The Green Room by Deborah Turrell Atkinson Read Free Book Online Page B

attracted both Storm’s and the commentator’s attention. He watched several moments without even appearing to blink. One of the surfers, in black shorts and a black rash guard, finished a nice backhand cutback and headed for the leading curl of the wave.
    â€œIs Nahoa wearing the red and white shorts?” she asked Robbie.
    â€œYeah, you can tell it’s Nahoa because he’s goofy, remember? His right foot is forward.”
    Their new friend looked over at Robbie. “Hey, you’re right. This is a right-hand break, though, which puts him at a slight disadvantage.”
    Robbie looked at him with concern, then back through the binoculars. “He hasn’t gone yet. I think he’s waiting for the guy on the wave.” Robbie pointed without bothering to lower the glasses, then gasped.
    Storm could see what happened without the binoculars. The black-clad surfer had misjudged the leading edge of the fourteen foot wave, and the curl slapped him from his board as if he were a mosquito. The guy bounced twice before the wave closed out on him and swallowed him in its salty spume.
    Spectators murmured nervously and stood on tiptoe to catch sight of a tiny person on the vast plain of foam. Storm held her breath. “You see him yet?”
    Robbie kept the glasses to his eyes and merely gave his head a quick shake.
    â€œLemme take a look, okay?” The spectator reached for his glasses. Storm’s hands were balled so tightly that her nails dug into her palms. It seemed like minutes before the young man said, “There he is. Probably in the green room for a while.”
    He handed the binocs back to Robbie. “There, it looks like Nahoa Pi‛ilani is taking off.”
    Storm swallowed hard and unclenched her fists. The green room. That’s what people called the underwater space where either a wave shoved a surfer or where she dived to escape the crush of tons of churning water. Storm had been there; she’d been buffeted in the tumult like a dead fish, disoriented to the point that she couldn’t tell up from down. Even with her eyes open, there was no sensation of direction. Everything was green.
    A roar from the crowd brought Storm’s awareness back to the surfer on his rocketing board. The wave was huge, and its thunder dwarfed the excited hum of the spectators. Red and white shorts plunged into a steep takeoff, hung for a moment in a gravity-defying stall, then cut back up the face of the wave. Nahoa launched himself into an aerial and the crowd gasped again in mute admiration, then broke into a throaty cheer. Nahoa landed in a deep crouch and plummeted down the face, leaned way out, and spun his board in a one-eighty. Lifting his body in a move worthy of a ballet dancer, he shot back to the top of the wave and faced the rising curl of the monster. There, he hovered for a breathtaking second, and crouched.
    The crowd hushed. This was the move that the last surfer had blown. Fifteen feet above him, opalescent blue water curved in a fat wall. With a purpose that Storm would have sworn bordered on suicidal lunacy, Nahoa headed into a tunnel that moved with the velocity and mass of a freight train.
    Seconds passed, and no one moved. For Storm, time stood still. Her lungs burned and her eyes teared with the effort of searching for a tiny speck of a person, either against a wall of water or in the acres of white foam on the heaving horizon. She recalled Ken Matsumoto, the surfer who had recently died, and for whom this meet had been postponed.
    Suddenly, a tiny figure in red and white shorts squirted from under a blue curtain on the shoulder of the wave. The spectators went crazy. Storm and Robbie threw their arms around each other, and it was a few moments before they realized that their friend with the binoculars was hugging them, too.
    â€œWhat’d I tell ya? He does what he has to,” the young man shouted. “He’s the best.”
    Storm wanted to sit down