Close Out
Page 17
“What do you want to bet that was the fricken wave of the day?” Lucas asked.
Kai looked out, hoping to see another one coming, but the rest of the waves in the set were nowhere close to that one.
“Could have been our wave,” Lucas said.
“Yeah.”
“Now that everyone thinks Screamers is wide open, I bet you’ll have to watch a lot of those go by.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me it doesn’t bother you.”
“It bothers me,” Kai said. “Believe me, it bothers me.”
“But not enough to do anything about it?” Lucas guessed.
“I already did something about it,” Kai said.
The frown on Lucas’s face turned into a smirk. “Yeah, I guess you did.”
Thirty-four
At the First Bank of Sun Haven Kai stood by the open vault door while a woman used the key he’d found in his father’s medicine cabinet to open one of many safe-deposit boxes that lined the wall. She pulled out a long, thin rectangular container and handed it to Kai, then led him to a room about the size of a closet, with a desk and a lamp inside.
“I’ll wait out here,” she said, closing the door.
Kai sat at the desk and turned on the light. He stared down at the gray metal container. He’d already decided that if it contained money, he wasn’t going to take it. He lifted the metal lid. Inside was a wrinkled manila envelope held closed by a rubber band.
Kai slid off the rubber band and opened the envelope. Out fell a birth certificate, a folded yellow card with his immunization records, a photo of his mother holding a baby with blue eyes, and a one-way plane ticket to Hawaii.
Kai stared at it all in disbelief. It was almost impossible to accept that the Alien Frog Beast had done this for him. Kai put the papers back into the manila envelope, then placed the envelope in his pocket. He closed the metal container and sat for a long time without moving.
“Is everything okay?” the woman waiting outside asked.
“Yeah.” Kai got up and went back out, handing the container to her. A moment later he left the bank and stood on the sidewalk, feeling the sun’s rays on his face.
He had a decision to make. A big one. But either way, he had a feeling it was going to be okay.
Todd Strasser is the author of more than one hundred novels for teens and middle graders including the best-selling Help! I’m Trapped In … series. His novels for older teens include The Accident, The Wave, Give a Boy a Gun, and Can’t Get There from Here. Todd and his kids have surfed Hawaii, California, and the eastern seaboard from Florida to New York.
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