Audre & Bash Are Just Friends(21)

He’d spent all morning surfing Rockaway Beach in Queens, which had zero in common with the beaches back home. At Half Moon Bay, his favorite beach on the San Francisco Peninsula, the waves were smooth and mellow. Perfectly chill barrels you could ride forever. The sand breaks here in New York, at Rockaway, made the waves fast and unpredictable. Like the city itself.

It didn’t matter how rough the waves were, though. What mattered was that, out here, Bash Henry had the freedom to do his second-favorite thing in the world (after tattoo design): surfing to absolute physical exhaustion. For the first time, he could do it without sneaking around! Without fearing that his dad would somehow catch him breaking the rules—indulging in an “unmanly non-sport for white boys with meth addictions and slutty girlfriends.” His dad loved an extremely descriptive put-down.

Drying off in the unrelenting sun, he sucked in a huge gulp of beachy, salty sea air and held his breath, letting it make him dizzy before exhaling. Bash savored the taste of the sea. The feel, the smell. But nothing tasted better than the freedom to be here, worry-free, in the first place. Six months ago, it wasn’t possible.

Bash had come out to the beach alone, which was fine. To him, surfing didn’t feel like a group activity. It was meditation. And besides, he hadn’t met anyone here he wanted to share this with. Or anything about his former life at all.

Especially his track and field life. He never mentioned his athlete past. No one had searchable info about him. Bash Henry wasn’t even his actual government name.

If everything had gone right, twelfth grade was supposed to be a year of triumph. Athletic scholarships. Olympic trials. Trophies, accolades, applause. Instead, when he landed in Brooklyn, he was friendless, fatherless, and too burned out to even consider running for Hillcrest Prep—despite the coach aggressively recruiting him.

No, Bash was done with coaches. He was done with the pressure. The expectations. The ruthlessness. Coaches had ruled his life since he was five years old. And his dad was the worst one of all. As the director of track and field at California University, Milton had an entire Division I team to manage. But his greatest obsession was his son.

Bash was a once-in-a-generation talent. Everyone said so. And Milton expected him to follow in his golden footsteps. His son would be a better athlete than even him.

Turns out, Bash was a better athlete than his father. But now, he was also dead to him.

And it had only taken seven minutes for Milton to strike him from his life.

Yes, he knew the exact time. He’d been at the California University track, getting ready to do a practice session under the watchful gaze of his dad. A regular Saturday, no different than the rest. A bright, clear day. He’d just called Nadia Robertson and told her that he couldn’t take her to homecoming after all, because his dad banned him from attending a dance the night before a meet. (Milton also didn’t approve of Nadia’s short skirts. No “tramps” for his son.) Later that afternoon, Bash was meeting a track and field recruiter from University of Arizona. His muscles were on fire from that morning’s workout, but when didn’t his muscles ache? Everything was the way it always was.

Bash remembered getting in position at the starting block, glancing down at his watch, and setting the timer.

00:00

And then, with propulsive force, he sprinted. One circle around the track later, Milton walked down from the stands.

“I want you out of the house. You’ve got till tomorrow. After that, you’re no longer my son,” he said, turning on his heel. As Milton walked away, he added, “And you know why.”

(At the moment, Bash didn’t know why. But he found out later.)

The wind had been knocked out of him. Desperate for something, anything, to ground him, his eyes traveled down to his watch.

Seven minutes had passed since he set the timer. In seven minutes, his whole world had changed. In seven minutes, he had lost everything. The timing of it was always in the back of his mind. In the shower. On the subway. At school.

School. Thank God high school was over. It was funny—he didn’t mind it back home. He had a respectable average (low Bs), star athlete status, and teachers generally liked him. But every day at Hillcrest had felt like he was moving through a vague, unsettling dream. He felt both too visible and invisible at the same time.

Now that Track Star Bash was gone, he wasn’t all the way sure who he was, anyway. One thing was for sure—he certainly wasn’t into probing questions or heart-to-hearts, to try to figure it out. He just wanted to forget why he was in Brooklyn in the first place. He wanted to forget everything. He’d gone from having everything planned out for him—every meal, every race, every training session, every sports agent dinner—to having a wide-open future with absolutely nothing on the horizon.

It was a twisting tornado in his stomach. The thing he’d do almost anything to ignore.

His latest “almost anything”? Letting a pretty girl hire him to do… what, exactly? Unclear. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d done something stupid because a pretty girl asked. But this might be the stupidest thing. And she was the prettiest girl. Upsettingly pretty.

When Bash saw Audre sitting by herself in the park, it was like all the cells in his body started buzzing. He knew who she was: Audre Zora Maya Toni Mercy-Moore. She was brainy and confident, and had a wild best friend, an adorable set of dimples, and was a rising senior. She was earnest as hell and square in an adorable way. And extremely out of his league. She was the kind of girl who thought guys like him were a cautionary tale. He wondered what she would’ve thought if she’d met him in Cali. He looked like a different person then. Low fade, uninked skin, no piercings, no jewelry. He was a squeaky-clean, all-American jock. Bursting at the seams.