“Yes. To Huhn. It’s still that on my green card.”

“Huhn,” the other one repeats.

Huhn snorts. “Do you know what Huhn means in German? Chicken. It means chicken.”

Chicken, I echo silently, turning back to watch Kai help carry his lessons’ surfboards into the water. That’s what I am. I’m a big fat chicken. I’m scared to try anything new but scared of never having more.

So instead of running off, leaving the beach for my room or a spot at the pool, I stay glued to my lounge chair and watch as Kai gets his girls on their boards and pushes them out into the water, over the small wave breaking on the shore.

He paddles out behind them, and soon he’s in front of them, a foot on each of their boards to tow them out, his arms wet, skin bronzed, muscles rippling.

I watch him paddle with his lesson until the three of them disappear on the horizon.

Suddenly the sky seems so big overhead, heavy with clouds and jagged places of blue. I feel small in comparison, small and surprisingly fragile. Once I was young and wanted everything, and then I grew up and settled—it was settled, wasn’t it?—and learned not to look back, not to ask for more, not to want more because more didn’t come. More didn’t exist… at least not outside the imagination.

I sit forward, wrap my arm around my knees, and try to see where Kai and his lesson have gone on the horizon; but there are too many surfers in the distance, a cluster of bodies and boards. I wish I knew what was more, anyway.

Is “more” love? Is “more” emotion? Is it peace?

Happiness? Or is more just more of everything?

It’s time for my lesson, and I’m terrified. I try to be nonchalant, making what I hope is witty repartee, but on the inside I’m so nervous that I feel positively twitchy. Kai gets me a bright green rash guard, and I tug it on over my head. It’s tight and compresses my boobs but fortunately flares enough at the hips that my stomach isn’t on view for everyone. Just my butt.

Speaking of my butt, Kai hands me a bottle of suntan lotion, tells me to apply it to the backs of my legs since they’re going to get a lot of sun. I look up at him, eyes narrowing. “You’re saying they’re white.”

He smiles a little. “I’m saying you don’t want them burned.”