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She has been eyeing them for a while.
At 11 years old, Kiara doesn’t exactly fit in. All the girls at school are suddenly growing into odd giggling creatures, obsessing over hair and boys and candy-coloured nail polish, while boys her age are mostly gross and anyway wouldn’t be caught dead giving a girl the time of day, which leaves her with very little options in the friends department. Kiara doesn’t really care, though. Not too much at least. She spends most of her free time hanging out at The Wreck, chatting with the waiters and busboys while sipping her soda over the counter, learning about the Climate Crisis from Brad, who is a college student majoring in Environmental Studies back to the OBX on his break. He rants about pollution and emissions, and biodiversity loss, and how their home is doomed to disappear to coastal erosion; he lends her books and answers her questions, and messes her hair when she says something smart.
“Look at you, getting into activism,” he says with a smile, and then refills her soda before tending to the next customer waiting in line.
When she’s not at her parents’ restaurant, her favourite thing to do in the world is surf. Some days – the best days – Dad wakes her up extra early, before Mom is even up, and takes her down to the beach for the first surf. They drive around the island, finding hidden spots, and on a good day they get a decent workout in before driving back to The Wreck for breakfast.
It runs in her blood, surfing. It comes with the territory, with growing up in a place like Kildare – a spit of land surrounded by water. One of Kiara’s oldest memories is sitting on her dad’s board, barely a toddler. Dad would take the board out and sit behind her, keeping her safe between his legs. She remembers the ocean underneath them and the sun in her eyes and the absolute thrill of it all, her tiny, chubby hands flat on the smooth surface of the board. She is sure it happened, because of how many times she’s heard the story told by one of her parents, but she’s not really sure she actually remembers it. She thinks she does, anyway.
But now she’s not a toddler anymore, floating on a board that’s not her own. Now that she’s 11 she can hold her own on the outings with Dad, taking turns going for the best looking waves. She’s grown taller in the past year, a spur of growth that made her reach her mother’s height, and she’s still learning to readjust her balance on the board. But her legs are stronger now, her energy more focused, and on a good day she feels invincible on the water, floating like a sea goddess over the white foam.
She loves surfing with Dad, even though he’s not a kid and she tends to tire way before he does. It’s not like she has any other friends she could replace him with, anyway. But now summer’s approaching, and Dad has less and less time to spare for impromptu surfing sessions. The Wreck is open breakfast through late night 7 days a week in Touron season, and her parents become pretty scarce. So Kiara has to take matters in her own hands, drag her board to the beach by herself to take on the ocean on her own.
Most of the time, they’re there.
She’s seen them around, but she doesn’t really know them. She knows they don’t live in town, but rather on the other end of the island, deep into the Cut. One is a tall, lanky boy, covered in freckles and overgrown messy curls, with twinkly eyes and an infectious laugh. But it’s the other one she can’t take her eyes off. The second boy is shorter, scruffier, all sharp angles and electric energy, his blond hair golden in the sun. He moves on his board like he was born on the water, and Kiara can’t help sneaking looks in his direction, mesmerised. She’s never seen anyone their age surf like he does. In fact, she’s never seen anyone of any age surf like that, period. She thinks maybe if she watches him long enough she’ll absorb his secret, somehow. Maybe she’ll become as good as he is, as sure of her movements on the board.
The Heyward kid – Pope – hangs out with them, sometimes at least. She’s spotted him surfing with them from time to time, trailing along on slightly tentative legs. She’s known him forever, all the way back to kindergarten, although they’ve lost touch a bit in the past few years, since they’ve been split up into different classes at school. She still sees him around sometime, mostly trailing behind his Pops when they come by The Wreck for a delivery. He’s probably stuck at the store more and more, now that the season is picking up, and she doesn’t spot him at the beach quite as often. Which is unfortunate, for sure. While she’s not exactly close with Pope, at least she knows him. It would be nice to have an easier way in. Less scary.
But the other boys seem to live on the beach, diving in and out of the water for hours on end. She’s never seen any trace of parents calling them back or whisking them home, but that isn’t really uncommon for kids on the Cut. When the Tourons come, the parents disappear, and kids tend to be left to their own devices from a very young age. It happens to Kiara, too. There’s nothing particularly unusual there.
