Life's a Wave

Chapter 1

Okay, hey guys...I broke my leg a couple weeks ago and have had nothing to do with my life so I thought why not write a book. So I'm going to update really often and I hope you like my book! If people actually start reading it then I'm going to enter it in the watty awards so tell me what you think!

                When I was younger, I lived at the beach. We lived in a small, white beach home. The white paint was peeling, giving the impression of an old house. The outside had old furniture and had sand covering the porch at all times of the day, no matter how often my mom swept. Our backyard gave us the pleasure of being right on the sand. My mom used to say it was both a blessing that we lived in such a beautiful place, and a curse that it involved so much sweeping. Especially since her two sons didn't do anything to help.

                I understood where she was coming from, but I didn’t get why. I loved the way that even when I was in our house I could feel like I was at the beach because there was always sand. I loved that every night I would fall asleep to the sounds of waves crashing onto shore. I loved that every single day I would be able to come home to both of my homes, the beach, and my house.

                One day over summer, when I was six years old, I was grounded. That was the one day I hadn't gone to the beach that summer. I sat on the porch, after throwing a tantrum, and just started taking the view in. I could see my friends building sand castles and having the best time. I could see Rob, the lifeguard, running into the water to make sure everyone was safe. But something new caught my eye that day. I saw the surfers.

                I had seen people surfing before, but I never had a second thought about them. I asked my dad what they were doing, but I quickly got distracted with doing something else and not caring what he had to say. That day, I finally had the chance to really see what they were doing. I sat on the porch for four hours before being called in for dinner by my older brother. I just sat there, amazed at what they were doing with their surfboards. Their tricks, the way they made the waves look more fragile and beautiful than ever, and from that day on, I knew I wanted to surf when I grew up.

                "Daddy?" I sweetly asked my father after being grounded because I had been arguing with Liam. He looked at me with a stern look that he always had on his face after a long day of work. "I want to learn how to surf." The way his stern look turned to a look of confusion and then happiness amazed my six year old mind. He then asked me why I had just now wanted to learn about surfing and I told him. Of course, being six, I didn’t have as good reasons that I only now have looking back on that day, but my dad smile just kept getting bigger and bigger as I kept going on. You see, my father used to surf everyday and had always tried to get me and my brother to try, but he never got his point across to us.

                The next day, when my father came home from work, he had a new surfboard in hands, and told me that he was going to make me the best surfer ever, and he did. I was great, I had won about fifty competitions by the age of twelve, and had surfed with some of the greatest surfers out there by the age of fourteen. I was living my dream life, my father's dream life, but the good life always has to end at some point.

                Things started getting bad. I started to fall more into my brother's lifestyle, which wasn’t a good one. My father would tell me that he was disappointed in what Liam was doing with his life when we went out surfing together. I knew what he was talking about too. Liam was getting into drugs. Nothing that bad, but smoking marijuana and every once in a while a cigarette. As of today, those are the only two things I know that he got in too, but I could be wrong.

                It started when I was twelve and had just won my fiftieth competition for surfing. My father was so proud of me that he threw me a huge party with all my friends and surfing buddies. Before the party, Liam came into my room to congratulate me. He said that he really was proud of me and was sorry that he couldn’t be at my party tonight. I questioned him on why he wasn’t going to be there, but he just told me not to worry about it and don’t tell dad. At first I thought it was kind of odd for him, but when people started arriving it slipped my mind.