Waking Up to Boys

by Hailey Abbott

  “You’re good at tennis,” Sebastian said, his voice open and genuine. “You should keep practicing when you go home.”

  “I think I will,” Francis said. “I never thought I’d say this—I mean, I only took these lessons because my mom wanted me to—but I really like it.”

  “Excellent,” Sebastian replied, giving Francis a high five. “And if you ever have questions or if you just want to talk or anything, you have my e-mail.”

  “Thanks,” Francis said, turning and jogging off, his feet never seeming to leave the ground.

  Chelsea felt a twinge of regret. Sebastian was hot, and a really good guy, and much better at teaching than she would ever be. Maybe she had been stupid to dump him. But she knew in her heart that there was no way she’d ever be able to feel the way about him that she did about Todd. She just hoped that he would be able to forgive her. Squaring her shoulders, she called his name.

  Sebastian turned slowly, and his face darkened. “What do you want?” he asked.

  Chelsea realized she was nervous. She had been up half the night trying to figure out what to say to Sebastian to make things okay, but now that he was actually in front of her, she couldn’t remember any of the speech she’d planned.

  “I, uh…thought I owed you an explanation.” Her throat was suddenly tight and dry.

  “You explained enough last night.” Sebastian clutched his racket more tightly as he approached. But despite the harshness of his words, his tone wasn’t angry. He just seemed resigned.

  “No, I didn’t,” Chelsea insisted, lacing her fingers through the fence as Sebastian came around to the other side. “I didn’t tell you how great I think you are. You’ve been amazing to me. You were so sweet this summer and you taught me about…well…about guys and stuff. Because before I met you, I had, like, zero experience with guys.”

  She watched his eyebrows rise in surprise and pressed on. “Seriously, Sebastian—I’d barely ever kissed a guy, let alone dated one. And you were so nice and patient and—”

  “Chelsea,” Sebastian interrupted her. “I had no idea. You were so poised and confident when it came to physical stuff. Like that night in the Shag Shack—”

  Her cheeks grew hot. “That was my first time,” she said. “Well, if it even counts as a ‘time.’”

  Sebastian laughed. “Mine, too,” he said, leaning against the fence. “And I can’t figure out if it counts, either.”

  This time it was Chelsea’s turn to be surprised. “But you act like you have tons of experience with girls,” she said. “You’re all passionate and romantic—and you’re such a good kisser!”

  Sebastian shrugged and smiled boyishly. “At home, I’m just a tennis geek,” he admitted. “I spent most of my life training and competing before I realized it wasn’t for me. The way I acted this summer? I was just acting like the rich, confident men who bring women to the country club where I worked in Rio. I never really had a girlfriend. That’s partly why I wanted to date you—I thought a strong, self-assured girl would be good for me.”

  Chelsea couldn’t believe it. “You mean we had each other fooled all along?”

  “I guess so,” Sebastian agreed. “You were a good girlfriend, Chelsea.”

  “You’re not mad at me?” Chelsea asked.

  Sebastian shook his head. “Not mad,” he said. “A little sad. I would have liked to spend the last few days here with you. But it would have ended anyway. And even if it’s ending now, it was still pretty good.”

  “Thanks,” Chelsea said, taking his hand. “I think so, too.”

  Sebastian leaned forward and kissed her gently, chastely on the lips. “You’ll always be my maybe-first, Chelsea,” he said. “Now do what you gotta do. I’m rooting for you.”

  “Okay, I want you to both listen very carefully,” Chelsea said to the McCullough boys, who sat facing her in the boat in the middle of the lake, each of them eagerly clutching a board in his hands.

  “I can’t listen carefully,” Matt complained. “I have ADHD. It means I can’t sit still ever, even for a second.”

  “Well, that’s why you’re about to get in the water and pretend you’re being chased by a giant bloodthirsty shark,” Chelsea explained.

  Both boys’ eyes lit up. “They’re not real sharks, are they?” Mikey asked worriedly.

  “No, stoopid,” Matt huffed, elbowing his brother in the ribs.