So here she is, board tucked under her armpit, feet deep in the sand. Watching them, like a lurker in the distance. The boys don’t pay her any mind, engrossed in their incessant chat and ever-more-complex tricks to one-up each other. Here goes nothing.
She pushes her board into the water and slides on top, paddling out past the break.
At first she tries to stick to her lane, keep a healthy distance. She does a couple of runs to warm up, find her feet for the day. The third wave she catches, she rides spectacularly all the way to shore. When she dismounts her board on the wet sand, she’s disappointed to realise they haven’t even registered her presence, let alone noticed her achievement. She has to change tactics.
She paddles back out, but this time she doesn’t even try to catch any wave, just floats around them – closer and closer each time they swim back out. Once she’s close enough to make out words from their chatter, she gathers her guts and calls out to them.
“Hey!” Two heads of curly wet locks turn around at the sound of her voice, vaguely stunned. Kiara bites down her lip. “Wanna race to shore?”
The boys exchange a look with each other before turning back towards her.
“Sure!” says the first one, at the same time as the other one grunts, “Nah, we’re good!”
The first boy, the darker-haired one, turns towards his friend with a scowl. The blond one shrugs in response, eyes wide. The first boy shakes his head, rolling his eyes, then turns to her with a bright smile.
“I’m John B. This is JJ.”
“Kiara,” she says, and shakes his proffered hand over their surfboards. “Why the B?”
John B shrugs, but doesn’t seem annoyed by her question – just mildly disinterested.
“Everyone calls me that,” he says.
She turns to the blond one, squints a little at the sun in her eyes. “Is JJ short for something?”
“Yeah. For None of Your Business.”
“What’s up your butt?” she snaps, and then bites her tongue down as a reflex. Her mom would for sure scold her if she heard her use such improper language – but Kiara is ready to bet the boys won’t mind. In fact, it might even give her some street cred.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” JJ says, unfazed. “I’m absolutely peachy. You’re the one who’s invading our space, so if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, you own the ocean now? Sorry, I must have missed the memo.”
“What are you even doing here?”
“Same as you. You have a problem?”
JJ scoffs, then grins conspiratorially at John B before turning back to her with a mean set in his brow.
“Girls can’t be surfers,” he says. “It’s the rules.”
“Oh yeah? Says who?”
“Says everyone. Look around.”
To her dismay, he’s kind of right. The beach is pretty empty, but the only few girls around are a small group of high schoolers tanning on their towels. The only figures on surfboards are guys – mostly a few years older than them. Which means precisely nothing, aside from reinforcing that the female population of Kildare has horrible taste in pastimes.
“Well, I’m a girl, and I surf. I don’t give a damn about your rules. In fact, you know what? I bet I’m better than you!”
It’s quite the stretch – she really, really isn’t, and she’s very aware of that. But now that she’s said it she has to live up to it, so when he raises both his eyebrows so high they disappear under his messy blond hair, she juts her chin out and crosses her arms in front of her chest.
“Oh yeah?” he says – all the smugness in the world in his voice. “Prove it, then. Go on, let’s see.”
She’s really starting to regret her posturing, now. But John B is smiling wide at her, looking the picture of encouragement, so she flattens her belly down on her board and starts paddling out towards the incoming waves.
It’s really not too bad, at first. The waves are fairly small this time of the day and she easily jumps on her board, knees bent low to steady herself. Now if she can just stay put and ride this out...
She wipes out, because of course she does. She’s not really sures what happens but she loses her footing, the board suddenly slippery under her feet, and she falls face first into the water. When she re-emerges, sputtering burning saltwater from her nose, an obnoxious cackling sound fills her ears. Sure enough, JJ is sitting up on his board not too far out, holding his belly while he laughs. At her .
“Very impressive,” he calls out her way, “In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone belly-flop on the ocean so spectacularly. I’d say that’s a hidden talent! Wouldn’t you, John B?”
“I mean… yeah, that looked pretty bad,” John B agrees, a small sympathetic smile curving the corner of his lips.
Kiara’s face flushes with embarrassment and she pitifully climbs back up on her board, trying to save any remnant of dignity she has left as she starts paddling back out. JJ is already speeding past her in the opposite direction, eyeing the tallest wave she’s seen all afternoon with single-minded focus. John B is hanging back, waiting for her.
“You okay?” he asks her as she straddles her board and stops next to him.
