Blue by Lisa Glass Read Free Book Online

surf lessons, taking them out too far and too deep, just to prove how macho and talented they themselves were. It was way dangerous, and I’d had to help out these clueless girls and their arrogant boyfriends three or four times since I’d started surfing.
    Whitewater. Everyone knows that. When you start surfing, you only surf the whitewater. Straight back to shore and then repeat until you’ve done it hundreds, if not thousands, of times. After six months of that, maybe, just maybe, we’ll talk about riding the curl of a breaking wave.
    People were pulling steaming burgers off disposable barbecues and throwing them into bread rolls. Some tanorexic surf groupie in a short skirt came up and offered one to Zeke.
    “There you go, babe,” she said.
    “No, thanks,” he said.
    “Do you want something else then? Someone’s doing steaks.”
    “I don’t eat meat,” he said, all of a sudden very serious.
    “You’re one of those vegans, are you then?” she asked, like veganism was a terrible disease.
    “No, I’m vegetarian.” I thought about Daniel scarfing down his three Big Macs a day, and his extreme fishing weekenders where he’d camp out on the rocks without any food and only eat if he caught, killed and gutted a fish. Daniel loved the macho bull.
    “Oh,” she said. “Is that different?”
    “Kinda,” Zeke said, giving her a look that said, How stupid are you?
    The girl was still clutching the burger as if she didn’t know what to do with it. Eventually one of the other surfrats came over and plucked it out of her hands, and she drifted off.
    Wes and Garrett rolled their eyes, although I wasn’t sure if this was because they thought being vegetarian was pathetic or the burger-toting girl was.
    Soon enough the sky was full of stars, and a puffed-out Zeke came and sat next to me. I could feel the warmth of him through our clothes. He yawned and, since it was dark, I snuggled next to him and put my head on his shoulder. I felt him sigh in this really nice contented way, and I realized in that moment that I was totally calm and happy.
    Zeke’s brothers had come over too and they were chatting. Zeke was saying something about big waves thundering along like freight trains, and Wes was pointing out that fewer people had surfed the planet’s giant waves than had been to outer space. That Zeke was kind of a pioneer, if you thought about it.
    So Zeke had surfed giant waves too? Had he been there with his friend at Teahupo’o in Tahiti? He hadn’t said that. But if he had surfed that mega-scary reef break, then not telling me about it was freakishly modest.
    Then Zeke said, “Once, during this epic storm swell at Maverick’s, in California, I fell on to my board, landed on my chest and had the wind knocked out of me and I swear I thought I was dead. I had no breath. And I was so far under, just pinned down in the dark, with tons of water pushing on my back. Thought I was gonna pass out from oxygen deprivation. I could feel myself going through all the stages of hypoxia: the mental thrashing around, the throat spasming, the bright stars, and then it all went black.”
    “Sounds way intense,” Garrett said.
    I could hear in Garrett’s voice how he felt about his little brother. It didn’t seem to be an act just to do Zeke a favor with me and the other girls that were listening. Wes and Garrett actually respected him.
    Then Wes said it: “We’re so proud of you, bro. What you do is next-level brave.”
    “I don’t feel brave. When those big waves close out, they explode like bombs, bro, and when I wipe out then, I feel like I’m six inches tall. I don’t think, ‘ Wow, this is the most radical wave ever .’ I think, ‘ SHIT, please don’t kill me, wave. ’”
    “Well, that’s fair enough, brah, ’cause those bombs totally could kill you.” This was Garrett.
    “They probably won’t though. They’ll keep kicking my ass, yeah, but I don’t care. Just so long as I only get injuries I can