Blue Water High (5 page)

She pulled the blind back and stared at the stars. It was the same galaxy rolling around the earth, the same twinkling bits would be sprinkled above the farm in a couple of hours. She couldn't get Heath's question out of her mind. Was she desperate to get in or not?

Fly thought about the trials a few weeks ago. They'd been held at her local beach. If you could call having to get a lift and two buses local. Fly used to have to get up in the dark if she wanted a chance of getting to Prevelly Park in time for any of the best morning waves. It was a beach she'd surfed since she was eight. The waves were rarely bigger than five or six foot. And maybe that's why she'd made it her local. Maybe that's why she never stayed on the bus another couple of stops to Busselton or Yallingup, even when she knew the waves there would be better.

Everyone in town had been talking about nothing else but the Solar Blue Trials for two whole months before they happened. There was no other news. If the aliens had invaded and taken over the local fish and chip shop no-one would've noticed, because it wasn't related to ‘The Trials'. Even the teachers at Fly's school didn't bother marking the roll that week – they knew when they were up against something just too powerful to beat.

The judges from Solar Blue were in town checking out the talent for a week. It was like
Australian Idol
with zinc cream. There was a holiday feeling. Lots of friendly groups gathered in the street, comparing notes on how it was going. Anyone who'd ever even seen a surfing movie was down there giving it a burl.

If the trials had been on a year before, Fly would've
been first in the queue to try out. Not cocky, but quietly confident. Everyone knew she was the best grommet to have dipped her toes in the Indian for a long time. That's how she got her name. When she was in the water the older boys reckoned she stuck to the wall of the wave like a March fly. At home, when she was annoying her sisters by hanging around too much, they reckoned she was more like a blowfly hanging off the back of a sheep's bum.

A year ago Fly was fearless. But then, at the end of the summer holidays, after nearly six whole weeks of hanging in the water till she was wrinkled like a prune, Fly joined a couple of the older guys for an afternoon session down at Cowaramup. It was getting late. They knew they were pushing it, but the waves were too good to let go. There was a killer swell, the tail end of a tropical cyclone curling down the coast, and it was flinging waves in at the coast like a bull whip. On that afternoon a year ago, the ocean had curled its watery fingers around Fly's throat and squeezed the quiet confidence right out of her.

Sitting there on the bed in the dormitory Fly could feel her heart banging away in her chest. She didn't let herself think about what had happened. Not ever. Not that she remembered a lot. She didn't remember the wave. She didn't remember making it to shore. She didn't remember getting home. And she didn't tell her mum and dad what had happened. She didn't tell her best friend Tamara. It was only after a week that her oldest sister Kate had Chinese-burned the truth out of her.

And it was her oldest sister Kate who had, on the morning of the last day of the trials, reefed her out of bed and driven her to the beach. Kate had given her a long lecture about options. Fly didn't understand exactly what
she meant, but she knew Kate had decided to stay on the farm instead of going to university, and there were lots of days where she didn't seem too happy about it.

So now she was there, she might as well get in the water – that's what Kate had said as they'd pulled up at the beach. Fly guessed she was right. She just thought she'd go out there and surf the way she always did after what had happened. Safely. She would pick her waves very carefully. She would let the brutes pass because she wasn't up for it anymore. That was her plan. But something happened when she got out there. It was a four-foot swell, fairly regular. Nice and predictable. She picked the middle wave and pushed to her feet and then, without her permission, her body just took over and she was surfing like a maniac. Like the maniac she used to be, anyway. She cut the waves to pieces. And it was only afterwards, only when the big white envelope from Solar Blue arrived, that she started to freak. She'd made it through under false pretences. Even though she
could
surf like that, it wasn't how she was going to surf again. She wanted to, she wanted to let herself go absolutely, one hundred per cent mental, but the last time she did that she'd paid, big time.

And again, without her permission, Fly was back there. She could feel the fear, cold and tight around her throat. It was off the leash and hunting for something to bail up, like a wild dog, hunting for her. Fly struggled to suck in some air, just like she had at Cowaramup. That was the worst, that helplessness. To see how far away the surface was and to be completely at the mercy of nature's timing. You had three seconds left before breathing stopped being a question and to know that your wishes didn't count, there was a stronger force in action. It wasn't personal, it didn't
care that you just handed in a great geography assignment, or that it was your turn to cook dinner that night – what you wanted just didn't matter. Everyone said the great thing about surfing was that it was just you and the wave. But the wave doesn't care about you. You are a bystander. A hanger-on. A piece of seaweed.

Fly blinked hard at her reflection in the dormitory window. She was angry at herself for letting her fear come up uninvited. When it got really bad, Fly imagined that she had a big old milk can from the farm. She would reach out and grab hold of the fear and jam it into the can, shoving the lid on tight. When it was really, really bad, she would imagine herself sitting on top of the lid just to be sure.