“Yeah, I’m fine. You fall down, you get back up. Right?”
“That’s the spirit!”
And so she does. She picks herself up and gets back at it. She misses a couple of waves that the boys catch easily, which forces her to hang back a little, but soon she’s back in the groove – either slightly ahead or just behind them, each time reconvening out on the lineup. John B smiles wide at her every time. That boy is so friendly, generous with his words of encouragement and really going out of his way to make her feel welcome. Too bad the same can’t be said for his friend. She honestly doesn’t know what that kid JJ has against her. The entire time he’s been sulking in the background whenever John B is talking to her, and he only ever acknowledges her presence to sneer at her or make fun of her.
Which is really quite a shame because the boy is truly a good surfer. Annoyingly so, really.
John B is, too. Way better than Kiara, for sure. On a good day, Kiara is pretty confident in riding straight on a good wave, and she can mostly turn and carve without falling into the water too often. John B and JJ though are constantly one-upping each other, pulling trick after trick after trick.
In between goes, John B takes to hanging back for a little while with Kiara, each straddling their boards as they catch their breath.
“Hey John B? Wanna see something cool?” JJ calls from a distance, and they both turn in his direction.
He’s paddling furiously towards a wave, catching it easily. He pumps for speed with jerky motions and then launches off the lip. John B gasps as JJ briefly flies above the wave, but then something goes wrong and his arms flail helplessly for a second while he slips off his board and lands butt first into the water, the fall dragging down his board until it smashes on the water above where he’s just disappeared.
“Oof… that didn’t look good,” John B says with a grimace, and Kiara – still a little hurt in her pride from JJ’s earlier reaction – bursts out laughing, just in time for JJ’s blond head to reappear above the surface.
“Look who’s spectacularly wiping out now, uh?” she yells in his direction, cupping both hands around her mouth in place of a megaphone.
Even from this far, she can tell JJ’s face is bright red all the way to his ears. “Yeah, well, I don’t exactly recall you trying to pull an air 360, now, do I?”
“ Trying seems to be the operative word, there,” she taunts him. And really, it’s all show. Because the truth is that she is impressed, of course, that he even attempted that trick. And almost landed it, really, he had the speed to jump off and all, just hard luck. But she has to keep face, and he started trading insults first, so she has to retaliate.
“She kind of got you, there,” John B says good-naturedly as JJ swims back to them with a scowl on his face.
“Well, she doesn’t really know what she’s talking about, now, does she,” he scoffs – talking about her in third person as if she weren’t right there.
“Don’t worry, bub,” John B says, patting JJ over the shoulder. “You’ll get there. I believe in you.”
At around four o’clock the weather turns, dark clouds promising rain looming over the horizon.
“That doesn’t look good,” John B says, staring at the clouds as if they’d personally offended him. If scowls could turn the weather, Kiara is pretty confident John B’s would be able to clear the sky in no time.
“Yep, looks like a storm is coming,” JJ says, eyes wide and inexplicably bright with excitement. “We should stick around to surf the surge!”
Both John B and Kiara whip their heads towards him.
“The… What? ”
Kiara stares at him with wide eyes. That kid doesn’t make any sense. She’s never heard anything this stupid in her life.
JJ spares her a pretty annoyed look. “Of course you wouldn’t do it, you’re no fun. Plus, you can’t even really surf.” She’s already opened her mouth to object but JJ turns decidedly towards John B, a hopeful glint in his eyes. “What do you say?”
John B bites down on his lip as his eyes flick between her and JJ. Kiara bugs her eyes out and shakes her head at him. He can’t be seriously considering this, right?
“I don’t know, JJ,” John B finally says. “Maybe another time, okay?”
JJ doesn’t seem happy, but he also doesn’t react with the same vitriol he reserves for her. Instead, he dips his hand under the surface and splashes John B right in the face.
“It’s okay, JB, you can say that your wobbly knees cannot take the challenge. I’ll forgive you!”
John B splashes him back in retaliation and soon it’s a full on tiny hurricane between them. Kiara kicks her legs to push her board back and avoid getting caught in the crossfire, laughing.
When the impromptu splashing war comes to its end, John B turns to look at her, a kind smile on his face. “Come on. We should swim back to shore.”
