Air (11 page)

I ditched the bottle in a bin, caught them up and held out a twenty-dollar bill to Seb.

“For your trouble,” I said. “Split it with your mates.”

This moment was admittedly quite awkward, but I knew there was a big tipping culture in America and I didn't want to offend anyone.

He laughed and waved my hand away.

“Honestly,” I said. “Please take it.”

Seb nodded to his friends to go ahead, and they walked down the street out of earshot and waited for him there.

“Keep it. We don't want your money,” he said, and added, “What's your number?”

“My room number?” I asked, slightly scandalized.

He laughed again and made the phone sign.

Oh. I really
was
drunk.

Without thinking it through properly, and not wanting to be rude, I got one of my business cards out of my purse and handed it to him.

“That's me,” I said. “My mobile number's on there.”

“
Iris Fox. Face of Billabong UK
,” he read. “Surfer girl?”

I nodded, but didn't want to elaborate, because whenever I attempted to explain my current Face of Billabong status it wound up sounding braggy or pathetic, or both.

“Hey, you weren't at that signing thing yesterday? My sister made me drop her at the mall so she could get scribbled on by some surfer dude she has the hots for.”

Zeke. Brilliant, just brilliant.

“Yeah. I was there.”

“Cool. Maybe she got your autograph too?”

“How old is she?”

“Fourteen. No, fifteen.”

“Then, no, she didn't.”

“How long you staying?”

“Not long. Leaving after the contest.”

“If you want to talk tomorrow, we can grab a cup of joe?”

He was sweet and I couldn't help smiling.

“My dad runs the best coffee joint in Miami. Free espresso right there.”

“Wow.”

“Wow yourself, Iris: Face of Billabong UK.”

“That was kind of an accident. There was this sabotage thing. Not from me, like . . . by another girl who messed with my board and it all went crazy . . .” And talking of crazy, my stupid babbling was definitely making it sound like I was. “So, um, tell me more about this coffee place.”

“Garcias, in Little Havana. I'll call you.”

“No, don't worry. I'm sure you have better things to do than show some tourist around.”

“Yeah, not really. I can cut class.”

“You're in college?”

“Miami International University of Art and Design. Graphic and web design, but I'm more into the web stuff.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah, I love it.”

I looked down at the pavement and could think of precisely nothing to say. I couldn't exactly ask for my business card back, even though I had a feeling I shouldn't have given it to him, so I just nodded and said, “Thanks for the help. Oh, take your hoodie.”

Except, I couldn't get it off. Some loose threads on the inside had managed to get hooked on to my bra, which had clasps all over it, in order to be fully convertible.

“Here,” Seb said, “let me help you.”

He had his hand down the back of the hoodie, trying to work the fabric free, when I heard running footsteps behind me.

A figure crossed in front of me, and Seb shot backward and his head hit the exterior wall of the hotel's restaurant.

Zeke had arrived.

And his face was contorted with fury. He was sweating heavily, telling Seb to beat it before he called the cops.

“Stop it,” I shouted. “He was helping me!”

When Seb regained his balance, he squared up to Zeke, all flashing eyes and set jaw, and I saw blood trickling down his face from a gash on the side of his head.

“Are you high?” he asked Zeke. “I was helping her out of my sweatshirt.”

Zeke's anger was replaced by confusion, and then fright, when he turned to Seb and saw the blood. He started to apologize, “Sorry, man, I—” when Seb punched him in the face.

“Now we're even,” he said.

Seb's friends were watching from a distance, without moving, and without even looking particularly concerned. Judging
by the right hook he'd demonstrated, Seb could obviously handle himself in a fight.

Zeke made no move to retaliate. He checked his nose for blood, and said, “Feel better?”

“Kinda,” Seb said.

“He showed me the way back to the hotel when I was lost, all right?” I said to Zeke, so furious that I could barely get my words out.

“I guess I got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Nice punch though,” Zeke said, touching his eye, which seemed to have caught some of the blow.

“Yeah, Zeke, you did. He was just helping me out of his hoodie! I was cold in this stupid bloody outfit you and Chase made me wear.”

“Wait,” Seb said, looking Zeke up and down. “You're Zeke Francis?”

Zeke nodded, looking very uncomfortable.

