I wasn’t exactly an expert myself, but most of the time I could make it to shore without wiping out. If only the perfect wave would show up so I wouldn’t look like a total dork. I cupped my hand around my firebird necklace, hoping it would bring me luck, and let the wimpy waves pass by.
Violet sprung to her feet. “You can do it, Madison! Holy schnikies, go for it already!” Violet always had the craziest expressions.
When a four-foot wave finally surged behind me, I counted one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi. I popped onto my feet and spread my arms, imagining I was a red-winged firebird. Then I shot to shore under a cloudless blue sky.
Surfing is the closest thing I’ve ever felt to flying.
“Yes!” Violet lifted her fist in victory.
“Awesome!” shouted Noah, giving me two thumbs up.
Leroy barked his applause and wriggled free to bombard my salty legs with soft dog licks.
I peeled off the Velcro surf leash tethering my ankle to the board. Leroy hopped on, standing as still and regal as the Statue of Liberty.
“Move it, Leroy. I have next dibs.” Violet motioned to him to skedaddle off the surfboard.
Leroy stayed put.
“Looks like he’s trying to protect you, Violet,” Noah said. “Maybe he’s worried you’ll get hurt.”
“I can take care of myself, thank you very much. Besides, I’ve been looking forward to doing this all summer.” Violet nudged Leroy’s butt. He slinked off, his tail tucked between his legs.
Noah and I watched from the beach while Violet paddled beyond the waves. I stroked Leroy’s wiry white fur until he wriggled away to snuffle for crabs in the sand.
Noah had just turned thirteen—a year older than me. I’d met him last summer when we were both contestants on the reality TV show Stranded in the Amazon. Since then his voice had turned scratchy as sandpaper. We’d video chatted all year from his new house in Denver where he lived with his dad. When he stepped off the plane, I nearly gasped. He’d grown almost five inches.
“Pretty decent for her first day,” he said as we watched Violet teeter onto her knees, wobble to her feet, and then hold her stance for a few seconds before pitching into the surf.
Better than I did my first time.
“Good one!” I shouted. “Now try it without resting on your knees. Just pop straight onto your feet!”
Violet gave me the A-OK sign and kept at it until the shadows from the palm trees edging the beach grew long, and the sun sank low in the sky.
“Sorry. Looks like you’ll have to wait until tomorrow,” I told Noah. When Violet got super excited about something, sometimes she could forget to take turns.
He shrugged. “No worries. After all, we have two whole weeks.”
At least that’s what we thought at the time.
After Violet dragged herself from the water, she dropped the surfboard onto the sand and toweled off her long blond hair. It instantly sprang back into a zillion corkscrew curls. It was exactly the kind of hair my grandmother, Florida, wished I had, but didn’t. Mine was nut brown and stick-straight, just like my mom’s used to be. I liked it that way.
Leroy abandoned his crab hunt and jumped onto the surfboard again, repeating his Statue of Liberty imitation.
“That’s it for the day, boy. Come on.”
I patted my leg and Leroy followed us up the beach. We wound our way through a thicket of towering palm trees filled with songbirds and chattering white-faced capuchin monkeys. On the other side of the trees was La Posada Encantada, the five-room waterfront inn and café that Rosalie Claire and Thomas owned. Ever since I’d arrived, I’d been staying with them in their saffron-yellow bungalow on the far edge of the hotel.
The whole year, I’d counted the days until I’d be reunited with Rosalie Claire. Until she married Thomas last year, she’d been my next-door neighbor in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. That’s where I live with my sometimes-crazy grandmother, Florida Brown, who I’d moved in with after my mom died. At the time I thought my life was officially over, but thanks to Rosalie Claire, a mysterious TV—not to mention a little magic—my grandmother and I had learned to cut each other some slack. Until recently, that is, when Florida fell back on her old nagging ways. If only my mom could magically appear and tell her to cut it out.
Even though she’d been gone a year and a half, I still found myself thinking about my mom at least every other minute of every single day. Each night before I fell asleep, I double-wished I could see her just one more time. Whenever I had a spare moment, I drew pictures of her in my sketchbook, trying to cement all of the memories I had of her in my brain.
“You’re such a lucky duck,” Violet said as we walked the winding stone pathway through the inn’s tropical garden, blooming with orchids and passionflowers. “You got to be here the whole dang summer!” She picked a purple orchid and tucked it behind her ear.
Given what’s happened to me in my life, I didn’t exactly feel a hundred percent lucky, but staying here for three whole months qualified as being pretty darn cool.
“I really needed a break from Florida,” I admitted. “She started bugging me again about so much stuff, like wanting me to wear makeup and curl my hair. Ugh. I think her biggest dream in life is for me to be Miss Teenage America.”
“You’re only twelve,” Noah pointed out.
“Tell that to my grandmother.” When Florida put her mind to something, her will was stronger than a Category Five hurricane. You’d better give in or get out of her way.
“Like you said, sometimes your grandmother can be the absolute worst.” Violet gave one of her eye-rolls.
Violet and I had been best friends forever. Since the first day of first grade on Bainbridge Island in Washington State. That’s where I used to live with my mom. Violet is the only friend I wanted to be with after my mom died because everyone else suddenly started treating me like I was a different kid. From the minute we met, we’d told each other practically everything, except of course for the stuff that might hurt her feelings. But I knew for a fact I’d never told her that Florida was the worst. I’d only said she’d been super crabby. Way more than usual. And that I’d hoped it was just a temporary setback.
“It’s on account of my teensy headaches,” my grandmother would say after she’d scream at me or send me to my room for something tiny, like accidentally letting Leroy track dust into the house. Then she’d lie down on her bed with the curtains drawn shut.
I worried maybe something was wrong because until her headaches started, Florida had tried to be a better grandmother. She came to at least half of my afterschool soccer games, and for the longest time she’d laid off trying to turn me into a girly-girl. Which, for the record, would be about as easy as getting my dog to sprout wings and fly to Jupiter. I made her promise she’d go to the doctor while I was gone. I figured she must have been getting better because during our Sunday morning phone calls, she sounded as if she was almost back to her old self.
Violet, Noah, Leroy, and I wound our way past the tiki bar next to the hotel swimming pool. A man in a swimsuit and a woman wrapped in a flowery sarong shared a chaise lounge. They gazed at each other all lovey-dovey as they sipped a drink through two bendy straws stuck in the hole of a coconut shell.
“Newlyweds,” I whispered. “Hope they last longer than the couple that stayed here in July. They got married on the beach at sunset, then kept everyone up all night, fighting. The next morning they asked Rosalie Claire to recommend a good divorce lawyer.”
“Sounds like Florida and your Grandpa Jack,” Violet said.
True. Except my grandparents never officially