The boys head straight to a little pile of towels not too far from where Kiara has set her own camp – turtle towel laid out on the sand to get warm and her backpack with water bottle, snacks, and dry clothes. She quickly gathers her things and meets up with the boys again, who are vigorously drying their hair against their towels.
John B smiles wide as she approaches.
“Wanna come to my house? We’re heading there,” he says, board already secured under his arm. JJ is scowling in the background, quietly kicking around a few pebbles with his toe. He’s not saying anything, but she can tell he’s not happy.
Kiara, however, is very happy. She likes John B, a lot, and being invited to his house seems like an important step to mark the official start of their friendship.
“Yeah, okay!” she’s quick to accept. It’s still the middle of the afternoon, and her parents are okay with her staying out while the sun’s still out.
Turns out, it’s a fairly long walk to John B’s house. The boys walk barefoot on the side of the road while Kiara drags her flip flops with each step, her arms aching from lugging her board all the way. She hangs back a couple of steps behind them, following the trail of water droplets dripping from their soaked-up board shorts and listening in on their animated debate.
“Superman can literally fly! That’s objectively superior.”
“Yeha, okay, but Spiderman doesn’t need to fly because he can use his web shooters! And Superman becomes totally useless if you have even the tiniest bit of Kryptonite around and I don’t know, man, that sounds like a huge liability to me.”
Suddenly the boys veer off the main road and onto a dirt driveway leading to a beach shack covered in peeling white paint. John B and JJ ignore the front door completely and head left towards a wooden outbuilding in the side yard where they unceremoniously dump their boards on the floor before running off towards a screened in porch. Kiara quickens her pace and follows suit, leaving her board next to theirs and climbing up the porch steps right behind them.
John B’s house is super cool. There’s all sorts of interesting things lying around and multiple comfy couches on the porch and even a hammock in the yard – although possibly not for today, given the impending rain. JJ bursts the side door open and lets himself in, heading straight for the kitchen. John B turns slightly towards her and gestures inside. “Welcome to the Chateau!”
“The what?”
“That’s what we call it. Me and my dad.”
Kiara looks around, taking in all the little odds and ends of the Chateau . This place is so cool. There is a surfboard hanging from the ceiling in the corner of the wrap-around porch. It’s so cool.
“What about your mom, does she not like the name?” she asks, finally processing his words.
John B shrugs a shoulder, twists the corner of his mouth. “She doesn’t live with us. Hasn’t for a long time,” he says, casual. “I think she’s in Colorado. I haven’t really seen her in a while.”
“Oh,” Kiara says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“That’s okay. It’s not a big deal.”
And the way he says it, it sounds like it isn’t. Still, Kiara isn’t sure. She thinks that it is, truly, but she doesn’t want to say that out loud. Instead, she gives John B a wide, sincere smile.
“Well. I really like the Chateau. I wish my house looked like this.”
Inside, JJ is climbing over the kitchen counters and opening cabinets, looking for snacks.
“Hey, JB! He calls, throwing him a bag of marshmallows. “Can we build a fire to roast these?”
“Sure!”
“You have a firepit?” she asks, excited at the prospect.
“Yeah, just outside,” John B says, pointing out of the window.
“That’s so cool!” she gushes. “Although… I don’t think we’re in time to build one before it starts to rain,” she adds, pointing at the dark clouds above them.
JJ marches towards her and pinches her right above her elbow.
“Ouch! What was that for?”
“Do you have to ruin everything? Nobody asked for your opinion!”
Kiara blinks at him a few times, massaging the aching spot on her arm.
“What, is it my fault that it’s about to storm?” she asks, baffled. “Go ahead, genius, build a fire under a downpour. I’d like to see you try.”
JJ completely ignores her and turns back towards John B. “Fireplace?” he asks.
John B perks up. “That works!”
“Cool, I’ll go get some wood from the shed.”
And without sparing her another glance he saunters off the porch.
Kiara is suddenly getting a little nervous at the suggestion. “Are you sure we should do this, John B?” she asks. “Like, have you lit up the fireplace before? Sounds a little dangerous.”
“Nah, it’s okay, don’t worry. I do it with my dad all the time”
Only mildly reassured, Kiara follows him around as he gets the poking stick out. There isn’t even a working fireplace at her house, and yet she’s pretty sure her parents wouldn’t let her anywhere near lighting one. JJ walks back in and dumps an armful of chopped wood into the fireplace, and then they’re all too busy getting to work to worry much about anything else.
