Free A Sudden Silence by Eve Bunting

waves, barking its head off, and a bunch of us plowed in after it. Bry had grabbed it first. Last year.
    I told Debbie I'd for sure be back and took off. MTV was carrying the contest live and there were cameras and wires everywhere. The day was full of the smells of suntan oil and summer bodies, the exact kind of day my brother would have loved.
    Not everybody on the beach was that interested in the surfing contest. There were people milling around far back in the sand, tossing footballs or just cruising, looking for happenings. Some of them were setting off firecrackers. A knot of guys stood in what might have been a football huddle and I had just passed them when I heard, from somewhere in the middle of the huddle, a girl's quick scream.
    "No," she yelled. "Quit it, will you?"
    Heads turned and the lifeguard scrambled down his ladder, heading for the group, which had grown somehow, and there were arms flailing and something was tossed out on the sand, grabbed up, and tossed in again. A red bikini top! Chloes? I felt sick. Couldn't be. Not Chloe's!
    Now
I
was yelling, hurling myself against the outside bodies. "Let me in. Let her go!" I was clawing at heads and shoulders when somebody grabbed me. "Cool it, man! What's your problem? The girl's OK. Nothing happened to her. She crawled out. There she is."
    I jumped so I could see over the heads, and I saw a girl with a white towel wrapped around her top, brown skin between the towel and her red bikini bottoms. She was at the side, laughing, covering her mouth with her hand. Not Chloe. Definitely not Chloe.
    The guy who had talked to me grinned. "Thought she was your sister, huh?" I didn't have the strength to grin back "They were just messing around. She was sunning on her stomach without her top, and they were telling her to roll over and take the rest off. Nothin' serious." He had blue zinc on his nose to match his blue surfer Jams. "But now she's not even there and they're fightin' like maniacs. It's getting more serious by the minute."
    I took a deep breath. Not Chloe. I'd have punched out every single one of them if it had been Chloe. I was panting and covered with sweat. Where
was
she anyway?
    The TV people sensed a story and were juggling their equipment across the beach, and the lifeguard was trying to push his way through the mob, which swayed back and forth, oozing in all directions, growing even as I looked at it.
    A beer bottle was thrown, and then a beach chair, then all was chaos. The pier was emptying fast. People rushed like ants, spilling down onto the sand. A beach umbrella sailed like a parachute, and a firecracker ricocheted between the running legs. I heard the beat of the police helicopter.
    Police cars roared up, but somebody on the beach had flares, the kind they put on the road the night Bry was killed, and they were lighting them and tossing them into the crowd.
    "Oh, my God!" The guy in the Jams pointed to smoke in the parking lot and I saw a police car burning.
    Where was Chloe? I pushed against the traffic of running bodies, heading for where I'd seen her last.
    She wasn't there. Had I expected her to sit through this?
    Two surfers still rode the waves and the announcer still talked. But he wasn't describing the surfing. "Ladies and gentlemen, please stay in your seats. You came to watch the all-pro finals. Please stay in your seats."
    I ran along the edge of the surf among the abandoned chairs and towels and coolers, calling Chloe's name.
    And then I heard her. "Jesse! Jesse, over here."
    She lay on the sand on her side, and some guy knelt beside her. "She's hurt her foot pretty bad," he said. "I was just about to go for help."
    "It's OK," I said. "I'll take care of her."
    "So stupid!" She held up her foot. "Look!"
    I saw the bright blood dripping, the gash about an inch long.
    "Glass," she said. "I didn't think I should walk. Not in the sand." Her face under her tan was gray.
    I unknotted my T-shirt from my waist and tied it on her foot. I don't