  Chelsea glared at him. “Of course they’re not real sharks,” she said gently to Mikey. “There are no sharks in Lake Tahoe—only fish. But today, we’re going to pretend there are. So, Matt—listen to me, Matt!” she cried, grabbing him by the back of his life jacket as he attempted to moon a passing tour boat.

  Matt wriggled in his seat and stared up at her with his long-lashed cupid eyes.

  “There are sharks out there,” she said, leaning in as if she were telling them a juicy secret. “They’re swimming back and forth across the wake like this.” She indicated snaking motions with her good hand. “And you always have to stay away from them. But there’s a shark in the wake, too! So when you get to the wake, you have to bend your knees and hop so you leap over the shark’s head.”

  The boys looked at her with round, excited eyes. “Coooool,” they breathed in unison.

  “Ready?” Chelsea asked Matt.

  “Yeah!” Matt said. He raced to the edge of the boat and was about to lower himself into the water when he turned around to face Chelsea. There was something in his face she had never seen before: uncertainty.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Uhm,” Matt said. He sounded embarrassed. “Uh…there’s not really sharks in the water, is there?”

  “No, don’t be a baby!” Mikey screamed, clearly delighted at the opportunity to turn the tables on his bullying brother.

  Matt’s lower lip set in a hard line. “Fine,” he said, and jumped off the boat. Mike and Chelsea watched him swim out and turn around, wobbling a little on the getup but quickly straightening himself.

  “Go wide,” Chelsea shouted over the noise of the boat’s motor as she watched Matt drift away from the wake. “Okay, now there’s a shark chasing you! Quick, come in!” Matt cut in again, and when he was almost to the wake she cried, “Shark!” Matt looked surprised for a moment, but bent his knees and leapt, almost making it all the way over the wake.

  “Good job! Now the next time you come in, the shark is even bigger—so you have to jump higher and clear the whole wake.”

  “Otherwise you’re shark meat!” Mikey shrieked gleefully. As Matt approached the wake a second time, they both screamed, “Big shark!” together, and he went soaring across the wake, landing with a wobble—but still on his feet—on the other side. Mikey and Chelsea cheered, and even from the boat, she could see that Matt had a huge grin on his face.

  Chelsea smiled to herself. It might have been nearly the end of summer, but she was finally starting to get this whole teaching thing down.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chelsea sat tensely on the contestants’ bench, sweat pouring down her back so that her best competition wetsuit clung to her body even though she hadn’t even gotten in the water yet. All around her, the resort was bustling with color and noise: Bright advertisements from the Challenge’s sponsors covered every inch of the metal bleachers set up along the lakeshore, announcements blared over loudspeakers, motorboats sputtered to life, and the deeply tanned, visor-bedecked crowd chattered excitedly in the stands.

  The chaos had descended on the resort the morning before as contestants, fans, reporters, and their friends and family began arriving in droves. They backed up traffic on the long winding driveway and clogged the lobby with their overstuffed luggage and loud voices, occupying every room and cabin to bursting.

  Chelsea’s parents were ecstatic—business had never been so good! But as she ran around helping her parents with the extra workload, Chelsea was also keeping an eye on the influx and beginning to get very, very nervous. Her arm had just come out of th
e cast a few days before and still felt very weak. Everyone had been telling her all summer that she’d be crazy to still do the Challenge after her injury, and she was finally starting to believe them. Plus, there was the tiny matter of not having told her parents yet that she was competing. Chelsea knew that as soon as they called her name over the loudspeaker, she was in for it.

  “Monica Kaplan!” boomed the loudspeaker, and Chelsea watched the small freckled girl with spiky blond hair give her boat driver the signal to go. Chelsea sat forward on her seat. Monica was a relative newcomer to the competitive wakeboarding world, but she already had a formidable reputation as a force to be reckoned with.

