Dawn Patrol Read Online Free Page A

this,” Boone said to her.
    “Get used to what?”
    “Getting beat by a girl.”
    “My name’s Sunny Day,” she said ruefully.
    “I’m not laughing,” he said. “Mine’s Boone Daniels.”
    They went to dinner and then they went to bed. It was natural, inevitable—they both knew that neither one of them could swim out of that current. As if either one of them wanted to.
    After that, they were inseparable.
    “You and Boone should get married and produce offspring,” Johnny Banzai told them a few weeks later. “You owe it to the world of surfing.”
    Like, the child of Boone and Sunny would be some sort of mutant superfreak. But marriage?
    Not happening.
    “CCBHS” is how Sunny explained herself on this issue. “Classic California broken home syndrome. There ought to be a telethon.”
    Emily Wendelin’s hippie dad had left her hippie mom when Emily was three years old. Her mom never got over it, and neither did Emily, who learned not to give her heart to a man because men don’t stay.
    Emily’s mom retreated into herself, becoming “emotionally unavailable,” as the shrinks would say, and it was her grandmother—her mother’smother—who really raised the girl. Eleanor Day imbued Emily with her strength, her grace, and her warmth, and it was Eleanor who gave the girl the nickname “Sunny,” because her granddaughter lit up her life. When Sunny turned eighteen, she changed her surname to Day, regardless of how pseudohippie it sounded.
    “I’m matrilineal,” she explained.
    It was her grandmother who persuaded her to go to college, and her grandmother who understood when, after the first year, Sunny decided that higher education, at least in a formal setting, wasn’t for her.
    “It’s my fault,” Eleanor had said.
    Her house was a block and a half from the beach, and Eleanor had taken her granddaughter there almost every day. When eight-year-old Sunny said that she wanted to surf, it was Eleanor who saw that a board was under the Christmas tree. It was Eleanor who stood on the beach while the girl rode wave after wave, Eleanor who smiled patiently when the sun went down and Emily would wave from the break, holding up one imploring finger, which meant “Please, Grandma, one more wave.” It was Eleanor who went to the early tournaments, who sat calmly in the ER with the girl, assuring her that the stitches in her chin wouldn’t leave a scar, and that if they did, it would be an interesting one.
    So when Sunny came to her and explained that she didn’t want to go to college, and tearfully apologized for letting her down, Eleanor said that it was
her
fault for introducing Emily to the ocean.
    “So what do you intend to do?” Eleanor asked.
    “I want to be a professional surfer.”
    Eleanor didn’t raise an eyebrow. Or laugh, or argue, or scoff. She simply said, “Well, be a great one.”
    Be
a great surfer, not
marry
one.
    Not like the options were mutually exclusive, but neither Sunny nor Boone was interested in getting married, or even living together. Life was just fine the way it was—surfing, hanging out, making love, and surfing. It was all one and the same thing, one long, unbroken rhythm.
    Good days.
    Sunny waited tables in PB while she worked on her surfing career; Boone was happy being a cop, a uniformed patrolman with the SDPD.
    What busted it up was a girl named Rain Sweeny.
    Things changed after Rain Sweeny. After she was gone, Boone neverreally came back. It was like there was this distance between Boone and Sunny now, like a deep, slow current pulling them apart.
    And now this big swell is coming, and they both sense that it’s bringing a bigger change.
    They stand outside Boone’s office.
    “So … late,” Sunny says.
    “Late.”
    Walking away, Sunny wonders if it’s
too
late.
    Like she’s already lost something she didn’t even know she wanted.
9
    Boone walks into Pacific Surf.
    Hang Twelve looks up from
Grand Theft Auto 3
and says, “There’s an inland betty