Punishing the Brats

“Hey, Matt?”

“Yeah?”

“Um,” Chastity faltered. “Never mind.”

“Okay.”

* * *

“Wow, it’s amazing here!” Chastity said, climbing out of the car and running to the lip where the grass ended and the beach began. “Not a soul in sight!”

“I told you,” Matt said, grinning. He looked from left to right, and Chastity followed suit. A couple of miles of interrupted, uninhabited, absolutely beautiful coast. Water as blue as in travel advertisements, and sand as white as though it were the fake stuff from a spa.

The bay was curved sharply on the left, a hook of land jutting out, and held within the lagoon-like enclosure was water so perfectly calm that Chastity felt as though she were looking into a mirror. She could easily count in the reflection the number of red berries on a small bush on the other side. Then, toward the left, no longer protected by a caring arm of land, the water churned with repetitive surf, wave after wave after wave breaking far out to see.

“Are those waves big?” Chastity asked.

“Not really,” Matt replied. “The water is really shallow for a long way, and the waves start breaking a way’s out. Where we’ll be doing your first lesson will be somewhere over there.” He pointed at the sea, around fifty meters out from the shore. “Those are small enough that you’ll get the hang of balancing on a board first. You’ve got to master that before you can even think about trying to ride a wave.”

“How deep is the water there?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Matt said, humming and thinking for a moment. “Probably about waist height on you. Thigh height on me.”

“Great,” Chastity said. “Not too deep. I read about riptides on my phone earlier. Do I need to worry about that?”

“There are none here. This isn’t a riptide beach.”

“You sure?”

“Positive, honey,” Matt said, looking at her. “You can actually often see a rip tide if you pay attention. It literally looks like a river of water moving in an unintuitive way. Like, you’ll see this column of water pulling outward when the rest is coming inward. With a bit of practice, you can spot it in no time. Come on, I wouldn’t put you in any danger.”

“Okay,” Chastity said, unable to take her eyes off the perfectly idyllic scene before her. She stood for minutes, not even standing in sand yet, just taking in the sight of an empty, beautiful beach, seemingly unspoiled by people.

In the back of her mind, she sort of regretted that she was about to do just that.

“Where’s, uh, Dylan?”

“Oh, he’ll turn up eventually. I told him to give us some time first. What time is it now?” she watched him as he reached into his pocket for his phone. “Only barely twelve. Hmm, we got here pretty fast.”

“So when will Dylan come?”

“You want to start, eh?”

“Of course I do.”

“He’ll be along at around three I reckon.”

“Why so late”

“The surf starts to calm down in the late afternoon. It is your first lesson, after all.”

“Yeah,” Chastity said. She agreed with that, actually. Though she was eager to start, she wasn’t exactly a graceful creature in the water. Swimming wasn’t her strong suit, and if her attempts at skateboarding were any indication, she probably wasn’t going to be fantastic at surfing.

But it was trying it out, trying to learn, that was exciting, and she wasn’t about to not try it because she was a little afraid of looking silly.

“So what should we do now?”

Matt put his hands up, palms facing the sky. “Anything you want. We can go see the cabin we’ll be staying at. Or we can go swimming. Or have a snack. Whatever.”