Page 12 of The Surfer

“It’s not weird or anything?”

A little weird.

“Well, as I say, it did take me a while to come around to the idea. But I’m here now, aren’t’ I? I’ve made the trip.”

Cove, Sandy’s brother, is the real reason for my trip. Sandy first spoke to me about her younger brother a few months back, telling me the story behind the last year of his life. The surfing accident. The scars on his legs. The fact he’s given up on everything good in his life and has moved into her place to just laze around all day by smoking weed and drinking.

He sounds like a real charmer.

“Okay. You can always talk to me, though. If you want,” Sandy says, changing lanes on the highway. “I’m always here for you.”

I smile back at my best friend. “I know.”

“Trust me, it’ll be worth your while. You won’t regret coming here, we need you. A lot.”

“It’s that bad, huh?”

Sandy sighs. “Yeah, it’s that bad. Cove’s had a hard time, but now he’s just sulking around like a petulant child and it’s just infuriating. I’m at my wit’s end. The very end.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

“Well, for starters, there’s a different girl every night in his room.”

“What? Like, every night?”

“Yeah.”

“Doesn’t he have a girlfriend or something?”

“He did, and she’s insanely beautiful. A world-famous supermodel. But she left him once he had the surfing accident. She just sent him a breakup text when he was still in hospital just waking up from surgery, like, literally as he was waking up. It was perfectly timed to inflict the most emotional damage on him and, yeah, he took that pretty hard.”

“I’d bet. Wow, that’s cruel.”

Sandy turns to me and shakes her head. “But don’t you dare start to feel sorry for him, he’s not some lost puppy to pet and fawn over. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and he knows the consequences. I’ve given him enough chances; our dad has given him enough chances. This is it for him, the end of the line.”

I’ve never seen Sandy so riled up; her brother really has taken her to her tipping point. “His accident was a year ago, right?”

“Yeah, the Oceania Surfing Competition, that was when he fell off his board, lost the competition, and messed up his legs.”

“One year and he’s still recovering?”

“Recovering?” Sandy tuts under her breath, her sarcasm practically dripping. “There’s no need for him to physically recover anymore, he’s one hundred percent fine now. The only thing that needs recovering is his attitude. Wait, it doesn’t need recovering, it needs fixing.”

What a situation.

“Well, hopefully, I can help.”

Sandy turns away from me and back to the window with both her hands tightly gripped around the steering wheel. “Hopefully you can.”

Oh, so Cove is worse than I’ve thought if he’s winding Sandy up like this. Way worse.

A different girl in his bed every night? Sulking around? Not surfing anymore? Drink and drugs?

I know exactly who Cove Finn is.

A bad boy.

A player. A classic scoundrel.