“Yes,” Pop asked. “Do they have dancing girls?”
Frannie wrinkled her nose. “What, are you crazy? It’s a cafe that sells sandwiches and teenagers sing in bands. But I’ll be sure and make the suggestion.” She changed tack. “Come on. You were at me all month to get back out of the house.” This was true, she realized, even though ever since she’d run to Saul’s at the beach she’d felt so… energized that she had barely thought about the accident.
“We need to ask your brother to come over,” Mom said to Pop. “In thanks at the very least.”
Pop offered up a hand, Sure.
Frannie jumped again. “It’s the neatest cafe in Laguna Beach.”
Mom eyed her. “You know all the cafes in Laguna Beach?”
“They have coffee and music and sculpture and books and ooh, it’s just fantastic,” Frannie said.
“I’ll bet there’s a boy,” Mom said.
Frannie was stumped by that.
“Of course,” her pop said. “A surfer boy and they probably all go around shirtless in that place.”
“Darling, do the boys wear shirts?” Mom asked.
“I think it’s a rule,” Frannie answered solemnly. She was careful not to mention the fight that had started and that she had actually gotten involved in, or the undercover cops, which didn’t seem to speak well of the place. Or the sculptures that had everyone all tizzied up. “Mom, look, this is a great summer I’m talking about. I could spend it following my friends to the beach or I can work for Saul—I know I’ll get more out of the cafe, I just know it.” She couldn’t help that when she got worked up, she started to shriek a little bit, but there it was.
“Well,” her mom said. “Just be careful. Saul’s okay and he can look after you. But Frannie,” and here she leveled a dishrag at her, “a lot goes on around the beach, and you don’t know what people really want from you sometimes.”
She was up with the chickens to pump it out to the beach. She realized she had no idea when she was supposed to meet Newpup, so she got to the beach at 8:30 and wandered around the curve of cliff and sand below the Hotel Riviera. She could have thrown a baseball high and hard up the cliff and over Ocean Highway and hit Saul’s cafe, she figured.
Newp and his friends showed up at 9:30 and immediately started hitting the waves, all of them with those lean looks that made Frannie practically swoon. But Newpup stayed with her and led her back to a bunch of boards at a little workshop area next to a wooden hut. He chose a board and began walking with Frannie back towards the waves.
“Saul knows people,” Newpup said, as though answering a question he’d asked himself. “If he wants you as a waitress, that’s good enough for me.”
“What are they doing?” Frannie asked, looking out at the surfers in the water. She and Newp had stopped at the water’s edge. There was a wide expanse of choppy water, and then beyond that, where the water got calm, all the surfers had lined up, sitting on their boards, looking out to the horizon. To Frannie they seemed like a string of jewels, the facets of their shoulders sparkling with water.
“Looking for waves,” Newpup said. “Come on.”
They waded out to the water and Newp dropped the board down and straddled it. Then he swiveled back and gestured to her. “Climb on.”
Frannie got on the board—it was more buoyant than she expected, and smooth, all covered in fiberglass like a boat. She held on with both hands as though it would start bucking in a second, and he tapped the section of board between them. “Get closer,” he said. “Against my back.”
She slid forward until her chin was sideways against the middle of Newp’s shoulder blades.
This was a little closer to this boy than she had anticipated being this particular morning, and she felt dry in the mouth, sure that he could hear her heart beating against his back muscles.
“Okay, Frannie,” Newp looked back and stopped, watching her face. “We’re gonna paddle. Paddle fast because we gotta get over the breakers.”
She dipped her hands into the water and mimicked Newp as he leaned over and started paddling hard and fast with his hands scooped. She paddled the same, the water splashing around her legs. The little breaker waves started coming, hard and galloping. She paddled on, hearing Newp breathing hard.
“A few more yards!” Newp called, and she paddled, but for a second she closed her eyes to listen to the chopping sound of the water. Finally they broke over and slid across the water, into the calm beyond, not far behind the line of surfers looking out west.
Frannie sat up and turned to look back towards the beach and the hut, and the Riviera Hotel a few hundred yards beyond that.
“You’re not even winded,” Newp said.
Frannie looked away from the beach and smiled at Newp. “Why should I be winded?”
“This paddling is a —it’s tough,” he said, awkwardly avoiding some curse or another.
“Boy are you a chauvinist,” Frannie laughed. “If you must know, I’m a pretty avid cyclist, and my mom made we swim ever since I was born. Plus a lot of cross-country skiing. So no, I’m not winded. Oy.”
He raised an eyebrow and waved his hands in surrender. “Okay.”
They paddled until they got in next to the line of surfers, about ten or twelve of them. Newp seemed to know them all and they all hooted at him.
“Hey, Newp, who’s the guppy?”
“You bring one for me?”
“Does she have a sister? I mean like a big sister.”
“This is Frannie,” Newp said. He turned back to her. “You have a sister?”
“Not around here,” Frannie said. She did have a sister, Dolores, who was off in Chicago.
“You robbin’ the cradle, Newp?” one of the boys said.
Newp waved his hands. “Nah, she works for—”
“Surf’s up!” another boy shouted, and Frannie looked out to the ocean to see, indeed, a wave rolling in.
“Okay,” Newp said. “Hold onto the board. We’re gonna paddle and grab it.”
“Grab it?” she said. “But we’re facing it.”
He bucked in the board and they started to turn sideways. “Paddle sideways to it, come on.” And they were paddling southward as the wave rolled, unbroken, a swell that even now was starting to lift them. She felt the power of the rolling water as it pushed them and everything around them five feet higher.
“Okay, stay there,” Newp said, and he tilted and paddled and now they were pointed back towards shore, the wave lifting them, and Newp suddenly sprang to his feet, one foot in front of the other, arms spread for balance.
They were riding on the wave. Frannie heard the water smacking fast against the underside of the board as Newp guided them down.
It lasted just a few seconds, sliding in towards shore, until they reached the chop and then her toes were touching the sand below them.
“Ha!” Newp jumped into the water and held the board. “How’s that.”
She laughed and looked back at the waves, which shimmered and sparkled. She wanted to feel the waves again. “That was... “
“You want to go again?”