  Monica got up quickly and cut through the water like a Japanese fighting fish in her aqua-and-neon-pink wetsuit. Her first series of jumps was quick, light, and precise; Chelsea could see that the hype around her was well-deserved. It had been that way with many of the women who had gone before, too: They were simply better than Chelsea had expected.

  Don’t think that way, she told herself sternly. You still have a couple of tricks in your back pocket that you haven’t seen a single one of them do.

  Monica executed a brilliant backflip with a surprising twist right at the end, followed by a series of quick surface turns that made her look more like a ballerina doing pirouettes than someone hanging on to a rope behind a speeding motorboat. At the end of her routine, the crowd in the stands broke into raucous applause and catcalls. Chelsea turned and saw that many of the spectators had gotten to their feet to give Monica a standing ovation. Sweat drenched the small of Chelsea’s back as the tiny doubt that had been there since the morning before blossomed.

  She tried to clear her mind by running through her routine in her head, but got distracted as Monica’s scores blasted out over the speakers: 43.26, 39.51, 39.69, 44.87, 40.04. They were the highest scores yet in their division. Chelsea began chewing on the insides of her cheeks.

  Monica returned to the bench, her pale cheeks flushed. Droplets of water shimmered in her still-spiky hair.

  “Good job out there,” Chelsea congratulated her with grudging admiration. “You looked great.”

  “Thanks!” Monica seemed genuinely pleased. “You’re up next?”

  Chelsea nodded through what seemed like buckets of sweat pouring from every gland in her body. She felt like she might hyperventilate.

  “Good luck, then,” Monica said, reaching out to give her a high five.

  At that moment Chelsea heard her own name screaming through the distortion of the speakers. She took a deep breath, got up, and headed for the boat.

  “Ready?” the driver asked as she strapped her feet into the bindings on her board.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” she replied, striving for a cheerful tone. The truth was, as nervous as Chelsea felt, just being near the water made her feel a little bit calmer. She knew that no matter what happened, she was doing what she was meant to do.

  “Let’s do this!” the driver said, starting the motor. Chelsea’s head didn’t even have a chance to stop spinning before she was in the water and swimming out to the full length of the rope behind the boat. In those brief moments of buoyancy, her head cleared and she found herself entirely focused on the task at hand.

  Chelsea quickly became a combination of animal and machine, with the sleek strength of a panther as well as the speed and precision of an electrical conduit. She flew through her first series of moves. Her mind raced mere moments ahead of her body as she calculated the weight and velocity of each jump and turn.

  She could hear the crowd ooh and aah as she landed, and the sound boosted her courage. She had the rare and spectacular feeling of flying on the water, as if she had grown wings and her feet weren’t touching anything at all. Going into her grand finale, she knew she was going to hit it out of the park.

  She braced herself as she was about to go into her final trick—the one that nobody had ever seen her perform successfully before, but that she knew deep in her heart she could do.

  She gathered every ounce of strength that she had and threw herself into the jump. She felt her body hurtle through the air once, twice, and…

  She reached for the water with her toes, bending her knees in preparation for her landing. But the water wasn’t below her feet where she thought it was going to be. She had only a second to panic before she landed smack on her butt, the towrope slack in her hands.

  A loud, pained gasp went up from the bleachers, and Chelsea realized in horror that she had blown it. A landing like that could take ten points off your score if the judges were feeling generous—and those ten points were enough to land her soundly behind Monica, and probably everyone else.

  As she swam back to the boat, her body felt as old and unwieldy as the rock-topped mountains ringing the lake. She knew that as soon as she stepped onto dry land she would have to stop grumbling and smear a big fake smile on her face. And, sure enough, there was the ESPN3 reporter with his microphone, an even bigger and faker smile stretching his square, tan face. He was surrounded by reporters from lesser local and sports papers, as well as a cameraman and someone dangling a boom mike right in Chelsea’s face.

  “Chelsea McCormick,” he crooned in his sportscaster drawl. “That was some move you tried there. How do you feel after that baaaad digger?”

