style="font-size:15px;"> “And how you know that, Miss Know-it-all Yvette?” Junie jumped to her feet, ready to fight. Junie was a good fighter, in some ways a better fighter than Yvette, despite Yvette’s mouth. “And just what was it that took your mother away?”
A fearful silence descended over the group. What would Yvette say or do? A shadow darkened Yvette’s face and her bottom lip began to tremble. For a moment it seemed she was about to cry, and if she started crying I didn’t know what we’d do. Yvette could be “hard” at times, yes, but she also spent hours and hours, crying for no immediate reason. Her mother had left for New York over three years ago and since then no one heard anything from her. Not a word. Not a letter. Nothing. No one knew if she had landed, if she had not landed, or if the plane had just been gobbled up by the infamous Bermuda triangle. Yvette’s mother simply disappeared in thin air it seemed, and the people in the district often openly speculated if she was even still alive. Sometimes I looked at Yvette, wondering how she did it, how she survived day after day, month after month without getting any information about her mother? As miserable as my mother could sometimes be, as miserable as she sometimes made me, I knew I wouldn’t be able to cope with people openly speculating whether she was alive or dead. I knew I could not live without my mother.
Yvette’s face darkened some more, but this time in anger. A sneer spread across her full dark lips and I could tell she was getting ready to say something really hurtful.
“Well,” she said to Junie, “if you or your mother could read, you’d know what it said on the death certificates.”
The joke about Junie and her mother was that even if their names were on johnny cakes in front of them, they wouldn’t know it, for neither could read. This was not exactly true. Junie wasn’t the brightest girl, but she could read a word here and there, a few sentences. She certainly knew how to spell her name, fill out forms. True, she wasn’t as bright as Yvette, but then few people were. Had Yvette taken the common entrance exam, she’d surely have passed for one of the high schools in Kingston, but she hadn’t taken the exam because her father couldn’t find her birth certificate and there was no way to verify she was of the age to sit the exam. What would become of her when she finished primary school, no one knew.
“Can’t read? Says who?” Junie asked, her hurt showing, ready to fight.
“Says me and everybody else.” Yvette’s arms were akimbo, daring Junie to touch her.
“I have a good mind to punch your stinking mouth!” Junie doubled up her fists and started getting closer and closer to Yvette. “That would teach you to keep it blasted shut!”
“Just you try it!” Yvette was trying not to show she was afraid Junie might make good on her promise. “Just you try it!”
“Alright, alright, that’s enough!” I stepped in to calm things down between the two young lionesses with fire breathing out of their nostrils. Junie and Yvette eyed each other, smelling and circling each other for quite some time...
Now as we looked down towards the river, I thought if we didn’t do something to please Yvette we’d have a miserable time. I realized if we stayed near the rushes, it wouldn’t matter much if we took our clothes off, for no one could see us from way up here on the road. There were certainly enough bushes and trees sloping down to the river to hide us. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d stripped down naked in front of each other; we’d done that dozens, perhaps hundreds of times before when we came to the river. But now that our bodies were changing …
“Look, we’ll take off as much of our clothes as we’re comfortable with.”
“Coward!” Yvette mumbled under her breath.
“Will you just shut up! Will you just for once keep your big mouth shut?” I was getting really angry now. “Do we want to go to the river or don’t we?”
“Let’s go,” Monique said, jumping up and getting ready to lead the way.
“Let’s go under the bridge,” Yvette said in yet another dare. The girl was seriously getting on my last nerve! The bridge was the place Grandy had warned me time and time again not to go near. The water under the bridge was dark and it was deep. There you could not see the bottom of the river. There were sharp stones hidden in the water under the bridge, and because it was so dark it wasn’t easy to see them. Someone could really hurt themselves on those stones. This was what the district people said all the time. People had to be careful with those stones. But that was not the worst of it. Under the bridge was ole crab and rivermumma! Yvette herself knew that. Another terrible hush fell over the group.
“Are we going or not?” Yvette was looking around her, something lit and burning bright inside her, something which looked like the bright orange-red flowers of the poinciana trees. Flame of the forest, those trees were called. As bright as any midnight fire. I looked at Yvette. She had already accused me of being a coward for refusing to take my clothes off; now I could not refuse her dare without looking even more of a coward in front of the other girls. I would give in. We would go under the bridge. I was the Kingstonian. I was the one supposedly afraid of nothing.
“Sure, we can go under the bridge,” I said, struggling to sound brave.
“Well, all right then,” she said, triumph in her eyes, “Let’s go. Let’s go under the bridge!”
We started climbing down the banking, which was rocky and steep. Trees sloped down to the river forming a heavy green canopy overhead – cocoa trees, banana trees, breadfruit and a few mango trees. When they were in season, the district boys would raid them, picking all the ripe fruits, leaving the trees as bare as the backside of a newborn baby. We stayed close to the ground, clinging onto bushes, baskets under our arms, as we gingerly made our way down. Yvette was in front, followed by Sophie, Monique, Junie and finally me.
Water rushed swiftly and thundered over the falls a little way ahead. The sound was very loud, because there was quite a drop, and the water seemed to growl going down, releasing an ever-present puff of white spray as if it were the breath of some dragon. Grandy often told me the story of the man coming home drunk one night who tumbled down the slope and over the falls. It took days to find his mangled body. The river gets hungry for companionship every now and again, Grandy said, opens its mouth wide to take someone in. Even the youngest child knew enough to be wary of the falls. This was why we always went upstream, towards the bridge.
Before long we left the trees behind and were out in the hot sunshine again. We reached the water’s edge. We hitched up our skirts above our knees and wedged the baskets carefully under our arms. Beads of sweat had formed on Yvette’s upper lip and I watched as she lifted her skirt to wipe the sweat off her face. Her chest was heaving from the effort of climbing down the mountainside.
“So,” Yvette drawled, jolting me out of my thoughts, “why you staring at me like that?”
“And what are you using to know that I’m looking at you?”
Sophie and Monique giggled, while Junie shook her head.
Yvette hissed her teeth and began wading out into the shimmering silver pool of water where it looked like someone had thrown many golden sparkles. Her clothes started to cling to her slender frame and I could not help thinking how beautiful she was. She was one of the darkest persons I knew and certainly the most striking with her hair combed into four thick plaits. Beside her, Sophie, Junie and Monique seemed like wilted hibiscus flowers. Her mother, whom I had never seen, was still talked of as a beauty, so much so people were wary of her. You could never trust so much beauty. People said this was her downfall; why, young
