by Edie Claire
“Would you?”
“Hell, no,” he laughed. “No way is anyone ever getting me on a surfboard again. Complete humiliation. I totally suck. But I’d go and cheer you on, anyway.”
I smiled at him. A sweet, smart, good-looking, yet self-deprecating jock. What was not to love? Of course Lacey had feelings for him. She must just be afraid he wouldn’t return them. Afraid of losing whatever special bond they already shared.
“Hey, do you have the time?” he asked, looking around him on the beach and grabbing his towel. “I left my phone in the car.”
I hadn’t brought mine either, but I sneaked a peek in Kylee’s bag and made a report.
Matt swore. “I can’t believe it’s that late already. I’ve gotta go.” He stood and dried off with the sandy towel.
I rose with him, disappointed. This would have been the perfect chance for a heart to heart. “Oh, no. Do you really have to head out to practice already? Surely traffic’s not that bad.”
He shot me a canny look. “It’s not just that,” he said in a low voice. “I have to go kill a guy first.”
Uh-oh. It was convenient that he’d broached the subject of Lacey himself — not so convenient that beneath his good-natured exterior, I could now see so much bottled-up anger brewing that I could almost believe he was serious.
“You know that wouldn’t help Lacey at all,” I reminded, just in case he was more serious than I knew. “Right?”
He looked away from me, and his jaw muscles clenched. He didn’t answer. He threw the towel over his head and rubbed at his hair. After a moment he stopped rubbing, but continued standing there with the towel over his head, motionless except for the slow, intentionally controlled movements of his ribcage. “Matt?” I urged again.
He made a growling sound and ripped off the towel. “I’m sick of it, Kali,” he grumbled. “I’m sick of standing by and watching these jerks rip her heart out. She doesn’t deserve that.”
“I agree with you!” I said with enthusiasm, seeing my opening. “But she said herself, she has ‘selection’ issues. So if you really want to help, why don’t you steer her toward somebody better next time?”
I watched with amusement as his forehead wrinkled into a frown. Never mind that he’d suggested the exact same thing a couple hours ago. “Like who?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” I said innocently. “How about your friend who works at La Ola?”
“No way!” Matt barked. “The way he—” He cut himself off with a self-conscious look. “He’s not going out with Lacey. Forget it.”
I squelched a smile. Then I named two more friends of his.
“No,” he said instantly, both times.
“Okay, fine. Forget your friends,” I replied. “Then what about…” I struggled to remember the name of a guy Lacey had told me about from a rival high school. He was a star athlete, and supposedly really good looking, but he also had a reputation for being a player, and there were rumors that the ex he’d dumped last spring was about to be a single mother. “How about… Troy Ferg—”
“Over my dead body!” Matt exploded, his face turning six shades of purple. “Kali, how could you even say that?” He turned away from me and paced six steps, which was fortunate, because I really needed to let out a laugh. I barely had time to recover before he did an about-face and stomped back to me again. “I know you don’t know who he is, but if that guy… Ughh!” He took both hands and mimed an action which the Troy in question would probably not survive.
“Sorry,” I said sincerely. “Bad suggestion. But who do you think she should go out with, then?”
He looked at me, or rather past me, his chest still heaving a bit from the horror of imagining Lacey in the clutches of… well, anybody, apparently. He appeared to draw a blank. “I don’t know,” he said finally, his voice thoroughly agitated. “I have to go.”
He hunted around through our piles of stuff until he found his sandals and keys, then he stepped over and gave me a hug. “Look, Kali, I’m sorry if I yelled at you. I’m just really ticked about… you know.”
“I know,” I said, hugging him back.
“I’m glad you guys asked me to come. Tell everybody I said bye, and to come to La Ola anytime I’m on duty — I’ll make sure everybody gets free chips.”
I chuckled at his worthless offer. All the customers got free chips. “Gee thanks.”
“Later.” He managed to grin at me as he walked away.