As the boys get the fire to take on, Kiara steps back into the kitchen to look for supplies. She finds some skewers at the bottom of a drawer and then scavenges the fridge until she finds an open bar of chocolate. She breaks it into squares into a glass bowl and adds a knob of butter in before sticking it into the microwave.
“I found these,” she tells the boys, handing them the skewers.
“Awesome!” John B says, taking one from her hand and starting to poke it into a marshmallow.
The microwave dings and Kiara moves back into the kitchen to check on the chocolate. She gives it a vigorous stir to make sure the melting is even and sticks it back into the microwave for another 30 seconds.
In the other room, the boys are arguing animatedly, their voices getting louder and more urgent. As the pungent smell of something burning fills up the kitchen, Kiara sticks her head into the living room.
“What’s going on?” she asks, and both boys jump back, looking at her like deers in the headlights. She’s relieved to notice the house is not on fire. However, JJ is holding a skewer containing at least seven marshmallows, some of which are basically blackened through while others are barely even touched by the flame. At least one marshmallow has fallen straight into the fire, where it’s wilting as it quickly carbonises.
“That’s… that’s not how you roast marshmallows, guys,” she says, barely keeping in a laugh.
JJ’s face switches instantly from vaguely guilty to annoyed. “Nobody asked you!” he snaps, holding onto his overloaded skewer. Kiara sighs.
“Here, let me try.”
She picks up the spare skewer and pokes a marshmallow at the very tip, then hands it to JJ in exchange for his half-carbonised mess. JJ eyes her obliquely under a frown but reluctantly accepts the swap. Kiara slides all of his failed attempts off the skewer and reloads it with one of the still salvageable ones.
“Here, hold it like this, not too close to the flame. You have to twist it around slowly so it roasts evenly, like this.”
The boys have a look of concentration on their faces as they dutifully follow her instructions, and Kiara bites down her lip to hide a smile. When her marshmallow is almost done, she hands her stick to JJ.
“Here, hold it for me one second, please?”
JJ is so surprised by the request that he forgets to object, instead focusing all his attention to not letting go of his own skewer while taking hers from her hand. Kiara smiles a thank you and then disappears into the kitchen, where she picks up the bowl of melted chocolate from the microwave. On a whim, she adds a little dash of cinnamon that she spotted in a cabinet during her previous search. She stirs it until smooth and then carries the bowl back to the fireplace.
JJ’s managed not to burn their marshmallows in her absence and he looks very proud of his achievement.
“Look! Aren’t these perfectly done?”
“They are!” Kiara concedes, then offers the bowl of chocolate. “Go on, dip it in.”
The boys’ eyes light up. “Ohhh. That smells like heaven,” John B says, lounging to dip the end of his stick in the bowl. JJ follows suit straight after and soon they both are sporting chocolate mustaches over their mouths.
“T’is delicious!” JJ proclaims over a mouthful. “Seriously. Best thing I’ve ever had.”
Kiara is practically beaming. “I’m glad!”
JJ catches himself, suddenly remembering he doesn’t actually like her all that much. “I guess you are good for something then,” he declares. “Even though you can’t surf,” he adds with a shrug.
Kiara rolls her eyes to the ceiling. “Well, nobody’s perfect, I guess.”
“Don’t listen to him,” John B says, pulling a newly roasted marshmallow from the fire and dipping it into her chocolate sauce. “It’s all just practice really. Hey, JJ and I are at that beach most days after school. You should join us!”
Kiara can barely contain her excitement at the invitation. “Yeah, I’d like that!” She turns to check on JJ, who’s stuffing more chocolate in his face but is otherwise uncharacteristically quiet. “I bet in no time I’ll be better than you,” she says as a thinly veiled challenge.
JJ scoffs. “I wouldn’t hold my breath, if I were you.”
The front door opens and closes and someone walks in, shaking wet shoes against the mat. John B perks up.
“Dad?”
“The one and only,” a deep voice calls back. A tall man enters the room, with a long, scruffy beard and kind eyes.
“Hey, kids. JJ,” he says, winking at the boys. “You roasting marshmallows?” he asks, sounding completely unfazed at the scene – the 11-year-olds handling an open fire in his living room and the remnants of their snack littered everywhere. His eyes then rest on her and he tilts his head in question.
