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But we swim out here, so why can’t we swim there? Are you thinking you might not want to go?”
    Bunny shook her head.
    “Then don’t think about it, just come with me.”
    Covey couldn’t imagine not going. Couldn’t imagine not feelingthe froth bubble away from her skin as her arm came out of the water, the blue-green world below growing black with depth, the bright sky above, and even the salt burning her mouth. She dreamed of being invited to compete abroad. She knew it was unlikely, but it could be her ticket away from this island. Because, yes, Covey intended to leave this town someday, even if her mother never came back to get her.
    “But your pa,” Bunny said. “What if he doesn’t agree?”
    “I’ll think about that later,” Covey said.
    Three afternoons a week, Covey pulled through the waves, pulled through her fear of sharks, pulled against lactic acid, and breathed in gulps of her future as a champion. Three afternoons a week, Bunny smeared grease on her face, pulled through the jellyfish stings, and studied a map of the island’s big harbor. Because wherever Covey went, Bunny wanted to follow.

Covey and
Gibbs
     
    I n those days, there were boys who would hack into the hulls of discarded fishing boats, shape them into flat boards, and ride the waves. Some of them went body boarding and surfing on pieces of refrigerator foam. They’d trim the polyurethane and laminate it with resin and fiberglass. They would laugh as they jumped off their boards and ran back to the sand. By the time factory-made surfboards came to Covey’s hometown, she was ready to try her luck at the sport.
    Covey turned out to be a natural. She didn’t have a surfboard of her own, but Gibbs Grant did. Covey had just turned sixteen when Gibbs joined the swim club. He was one of the older boys, but fairly new in town. His family had moved to be near relatives after a mining company bought his father’s land. Covey had heard about the Grant boy but when she first saw him step out of the changing room and into the pool area, she was sure that their paths had never crossed. She was certain of it because she would have noticed if they had.
    Covey had reached that age where the boys had stopped pulling at her hair. She had reached that stage where boys whispered as she walked by, hissed at her from cars, stood too close to her at parties, embarrassed her, repelled her, and sometimes, made her daydream. But none of them had done what this new boy did when he walked into the club that day.
    As Gibbs moved toward the border of the pool, Covey took one look at him and felt as if this boy, looking right back at her with thoseeyes of his, had just shot out his arm and given her a push, sending her falling, falling, falling backward into the deep end.
    Later, he said, “I see why dem call you Dolphin.”
    “Oh, yes?” Covey said.
    “You’re fast.”
    She shrugged and looked down at her feet. As usual, her toes were puckered from all that time in the water. She pretended to find this interesting.
    “The boys say you’ve been swimming out in the bay.”
    “Yeah, Bunny and I.”
    “Just you two?”
    “Mostly just us, but not always.”
    “You think I could come out there and swim with you sometime?”
    “If you’re good enough,” Covey said, smiling up at him.
    “I’m good enough,” Gibbs said, grinning.
    Gibbs joined them in the bay the very next week. One day he brought a surfboard. Covey wanted to try it immediately but Bunny scrunched up her nose. It was this interest in surfing that gave Gibbs and Covey their first excuse to see each other without their swim club friends, or their schoolmates, or the inquisitive eyes of their parents.
    The first time Covey and Gibbs followed a path down through the brush and into the cove where the surfers went, they found a trio of Rasta men on the beach. The oldest of them waded into the water and the next thing Covey knew, he was up on the board, a thing to behold, his graying dreads