I watched him with just the teensiest bit of insecurity. I was almost a hundred percent sure he wouldn’t kill anybody.
“Kali, where’s he going? He leaving already?” a voice called from behind me. I turned to see Zane walking out of the ocean, his mask pulled back over his head, those gorgeous curls of his wet and dripping again. The boardshorts he was wearing were my personal favorites, with bold alternating zigzags of green and blue, and I noted that five months into his recovery from the coma, he was still adding muscle. It took me a second to remember who he was talking about.
I joined him at the water’s edge and explained Matt’s departure. But although I tried to do the noble thing and convince Zane that I was perfectly fine sitting alone on the beach and that he should go right back to snorkeling, I could tell from his expression that I wouldn’t be getting away with that.
He pulled off the mask and snorkel, kicked off his swim fins, and sat down on a towel with me. “I know what you’re doing,” he announced, holding my eyes. “What that ghost made you see… made us see… it’s made you afraid of the water again.”
I looked away. In one way it felt really good to have him know me so well. In another way, it was scary. Not to mention humiliating. “I can’t help it. I know it’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid,” he said gently. “Look, the whole thing freaked me out, too. Of course it hit you harder. You’ve already been fighting that phobia your whole life.”
I still couldn’t look at him. But I did lean into his side a little.
He put his arm around me, and I cuddled up closer. I wondered, briefly, if enjoying his touch so much made me “needy,” but I decided that was taking the independence thing too far. Could I survive without Zane’s affection? Absolutely, and vice versa. But sharing it made us a whole lot happier.
“You don’t have to hide this stuff from me, you know,” he said, his voice bordering on reproachful, even as he held me. “We should be trying to figure it out together.”
I humphed. “Like I can hide anything from you,” I pointed out. “I’m sorry. I guess I just don’t want to think about it. I had myself believing that this new and improved shield of mine was ghost-proof, and it really ticks me off that it failed. I don’t like thinking that I let some dead guy get the better of me. Twice.”
“Hey, he got me, too,” Zane reminded. “I just wish I knew how it worked. And why. Was it really about the boardshorts? I mean…”
I shook my head with a groan. “We’re getting rid of those things today. Maybe this will all just stop then and we’ll never have to figure it out. As long as it’s not…”
My voice trailed off. My stupid mouth was about to blab stuff I didn’t even want to think about.
“What?” Zane asked.
“Nothing.”
“Kali,” he pressed. “Spit it out. We’re in this together, remember?”
I spat it out. “What if it’s me? What if it’s my blood in that water? Not because any ghost made up something to scare me, but because it was always meant to be?”
Zane’s face darkened. “That’s crazy.”
“Is it?” I argued. “How can we possibly know? Doesn’t it all make a weird kind of sense, if you think about it? I’ve always had these abilities. Maybe I’ve always been afraid of drowning, too. I’ve always thought that my fear of water started because I fell in that stupid fish pond when I was in preschool. But what if falling in water that shallow only freaked me out so much because I was already afraid?”
Zane drew in a ragged breath,
and fear sliced through me as I watched the logic of my argument become clear to him.
“What if I’ve always been fated to drown?” I said roughly, my voice threatening to crack. “What if these windows the ghosts are opening up are actually… scenes from my own future?”
“There’s no reason to think that!” Zane said sharply. “None. Since when does anyone know the future? It could be an attack aimed at where your confidence is weakest. Or it could be your own mind playing out your own worst fear. It could be a million other things!”
I released a pent-up breath. “It’s my own mind I’m afraid of,” I confessed. I caught his gaze and held it. “I wish it was as simple as a ghost ‘attacking’ us. But the more I think about it, the less sense it makes! We may not understand everything there is to know about our abilities, but one thing we do know for sure is that we’re stronger when we’re together. I’ve seen more shadows and been more sensitive to emotions since I’ve met you, but I also have a whole lot more power to block them when we’re touching. You said yourself you’ve done more intense remote viewing when you’re with me! So tell me this. Why is it that the worst ghost ‘attack’ ever happened to both of us when we were together at the car? My defenses should have been at their strongest then!”
