Blue Read Online Free Page B

faces.”
    “I’ll never forget that face. In fact, let me get a photo,” Cass said, smirking. I shot her a pissed-off look, but she didn’t put her phone down.
    “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said to Daniel. “He’s new here. Just arrived last week.”
    “New from where?”
    “Hawaii, I think.”
    “Just what Fistral needs. Another foreigner thinking he owns the place, disrespecting the locals and scratching for every wave out there. Be two minutes before he gets a slap off one of the tribe.”
    Zeke was busy waxing the boards and was totally ignoring Daniel, although he must have heard Daniel talking stink about him.
    “He’s cool, Daniel. Just leave him alone, OK? You not going out for the glass-off?”
    A glass-off is the early evening when the sea is calm, the wind drops and the breaking waves are smooth as glass.
    “Nah, the plans with the missus gotta come first, eh? Check out the quiver of boards on that van. You’ll have fun keeping up with him, dear,” Daniel said, turning to nod at the breakers coming in thick and fast.
    Daniel had spent the past two summers as a surf instructor for Ocean Ride Surf School, which is when he’d started saying things like “a quiver of boards.” Waves were no longer good, they were “porno,” “crippler” or “super-epic.”
    In fact, since Daniel started working there, he’d begun acting like he owned the beach, dropping in on the waves of other surfers if he thought they weren’t good enough to ride them properly. The more I thought about it, the more I realized thatDaniel had become a total tool in the past year: ultra-competitive and selfish. No wonder he didn’t like the look of Zeke. God help a guy that Daniel thought might surf better than he did.
    Cass piped up with, “Keeping up with that dude? She wishes ,” which annoyed Daniel even more.
    “Shut up, Cass,” he said, “you’re really starting to give me a headache.”
    Ha. Good. They deserved each other.
    “I’ve gotta split,” I said, seeing that Zeke had almost finished waxing the boards and was looking over at me. There wasn’t that much time until nightfall.
    Daniel couldn’t resist one parting shot. “Don’t waste your time, Iris. You know he’ll end up with a Barbie on his arm.”
    “Yeah, you’d know all about that,” I shot back.
    “Well, don’t blame me when he breaks your heart.”
    I walked back to Zeke, still sick at the thought of Cass and Daniel all cozied up together and having the nerve to take a shot at me.
    “Sorry,” I said to Zeke, shaking my head.
    “Friends of yours?”
    “No.”
    “Used to be, huh?”
    “I guess not,” I said.
    Zeke gave me a look like he knew a thing or two about people letting you down and breaking your heart, but he changed the subject.
    “So let’s go surfing already,” Zeke said. He locked his van, stashed his keys on a magnet under the wheel arch and then picked up his board.
    But it was as if all the courage had drained out of my feet, because all I wanted to do was turn back and go home. In the end, I made myself go.
    Walking down to the beach, I could tell that other people were staring at Zeke, most likely wondering what he was doing with me in my horrible rented wetsuit and easy board.
    We were wading through the ankle busters when, at the worst moment possible, just when I had dropped my board leash and was bending over to get it, three tweeny girls came up to Zeke and took pictures of him on their mobiles. They tried to do this slyly, but the flashes from their camera phones lit up the evening beach.
    Zeke didn’t say anything. It seemed like he was embarrassed. Still, they were just kids and probably went around taking photos of all the hot surfers on the beach.
    Zeke started limbering up and, as he tossed his board on to the water, I was glad to see that he wasn’t moaning about needing boots or a hood, or complaining about the coldness of the water. Some foreign surfers would just not quit