The Ledge Read online

  Copyright © Lesley Choyce 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The ledge / Lesley Choyce.

  Names: Choyce, Lesley, 1951– author.

  Series: Orca soundings.

  Description: Series statement: Orca soundings

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2019016901X | Canadiana (ebook) 20190169028 | ISBN 9781459824614 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459824621 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459824638 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8555.H668 L43 2020 | DDC jC813/.54—dc23

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019943968

  Simultaneously published in Canada and the United States in 2020

  Summary: In this high-interest novel for teen readers, sixteen-year-old Nick tries to adjust to his new reality after a surfing accident leaves him paralyzed.

  Orca Book Publishers is committed to reducing the consumption of nonrenewable resources in the making of our books. We make every effort to use materials that support a sustainable future.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Edited by Tanya Trafford

  Design by Ella Collier

  Cover images by gettyimages.ca/edb3_16 (front) and

  Shutterstock.com/Krasovski Dmitri (back)

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  23 22 21 20 • 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter One

  One day you’re this. The next day you’re that. Everything can change so quickly. Not even in just one day, but in one hour. Or, in my case, one minute. Think of it as Nick Peterson Before. And Nick Peterson After.

  By the time I hit sixteen, surfing had become the biggest thing in my life. All that kid glory from skateboarding was behind me. Hockey had me for a while, but it faded. As did football and track. I had some glory there too. But it was all in the past when surfing became my thing. The thing. But enough ancient history. Let’s cut to the event.

  September found me back in school, a ripping summer of waves behind me. I had surfed almost every day. I’d given lessons, too, and made decent cash. I had persuaded Olivia to be my girlfriend. Olivia—a year older than me, with her own car and her own credit card, and willing to foot the bill for whatever we did. She resented surfing sometimes, as it took time away from her. But she knew that if she asked me to choose between her (and her car and her credit card) and surfing, surfing would win.

  Being stuck sitting in a classroom sucked more than ever that year. Fall brought bigger swells out of the south. Waves not ridden. Time wasted at a desk, not on a board. I’d been watching this place out of town, a headland called Delbert Point at the end of Fraser Road. No wave had broken there all summer. “Swell not big enough,” the Wreck had once told me. The Wreck was what we all called this old guy who lived out near the point. “Need a big push out of the south,” he said. He liked to talk about his glory days on the waves. I wasn’t even sure I believed the stories at first. Especially the ones about the break there, the one he simply called the Ledge.

  A ledge—what surfers sometimes call a slab—is a big, flat piece of rock under the surface of the ocean. A wave, but it has to be a big wave, rolls in, hits it and jacks up like double overhead in a split second. You have to hit it just right. And then this big thick monster of a thing roars over it, not acting like any sane wave you’d ever known. Thick and meaty and heavy, heavy, heavy.

  If you could take off just right, you could drop, pull a power turn, set your track really high and boot it through an ugly but oh-so-hollow pocket and out the other side. If it could be done, then I figured I could do it. I was sure of it.

  Of course, if the crashing lip of water hit you, you’d be squashed like a bug in the shallow water barely covering the wide black slab. Dangerous, yes?

  Dangerous but doable.

  So that’s how it came to be that on that fateful second day of October, I was not sitting as usual in my English class, dreaming of the perfect wave.

  Let me paint the picture. Big swell out of the south. Bigger than most. The beaches were all closed. Most point breaks around were big but shapeless. When I had woken up that morning I had felt it in my bones. The Ledge was calling me. You think I was going to go to freaking school? No way.

  I left the house early, my board under my arm. My parents were already off to work. I hopped on my bicycle and rode to the headland at the edge of town.

  And that’s when I saw it. Everything the Wreck had said was true. It was big, mean and more powerful than any wave I’d ever seen. And it looked scary as hell. I slipped into my wetsuit and paddled out.

  Chapter Two

  Everyone knows you’re not supposed to surf alone. I told that to the people in my surfing classes. But rules like that are for beginners, I figured, not for real surfers like me. That October day I was alone. All alone staring at a most turbulent sea.

  The paddle out was difficult. All kinds of strange currents were tugging my board one way and another. The sky was dark. There was a storm out there at sea somewhere generating this big swell, but here, near the coast, the wind was offshore. It would make the wave hollow and fast. After a long, hard paddle, I stopped and stared at the monster of a wave, the final one of a set of seven, pounding down on the shallow shelf of rock. I could see where I’d need to take off, where I’d need to hang high on the wall of the wave, avoiding the quick drop, aiming for the shoulder and safety.

  Most all of my life, I’d been good at taking the fear that would crawl up from the back of my neck into my skull and transforming it into something else. Something that made me want to do it—whatever it was. Do it and not back down.

