I blush, folding my arms across my chest. Jas has a gift for making me feel like I’m the bad guy. And maybe I am; he didn’t owe me anything and yet he came to my window last night and brought me here.
“Even people like me have parents, you know. Mine taught me to say please and thank you, same as yours.”
I don’t answer. It’s hard to believe that his childhood could have been anything like mine.
“Come here,” Jas says, walking down the beach, his back to the motel. “I want to show you something.”
I follow. Sand sticks to the bottom of my pajama pants, and the wind whips through my T-shirt, making me shiver. This beach is tiny; only a few yards from here the water meets the mountains, the hills dotted with houses. No doubt the owners paid premium prices for the views: ocean on one side, mountains on the other.
Jas stops walking and points to the biggest house by far, perched on the tallest peak. Three times the size of the glass house, at least. You could fit Jas’s entire Kensington house inside of it. But unlike the other houses on the hill, it doesn’t have enormous walls of windows facing the sea. Just normal-sized windows peeking out from beneath the Spanish tile roof, as though whoever built it didn’t value the view at all.
“You see that house?” Jas asks.
“It’s impossible not to see that house,” I say. “Can you imagine all the trees they had to chop down to build that house? The roads they had to carve into the mountain just to get there?”
Jas nods. “I can imagine,” he says. “I spent my whole childhood imagining.”
I squint in the sunlight, holding up my hand to shield my eyes. “What do you mean?”
“That’s where I grew up,” he says.
“That’s where you grew up?” I echo, wishing I didn’t sound quite so incredulous, but Jas just laughs.
“Oh yes,” he answers. “And I learned a lot more than my pleases and thank-yous. I learned just how to hold a salad fork and a steak knife, how to sip soup and drink iced tea every afternoon at four p.m. on the button.”
I can’t imagine that Jas lived a single second of his life on the button.
“How did you get from there to—” I stop myself, but Jas still answers the unasked question.
“I discovered surfing. It was impossible not to discover surfing. I could see every beach for miles around from that monstrosity, and every day, rain or shine, there they were. Surfers. Kids who had nothing but the clothes on their backs and the boards at their feet. Kids who were having a hell of a lot more fun than I was. So one morning, I snuck out, bought a board with my allowance, and…” He trails off, a strange sort of smile dancing on his lips at the memory. It’s a look I know well; I’ve seen it on Pete’s face and on my brothers’ faces, too. That look that says you don’t understand what the rest of us are doing on land, when there’s that much joy to be found on the water.
“What happened?”
Jas shrugs. “It’s not a particularly unique kind of story,” he says. “I blew off school to chase waves. Rigged a rack to the roof of my car, strapped on a couple boards, and took off for days at a time. I wasn’t exactly the son they had in mind—you know, straight As, college-bound, that kind of thing.”
I nod, thinking about my brothers. By the time they ran away last year, they’d been driving my parents crazy for months. Every morning, when my parents and I woke up, we didn’t know whether John and Michael would be home or would have vanished to hit up the newest beach where the waves were said to be charging. My parents came to dread phone calls most evenings from our school, warnings that if things didn’t change my brothers would be held back a year, suspended, expelled. I got used to the way my mother’s lips pressed into a thin line when my father lectured them about priorities. I got used to the look on my brothers’ faces, like my dad didn’t have a clue what that word really meant.
“When I was sixteen,” Jas continues, “my parents said they were sending me away to school. I can’t remember the name of the place, but it was someplace landlocked, nowhere near the ocean. They thought all I needed to get straightened out was some time on dry land.” He laughs now, but there’s no joy in it. “So I left. I wasn’t scared of being homeless, of being alone with nothing but the clothes on my back and the board at my feet. But I was terrified of living a life without the ocean right outside my door.”
I open my mouth to make a crack about a big tough guy like him being so frightened, but I press my lips together before a single word can escape. Because he looks so serious. He wasn’t a big tough guy, not back then. He was a sixteen-year-old kid. Like my brothers. Like me; and I’ve fled, too.
“A few months after I left, I ran into Pete. Little brat cut me off on a wave down on Huntington Beach.” He smiles at the memory. “I charged after him like a bat out of hell. I mean it, I was ready to kick the kid’s teeth in.” He shakes his head. “But then he grinned at me and held out his hand. And before I knew it, I was crashing on the floor of whatever empty abandoned house he’d found to shack up in that week.”
I smile. “Sounds kind of nice,” I say.
Jas nods. “It was. It was…” He pauses. “Don’t make fun of me for what I’m about to say, okay?”
I nod.
“It was the happiest time in my life. Pete and I just made our way up and down the coast, talking a big game, sleeping on couches and camping on beaches and just—surfing, you know? Every wave we could find.
“Finally, Pete discovered Kensington and those empty houses, and we moved into one of ’em and woke up with the sunrise to surf every morning. And we were so good. We knew how good we were. It was only a matter of time, we said, before we’d fly off around the world and start in on the big waves, the famous ones. At night, we’d say their names like other people say their prayers: Maverick’s, Witch Tree, Jaws, Pipeline, Teahupoo.”
“Cho-poo?” I echo. “What’s that?”
“It’s a wave in Tahiti,” he explains. “Teahupoo is Tahitian for broken skulls.”
“Seriously? You wanted to surf a wave called Broken Skulls?”
“I still want to,” Jas says.
“Well then, why didn’t you?” I ask. “Why didn’t you and Pete get out there and conquer the world just like you planned?”
Instead of answering me, Jas begins walking back in the direction of the hotel. I follow. “You hungry?” he says. “Let’s get something to eat.”
“I’m in my pajamas,” I say. “I don’t have any shoes on.”
“Neither do I,” Jas answers. “Don’t worry, the place I’m taking you doesn’t exactly have a no shoes, no shirt, no service policy.”
“You see,” Jas begins about twenty minutes later, when we’re sitting at a splintered, beat-up picnic table that I think may have been painted white about fifty years ago, “my life used to be a lot like your life.”
“Oh, did you make a habit of running off with drug dealers in search of your missing siblings, too?”
Jas shakes his head. “Let me rephrase that. My life used to be a lot like your life used to be. Fancy house on a hill—”
“My house is not like your house,” I interrupt. My house is nice and all, but Jas grew up in a castle.
“Fair enough,” he says, nodding. “But we both grew up in nice homes with parents who wanted what they thought was best for us. I went to school five days a week, just like you. I was supposed to go to college, just like you. I even dated a girl like you—smart, pretty, determined as hell to get the things she wanted, whether it was her next wave or her next test score.”