  Chelsea’s grin felt fragile, like it would shatter at any moment and give way to tears. “It’s too bad I wiped out at the last moment, but I feel like I gave it my best shot and I’m proud of myself anyway,” she lied, not wanting to sound like the sore loser she actually was.

  “You sure did, you sure did,” the anchor agreed. “Not many sixteen-year-old girls have attempted a seven-twenty in competition—and certainly not so soon after recovering from a broken arm. How does that make you feel?”

  How was she even supposed to answer something like that? She stared into the camera for what seemed like an eternity, watching the anchor’s smile strain until it was really more of a grimace. “Well,” she finally said, “I like challenges, and this was definitely a challenge.”

  “Well, it sure was, it sure was!” he replied heartily, laughing more in relief than because he thought what she had said was particularly funny or true. “Hey, it sounds like they’re announcing your scores.”

  Chelsea held her breath while the numbers crackled in huge sound waves around her head. She was definitely way below Monica—in fact, thanks to that landing, she was now closer to the bottom than the top of her division. She wanted to weep.

  “Well, that’s tough luck, now, isn’t it?” The reporter patted her on the shoulder with his huge ham of a hand. “But I bet you’ll do better next year, right?”

  “Of course.” Chelsea stared levelly into the camera and tried her hardest to smile. “There’s always room for improvement.”

  Chelsea watched the rest of the Junior Women’s Division in a daze, her eyes glazed over. She berated herself as she watched other girls with less skill perform far easier routines than she had and still get higher scores.

  She wondered if she was doomed to a lifetime of “almosts.” She had almost nailed the routine, almost had sex with Sebastian, almost made friends with her half sister, and almost gotten Todd to notice that she could be more than just a boarding buddy. Everything was almost there, but not quite. She was becoming deeply, existentially tired of almost. Just once, she wanted things to be perfect.

  “Still brooding over that landing?” Chelsea blinked to clear the haze in her head and saw Todd standing in front of her.

  “No,” she said.

  “Liar.” Todd plopped into the empty spot next to her. “I know you’re playing it over and over in your head, thinking about how you could have done it better…and probably wondering what kind of score you would have got if you’d only done a five-forty instead.”

  “How’d you know?” Chelsea asked.

  Todd shrugged. “You’re Chelsea,” he said simply. “That’s what you do. You obsess over how you should have done
everything better.”

  “Well, I should have,” she replied, surprised that Todd knew her that well. “If I hadn’t overcompensated on that last jump, I’d be a shoo-in for first place right now.”

  Todd’s nose was wrinkled in confusion. “Why are you like that?” he asked. “It’s one thing to want to be good, but you always push yourself so hard, like you have to be the best or it’s nothing at all. I want to win, too, but there’s something really intense about how competitive you get.”

  “Why am I so competitive?” Chelsea asked in disbelief. “Why do I always push myself so hard? Because I have to be the best, that’s why! I have to win so I can prove that I’m better than you.” Chelsea clamped her hand over her mouth, shocked to hear the words even though she had long known them to be true.

  The furrows on Todd’s face deepened. “But you know you’re better than me,” he said quietly. “And I do, too.”

  Despite the staticky roar of loudspeaker announcements and the crowd, that moment felt silent to Chelsea. Silent, and suspended in midair like a wave still swelling before crashing into the shore.

  “Do you really mean that?” she asked finally.

  “Yeah,” Todd said. “And most of the time, it kills me knowing it. I knew you were going to be good—probably better than me—from the first lesson I gave you. It hasn’t been easy, Chelsea. But you’re the best, and you deserve to win.”

  With that, he got up and began walking away. “Wait!” Chelsea called after him. Her mind was still somewhere back on you’re better than me.

  Todd turned and looked at her, the expression on his face one of both pain and triumph. “What?” he asked.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “To resign from the finals,” Todd told her. “I can’t compete knowing you’re the one who deserves to win.”

  “Todd, what? Wait!” Chelsea called after him. But if Todd heard her this time, he didn’t turn around. Her head spun and her chest felt empty and cold. Todd had just given her what she always wanted. Why did it still feel like it wasn’t enough?