Sunrise

by Melissa J Morgan

  Danica just shrugged. “That’s up to Ben.”

  “Raw meat is gross,” said Sasha with a shudder.

  “Actually, it’s not just gross, it’s sort of dangerous,” Emmy said.

  A shiver ran down Cassie’s spine. Wait—what are they talking about? She scanned the crowd, trying to make sense of it. “What’s going on?” she whispered.

  But the C.I.T. beside her shushed her. Ben had just come back, raw meat bulging disgustingly from his shorts pockets.

  “Ben, maybe you shouldn’t—” Emmy started to say.

  “What do you know about it?” Danica was saying to Emmy. “Go swimming with hamburgers much?”

  Swimming? Hamburgers? Cassie thought in alarm. She froze.

  Emmy fumbled on her words but continued. “It’s just that, I mean, sharks are rare on Big Island, but they are out there. It’s not unheard of. My brother knows some guy whose cousin got bit, seriously. And sharks are attracted to raw meat—animal and human and hamburger. They have, like, a meat radar from, like, hundreds of miles away, I think, I mean I swear I heard that—”

  Ben clapped his hands, cutting her off. “Well, I love me some hamburger. Let’s do it.” And before there was time to argue he’d run off toward the crashing waves in the near distance.

  That’s when Cassie found her feet. Suddenly she was up and running. She knew she was overreacting, but she couldn’t stop herself. It was like she’d been separated from her body. Like someone had taken control of her legs and was using them to sprint out of the rec hall and across the sand toward this guy she didn’t even know, all because she heard something about sharks and meat and had to stop it.

  But maybe she wasn’t overreacting. Cassie thought the whole idea of putting raw meat in someone’s pockets and telling them to jump in the ocean at night was just so not funny. She didn’t care who it was—egotistical Ben with the flashy smiles full of teeth or Charlie or whoever. Maybe Danica thought the hamburger thing was just some dumb prank, but it could actually be deadly if he went through with it. Sharks are, in fact, attracted to raw meat—anyone could look up that piece of information on Wikipedia. Is everyone insane? Cassie wondered.

  “Ben!” she called. “Hold up!” She reached him on the beach at the point where the tides were crawling up onto the sand. She grabbed his arm. Would she dive in after him if he was fool enough to go in? Dude, she hoped not.

  “Hey there,” Ben said. “Cassie, right? You coming in with me?” He probably figured she had a crush on him, that that’s why she’d run after him. Great.

  Standing so close to Ben like this, she realized how it might look to anyone else. All the other C.I.T.s probably figured she had a crush on him, too.

  Also, standing so close to Ben, she noticed one other thing: He smelled. Not like cologne straight out of GQ, but like meat. She stepped back. It was times like these that she considered becoming a vegetarian.

  “No,” Cassie said, trying to explain. “Just don’t do it. I don’t want you to.”

  “You’re saying you don’t want me to go in the water,” Ben said.

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “You’re saying you’re worried about me.”

  “I guess,” Cassie said reluctantly. “I guess that’s what I’m saying.”

  “I kind of like that,” he said. “For you, I won’t go in. Feel better?”

  “Yeah, thanks,” she said. She was feeling very, very silly now for running after him.

  “Good,” he said. “I’m glad you feel better.” Then he was—oh no—putting his arm around her.

  Beautiful. Now I’ll smell like beef, she thought.

  This was getting blown up all wrong—she’d just wanted to stop the stupid dare, not make Ben think she liked him. She shrugged off his arm and headed back for the rec hall. The rest of the C.I.T.s were standing on the edge of the room, watching.

  “What was that about?” Danica said, narrowing her eyes at Cassie.

  Ben answered for her. “I’m not going through with it,” he said. “Cassie thinks it’s too dangerous. So what should I do instead? Eat the meat and risk salmonella?”

  Danica wrinkled her nose. “Just get rid of it,” she said. “You smell. Besides, you get salmonella poisoning from chicken.” She rolled her eyes.

  Ben dumped out the contents of his pockets in the trash. Cassie noticed that he kept looking right at her. He really thought she liked him. The idea was so ridiculous she wanted to laugh. She met Micah’s eyes and then pulled away quickly.