A flicker of angst shot across his handsome face. “Were you trying to block… at that moment?”
“Yes,” I answered heavily. “I made a point of it, because the same thing happened to me before when I handled the clothes in the suitcase. But it didn’t work!”
I burrowed my head into his shoulder and wrapped my arms around him, as much for his consolation as my own. “Now you see what’s bothering me. Either I’m being attacked by something way too powerful for my defenses — or it’s not really an attack at all. It’s just my own brain trying to tell me something.”
I closed my eyes and held him tight. “And I don’t even know which is worse.”
Chapter 15
We were back outside of Zane’s apartment, dropping him off and getting ready to head back home, when Tara’s phone rang.
I had done my best to hide my increasing angst, and so had Zane. But the truth was that sharing my fears aloud had only made them seem more real to me. And although his superior acting skills allowed him to hide it better, I knew that he was every bit as disturbed as I was over the drowning thing. I knew because even though the surf was pancake flat the whole rest of the afternoon, not once did he insist that I get back in the water.
For Zane, that was the equivalent of a major freakout.
“Who is this? Oh, hi!” Tara said happily into her phone. I noticed that her nose and forehead were shining bright pink, and I felt guilty for not pushing the sunscreen. My land-locked friend wasn’t used to the glare effect of the sand and water; she was going to fly back looking like a lobster. “We’re on our way to Mililani now.” She paused a moment. “You what?”
Even as I watched, her face fell. Then her forehead knitted into a frown. “Are you kidding me?”
“Uh-oh,” Kylee murmured. “Methinks TJ is blowing her off again. This will not end well.”
“Look,” Tara said sternly, using a voice I’d only heard her use on her little brothers. “I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but I need my stuff, okay? If you’ll just tell me where it is, I’ll come there and I will get it myself.”
Zane stopped in the process of unlocking his door and looked at her warily. When Tara used “the tone,” it didn’t matter what actual words came out of her mouth. Everyone within hearing distance who was now or had ever been a mischievous little boy automatically felt their sphincters tighten.
There was a much longer pause, during which Tara’s expression gradually softened. “Yeah, okay. I understand,” she said finally. “No, that’s cool. Sure, that’d be fine. I mean, hold on a minute.” She put down the phone and looked at me. “He’s offering to deliver it wherever we want first thing tomorrow morning. He has to leave Mililani right now — something came up. He says he feels really bad. Anyway, he doesn’t want us to have to drive anywhere else out of our way again. Is that okay?”
I shrugged. “Sure. Just have him drop it off at the house. When exactly?”
We set up a time, I gave out the address, and Tara hung up. She dropped the phone into her bag and then stood still a moment, staring into space. “That was weird,” she said finally.
“Weird how?” Kylee asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just that from his texts and his voice mails, I expected him to be some semi-literate clod, you know? But talking to him, he wasn’t like that. He really did sound sorry about everything. He didn’t say what was going on with him exactly, but he seemed really busy, like stressed out. Geez, I almost felt sorry for the guy.”
Kylee snorted. “Well, that is weird. When he cancelled out again I thought you were going to give him TaraTime or something.”
I laughed, then turned to Lacey and Zane with an explanation. “Um, it’s kind of a twist on timeout as a babysitter’s punishment. Except TaraTime involves being forced to clean things.”
“I may still do that,” Tara retorted, although she smiled as she said it. “But I do really believe he’s sorry. He was actually pretty nice about it.”
Kylee and I exchanged a glance. Was it just the budding sunburn, or was our Tara actually glowing a bit?
“Hmmm,” Kylee purred suggestively. “And about how old did this mysterious Tim Jones’ voice sound?”
Tara shrugged. “I don’t know, but his name’s not Tim Jones. That’s some other guy he was traveling with. He said his name is Makani.”