  It took me a while to figure out where to sit as I watched wave after wave rear up, spit forward, crash down and then plow shoreward as a heaving pile of white water. Even when I thought I’d found the spot, I’d be pulled one way or another by the current. Then I figured out that I had to keep paddling my six-foot board in from the deep at a forty-five-degree angle until I arrived at the perfect takeoff spot just at the instant the wave started to jack up.

  I failed to get it right at least a dozen times. Discouraged? No. Challenged? You bet. Pumped to the gills on adrenaline, I was going to tame this beast.

  And then I saw it. The last wave of the set. Big, yeah, way big. Bigger than anything I’d ever ridden. Did fear start creeping up the back stairs of my brain? For sure. Boy on a mission beating it down? You bet.

  Paddle, paddle, paddle.

  Got it.

  It’s got me.

  We can do this together, wave buddy. Throw what you got.

  I
t threw.

  As I began to drop, I pounded my back foot down on my board to make the fin lock into the water and give me a radical turn to the right. So far, so good.

  And then I noticed the sound. Not the normal wave sound. Not the lip crashing or the wind rushing up the face. It was the sound of the water sucking out below in the trough, sucking out over what looked like the bare face of solid stone.

  But the dark wall of water before me looked like something I understood. It was the wall of a wave, after all, a big, ugly bully of a wave, but a wave nonetheless. I was moving faster than I had ever moved on a surfboard before. And it was my wave. Mine alone.

  I guess I’m stretching this out. But at the time it seemed to happen in slow motion, just like in the movies. It probably all happened real quick. And real bad.

  The wave changed. It got fatter. It got weirder. The hollow tube I was looking for was not round or almond-shaped. It was almost square. No lie. As the wave sucked out over the Ledge, it created this square prison that would not let me out. I had miscalculated.

  What’s worse is that this suddenly morphing wave collapsed completely all at once, top to bottom, with me inside. It had lured me into its mouth and then chomped down hard. It had no intention of letting me out.

  I felt the weight of the water overhead slam down on me, knocking me off my board. Then I felt the rock. I hit it once, twice, and then, as blackness set in, the force of the breaking wave started pushing me off the Ledge and down into deeper water. I only felt pain for maybe a second. Then nothing.

  Nothing until I woke up in an ambulance and heard the sound of the siren. I had to throw up, so I tried to lean over but couldn’t. Instead I vomited straight up in the air, and it came down on my face. A woman’s hand was wiping it away and sticking fingers in my mouth to remove the crud. I would have thought it was maybe the worst feeling in my life just then if it wasn’t for the pain in my skull.

  But even that wasn’t the worst of it. I couldn’t feel my legs. I couldn’t move my feet.

  “Don’t try to move,” the woman’s voice said. “You had an accident.”

  I was still sloshing puke around in my mouth, and I wanted to say something or scream something, but it just took too much energy.

  So I lay there in unbelievable pain, looking up at the lights in the ceiling. I desperately tried to remember what had happened in those seconds after the wave slammed me into the rocky bottom. Somehow I had ended up onshore and ultimately here in a wailing ambulance on its way to the hospital.

  Chapter Three

  I could report to you a whole lot of boring bullshit that happened during the next month. But I’ll give you the short version.

  I couldn’t move my legs.

  The doctors said I might recover the feeling in my legs and walk again. Or I might not.

  My parents freaked out.

  I freaked out.

  Shrinks started coaching me about my “new situation.”

  A guy named Ahmad became my physical therapist and kept telling me to trust him and be patient.

  I missed a month of school.

  I ended up home in my bedroom with a goddamn catheter attached to my you-know-what, playing video games where the bad guys were the good guys and the good guys were the ones I was killing.

  If you think I am going to drag you through all that and give you more dirt on my sad situation, then I’ll say the same thing to you as I said to the kids at school when I went back. Screw you. Really. Frig off.

  Oh, and get this. I returned to school in a motorized wheelchair. Yup, I did. It just kept getting better and better. But if you want the whole story of what went down between the wave and the return of the defeated warrior to the hallowed halls of high school, you’ll have to ask someone else. I don’t want to relive it.

  In fact, maybe you could ask Olivia. She and I lasted all of two weeks after the accident. That hurt too. So maybe I should, like the shrink says, “talk and share the pain.”

  One day she came into my bedroom while I was propped up killing a team of FBI agents who were chasing me because I had threatened to deploy a deadly virus on Philadelphia.

  “How are things today, Nick?”

  “Things are about the same. Life sucks. This sucks. Each morning I wake to the same old shit. And nothing seems to change.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “People keep saying that. But I was the one who did this to me. So I don’t even have the luxury of blaming someone else.” I threw the game controller at the wall, and the video game froze.