  It was her turn next.

  “Dare,” she said. “Just as long as it has nothing to do with hamburgers.”

  “You can’t have three dares in a row,” Danica said. “Game rules.”

  “Really?” Sasha said. “I didn’t know that was in the rules . . .” She trailed off at the look Danica gave her.

  “Fine,” Danica said. “She can have a dare if she wants a dare. How about this—it’s a good one—your dare is truth.”

  “Truth, truth, truth, truth, truth,” the chant echoed around the circle. Cassie took a seat on the floor. She felt heavy, stuck in place. Being in the closet with Charlie hadn’t been this uncomfortable.

  “Let me ask the question,” Danica said. She brushed her stick-straight blond hair over one shoulder and shot a long look at Cassie. “Sierra, could you bring me my bag?”

  Sierra obediently handed it over.

  Danica fished around in the bag until she came up with a magazine. It looked like Teen Vogue, but Cassie didn’t catch the cover. Danica shook some sand out of it and then flipped through until she found a page. She held it out, spread flat, showing the Coco Beach ad.

  Cassie knew just the one it would be. It was some surfer girls from her team standing around on the sand, boards poking skyward, hair still wet from the sea. Cassie was in the middle, the only one of the girls not smiling. She had this dead serious look on her face. All the girls had quotes under their pictures. Cassie’s read: Competition is my life. And the word life was underlined, six times, to show she really meant it. And she had meant it, she had, at the moment when that photo was taken. It was just a few months ago, but it felt like a lifetime.

  “Obviously this is you,” Danica said, waving the page around. “So tell us the truth, Cassie, if competition is your life, then what are you doing here?”

  “I’m a C.I.T.,” Cassie said, just stating the obvious. But she knew even as she said it that Danica wouldn’t let up.

  And she didn’t. “We know you surf the big-time,” Danica continued. “And we know that big-time surfers don’t just chuck it all to go to summer camp. So what is this, some kind of joke to you?”

  “It’s not a joke,” Cassie said. Her voice came out softer than she meant it to.

  She wasn’t about to make a big deal of it. So she surfed. So she surfed at big contests for money. So she’d won a few times. So she had a big-deal sponsor like Coco Beach. So what. It’s not like she wanted to go around Ohana bragging about it.

  “Nice bikini,” Ben said, taking a closer look at the ad.

  Cassie rolled her eyes.

  Andi spoke up. “Wow, Cassie, it’s like in Blue Crush. Not that you’re a maid and clean hotel toilets”—she shuddered—“I just mean you must be really good.”

  “I’ve been surfing since I was seven,” Cassie said with a shrug. “I went pro when I was twelve. I’ve always surfed. So, yeah I’m good.” She didn’t mean that to come across as arrogant, but she realized that maybe it did. “I mean I hope so,” she added. “I hope I’m good.”

  “Oh, you’re good. No argument there,” Andi continued. “But Danica does sort of have a point. Like I was asking you before, what are you doing here, anyway?”

  “It’s wack when you think about it,” Ben cut in. “Pro surfers travel all over the world. There’s a competition every week. Who takes a break to go to camp? Not that this place isn’t awesome, so don’t throw anything at me, Danica, but still.”

  “Wack isn�
�t a word I’d use, but it is strange,” Charlie chimed in. He met Cassie’s eyes and shrugged.

  “Yeah,” said Sasha.

  “Yeah,” said Sierra.

  All eyes were on Cassie. What did they want her to say? Yes, I’m a total freak? I gave up a surfing career so I could go camp, hey could you pass me that marshmallow?

  Micah spoke for the first time. “Did something happen?” he asked her.

  Cassie had planned to avoid answering that question all together, but the fact that Micah was the one to ask made her unable to ignore it. “The truth is, well, what’s going on is that I’m here because I’m taking a break because”—here Cassie paused—“because I had an accident.” She looked out across the circle and there was Micah. She shrugged. She wanted it to seem like no big deal, but it was obviously a big deal. She wouldn’t be here taking a break otherwise.

  “You wet your pants in the water,” Ben shot out. “I knew I wasn’t the only one who pees in the ocean.”

