In the Break Read Online Free PDF Page B

the water, I supposed, for his board was gone — mine and Amber’s
     were still underneath the car, safe and undisturbed — and I could see a surfer paddling through the swells.
    Last night we’d driven until we could no longer stay awake, and we’d parked not far from the parking lot at Swami’s, the nickname
     for the Self-Realization Fellowship grounds overlooking the reef break south of Encinitas.
    Sometime before light, when I was groggy and Amber was out, Jamie drove us into the parking lot. The lot had a curfew posted,and we didn’t want to get hassled by cops for something that dumb. Light was just dusting the golden dome of the temple.
     My mother’s car was the only one in the lot.
    As I pissed in the bushes I watched the surfer. Jamie, I could tell by the way he paddled. We’d surfed together since the
     summer of the fifth grade.
    The summer after her husband’s death Mrs. Watkins spoke to my parents about surfing. They all decided that it would be a good
     idea for Jamie and I to get boards. At that time Amber was going the cheerleader route, sneaking out of her bedroom window
     at night and running with the wild girls. She had no interest in surfing during that era. She did take it up when she was
     in the ninth grade, probably to impress Robert Bonham, who surfed really well. And when she started surfing she hit it with
     a vengeance.
    So my parents and Mrs. Watkins took us to the beach a few times a week that summer and Jamie and I began our surfing lives.
     For Jamie it was a way to grieve, I guess, because he used to cry in the water sometimes. He thought nobody could tell, but
     I could. I let him have it, and was just there with him, just was with him.
    We surfed and we shot hoops and we hung together, and even Amber got tired of hanging out with angry chicks who got in trouble
     all the time. It wasn’t in Amber to be a criminal, like her screwed-up so-called friends of that time.
    I looked back in the car; Amber showed no sign of waking so I was stuck — I couldn’t leave her like this, asleep in a parking
     lot. “Ah,” I sighed, looking over the ocean, wondering about Nestor and my mother. I could barely make out Jamie’s form out
     in the water.
    The summer between the seventh and eighth grades, our third full summer surfing, Jamie bestowed “best surfer” title on me.
     That summer his mother had worked out of necessity — it was after Mr. Watkins’s death and before she married F — and on her
     way to work she dropped us off at the bluffs, where the waves were always better than in front of the mesa where we lived.
     This also saved us from having to ride our bikes on a two-lane road, pulling the board rack that Nestor had fashioned out
     of an old wagon for me.
    That summer there was a sandbar buildup not far from the limestone cliff, which offered a great left. Jamie was goofy foot,
     meaning he faced the wave when going left; I was regular foot — I faced the wave when going right. On the prevailing south
     swells I became excellent at going backside, left, going with my back to the wave. I could crouch with one knee up and the
     other knee almost resting on the board and grab the outside rail, leaning into the wave, making ones that I shouldn’t have,
     perfecting this maneuver while surfing the left-breaking sandbar all summer.
    In mid-August, Claire Watkins stopped at the bluffs to drop us off, as she’d done many other workdays. It was a misty morning,
     not too unusual right along the coast, but the parking lot was filled with cars, and the entire cliffs were lined with onlookers,
     something we’d not seen any other summer day. Mrs. Watkins got out of her car with us. What we saw on the ocean that morning
     was a surfer’s dream: summer morning south swell, huge empty waves. The biggest waves we’d ever seen. Not even the older surfers
     ventured out, and everyone stood hypnotized and in awe of the beautiful and violent display before them.
    “You boys don’t