“You never said your boyfriend was Zeke Francis,” Seb said to me. “This is the guy my sister's obsessed with. Dude, she has money on you to win the tour before you hit twenty-one.”

“Shit. I feel bad. I'm real sorry,” Zeke said.

“Forget about it.”

“How much?”

“Huh?”

“How much did she bet on me?”

“A hundred bucks.”

Zeke got his wallet out of his back pocket and counted out five twenty-dollar notes and handed them to Seb. “Here, take it. Give her back her money.”

“What? Why?”

“I'm not gonna be world champ before I'm twenty-one. Probably not gonna be world champ ever.”

Seb put up his hand. “What is it with you people trying to give me your money?”

“You tried to give him money?” Zeke asked.

“For helping me find my way back. I thought you were supposed to tip everyone here!”

There was a pause, the most uncomfortable silence imaginable.

Finally Seb broke it, with, “Y'all have a nice night,” and walked off shaking his head and muttering, “I can't believe it. She said he was such a good guy.”

“Thank you,” I called after him, but he only nodded without looking back.

Then I turned to Zeke and said, “You have some bloody nerve.”

Zeke's eye was already starting to swell up. In a few hours it'd probably close over. Part of me wanted to run to reception and ask for an ice pack, but another part of me wanted to grab a biro and stab him in the other eye.

We stood in front of the lobby with its trailing ferns and massive indoor fountain and squared off.

“Iris, baby, I'm so sorry.”

He tried to hug me, but I was having none of it.

“Don't ‘baby' me, and don't touch me.”

“Just tell me you're OK?”

“Yeah, I'm super.”

“You sure? You're not hurt?”

I looked at my arms and legs in an exaggerated way, as if I was expecting to see burns or blood.

“Doesn't look like it.”

“Sheesh, Iris. Where the heck have you been? And why are you wet?” He didn't wait for an answer. “I'm running around all the bars and diners, going out of my mind. I stood in line for
like a half-hour to get into that dive club on the corner to look for you, since the assholes on the door wouldn't just let me in, even though I totally told them it was an emergency. Chase made his driver take him around the backstreets, in case you'd gotten lost. I was just coming to check the hotel room one last time, and if you weren't there I was gonna call the cops.”

He had sweat on his forehead and he looked so panicky that a tiny part of me felt bad.

“Well, I didn't know you'd flip out. I didn't even think you'd be looking for me. You seemed pretty busy back there.”

“
Flip out?
You took off left me high and dry.”

I shook my wrist free of his grip. “Why, Zeke? Why did I do that?”

“You're asking
me
?”

“Oh, get lost, Zeke. You totally know why.”

I could tell he was on the verge of shouting at me, but I didn't care. I wanted to push him, see him lose his rag.

“Because you say you wanna be treated as a grown-ass woman, but you're a little kid who acts out when things don't go her way?”

That one hurt. I shook my head and made a scoffing sound, too annoyed to answer in actual words.

He looked up at the atrium ceiling high above us, fingers interlinking at the back of his neck as if he'd cricked it. Then his gaze came back down to me, eyes accusing.

“Where did you even go tonight?”

“What's Chase's real name?”

“Are you serious? How are you even still talking about that?”

“I want to know.”

“If Chase wanted you to know, you'd know.”

“Fine. I don't give a toss anyway. South Beach.”

“At night? Have you lost your mind? There are gangs here. Anything could have happened. What were you THINKING?”

“Nothing did happen though, did it? I was fine. Chill out.”

“Don't This is not pretend, Iris. This is real life. There are real bad guys out there. So how about you grow the hell up already?”

“Oh yeah, cos you're, like, so much more mature than I am, being, what, a whole two years older. Ooooh, Zeke Francis's got it all figured out. What a legend.”

He exhaled and put his hands in his back pockets. When he spoke, he put on his “reasonable” voice, the one that made it seem like he was perfect and I was a lunatic. “Come on, Iris, I'm not trying to be a jerk. I just don't want you to ever pull a stunt like that again. Jeez, I thought you were smarter than this.”

Who was Zeke to tell me I was stupid? His greatest achievement was what exactly? Pissing around at the edge of the ocean on a surfboard?