  “Ewwwww,” Andi said. “Guess who I’m not swimming next to ever again.”

  “Not that kind of accident,” Cassie said. “Look, why are we talking about this? It was nothing, seriously. Truth or dare, who’s next?”

  Danica raised her hand, though clearly not to volunteer. “But now you got me all curious about the accident,” she said. “Did you, like, lose an arm or something?”

  “A boat!” Sierra shouted. “Did you fall off a boat?”

  “I bet it was a Jet Ski. Everyone falls off Jet Skis,” Sasha said.

  “No, no, something way bigger . . . I know, an airplane! A plane, like, fell out of the sky and landed on you, but you escaped.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, Sierra. She would have been crushed or blown up into little bits and then she wouldn’t have any legs.”

  “True. So she forgot how to swim, because she got amnesia, and she drowned!”

  “Obviously she didn’t drown because she’s sitting right here.”

  “Almost drowned.”

  The reasons were getting ridiculous. Cassie was waiting to hear alien abduction next. But then Emmy was the one to say it: “Shark attack,” she said. “It was, wasn’t it? That’s why you were so totally freaked out about Ben going in the water.”

  “I knew it,” Ben said.

  “You did not,” Danica said.

  “I would’ve figured it out,” he insisted.

  “So was it a shark, really?” Emmy said to Cassie.

  And Cassie just couldn’t keep it off her face. This was the truth part of the game, after all. And even if her mouth opened up to deny it, her expression would have shown the truth of what happened.

  How she’d been on her board, out in the water. It was way early in the morning, and she was doing what she usually did before she even ate breakfast—seeking a good wave. She’d already gotten one wave that morning—a big one, and it slammed her. She’d rolled and spluttered and hit something hard with her foot, but she was fearless, after all. She wouldn’t let anything stop her. So she got rolled, so what. She came back up for air, and she got back on her board, and she waited for the next wave.

  And because of this, she should probably blame herself for what happened next. If she’d looked at her foot, if she’d let herself feel the pain, she would have seen that she’d scraped it up pretty badly on a rough patch of coral when she went down. She would have seen that she was bleeding. If she had been paying attention, she would have paddled in. Because that’s what you do when you’re bleeding—if there’s any chance there could be a shark in the water, any chance at all, you head back, you paddle in.

  But she hadn’t been thinking. She hadn’t cared about the pain in her foot; she’d hardly felt it. What she’d been so totally focused on was that she didn’t want one bad wipeout to ruin her whole day. So she’d floated on her board, keeping an eye out for the next wave. And all the while her bad foot was dangling down in the water. Calling to whatever was down below.

  Then it came. She didn’t know how she saw it—this moving shadow, sinister, like an enemy submarine from a war movie. She had no clue what it was. But there was something in her, some reflex that knew to move her leg. She pulled her leg up onto her board just in time. When the shark came to the surface for a bite, it got the tail of her board instead. If she hadn’t moved . . . If . . .

  Here in the rec hall, with all the C.I.T.s staring at her, Cassie shook the memory away, trying not to think of it.

  “No. Way,” Emmy said. “Where did it get you?” Her eyes were running up and down Cassie’s body, trying to find some scar that no one had noticed before. Except there was no scar.

  “Wait,” Micah said. “Are you serious?” He had an incredulous look on his face. Like she should be dead, but by some weird miracle of the ocean, some senseless twist of fate, she was alive. Almost swallowed by a shark and yet somehow still here.

  But that’s the thing. She wasn’t almost swallowed by a shark. It didn’t actually bite her—it had taken a bite out of her board instead. And for some reason she couldn’t bring herself to admit it, that nothing, in fact, had happened. So why was she so freaked out if nothing happened? It made no sense.

  At this moment, Tori burst into the rec hall. She froze when she saw how quiet everyone was. “I thought you guys were playing a game,” she said lamely. Then, “Please, please don’t tell my counselor I snuck out, okay?”

  With all eyes now on her, Tori tiptoed over to Cassie sat beside her on the floor. “I figured you’d need me,” she whispered to Cassie. “Sure looks like it, too. They’re serious about truth or dare here, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Cassie said. She motioned to the room. “I told them.”

