The surfers rode the wave one quarter into the bay. Seeing how well Gwen and the Smith twins were surfing, Raymond and his friends glanced at the three with displeasure. They closed in on Gwen to ram her. But being telepaths, the twins had felt their four competitors’ intentions and telepathically warned Gwen, who promptly dodged the attack and gave Raymond a mouthful of saltwater to boot.
“You rascal!” yelled the young man and attacked Gwen anew.
The cameraman zoomed in on the seven surfers. The last song finished, and the band went on to play Iko Iko in the style of Captain Jack.
“It seems like a hustle’s broken out between Raymond Dickens’s team and Gwen Hammond’s,” said the reporter of the livestream as he saw what was going on.
“Those …” Mrs. Smith pointed at the sun and then the beach.
“Come on, guys! Kick those …” Mr. Smith made the same gesture as his wife, “… in the butt!”
With her strength and bulk, Gwen almost pushed Raymond over. She, Ashley and Ashton fought bravely, but in the fight of four against three, they went under in the end. They "gargled" curses as the immense wave rolled over their heads.
“Crap!” shouted Mr. and Mrs. Smith together.
Raymond clapped his hands. “Now that that’s been taken care of, let’s focus on winning.”
An evil smile on his face, he looked ahead and overtook all the others. But his joy didn’t last long. When the wave was halfway into the bay and a hundred and fifty feet high, the twins and Gwen breached out of the water beside him.
“Hey! Where have you come from? Haven’t you –”
He got his answer before he could finish. A few dolphins stuck their heads out of the water. Swimming faster than the wave, they had pushed Gwen and her friends forward under it and out of the water at its helm.
“See?” said Gwen and stuck out her tongue. “If you help marine life, it will help you, too.”
“You cheats!” yelled one of Raymond’s friends.
“Hear who says that!” retorted Ashton.
“Yay!” shouted Ashton and Ashley’s parents and danced to the song and hollered “Hooray!” when the band sang this word.
The dolphins nudged Gwen and her friends on and shielded them from the bullies. Everything appeared to run smoothly. Gwen could almost taste the fresh apple already. But suddenly, the dolphins dove down and vanished. “Where are you going to? Why?” she called after her cetacean friends. She looked around and readily got the answer to her question. Above and behind her, nearly two hundred feet above sea level, she could make out a large triangular fin cutting through the wave’s surface. She began to breathe too fast. She loved the ocean and its dwellers, including the owner of the fin, but she also had an irrational phobia from his kind in spite of being a fierce advocate and protector of it. She no longer thought of winning the race, but only of getting out of the water, so she braked her unending descent on the front of the wave so as to rise on the face of the watery behemoth until she got near its peak. In the process, she surfed away from the fin. She was now over three hundred feet high and level with the top of the cliffs. She surfed to one side of the wave. As the water washed over the cliff’s edge and drenched the feet of the crowd standing there, she surfed on it over the cliff’s top, accidentally knocking one of the onlookers over. “Sorry, Mr. Smith.”
“No prob, Gwen. But how are you gonna win now?” said the tall muscular man with the well-tilled beard and moustache and got up as the water subsided.
Gwen got up, too, and sighed. “Probably not at all.”
“But then those ecological criminals will get the prize money and use it to further endanger sturgeons and sharks instead of helping those important animals, as our kids and you would do.”
“You’re right. We can’t let that happen. But the wave has passed. What shall we do? What shall we do?” said Gwen.41Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ3isHzSINxV