“I know what I'm doing. I don't need you to protect me. I'm not your responsibility.”

“Yeah, you are. I made a promise to your mom.”

“What? No, you didn't.”

“Sure I did! Your friends and family are in Newquay. Without me, you have no one. And you're sixteen!”

Ouch. A dig at me for not having made any of my own friends yet?

“I'm practically seventeen, actually, and I can handle myself. You're not my knight in shining armor. I managed just fine before I met the mythical Zeke bloody Francis.”

His face lifted into this incredulous, fake smile and then it was gone, replaced by pure anger.

“What the hell is with you tonight? You're acting nuts.”

“No, I'm not.”

“Yeah, you are. One-hundred-per-cent loony-tunes wackadoodle.”

I opened my mouth to deny it, and throw a drink in his face for good measure, when it occurred to me that maybe he had a point. I took a breath and said the words that should have come out of my mouth the moment we ran into one another: “I saw you getting off with that girl. Amber's friend. INGA.”

“She kissed me. I wasn't kissing her. Like the time you made out with your psycho ex-boyfriend.” He made the jerk-off motion with his hand, which I'd never seen him do before. “Y'know, on that frickin' rust-bucket fishing boat?”

“Oh, so you're still hanging on to that one, eh?”

Zeke always made out that he was so Zen about everything, but when it came down to it, he could obviously hold on to a grudge with the best of them.

“Hanging on to it? Nope. Remembering it from time to time, yeah. But I get it: sometimes stuff just happens.”

“So you're actually saying you didn't kiss her back?”

“OK, for one thing, I've known Amber and Inga for years. And, two, the kiss was for a picture.”

“Oh, well, that's all right then.”

“It's not as if I was making out with her. I kissed her two seconds for a picture. You think I'd kiss another girl for real?”

“Of course it was real. I saw it. You kissed her, Zeke.”

“For one breath. What am I pushing her across the room the second she touches me?”

“Cool. The next time I get talking to a lad, I'll snog him and we'll see how you like it.”

“Iris,
come on,
it was a second before I stepped away. It meant nothing. And PS, even if I did make out with some other chick, you don't get to put yourself in danger just to spite me, OK? That shit is not gonna happen ever again.”

“So I should just smile and pretend everything's all right, even when my boyfriend's getting off with another girl?”

“No. That's not what I'm even saying.”

“Yes, you are.”

“That's a flat-out lie and you know it. Just rethink the scorched-earth policy. You don't have to burn everything down the second I mess up.”

A group of people had left their glasses of red and white wine on the shiny coffee table next to me. They'd hardly been touched. I picked up a red, and my fingers twitched to throw it in his face, twitched so hard I almost did it, but instead I raised the glass in front of his eyes, said, “
Cheers, brah
,” and downed it in one. It tasted horrid, like some chip shop's cheap vinegar. I slammed down the empty glass and with my eyes dared him to say a single thing about it. Then, before I could back down, change my mind, I picked up a glass of the white wine and downed every last drop of that too. I did this with another two glasses before I was done.

I belched and shoved my hand over my mouth because I sensed the belch was a prelude to a stream of winey vomit. I waited a
moment, and when the danger was over said, “You can't control me, so don't even try,” which was admittedly a dramatic thing to say, but I'd been listening to Greg Holden's “The Lost Boy” a lot, which had a chorus that banged on about not being commanded and controlled. To make it less weird, I added, “You're not the boss of me.”

“I don't want to be.”

“Right, so I can do whatever I want.”

“Not if you wanna be my girl,” he said. “I can't deal with that BS. You scared me to death out there. I thought you were getting trafficked out of the country on some cargo ship.”

I rolled my eyes. “Your imagination needs to calm right down.”

“How was I supposed to know you were fine? You totally ditched me. Wait,” he said, remembering something, “I need to call Chase and tell him I found you.”

Zeke got out his phone. “
Bro . . . Yeah . . . At the hotel . . . South Beach . . . Uh-huh . . . Right? That's what I said . . . Because of Inga . . . Yeah, I'll tell her you said hey. Catch you later.
”

He sank down on one of the lobby sofas and put his head in his hands. I moved to stand in front of him. He sighed, and when he looked up his eyes looked old and tired.