  “You told them told them?” Tori said softly. “I thought you didn’t want to tell anyone, Cass.”

  Cassie shrugged. “Well, I did,” she said.

  “Okay,” Tori said tentatively. She put her arm around Cassie for support.

  Cassie felt so stupid for taking this whole thing so seriously. Anyone else would have been: Whoa, shark almost got my foot . . . didn’t . . . cool, so where’s the next wave? But Cassie was traumatized. She remembered her board splitting in two and lots of screaming. Then this mad scramble in the water, the kids with her trying to get her on the board and back to shore, someone saying Did it get her leg?, Did it get her leg?, just saying that over and over so Cassie thought maybe it had, and then being on the sand, and all the faces hovering over her, and not being able to look, not wanting to see. And when she did, she saw that she still had her legs. Both of them. And her arms and everything else. She was fine, perfectly fine. There wasn’t a scratch on her.

  The other surfers there had laughed it off—though no one went back in the water. Once a shark is spotted, surfing is pretty much out for the rest of the day. Everyone said it was a bummer about her broken board, and that was that. No one—not her surfing friends, her teammates, her family, her coach—thought she’d be reluctant to get back on a board after that.

  Because nothing happened! Cassie’s mind shrieked at her.

  She didn’t want to tell this to the other C.I.T.s—it was bad enough they knew about the shark at all. But Tori didn’t know what they’d heard so far. She must have thought they knew the whole story. So Tori said, “Yeah, it’s lucky nothing happened.”

  Danica jumped on this right away. “What do you mean nothing happened? I thought there was a shark.”

  “There was a shark,” Tori said, clearly confused.

  “And the shark bit her . . .”

  “No, it bit her board.”

  “So it didn’t bite her?”

  “No.” Tori turned to Cassie, all confused. “What, didn’t you tell them that?”

  “Actually, she didn’t,” Danica said. “She made it sound like the shark chewed off her leg.”

  “It could have,” Tori said, getting defensive.

  Cassie found herself unable to say much of anything, and she was grateful that her cousin was there. “S
he cut her foot,” Tori said. “Sharks are drawn to the smell of blood, you know, it’s like science. Cass escaped just in time. She could have been totally swallowed.”

  “But she wasn’t,” Danica said. “Nothing actually happened. Right, Cassie?”

  Cassie opened her mouth. “Right,” she found herself agreeing.

  “I don’t get it,” Emmy cut in. “If nothing happened, then why stop surfing?”

  “You don’t think that would have been freaky?” Andi said. “I do. I would have been beyond freaked out for like a week.”

  Cassie cringed at that. For her, it had been four months.

  Yeah, everyone was agreeing. Close call. Freaky. They seemed to understand. Hopefully they’d drop it and move on with the rest of the stupid game.

  Danica didn’t seem to want to let that happen. “I bet you’re scared to go in the water at all,” she said suddenly. “I would be. I’d be petrified.”

  “I go in the water,” Cassie insisted.

  “Yeah,” Tori jumped in. “She’s always in the water.”

  “Oh good,” Danica said. “’Cause that would be a weird. A C.I.T. for swimming who’s afraid, you know, of water.”

  Cassie stood. She wiped some whipped cream off her shirt. She looked out in the direction of the ocean, her home ocean . . . it was just like looking out on her own familiar street. Except, this street was filled with invisible breaks where you could get the leash to your surfboard caught and flail around and really almost drown—no joke, that happened to another surfer she knew—and with riptides that could pull you out faster than you wanted to go, and heavy waves that could throw your board out like a cannon, and killer animals that could creep up beneath you and swallow you whole . . .

  “Nothing to worry about,” Cassie said. She heard a big wave crashing out where she couldn’t see it. “I’m not afraid of the water. I go in the water all the time.”

  Four

  Cassie was used to getting up before the sun. That was the life of a surfer: stumbling out of bed while it was still dark, listening to the surf report to know where to get the best waves, grabbing a bathing suit, a board, heading for the water just as the first shock of light was peeking over the horizon. The waves weren’t so packed then. There was quiet, this sense of peace. For Cassie, it was the only time surfing wasn’t about trying to win.