“And who did the cat drag in?” he asks, raising his eyebrows over the rim of his glasses.
“This is Kiara, Dad!” John B introduces her enthusiastically.
“Hi,” she says with a little wave of her hand.
“Well, nice to meet you, Kiara. I’m Big John. Any s’mores left for this old man, kids?” he asks, leaning down to pick the bag from the floor and poking a marshmallow on a skewer.
Kiara holds the bowl of chocolate as an offer and Big John dips his roasted marshmallow in.
“This is the best snack I’ve had in a long while. Thank you, Kiara,” he says, and she smiles wide at him. “I’ll be in my study, kids. Shout if the house’s on fire,” he then says, and disappears again through the hallway off the kitchen.
Replenished from their snack, and hyper from the sugar rush, the kids head back out on the porch. It’s started to rain by now, the sound of the heavy water droplet hitting the roof filling the confined space of the screened in porch. The boys are restless, bouncing around and pulling ideas after ideas out of their pockets.
The three of them are in the middle of testing a circuit that involves a skateboard, a pile of chairs precariously balanced and an impromptu slide made of couch cushions when Big John reappears, poking his head through the glass doors.
“Looks like the storm might get worse soon,” he says, pointing at the horizon. “Would you like a ride back home, Kiara? Not sure how your folks would feel about you getting stuck here overnight.”
She’s slightly thrown off to be singled out in the offer. Wouldn’t JJ need a ride home, too? But maybe he’s staying the night, or maybe he just lives very very close, she reasons. She doesn’t actually know. Anyway, Kiara catches a glimpse of the angry dark clouds in the sky, the raindrops quickly intensifying, and she nods her head.
“Uhm, yes, please. If it’s not a bother.”
“Come on in, then, we’d better get going.”
Big John helps her load her board in the back of his van, which is old and brown-and-cream coloured and covered in stickers and trinkets. Big John affectionately refers to it as the Twinkie.
“Where to?” he asks her, tapping his fingers over the wheel.
Kiara sneaks a look at the clock. It’s not even six o’clock.
“Would you mind dropping me at The Wreck? It’s my parents’ restaurant. They’re probably both there now.”
“Sure thing.”
Not ten minutes later, Big John is pulling into The Wreck’s parking lot, and opening the sliding door to pass Kiara her board.
“Thank you so much for the ride,” she says, holding her board above her head to protect her from the rain.
“No problem, kid. Take care!”
He honks the horn as he pulls out from the lot, waving at her through the window. Kiara waves back, and then turns on her heels and runs toward the warm lights of The Wreck.
She doesn’t see the boys for a few days after that first afternoon, but then she does. In the next couple of weeks they’re at the beach surfing more often than they’re not. Any illusion of having gained any ground with JJ with her chocolate-dipped marshmallows at the Chateau is quickly wiped away as the boy practically sneers at her when he next sees her.
Days and then weeks pass and JJ continues to be an absolute menace. And for no reason, really – she’s been a perfectly good friend, even sharing all of her snacks with him and John B. It’s nothing that she can’t handle though. Mostly he just teases and hurls insults at her, but one time while they’re on the beach he reaches out and pulls at one of her curls to annoy her. Kiara retaliates by elbowing him in the ribs with no regret. She’s happy to report he doesn’t try that again.
On the other hand, John B is probably her best friend, now. She knows it’s a one-way street and she’s not his, but that’s okay, friends can work like that, she thinks. She’s learned that he and JJ have been best friends for years, which is pretty much a mystery to her because JJ is truly insufferable. She had a completely different impression of him back when she was just watching him from afar, admiring his surfing prowess. Turns out, just because you’re good at surfing it doesn’t mean you’re a nice friend, as proven by the fact that JJ is definitely not nice. Which would be fine if he and John B weren’t practically attached at the hip. If she wants to spend time with John B, unfortunately it seems she’ll have to suck it up and tolerate JJ, too.
Today’s a good day, and JJ’s too busy jumping off waves to pay her any mind. John B trails behind him and the two holler at each other over the waves, but not even John B has enough energy to keep up with JJ, and in the lulls between bursts of energy he straddles his board and floats on the water with her.
“How does he do that?” She’s sitting on her board next to John B, eyeing JJ in the distance. The boy’s been moving around like a firecracker all afternoon, lifting off the lip of the wave and landing back on his feet – and making it all look like a walk in the park.