What the hell, I thought. I'm gonna go for it. Come out with the thing that had been bugging me for months. Why shouldn't I tell him the truth?

“I'm fed up with girls throwing themselves at you. You just let them. You should tell them to get lost. You shouldn't even be talking to them.”

Zeke looked genuinely shocked. “I shouldn't talk to any girl but you? You sound like a twelve-year-old.”

“And you sound like a dickhead.”

“I'm gonna talk to people, and since half the people in the world are girls, I'm gonna talk to girls.”

“Even when they're blatantly trying to pull you?”

“Girls can talk to me without wanting to get with me. I mean, I'm flattered that you think I'm this babe-magnet, but it's really not like that.”

“At least fifty percent of your friends are female. What bloke has that many female friends?”

“Fifty percent of human beings are female. Yeah, I have plenty of chick friends. I like hanging out with girls. They're fun and cool. So what? It doesn't mean anything. Sometimes people are just being friendly, you know?”

“Over-friendly if they're giving you their number, or sticking their tongue in your mouth.”

“Hot damn, Iris, what am I supposed to do? Step away each time a girl asks me how my day is?”

“Yeah, maybe. You're allowed to walk away if you don't want to speak to someone. I would why can't you?”

He was looking more and more shocked by the second.

“Because it's freakin'
rude
.”

I looked over to the two women standing at the reception desk. One of them was reading a paperback, completely uninterested in us, and the other one was doing her best to appear so.

I held up my mobile phone in his face and loaded up Twitter. “Look,” I said. “Just look.”

When I searched for him, @Surfgeekzeke, it was one long string of tweets from girls. Some of them had even tweeted photographs they'd taken with Zeke, and the composition of those photos usually went like this: the girl would be holding Zeke's surfboard, he'd be standing next to her with his hand on her lower back and they'd both be smiling into the camera, or he'd be smiling into the camera and she'd be gazing up at him. The captions were always along the lines of “Awesome to meet the amazing @Surfgeekzeke. You're soooo hot and talented!!! DM me, baby . . .”

“When did this even happen?” I said, looking at the latest one, taken on South Beach and featuring a girl with a button nose, absolutely no hips and a ridiculously inflated cleavage. “Where was I?”

“Iris, they're fans. How am I supposed not to talk to fans? Without those guys I don't have a career.”

“Firstly, they are not guys, and secondly, they are not fans. Surf fans know about surfing. Those right there?” I said, jabbing my thumb at the screen. “Groupies.”

Zeke looked aghast.

“You know that just by looking at them? Damn, girl, teach me your mind-reading skills. Be real handy in the line-up. Besides, guys say stuff about
you
all the time.”

“No, they don't. Not like this.”

“Uh, how about last week when that picture of you in a bathing suit went up on the Billabong Facebook page?”

“I didn't even know it did I haven't been on Facebook much lately. What did they say?”

“Let me think: ‘If there's grass on the field, play ball,' and like a million worse versions of that. Oh, and one douchebag just posted a picture of lotion.”

“Why would he—”

“For jerking off!”

“Ew. Rank.”

“I know!”

“Well, what happened to not caring about stuff that people say on the Internet?
It's nothing to the universe
, remember . . .”

“You wanted to talk about this!”

“This was supposed to be a relaxing break between contests,” I said, sighing, as if he was completely responsible for this blazing row.

“So why are you spoiling it?”

And that's when I remembered, and felt so ashamed I wanted to stick my head in an oven. I had just given my number to a boy. A boy who seemed interested in me.

There I was, slagging off girls who flirted with Zeke, and I had given my Billabong business card to Seb, a complete stranger. Why? Just because I was angry with Zeke? Was I really that pathetic?

I was a hypocrite.

My head throbbed and I sat down on the sofa next to Zeke. I could feel my stupid eyes welling up with tears and I wiped them away.

Zeke was quiet, and then said, “Let me find you a Kleenex.”

He walked off and I heard murmured voices as he approached the reception desk staff.

The wine had been strong and the room was starting to spin. Black circles around the edges of my vision closed in and suddenly I was lurching sideways and falling into upholstery.

The last thing I registered before I passed out was Zeke saying, “
Oh, brother
,” then getting a grip under my arms and lifting me.