and smoothed the sheet and comforter back into place.
I didn’t usually make my bed, so the fact that I was doing it today probably wasn’t lost on my dad. But then, he’d never been as easy to fool as most of my friends’ parents were. It probably came from all those years hanging out on the pro-surfing circuit, partying and chasing girls.
He always told me he’d never really been into the life, but I’d seen the old surfer magazines and looked through the scrapbooks my mom had kept from before I was born. In each of them, he was always right in the thick of things—usually with my mom. The weird thing, though, was how happy he looked in the pictures. How happy they both looked.
“I know you don’t want to think about it, sweetheart. But we don’t have a choice. Things are going to change soon. You can’t hide forever.”
“Nothing’s going to change,” I answered. I already mentioned that I was the queen of denial, didn’t I?
He watched me for a minute, then crossed the room and pulled me in close for a hug. It was one of those strong, all-powerful hugs I remembered from my early childhood—the kind that smelled of salt water and Tommy cologne and made me feel incredibly safe.
Like a child, I clung to him for a second, trying to hang on to everything that I had right now. Trying to remind myself once and for all why I was going to resist the lure of the sea. Here on land I had my family and Mark and Brianne and Mickey and Logan. I had school and surfing, parties and painting. Art school and studying abroad.
What exactly did I have waiting for me out there anyway? A mother who hadn’t cared enough to stick around—or to come back and help me through a transition I so totally didn’t want to make?
Randomly, Kona’s face rose in front of my eyes—intense and beautiful and full of an ancient knowledge I couldn’t hope to understand. I hadn’t seen him since he’d all but disappeared during the thunderstorm, but then it wasn’t like I’d exactly been looking for him. I’d been avoiding the beach like I would a particularly nasty bit of flotsam.
That hadn’t kept me from thinking about him, though, even when I was awake. The night before last I’d even looked up the origin of his name on one of those baby sites. I had been right—it was Hawaiian, and it meant “island wind” or “storm.”
The name—and its meaning—seemed to fit him perfectly. Maybe too well. Like a powerful storm, he had disrupted my life from the moment I first saw him. His presence was an all-encompassing thing, until I felt almost like I was moving back and forth at his whim.
“Tempest. You can’t hide from this.”
My dad obviously didn’t know me as well as he thought he did—if my transition was the thousand-pound purple gorilla in the room, then I was more than okay with pretending bananas didn’t exist. “I won’t be mermaid, Dad.”
“How do you know that? You love the water—you have the most natural affinity for it that I’ve ever seen. You might very well have your mother’s genes—”
“If I do, then that’s all I have from her and genes aren’t enough. You know what she said. I get to choose and I will never choose to be like her.”
“Sweetheart.” He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “You see everything in black and white. You always have. But life isn’t like that.”
I stood up, made a beeline for my closet. I couldn’t stand to listen to him, didn’t want to hear any more. It wasn’t like I didn’t know the lecture by heart—every time my mom came up I got the shades-of-gray speech. If I had to listen to it today, I just might lose my mind.
How could he be so understanding? She’d run out on him and my brothers and me like we were nothing more than a temporary family. One that stood in for the real thing while she experimented with life on land. In my book that was unforgivable, and I absolutely, positively would not become like her.
I refused to ever be that
I didn’t usually make my bed, so the fact that I was doing it today probably wasn’t lost on my dad. But then, he’d never been as easy to fool as most of my friends’ parents were. It probably came from all those years hanging out on the pro-surfing circuit, partying and chasing girls.
He always told me he’d never really been into the life, but I’d seen the old surfer magazines and looked through the scrapbooks my mom had kept from before I was born. In each of them, he was always right in the thick of things—usually with my mom. The weird thing, though, was how happy he looked in the pictures. How happy they both looked.
“I know you don’t want to think about it, sweetheart. But we don’t have a choice. Things are going to change soon. You can’t hide forever.”
“Nothing’s going to change,” I answered. I already mentioned that I was the queen of denial, didn’t I?
He watched me for a minute, then crossed the room and pulled me in close for a hug. It was one of those strong, all-powerful hugs I remembered from my early childhood—the kind that smelled of salt water and Tommy cologne and made me feel incredibly safe.
Like a child, I clung to him for a second, trying to hang on to everything that I had right now. Trying to remind myself once and for all why I was going to resist the lure of the sea. Here on land I had my family and Mark and Brianne and Mickey and Logan. I had school and surfing, parties and painting. Art school and studying abroad.
What exactly did I have waiting for me out there anyway? A mother who hadn’t cared enough to stick around—or to come back and help me through a transition I so totally didn’t want to make?
Randomly, Kona’s face rose in front of my eyes—intense and beautiful and full of an ancient knowledge I couldn’t hope to understand. I hadn’t seen him since he’d all but disappeared during the thunderstorm, but then it wasn’t like I’d exactly been looking for him. I’d been avoiding the beach like I would a particularly nasty bit of flotsam.
That hadn’t kept me from thinking about him, though, even when I was awake. The night before last I’d even looked up the origin of his name on one of those baby sites. I had been right—it was Hawaiian, and it meant “island wind” or “storm.”
The name—and its meaning—seemed to fit him perfectly. Maybe too well. Like a powerful storm, he had disrupted my life from the moment I first saw him. His presence was an all-encompassing thing, until I felt almost like I was moving back and forth at his whim.
“Tempest. You can’t hide from this.”
My dad obviously didn’t know me as well as he thought he did—if my transition was the thousand-pound purple gorilla in the room, then I was more than okay with pretending bananas didn’t exist. “I won’t be mermaid, Dad.”
“How do you know that? You love the water—you have the most natural affinity for it that I’ve ever seen. You might very well have your mother’s genes—”
“If I do, then that’s all I have from her and genes aren’t enough. You know what she said. I get to choose and I will never choose to be like her.”
“Sweetheart.” He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “You see everything in black and white. You always have. But life isn’t like that.”
I stood up, made a beeline for my closet. I couldn’t stand to listen to him, didn’t want to hear any more. It wasn’t like I didn’t know the lecture by heart—every time my mom came up I got the shades-of-gray speech. If I had to listen to it today, I just might lose my mind.
How could he be so understanding? She’d run out on him and my brothers and me like we were nothing more than a temporary family. One that stood in for the real thing while she experimented with life on land. In my book that was unforgivable, and I absolutely, positively would not become like her.
I refused to ever be that
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