Red Flag on the Beach

The klaxon cut through the salt air and every head on the beach turned toward the water.

I was already paddling, already committed, already too far out to pretend I hadn't heard it — the red flag snapping on the lifeguard tower, the current dragging at my ankles like a hand. Beside me, Jessica Montford was laughing.

"Told you," she shouted over the wind. "Too scared to enter. Too scared to even *finish*."

I'd entered this competition because Don had looked at me across the breakfast table three days ago and said, *Not for me. Not for Sophia. For you.* He'd said it quietly, the way he said everything that mattered, and something in my chest had unlocked. So I'd signed my name on the sheet and spent every dawn since in the freezing Atlantic, learning to stand on a board that hated me.

Now the sea was trying to kill us both, and Jessica was still scoring points.

The red current hit properly at the second buoy. It came in sideways, a wall of churning grey that flipped my board and rolled me under, and when I surfaced, gasping, Jessica was thrashing twenty metres out with her leash wrapped around her wrist and her face gone the colour of the foam.

"Help!" she screamed. "I can't— my arm—"

My board was still with me. Hers was gone, swept out past the break. There was one piece of fibreglass between us and the open water, and I didn't think. I never think in the right order.

I kicked toward her, shoved the board under her chest, and pushed. "Take it. Go. *Go.*"

She grabbed the rail. She looked at me — properly looked, close enough that I could see the water beading on her lashes — and for half a second I thought she might actually thank me.

Then her palm hit my shoulder and drove me under.

I came up choking. She was already on the board, paddling, and when I reached for the rail she kicked out and caught me in the ribs and I went under a second time. The current took my legs. I remember thinking, absurdly, that I hadn't told Sophia where I'd left her medication.

Then the water closed over my head and there was only noise.

---

I woke on the sand with the sun in my eyes and someone's hands on my sternum, and the first thing I saw was Don's face, grey and wet and absolutely furious.

"You're breathing," he said. Not a question.

"I'm breathing."

He sat back on his heels. His shirt was plastered to his shoulders, his hair in his eyes, and there was a graze along his forearm where the reef had caught him. He had gone into a red current in a three-piece suit. For me.

"Don—"

"Not now." He looked past me, down the beach, where Jessica stood wrapped in a foil blanket with two officials and her father's driver already on the phone. "Her first."

The aerial footage came out that evening. The club had a drone up for the broadcast, and the drone had seen everything — Jessica taking the board, Jessica's palm flat against my shoulder, Jessica kicking out when I reached for the rail. Twice. The second time was the one that made Marco go very quiet in the passenger seat.

The club wanted it filed as an accident. *Rough conditions, no fault, everyone's shaken.* Jessica's father rang the club president, then the coastguard, then, apparently, everyone he had ever bought dinner for, and demanded the footage be deleted.

Don listened to all of it from the terrace with a glass of water he never drank from, and then he made three phone calls.

"The footage goes to the university disciplinary committee. Unedited." A pause. "The surf club's funding is suspended pending review. And every agreement we hold with Montford Group is frozen as of tonight."

"Sir," Marco said carefully, "the Montfords will take that as a declaration."

"Good."

I found him an hour later in the study, still in the ruined shirt.

"Don't," I said.

He turned. "Don't what?"

"Don't burn your business down over me. I'm not—" I stopped, because the sentence ended somewhere I wasn't ready to go. "Let the university handle it. That's what the footage is for. And leave Jessica to me."

Something moved behind his eyes. "Nicole."

"Please."

He was silent for a long moment. Then: "The committee gets the footage. That's not negotiable. The rest—" he inclined his head, "—the rest is yours."

---

I found her the next morning at the club's recovery session, sitting on the edge of the dock with her feet in the water and her arm in a sling she did not need, telling anyone who'd listen how *terrified* she'd been, how she'd *acted on instinct*, how poor Nicole had simply been in the wrong place.

I had my phone in my hand and the live stream already running. Fifty-one people watching. Then two hundred. Then I stopped counting.

"Jessica."

She looked up and smiled. "Oh, you're alive. How brave of you to—"

I slapped her. Once, across the cheek she turned into, and then again, backhand, because she'd turned the same way twice and I'd learned something about her.

"That's for pushing me back in," I said. "And that's for lying about it."

She scrambled backwards and I put my foot flat against her sternum and shoved. She went off the dock with a shriek and a splash, sling and all, and came up spitting water in front of a camera that was still broadcasting.

"Say it," I said. "Say what you did."

She said nothing. She didn't have to. Everyone had already seen the drone.

I ended the stream, sat down on the dock, and shook for ten minutes straight.

Don found me there. He didn't say anything about the video, or the two hundred people, or the fact that I'd just kicked a Montford into the harbour on the internet. He sat down beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched, and looked out at the water.

"Was it worth it?" he asked.

I thought about the letter I'd written Tyler in Year Ten and never sent. I thought about every party I'd left early, every compliment I'd deflected, every time I'd made myself small so nobody would have to look at me.

"Yes," I said.

He nodded slowly. "Then I'll handle the fallout."

I should have thanked him. Instead I said, "She'll come for me now. Properly."

"I know."

"And you'll still be here."

He turned his head and looked at me — really looked, the way he had on the sand — and said, "Where else would I be?"

I didn't have an answer for that. I still don't. But the water was calm again, and the sun was out, and for the first time in my life I'd stood up in front of the whole world and refused to sink.

**Was Nicole's public retaliation justified — or should she have left it to the committee?**