Page 89 of Under the Waves
“They don’t matter,thisdoes.”
I reached towards her but just as my fingers brushed against her arm, she flinched and pulled away.
“Jasper.”
“Poppy.”
“Go,” her eyes turned cold and sharp, narrowing in on me. Gone was my Wellsy, replaced with the rival I’d known all these years. “We can talk after your heat.”
I didn’t get a chance to speak because she was already walking away from me. I watched her blurred figure disappear into the crowd and beyond. My chest heaved as I warmed up, this pressure building up inside of me.
I ended up winning that heat, but it didn’t feel like I’d won anything because she wasn’t there with me. The one person who had always been at my competitions wasn’t there, and even though my best friend was in hospital, why did that feel so much worse?
Maybe that made me the worlds shittiest friend on the planet.
Maybe after all these years, they’d finally realize how much of a disappointment I really was.
I couldn’t do this any longer.
I was breaking under the weight of their expectations, and nothing was keeping me from falling apart excepther…but. She. Wasn’t. There.
Poppy Wells was gone, beyond the horizon, far away from the mess that I’d become.
She’d avoided me the entire week since then.
Even at work, I never caught her long enough to explain myself. Until today…and she’d barely even looked at me. I riled her up by resorting to that easy back and forth we had but, apart from that, she wouldn’t even acknowledge me.
I hated it. Dreaded it. Wanted to fuckingburnit.
“Do you think he’s trapped in space? You know, like you see in those cool alien movies.”
“You mean Star Wars?”
“I love those movies! Me and Jasper watch them all the time. Jakson is super obsessed with them, even more than us. He loves Anakinsoooooomuch.”
“Pepe who’s Anakin?”
“Ugh, come on Juni, it’s literally Darth Vader but in his Jedi era!”
“Clone wars Anakin is my favorite.”
Three little kids wrapped up in wetsuits that were back to front stared up at me with gaped expressions like I had whipped cream on my nose.
“What are you three doing,mm?” I mused, signing the words at the same time, trying to act as cool as I could muster right now. “Your wetsuits are all back to front.”
Pepe crossed his arms over his chest and glared at the other two. “See, I told you,” he said, signing, too.
I laughed, ruffling the back of his hair. “You too, kid.”
His small brows crossed as he huffed, storming back into the changing rooms. I chuckled and ushered Juniper and Rhys back into the changing rooms. After I double checked all the kids had their wetsuits the right way round, I started the lesson.
For the most part, it ran smoothly. We spent most of our time on the sand learning how to stand up correctly on our boards. A few of the kids mastered it within a couple of tries, and no matter how much they begged me to let them try it out on the waves, I refused. I needed to be confident in them, trust them enough to know that if I let them out there on the openocean, they wouldn’t panic, because that was when accidents happened. Fatal or not, it didn’t matter. They’d be stuck on the sand for now until I knew in my bones that they were ready.
Most of the kids rushed back up to the surf school before I even finished giving the end of the lesson recap. I didn’t mind though, I got why they did it. I was once them too and I wouldn’t be that kind of coach who trained through fear and punishment—how I had been coached.
Pepe stayed behind and nagged me all the way back to the school about wanting an extra few hours of practice on the waves. He was a good kid, and I loved him like a brother, but I couldn’t stay behind and watch him.
I had plans to meet Lia at the hospital to see Jakson. According to her, he was being awhiny, needy little baby. That voicemail made me laugh when I first heard it. Jakson stole the phone off her and proceeded to go into a full on fifteen-minute rant about how he wasn’t needy and how if he was,which he wasn’t, it was completely justified after all he’d been through.