Best Friends

Sarah and I clutched our towels around our bathing suits, squealing as Danny chased us around the pool. From her sun bed, my mother lifted her head, shading her eyes from the bright sun with her book, and called out sternly to us to be careful. Sarah and I collapsed onto a sun bed, giggling while Danny pulled one of the thin cushions from another sun bed to the edge of the pool and lay down with his right hand dipped in the pool, mischievously threatening every so often to splash the cold water onto us.  

It had been a glorious three days. We had hardly spent any time inside the hotel. I was so glad that Sarah’s parents had agreed for her to come away with my family on a beach holiday. And I was secretly even happier that Danny just happened to be there with his parents too. I had had an enormous crush on him since the sixth grade and although it had been an entire year of turning bright red each time he so much as looked at me, neither he nor Sarah knew how I felt. Although she was my best friend, Sarah had a way of making me feel like most things I said or did were laughable. It was better that she didn’t know about my crush on Danny.

As the azure pool glistened in the sun’s golden rays, we took turns at jumping into the pool to see who could make the biggest splash. We would start off a distance away from the pool’s edge, running towards it and finally take the biggest leap we could, hugging our knees mid-air, just before we hit the water. Sarah managed to capture everyone’s attention (as was the case most of the time) with her immaculate underwater hand-stands. I could tell that Danny, in particular, was impressed and that this seemed to please Sarah greatly.

Before long, my mother was beckoning us to get cleaned up and changed for lunch. We promised Danny that we would meet him the following day for a game of water polo and then ran barefoot back to our hotel room. “I don’t want this holiday to end!” Sarah moaned as she stood at the balcony window, looking out onto the beach. “We still have another whole day left before we have to go back”, I replied optimistically but I too felt the sinking feeling that our holiday was coming to an end too quickly. For me, it meant fewer opportunities to see Danny, once we were back at home.

Sarah and I washed up, donned our shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops, and made our way down to the hotel’s dining room. My parents were already seated at a table, waiting for us. As we approached them, my mother looked at me and exclaimed disapprovingly, “Look at how dark your skin has gotten! Didn’t you use any sunscreen?” I looked down at my arms and legs and realized that I was really tanned. I never understood why that was a bad thing. I thought my skin looked so beautifully dark and flawless. I looked over at Sarah whose skin had a light bronze glow all over, except for her nose which was a reddish brown. She gave me a look of triumph as though to say, “I managed not to mess up like you did!”

I sulked through most of the lunch, perking up only when my father said that Sarah and I could have some money to go and get our hair braided on the beach. We hastened through our meal and excused ourselves from the table, dashing out into the sunshine again. We scampered past the pool and through the little gate that led onto the beach, whipping off our flip-flops and letting our feet sink into the powder-soft sand. The great big leaves of the palm trees swayed in the wind as the ocean drew closer with each wave. The almost-translucent crabs darted across the white sand, seemingly daring us to step on them. Some distance ahead of us, a man with a stick led a camel down the shoreline, a little boy nestled between its humps, his little legs dangling high off the sand. Beach vendors dotted the hotel’s periphery, their beautiful paintings and carvings laid out on a background of sand, and their exquisitely colourful sarongs flapping in the wind. As Sarah stopped to pick up a shell, I spotted two ladies sitting under the shade of a palm tree. A piece of cardboard stuck in the sand with the words “RASTAS DONE HERE. WELLCOM” written untidily across it told me we had found our hair-braiders. I called out to Sarah and we walked over to the women to get our hair makeovers.

Almost three hours later, we were finally done. We stood up, shaking off the pins and needles in our legs, and looked around. The tide was out and the beach had emptied out considerably. Sarah and I took a little walk along the strip of sand that had been under the tidal waves earlier that day, digging our toes into the wet sand, trying to unearth pretty little shells. Once we got closer to our hotel, we sat down on the soft sand and watched the waves breaking against the reef in the distance. I absent-mindedly picked up a handful of sand and let it pour through my fingers as I daydreamed about Danny.

A man’s voice behind us startled me back to reality. I looked over my shoulder and saw a man, wearing a cap, holding a bunch of leather bracelets and wooden key-chains in different shapes. Sarah began to engage him in conversation about the price of the key chains and so he moved in front of us and crouched down to face us. There was something about this man that unnerved me. I pretended to be disinterested in the conversation, looking out to the ocean, but from the corner of my eye, I could see that he kept turning to look at me.  I drew my knees in and hugged them. He was making me decidedly uncomfortable. Sarah, completely oblivious to my discomfort, asked me if I wanted to get a personalized key-chain. “No!” I snapped in response. I wanted the man to go away. Couldn’t she see that I was uncomfortable? As he stood up to dig into his pockets for some paper on which to write Sarah’s key-chain order, I took a good look at the man. He had protruding veins that ran over his smooth ebony skin, from his wrists, over the bulging muscles in his forearms and disappeared under the sleeves of his loose, button-up shirt. Hanging from underneath his cap, were short braids, not unlike those we had just gotten. His eyelids were droopy, as though he was sleepy and in his mouth, he chewed on what looked like the end of a twig.

He looked up at me suddenly, catching my stare and I felt a surge of panic shoot through my body. His eyes… they looked like dark beads set against a thick yellowish backdrop, taking me in, bit by bit, through their droopy eyelids. I looked away quickly. I wanted to get up and run back into the hotel compound but my body wasn’t listening. Sarah chatted away, answering the man’s questions, each of which he asked in a drawling voice, slowly averting his gaze every so often to look at me. I stared directly ahead of me at the ocean, praying that my fear was not apparent to him as I grew increasingly nervous.

He asked Sarah where we were staying and she pointed to the hotel behind us. I wanted to scream out and shake her and tell her to stop giving this stranger all this information but I could not seem to get my voice or my body to obey my mind. I began to tremble. The beach was now practically void of any people, save the man with the camel. All sorts of thoughts raced through my mind. I began to have flashbacks of an incident that occurred when I was nine years old, and a drunken man had accosted me outside a restaurant’s restroom. I shuddered as I closed my eyes and saw those eerie translucent-green bloodshot eyes boring into mine.

“You, you look like a tourist because you have a white skin,” the key-chain vending man said to Sarah, “but your friend – she look more like me.” I could feel his stare burning into me. “Me, I prefer this colour…” He reached over and slowly but deliberately stroked my thigh upwards.

That was it! My body finally kicked into defence-mode as I shoved his hand away, got to my feet and with all my might, kicked the fine sand into his eyes. I didn’t even stop to look at Sarah as I then whirled around and bolted for the hotel entrance. Just as I approached the incline to the open hotel gate, I felt my left foot hit something hard and before I knew it, I was laying face-down in the sand, my ankle resting atop a piece of driftwood. I hoisted myself back up again, and as the tears came hot and furiously down the sides of my sand-covered face, I heard the distinct sound of Sarah’s laughter behind me...