Zane pulled his door shut again with a slam. He’d only just managed to open it. He stood there with his hand on the doorknob, his key still extended, his eyes wide and staring.
“What did you say?” I asked Tara, praying that Zane would remain standing. I sidestepped closer to him as I awaited Tara’s answer. Maybe if he passed out, I could at least keep him from hitting his head on the ground.
“Makani?” she repeated. “I’m pretty sure that’s what he said.”
“Really?” Lacey asked with enthusiasm, her own eyes widening.
Zane made a gurgling noise.
“Steady,” I teased, throwing an arm around his middle. “Try to breathe.”
“What’s wrong with the name Makani?” Tara asked.
“What’s wrong with him?” Kylee asked, pointing to Zane with concern.
I laughed. “Um… I guess you could say he’s having a fangirl moment.”
Zane tried to turn and glare at me, but his effort was half-hearted. He took a deep breath and gave his head a shake. “Makani Marro,” he announced to them both, “is not only a professional surfer, he is the next great hope for a Hawaiian World Champion! Doesn’t the name even sound familiar to you? He’s a superstar! Grew up right over in Waialua, blew away the pro juniors, made the CT as a rookie when he was only eighteen. He’s nineteen now, and with the big win he just had at the Pro Tahiti, he’s sitting in the number one spot — on track to win it all!”
Zane’s delivery of this information, needless to say, was profoundly dramatic, and by the end of it he had Kylee and Tara blinking at each other, equally impressed and bewildered.
“Well if he’s that big a deal,” Kylee said finally, “why didn’t he just say so?”
“Why would he?” Lacey pointed out. “If I were him, I wouldn’t. Zane’s right — around here, Makani’s a rock star. For all he knows, Tara could be some stalker chick who stole his suitcase on purpose.”
“We don’t know for sure it’s the same guy,” Tara said skeptically. “All we have is a first name. Surely the name’s not that unusual.”
“But his bag came from Tahiti, and it had a contest jersey in it!” Zane reminded. Then he clapped a hand to his forehead and swung around to look at me. “Kali! The boardshorts! Just picture him up on that podium at the awards ceremony… I could swear he was wearing a pair just like that! Do you remember?”
I had watched the contest with Zane, partly on cable in my parents’ living room and partly online. Since the various rounds took days to complete, I could hardly claim to have paid attention to every minute of it, and I had no memory of what any of the surfers’ boardshorts looked like. But if Zane claimed to remember details of the final ceremony, I believed him. Surfers noticed surf gear. And Makani was sponsored by AirTide.
“It’s almost certainly him, Tara,” I agreed.
“This is so exciting!” Lacey cried with a bounce. “And you’ll all get to meet him tomorrow! That is so cool!”
Zane looked from Tara to me, and his green eyes danced. He flexed his biceps in cartoonish fashion. “Kali, I don’t suppose you or your mom need any manly chores done around your house tomorrow? Say around ten oh crap!”
“Ten oh crap?” I laughed. “No, but maybe around nine oh crap?”
“No!” he exclaimed. “This is serious! I can’t! I have orientation tomorrow!”
My smile faded. “Oh.”
“I can’t skip that!” he groaned. “It’s registration.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “But you’re right, you really can’t skip. You won’t get the classes you want.”
He made a pained sound, and as I threw a sympathetic arm around him, I noticed that Kylee and Tara were communicating via some bizarre nonverbal gestures. “Well,” Kylee announced, “we’ll head on back to the car and leave you two alone for a few. But don’t keep us waiting too long!”
The three of them thanked Zane again for lunch, then walked away down the road toward where my dad’s car was parked.
“Something’s up,” I told Zane as they moved out of sight.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. But I wouldn’t get too comfortable.” I turned and nestled into his arms anyway. “I’m really sorry you can’t meet Makani tomorrow. I know what it would have meant to you.”
“It’s okay,” he answered. “I would have embarrassed you all anyway, what with the screaming and everything.”