John B looks at her and shrugs with a smile. “You know you can ask him, right? He’ll teach you.”
Kiara scoffs, rolling her eyes. “Well, in case you haven’t noticed, JJ doesn’t like me very much.”
John B is uncharacteristically quiet, eyes fixed on the surface of his board, where he’s drawing invisible shapes in the shallow water with the tips of his fingers.
“I don’t think that’s really true,” he says, and he’s still evading her eyes. He sighs, his shoulders slumping down at the motion. “JJ’s just… I don’t know. He’s kind of weird with people sometimes. Look, I know he’s not the easiest to get along with, okay? But, like. He’ll come around. Just give him some time.”
He’s looking at her now, straight on and expectant. Kiara shrugs a shoulder, gives him an unconvinced smile. It’s not like she’s losing any sleep at night over JJ not liking her, really. She doesn’t much like him herself, to be honest. But this seems important to John B, and John B is her friend, so she says, “Okay.”
John B smiles wide and bright.
“Come on,” he says, “let’s go catch some waves. We can’t let JJ have them all.”
And so they do.
Since seeing JJ attempt that air 360 the first day she met him she’s had it in the back of her mind to try and nail the trick herself. She’s pretty sure she’s a bunch of skills short to even attempt it, but she is determined. What she lacks in experience she more than makes up for in stubbornness.
JJ might not be inclined to teach her his secrets, nor she to ask him to, but looking is free. Day after day, she obsessively studies his every movement whenever he’s far enough that he won’t notice. That distance shortens considerably as time goes on, since Kiara is pretty confident that the kid is too self-absorbed in his own surfing to notice her lurking anyway.
And then she practices. And practices. And practices some more. She practices endlessly whenever she’s alone, until her arms ache from paddling out and her legs tremble under her weight. And she practices when she’s with them, following John B along and trying out anything he does.
The weather’s getting warmer, the days longer. It’s the best time of the year to learn because the waves are not as big and angry as they are in the winter. Summer waves are warm and gentle, practically inviting you in, barely tall enough to be any good. The island is filling up with Tourons and the beach is getting busier, and still Kiara puts in the hours, day after day.
And then one day it just happens. She feels it in her bones before she even tries it, she just knows that she’s ready. It’s a sunny afternoon, the blue sky empty of any clouds. She’s out with the boys, which is not maybe ideal – she promised herself she wouldn’t risk it in front of them until she was sure she could land it. But she is sure today, somehow. Today is the day.
She waits until she spots the perfect wave coming, just tall enough to offer a good ramp. She paddles out furiously and beats the boys to it, catching it perfectly. She accelerates on the wave until she’s so fast that the wind rings in her ears, then kicks the tail with her foot and launches her board off the lip, and suddenly she’s flying.
She doesn’t do a 360. She doesn’t even do a 180. In fact, she barely turns at all, but she stays over her board and brings it with her, flying in the air over the cusp of the wave. She keeps her eyes on the landing and, just like magic, she does it. Her board hits the water exactly where she wants it to, and she bends her knees to absorb the impact, keeping her balance. She’s done it, and it’s the most exhilarating feeling.
She’s riding the adrenaline rush afterwards, all the way over the rest of that one perfect wave, and for a moment she even forgets that the boys are there at all, just smiles widely at her own accomplishment. When she turns back out and spots them, JB is cheering her on from the distance, fists in the air. And JJ – JJ is smiling at her. A quiet, little smile, that carves a dimple in his cheek.
“That was pretty cool,” he says once she’s swam back out to them.
And Kiara feels completely invincible. It’s not like she’s done any of this to impress him, because she really hasn’t. And yet, from the beginning, it has always been a contest between the two of them. And this moment – right now – this is when JJ Maybank has finally recognised her and accepted her as one of his own.
She trails him on her surfboard for the rest of the afternoon, matching his pace, and for the first time since that stormy day weeks and weeks ago she feels like she’s one of them – not Kiara and the boys, but part of a trio. She falls in step behind them back to shore, after, and JJ doesn’t sneer at her, nor taunt her, nor does he sulk in silence when John B invites her back to the Chateau.
It’s the beginning of the summer of 5th grade. Kiara doesn’t know it yet, but she will be a Pogue before anyone’s realised she wasn’t there before.