This morning, he did the same. I ran into the ocean and out, and he ran in and out chasing his driftwood. After a while, Dylan emerged from the tent, blinking, wearing a pair of Hawaiian-print board shorts, all his scars on full display—the puckered pink one that ran over his biceps, the constellation of perfect circles across his belly, and one-foot-long thin marks here and there, not the ordinary kind of scars a person had. He told crazy stories about them—that he’d wrestled a pirate, danced over coals, gotten stuck in a meteor shower in outer space.
“Hey, kid,” he said now, his voice raspy. “Where’s your sister? Did she ever come down?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
He frowned, looking up the stairs toward the restaurant. He tugged his shirt on and sat down on the sand to light a half-smoked joint he took out of his pocket. The sweet smell mingled with ocean and fog to make a scent that I would always associate with him. “You hungry?”
“Not yet,” I lied. My stomach was growling a little bit, but I never, ever got to have him to myself, and I planned to enjoy it as long as I could. “Are you surfing today?”
“Yep.”
“Are you ever going to teach us?”
He glanced over at me. “You really want to learn?”
“Duh!” I flung out my hand toward the waves. “You’ve been telling us for ages that we could.”
He inhaled, held it. His eyes were red already from all the drinking the night before, but it only made his irises pop—those abalone-shell colors blasting right out of his face. As he exhaled in a small stream, I tried to catch it, and he laughed. “You never want to do this, little girl.”
“No,” I said definitely. “Drugs are bad for you. Smoking is really, really bad for you.”
“You’re right.”
“So why do you do drugs if you know they’re bad?”
His long hair was caught back in a ponytail, and he reached up and tugged out the rubber band, working his fingers through the tangles. I touched my braid to check it, but it was still very tight and good. “I don’t know, Kitten,” he said. He plucked a piece of pot off his lip. “It’s stupid, but I guess I like not thinking.”
“But why?” I leaned in. “I love to think.”
He smiled. “You’re so good at it—that’s why. And that’s the reason you should never, never, never do any drugs—because you are so smart.” He tapped my forehead. “You’re the smartest one of all of us. You know that, right?”
I shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Good.” He pinched the end of the joint. “Pinkie promise me, okay? You will never, ever do drugs.”
I reached up my pinkie, and we twisted them together. “Promise.” I wished he didn’t have to do drugs either, but I could feel that darkness in him getting better as he smoked his joint. It was like he carried around some mean monster that shut up only when he drank or smoked pot.
“Surfing’s better,” he said, and stood up. “It’s going to be cold.”
“Duh.”
He grinned his best grin, the one that crinkled the edges of his eyes, and held out his hand. “All right, then. Let’s do this thing.”
He kept his board, a longboard with red and yellow detailing along the rails, on the beach. He put me on the board in front of him and paddled us out only about five feet. Waves were low and slow, and even I knew that these were bland conditions.
We just sat on the board, our feet trailing. In his deep, quiet voice, he explained how to feel the movement, the energy of the waves, and I was enchanted by the science of it, feeling the movements, the swells. We practiced first on my belly; then he showed me how to stand up from a squat, which was easy. He stood me up with him, laughing when my balance was solid—“Kit, that’s great! That’s really great!”—but I wasn’t surprised. I was always good at physical things.
Paddle out, stand up, feel it. Paddle, stand up. He made me stand in front, one hand on my waist to steady me, and caught a wave so small it hardly made a ripple, but we rode it down the shoreline quite a way, and I could feel the difference between that and a no-wave.
That ride, that single, easy ride on a tiny wave, made me a surfer. Behind me, Dylan murmured encouragement—“There you go, steady, bend your knees”—and his approval made me ten feet tall, the princess of surfing. Overhead was the heavy sky, around us the ocean and her secrets, and my feet on the board, the water cold, my fingertips frozen.
The wave petered out on the far end of the cove. “Hungry?” Dylan asked.
I was ready to catch raw fish and shove them down my throat, but I didn’t want to quit. “A little.”
“Getting tired?”
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“Looks like Josie’s brought food down.” He waved toward the cove, where I saw my sister spreading out a blanket and pinning it with a basket and whatever she’d lugged from the kitchen. She waved back and put her hands on her hips.
We paddled toward her, and I waded out. Grabbing a chunk of cheese, I started to gobble it before I even went back to the tent for my hoodie. Ducking into the relative warmth of our tent, I found the hoodie, tugged it on to stop my shivering, and scrambled back out.
Josie stood with her arms crossed hard over her chest, glaring at Dylan. “You taught her and not me?”
He settled on the blanket, taking grapes and bread and cheese from the basket she’d carried down. “You weren’t here. Did you sleep in your room?”
She gave a hard, jagged shrug. “I couldn’t find you guys, and it was dark, and I just went to my bed.”
“Hey, hey,” Dylan said, “we didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” He stood on his knees to rub her back. She jerked away violently.
He backed up, hands palm out. “You okay?”
“Fine.” She fell to the blanket, her body sharp, all knees and elbows. “I’m just mad. I want to learn to surf too.”
He watched her for a minute. I sat close, and he wrapped an arm around me. “Eat, kiddo.”
But he didn’t have to tell me twice. My gut felt like an empty, yawning hole, and I chewed as fast as I could. Josie radiated prickly light, most of it directed at me, but I ignored her, feeling my blood swaying in an echo of the waves. I watched them rolling in, little, little, little, big. Little, little, big. Little, little, little, big. Big. Really big.
“It’s fun, Josie,” I said, and something in me was quiet. “You’ll like it.”
“If I’d known there was gonna be lessons, I’d’ve been here.” She almost sounded like she was going to cry. “No one told me.”
Then she did cry. Crumpled over herself, knees sticking out side to side, skinny arms bracing her head, all that long hair scattering over her like a blanket.
“It’s okay, Grasshopper,” Dylan said, patting her head. “We have all day. We’ll all surf, right?”
Josie didn’t raise her head, just stayed where she was, crying softly, Dylan’s hand in her hair.
Decades later, I stand on the beach at Piha, New Zealand, clad in a rented short-sleeve wet suit and holding a rented board, and I think about how much he smoked weed and drank with us. We idolized him then, but as an adult, I’m appalled.