Trent looks over Grandpa at me and I drop my gaze, pushing back from the curb. “Later, I guess.”
But I don’t go back later. There’s work to do, reading through the play Moana wrote for the school holiday production. I tell her it’s best if I crash on her couch and work on it all night.
She shakes her head. “Whatever it is, staying here won’t solve it.”
She feeds me dinner and brings me a blanket anyway.
I use her laptop to read through the play. It’s about a fictionalised Tangaroa, God of the Sea, reborn as a boy who’s forgotten where he belongs. A group of beach kids take him out on the water and introduce him to his ocean kin until he remembers—only for the children to find themselves lost at sea. Moved by their kindness, Tangaroa summons a storm, and a giant wave lifts the kids and carries them safely home.
“What do you think?” she asks, handing me cookies.
“You should become a writer.”
She snorts. “That pays as well as acting.”
“The only thing . . .”
She winces, readying herself for it.
“I mean, it’s basically a tsunami that carries them back home. Aren’t we supposed to be afraid of big waves?”
She thinks about this a moment and leans in to nab a cookie for herself. Her eyes shift to mine. “Maybe not all waves.”
This... I can’t sit still. I curl a finger towards the wine bottle on the table, and Moana pours. Cling-cling.
I don’t go back to Grandpa’s the next night, either. I head to another mate’s place, and perfect the ancient art of Not Being There: arrive home after midnight, leave before dawn, and develop a passionate relationship with the creaky side gate. Once, I catch a glimpse of The Flooder through the kitchen window, head bowed over his laptop, one hand curled around a mug. He doesn’t see me. I don’t let him.
It feels . . . childish.
Like stomping on a sandcastle because it’s not perfect enough, the walls crooked, the moat not holding water.
I regret it.
But I also can’t help it.
Because he could read me from first sight. And I’d started to want that.
To be read. To be seen.
He hadn’t finished seeing me.
sand dollars/sea biscuits
Fragile yet surviving in harsh tides.
I’m running late after an audition in Miramar. One bus, then the other. I have to stop at the supermarket for lollies on the way. A Moana must, to encourage the tamariki.
I grab a couple of lolly scrambles and race out of New World, across the parking lot, head ducked against a ferocious gust. My backpack thuds against my spine, lollies and my audition sheets and a library book I keep forgetting to return.
The wind’s so strong I can taste the ocean from three-ish blocks away. I imagine waves bashing against rocks and find it mildly absurd how fast I’m racing towards it. I raise an arm above my head as I cross the zebra lines?—
Oof. My arm bashes into another’s.
I glimpse a struggle with an inverted umbrella as the man turns, apologising.
Trent.
The impact of it being him jolts another breath out of me; the world tilts, then steadies only because he’s abandoned the umbrella at his side to hold me there, fingers firm on my sleeve. In the middle of the zebra crossing.