She flopped down onto the bed and pulled the scratchy, brown blanket up around her neck. This was Heath's fault. Heath and his ‘Are you desperate?' questions. He'd hassled her onto a wave which had punched out her tooth and now he was shooting his pinball questions spinning around her brain. She would stay away from him tomorrow. Maybe that was exactly the kind of preparation she needed to do …

And yet, as she let herself drift towards sleep, she had a disturbing new thought. Maybe, just maybe, Heath hadn't been totally responsible for hassling her onto that wave. Maybe, if she were being completely honest, she'd paddled her way onto it because she wanted to show off – in front of Heath.

There were huge fluffy clouds snuggling around the sun as it came up the next day. But Fly knew they'd be burned away within an hour. And she was right. If Heath had the tilt monitor, Fly was a weather forecaster extraordinaire. Her dad trusted her completely about all things meteorological. He called her his personal weatherman. Not that she was a man. But it didn't bother her.

Really, in spite of last night's terror session, not much usually bothered Fly at all. She was unflappable, according to her mum. She was even-keeled, according to her teachers. She was the person you could ring up in the middle of the night with your worst drama and be sure Fly could find some light at the end of the tunnel, according to her friends. She cruised at school, she actually really liked her family. She was excellent at weather forecasting.

And it was this list of positive things Fly focused on as the dentist wrestled and wriggled her new temporary tooth into that big black gap in her mouth. It was a teaching hospital Deb had brought her to this morning and six young dental students all peered into Fly's mouth as
the dentist pointed out the finer details of his work. She wished he'd hurry it up a bit. The clock on the wall behind him told her she was meant to be in the water in twenty minutes. She drew in a breath and told her impatience to take a seat – at least these people were learning something from her misfortune. Something good came out of it after all … See! Miss Positivity to the end.

Fly and Deb pulled into the car park with six minutes to spare. There was a much smaller crew of people gathered on the beach today. Just the judges, a handful of spectators and the guys who'd already earned their place at the academy – the winners from yesterday. Fly let her eyes linger on the group of three girls and three guys, all of them wearing that unmistakable air of achievement. Fly was sure they'd all had something on their wheaties that she'd failed to add. But there wasn't time to ponder too long. Deb was hustling her down towards the tent where Simmo waited with Stacey.

Fly couldn't block out a brief flash of the tilt sign on the pinball machine as she greeted Stacey, but she pushed it out of her mind and tried to concentrate on what Simmo was saying, which was basically that they'd be operating under the same rules as yesterday: best waves from two ten-minute heats added together then averaged, and one of them got the spot, the other one got the fast train home (or bus, if it happened to be Fly).

As Stacey headed off to get her gear ready, Heath came up with another guy. Matt Leyland was from King Island.
He was handsome and friendly, and he had a brain the size of Antarctica.

‘Did you organise another board?' Heath asked. ‘As generous as I am, there are only so many boards I can afford to lose.'

Fly nodded. ‘Simmo's lending me one of the academy boards. It's out the back of the tent.'

Matt piped up at this point. ‘I'll get it.'

He walked off, leaving Fly alone with Heath. So much for her grand preparation plan to stay away from him.

‘How'd you sleep?' Heath asked.

‘Like a rock,' said Fly. Because there was no way she was sharing her night-time dramas with Heath, thank you very much.

The conditions were messier than yesterday. No question. There was a stiff onshore breeze and it pushed the waves forward faster than nature's recipe had planned. They crumbled and foamed and fell all over themselves. Fly sat out the back waiting for something rideable to appear. Stacey paddled back out from a sloppy ride. She didn't meet Fly's eye.

‘You're game coming in this water with only a temp tooth,' Stacey said. ‘The amount of pollution in here – you could get hepatitis or anything.'

Fly smiled – thanks for that. She wasn't fully prepared to buy Heath's theory, but she was starting to think maybe Stacey wasn't the world's loveliest human being.

And maybe the thought about Heath made Fly look to
the beach. She could see the crew now standing on the shore. What she didn't want to see was that Heath's head was starting to tilt at a bad angle. It was the last thing she needed and so she turned and paddled hard for the first wave instead.

Even though the waves were messy, there was still some grunt in them. Fly managed to get on board, but as she started hurtling down the face, something was clearly wrong. She was wobbling. Wobbling like a plate of jelly sitting on top of the washing machine. The wobble she was cooking up was truly awesome and there's only one thing that delivers such a bone-jarring wobble – a missing fin.

Somehow, Fly managed to pull off the wave without a complete wipeout. She reached back around to where the fin should be. Nope, nothing there. It just didn't seem fair that, after all the mishaps, she should lose a fin right when it counted most. But she could either have a good old complain about it or, with eight minutes of the heat remaining, she could paddle hard for the shore and try to sort something out.

Fly's lungs were on fire by the time she pushed her way through the white water. She always piked on soft-sand running. She knew it was good for her, she knew how much it improved lung capacity, but it just seemed so painful. She was completely out of breath by the time she reached the shore, and just stood there panting at Heath and the rest of the Solar Blue crew.

‘Lost my fin,' she finally managed. ‘Need a new one.'

One of the others, a supremely pretty girl called Perri, took off, calling back over her shoulder, ‘I'll see if we can borrow Bec's board.' She sprinted off down the beach to where another girl sat on her own, her board at her feet.