The North Shore of Oahu was the first place she’d started to think of as home since dropping out of college. She was with her beautiful young boyfriend, Jens, a skinny German surfer she’d met in Indo. He looked like Pan with his shoulder-length hair, golden skin, full lips, and cinnamon eyes. The stripe of zinc oxide across his nose almost seemed tribal on him, and he wore his ripped-up wet suit so low on his waist that it practically hung off the hook of his penis. It wasn’t love, but Jens was sweet and sensual and wonderfully indefinite. Maybe he’d go home, maybe he’d spend another month here or there, maybe he’d go to Bali, maybe New Zealand. Maybe she’d go with him. Maybe he’d go alone. It was all good.

Through their connections (the surfing underworld was all about connections), they were able to live in a tree house that was built into the bluff in a surf colony a few minutes from Sunset Beach, and she got a job working at Jameson’s as a bartender. She owned a car, a five-hundred-dollar beater Volkswagen bug she could only afford to drive because, at that time, there were no insurance laws on the island.

The Banzai Pipeline was the best seven-mile stretch in the world. Poppy thought she could handle it. She was getting good enough that she even thought she might land some sponsorships and free gear, but just when she thought she was ready—when winter rolled around and the swells grew—she broke her jaw when she hit coral in a bad pearl. The break was fast, but the time she spent under the water had seemed to last forever. She would have drowned if the current had been stronger, or if she’d hit her head instead of her jaw. Her friends pulled her out of the water, semiconscious.

It was a painful break, more painful than when she’d broken her ankle. Her jaw was wired shut, and the ever-moving life she’d been living for over a decade came to a grinding halt. For six long weeks she sipped Ensure from a straw and got strung out and constipated from Percocet. She spent her days feeding the chickens and stray cats that wandered near her tent. Her only companion Burl, who owned the surf compound. He was a leather-skinned, silver-haired old-school surfer with an outie belly button so large it looked like it had been sewn onto his stomach. She wanted Burl to be a father figure to her, because she missed her own dad, but drugs had turned Burl’s brain into scrambled eggs. He couldn’t hold a thought. He just nodded and smiled, grateful for her company.