  Olivia walked over to pick it up. Something about her, something in the air in the room, told me she was here to tell me something important. “Nick?” she began sweetly.

  “Olivia?” Sarcasm poisoned my voice, but then, that same sarcasm had poisoned just about every word that had come out of my mouth since my big wipeout.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” she said.

  I almost laughed. Almost but not quite. “Do what?”

  “I’m not strong like you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s just that…”

  “Just what? Say it.”

  “It’s just that it hurts me so much to see you like this.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “But I’m not someone who’s good at…” Olivia looked away from me then and walked to the window and opened the blinds. I cringed at the bright light, but it was that sunlight coming into the room that maybe allowed me to see where this was going.

  I took a deep breath. She was breaking up with me. The girl was here to tell me she was moving on. The rage began to grow deep within. I almost exploded.

  And then she started to cry. She sat down on the bed, leaned into me and cried until I felt her tears on my shirt. My rage subsided. I felt sorry for her. Of course she couldn’t handle this. I couldn’t handle this either. The only difference was that she had a choice and I didn’t.

  I consoled her as only a paralyzed teenage boy can console a pretty but self-centered girlfriend who is dumping him but is brave enough to come into his bedroom and say it in person instead of by text message.

  I wanted to cry too, for both of us. Instead I held her in my arms, as my shirt sopped up the tears, and let her have a good healthy cry. Then she said some really silly shit like, “I’ll always remember our time together” or something inane like that.

  And then she left my room. It was over.

  My thought that day was, A lot of things are over. Most everything in my life that I’d ever cared about was over.

  And then it was back to school for Mr. Motorized Man. The teachers would all find a special place in the classroom where I could park my wheelchair. Kids would sneak looks at me, thinking, Is that the same Nick Peterson who was once quarterback of the football team? Is that the Nick Peterson who was on the cover of Thrasher magazine when he was, like, thirteen?

  Chapter Four

  So now you have a pretty clear picture of Nick Before and Nick After. If you want a list of the things I missed most—from peeing on my own to surfing overhead walls of glass for three hours straight—it would take too long. I should just get on with the story.

  I liked the drugs. The painkillers. The pain dwindled—the physical pain, that is. Hey, I still couldn’t really feel much of anything from the waist down. Lucky me. But I told the docs that I was still in pain so they would keep the meds coming. I was legally buzzed and occasionally blitzed if I took more than the recommended dose. But the drugs were making me dull. It was hard to concentrate in school. Hard even to concentrate on the video games sometimes. At least I didn’t have to put any energy or thought into keeping up with a relationship.

  Dreams about that wave kept coming back to haunt me. Night after night. My parents kept referring to it as “the accident,” as did most everyone else. But it wasn’t an accident. It was my own doing. And that made it all seem even worse.

  Ahmad gave me some stupid books to read by
people who had recovered from cancer or car accidents or sports injuries. The ones who tell you that you can grow and learn from bad things in life and become a more fully realized person. In my video-game world, I imagined I was hunting down those stupid optimists and blasting them from the face of the earth.

  But Ahmad was good to me. I gave him a hard time, and he always took my crap. He’d been assigned to me right after I ended up in the hospital. I gave him so much shit he should have thrown me down a flight of stairs and finished off the job. But he never lost his cool with me. Instead he just smiled. At first I hated that smile.

  And then I noticed that he was the only one who wasn’t giving me a smile filled with pity.

  “I am here to help you the best way I can,” he told me. “Yes, they pay me to do this,” he had replied after I hurled an insulting comeback about it just being his job. “And I’m grateful,” he’d added. But I could tell it wasn’t just the pay.

  I never asked him about himself until after Olivia dumped me. “Ahmad, you’re not from around here, are you?”

  “Everyone asks that. No. I’m from far away.”

  “How far away?”

  “The Middle East. Syria.”

  “Any surf in Syria?”

  He smiled. “I think so. Around Latakia. You know, usually when I name that country, people have opinions they seem to need to share.”

  “Ever surf?”

  “No. I’m not good at things like that. No good balance. Besides, I hear surfing can be dangerous.” There was just a hint of another kind of smile. A devilish smile.

  “No,” I said. “Surfing’s really pretty safe unless you’re an idiot like me.”

  “Maybe you could give me a lesson sometime.”

  “Maybe,” I said. And that’s when it occurred to me. This was the first honest guy-to-guy conversation I’d had with anyone since “the event.”

  We had a lot more conversations. I was into week six of my three-times-a-week physio sessions with Ahmad when I decided he was my only true ally in the world now. I mean, my parents were my parents, and teachers tried to be nice, and some kids tried to be kind to the gimp in the wheelchair who had once tossed a mighty mean football. But Ahmad was the real thing.