But then, reason and logic didn’t have much to do with how I was feeling, not when just the thought of Mark had my heart beating faster.
“So, since you’re not tired and I sincerely doubt I’m going to get any sleep tonight …” My dad nodded his head toward the dark, endless ocean outside our kitchen window. “You want to try your hand at night surfing?”
I stared at him in shock. “You never let me do that. You’ve been telling me it was too dangerous from the first time I asked to go.”
“Yeah, well, that was before you were mermaid,” he replied with a smirk. “If something happens, I’m pretty sure you can grow gills and get yourself out of it. Besides, you spend months at a time—nights included—in the ocean. What’s one more? But we have to get in and out—a storm is supposed to hit in a few hours and conditions will get rough.”
I almost asked about Sabrina again, but I didn’t want anything to ruin this night with my dad, so I headed for the stairs at a dead run, determined to get my swimsuit on and be out the door before my dad came to his senses.
It turned out, I needn’t have worried. By the time I had shimmied into a bathing suit, my father was already out the door, his surfboard under one arm and mine under the other.
Excitement welled up inside of me as I dashed after him. Between Mark, my friends, my dad … this was turning into the best night ever.
I should have known it was just the calm before the storm.
Part Two
The Focus
“What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark?
It would be like sleep without dreams.”
—Werner Herzog
Chapter 6
As I caught up to my dad, I realized the surfboards he was carrying weren’t our regular ones. I mean, my dad has six or seven boards, though he usually switches between two. I have three, but the only one I’ve used since my sixteenth birthday is the purple-and-orange Brewer my dad had specially designed for me.
These boards were different. They were clear, with strings of something—I couldn’t quite see what, even in the light cast from the streetlamps—stretching from the tip of the boards to the very ends of them.
I started to ask him what was up with the board change—if I was going to risk night surfing, I wanted to do it on a board I was familiar with. But he shook his head before I said anything and told me, “Wait until we get to the water.”
I did, and was shocked to see the boards light up the second my dad laid them on the sand. “There are only a half dozen of these in existence right now,” he told me. “The guy who created them asked me and a couple other surfers to try them out, see how they worked.”“They’re awesome!” I crouched down to run my hand over one. I’d seen pictures of boards tricked out with LED lights before—usually stunts pulled by surf companies and their prosurfers to get attention—but this was different. The boards weren’t merely lined with LEDs; the lights were actually inside the completely glassed-over board. It was brilliant, and beautiful.
“I know, right?” He held out a remote control. “And check this out.” With a few clicks, he turned the lights inside my board from green to red to blue to purple. He stopped there and handed me the remote. “I thought it would match your tattoos.”
I laughed. “That rocks.”
He switched his lights to white, then we grabbed our boards and started paddling out to sea. The waves were going off, just as Scooter had predicted, so we stayed close to shore for a few minutes, sitting on our boards and riding out the remnants of the waves as my dad explained some of the accommodations that had to be made when trying to surf a wave you could barely see coming at you—things like looking for the light of the moon reflecting off the wave face, feeling the wave instead of counting on seeing it, and once the ride began never looking directly toward the light on shore or it would mess with my balance, plus make it all kinds of difficult for my eyes to adjust to the dark again.
Then it was time. I knew it, could feel it in that part of me that had always been able to sense the pattern of the ocean. The buildup of the waves.
My dad felt it too. “Get ready, Tempest!” he called even as he shifted so that he was lying on his board.
I did the same, then started to paddle out. The wave was building up, swelling, and as it came into view I realized it was larger—much larger—than I had anticipated. If I didn’t paddle like hell, I was going to get worked.
So that’s what I did, adrenaline racing through my system as I searched for the perfect spot to drop in on it. Beside me, my father’s board glowed silver against the darkness of the ocean. He was close, close enough that I could reach out and touch him. It wasn’t great positioning for surfing, by any means, but then I wasn’t really out here for the waves. The father-daughter bonding time was suddenly a lot more important to me.
“Take it!” he shouted, doing what he always did—giving the first, the best, to me while he made do with the consolation prize.
Not this time. “You take it, Dad!”
He was going to argue—I could see it in his face—so I dropped back, out of contention, then watched as he took off.
It was a thing of beauty. Not just watching the great Bobby Maguire take on a wave of this proportion—which was, indeed, beautiful. But also the entire ocean around him had come alive, lit up. It was a sight to behold, one of the most gorgeous things I had ever seen.
Oh, logically I knew there was an explanation for it. I even knew what that explanation was. Lingulodinium polyedrum. Besides having a really weird name, it was a microorganism that lived in a lot of the waters off Southern California. During the day, it was best known for making the ocean around here weird and kind of cloudy, but at night it turned bright blue whenever something disturbed it.
In my time as mermaid, I had seen a lot of phosphorescent stuff—it was kind of hard to live at the bottom of the ocean and not glow, but there was something about this algae that was extra beautiful. Maybe it was the combination of night sky and water and human and glowing surfboard … I don’t know. But I was spellbound as my father streaked across the ocean like a shooting star, leaving a trail of electric blue in his wake.
My dad ended up shooting the barrel before riding the wave really close to the shore. And then it really was my turn, a wave of epic proportions calling to me to drop in.
I knew my dad would freak out—the thing would be massive by the time it finished building—but I wanted it. Badly. So I took it and prayed I wouldn’t wipe out.
I dropped in on the wave just as it crested. As I did, I made the mistake of looking toward shore—exactly what my dad had told me not to do. I could see him there, standing under a light and looking out at me. I couldn’t see his expression, but I figured it wasn’t happy. But if I nailed this wave, all would be forgiven.
I turned to look down at the wave and realized that I couldn’t see anything—the lights on shore had disrupted my vision, just as my dad had said they would. I felt a moment of panic at the idea of surfing this wave, which was high enough that riding its crest felt like being at the top of a mountain. And then it was too late to do anything but ride as I plummeted down the sheer, flat face of the most mammoth wave I’d ever ridden.