Ripped into a hoverboard so I can ride around the nursing home in style.”
Ripped is the name of my first surfboard. I named it that because Myles, my best friend who died at his first surfing competition, used to always say, “You ripped that shit up!” whenever I came back to shore after a good session. It’s the only surfboard I own that has a name.
“You’re so full of shit, man,” Yuri replies, not buying my senior-citizen hoverboard story. “Come on! It’s just standing there in your workshop collecting dust. I’ll shine it up nice and put it up on the wall in the shop. It will attract a ton of visitors and it will be admired long after you retire.”
“Who told you I’m retiring?”
“You gotta retire at some point.”
I sigh and hand the phone back to Lena. “I’m not talking about that board with him anymore.”
She rolls her eyes. “He just won’t let it go,” she says, bringing the phone to her ear.
She and Yuri talk for a few minutes about the shop, then Lena and I sit down to discuss the Tahiti