When Bomb and I get to Trestles forty-five minutes later, even at this early hour, it’s all surf trucks and tourist cars backed up along the road near the trailhead.
“Well, that sucks,” he says.
We park a mile up and walk a hundred yards, past a gaggle of groms baking a Pop-Tart on the heated hood of their parents’ SUV, and past several chirpy, rich-looking kooks who have no business on the waves, struggling into their wet suits.
Bomb points to a thicket.
“Follow me,” he says.
He spreads the brush wide, revealing a secret shortcut: a narrow path that leads to the beach from the bluff. We hike down through coastal scrub that scrapes against our boards and snags our backpacks. The pebbles under my bare feet poke and sting. A brown pelican flies directly over us with a fishtail peeking from its gullet.
“I know who put those rumors out,” I tell Bomb.
“Who?”
“That Aussie bitch, Kimberly Masters. And I’m telling you, if I see her in Sydney next week, it’s a full-on girl fight.”
Bomb walks ahead and clears a tree branch tangled with a tattered Metallica tee. Sweat beads on my skin. I smell the salty brine of the ocean mixed with a tinge of dog poo.
“Fine,” he says, “but you don’t know for sure, and you don’t want shit like that blowing up before the Games. I know it’s bullshit and you know it’s bullshit, but bigger guns think it’s real. Until then, we’re just moving forward, heads down, until they discover otherwise—which they won’t.”
“She’s been after me all season, pissed that she only came in third in the Nike XX, and she claims that I stole her wave, which is total crap.”
“Screw that,” Bomb says. “Your agent’s on it. What’s his name? Black-a-koff-ski, Blah-blah-bifski—I can never get his name right.”
“Blaszczykowski,” I say. “Jerry Blaszczykowski.”
“What is that? Polish? Anyway, you want gold, we’ve got to focus.”
When we get to the beach, we look out at the surf to the lineup. There’s, like, a gazillion surfers trying to pick off the same fifty-yard stretch of wave.
“Are total shitheads hijacking this sport, or is it just me?” Bomb says.
“They weren’t even on the surf cam twenty minutes ago. Did they all drop in out of the sky?”
“It’s not worth a paddle out,” Bomb says, so we hike back up the trail.
Back at the training center, Bomb orders two hours in Sisyphus, which is what I do, flat on my board, paddling until my shoulders and lungs catch fire. It’s designed to build upper-body strength and lung power so that when I ride a wave during a competition, I can get back out to the lineup quicker. It’s really not bad. Once you pass through the threshold of pain and exhaustion, you’re delivered into an out-of-body realm where it’s just you and your thoughts, which, at the moment, consist of wondering how to keep the doping news from my father and inventing notorious methods of disaster for Aussie Kimberly Masters.
The current dies with a hiss, and it’s back to the reality. I look up. Bomb’s finger is on Sisyphus’s control button.
“You’re right,” he says. “It’s the Aussie.”
6
The Friday-night rehearsal dinner is a classy sit-down soirée in a private room at Hotel del Flor’s Circa, a waterfront establishment that goes beyond the usual fare, with its exotic seafood and a Catalan chef. Tonight, it’s suits, ties, and dresses—my little black go-to with heels—but trust me, the wedding tomorrow is going to be a total Louis the XIV psychedelic partay. Twenty-five happy, anticipatory faces are seated along a beautifully dressed table jeweled with votive candles, calligraphic place cards, and glass vases filled with white tulips, the slat-wood ceiling spreading its ribs in an arc above. Beaded light sheens on the same fancy plates that the bride, my friend Penelope, has on her wedding registry.
Glasses clink, and the guests focus on Jerry, the best man, who’s standing at the head of the table with his champagne glass held high while Paul, the groom, a strapping Marine with biceps as thick as my thighs, looks on.
“Please stand up. Let’s raise a glass to Paul and Penelope . . .” yada yada “. . . found each other . . .” yada “. . . new road ahead . . .” yada. “I know about fifteen guys who, as of tomorrow, will be sobbing in their beer at the thought of Penelope with a wedding ring on her finger . . .”
The toast continues with a story of the couple stuck in a Jamaican hurricane, declarations of their love in the face of catastrophe, and closes with a wish for a hundred years of health and happiness. Penelope goes gooey with a thank-you and blows Jerry a kiss.
They seem like the perfect couple: Penelope, blond and pixie cute with a bubbly SoCal personality, a biology degree, and a brain Einstein would envy, and Paul, fresh out of the corps, taking on med school like he’s charging a hill. I’m truly happy for her, but I must admit to a tinge of envy. If I could ever get a relationship to take hold I wonder what a wedding would be like for me. Daddy blames himself for my relationship woes, since being raised by the Pentagon meant we never laid down roots anywhere. He holds this notion that maybe if I’d had a normal childhood—you know, growing up in the same house on the same street with a dog or cat with a gaggle of friends, actually having personal things (a stuffed animal collection or a bicycle, maybe)—and if I hadn’t had to pack up every six months, I might actually fit in somewhere, bleed all the salt from my veins, and be able to connect with a guy for longer than a few dates. But I think it’s more about what happens to a guy’s ego when he learns that I rode the Cortes wave that crushes any ideas of a first date. And the Olympian thing? Oh my God, talk about a repelling force field, which is pretty darn bad for a gal who gets a crush on any cute guy that walks by.
Anyway, there’s a big syrupy awwww before everyone stands, cheers, and clinks glasses. The skinny kid next to me, swallowed inside a blue suit, is Penelope’s seventeen-year-old brother, Nixon. We’re paired together in the wedding party. He’s sweet and cute, but tying a tie is clearly not his thing. On the flipside, his loopy brown curls, this untamed ’fro cascading off his head and dropping to his jawline, taking on a life of groovydom is wild, wonderful, plush, and ooh! I just want to dig my fingers into it. He’s computer-geek innocent, but though I’ll come to learn that he’s part Swedish, Guatemalan, and Chinese, his face is shocking white even in the dim candlelight.
Nixon clinks his glass against mine hard enough to slosh the champagne.
“Sorry,” he says with a nervous laugh. He clinks his glass on a few others, lifts it to his lips, then glances across the table to his father, who nods, it’s cool. He takes a sip and winces. We sit down.
“You like champagne?” he asks, setting his glass in front of him.
“It’s OK.” I say taking a sip. “The bubbles get me drunk super fast. You?”
“Of course,” he says, “Who doesn’t?”
There’s an incredible vulnerability in his soft brown eyes when he tells me this.
It’s weird, but he knows all about me, I mean, not just the public stuff. He knows my pizza preference (Hawaiian) and that I’m into the band Junk Bees. He knows that I have a penchant for mango-and-pineapple ice cream, that I’m a Pisces, and that my favorite earrings are a pair of little silver turtledoves. But the most interesting detail he knows is that I’m named after an atoll in the Maldives archipelago, a lonely little eyelash of an island in the Indian Ocean, surrounded by a ring of cerulean blue. I figure that Penelope briefed him so he wouldn’t feel awkward sitting next to me with nothing to say, but lack of conversation isn’t a problem.
“So, how long have you known my sister?”