Sadie's Island

SADIE’S ISLAND

Lucie Claire was the prettiest girl in twelfth grade. I envied her blue eyes and her wavy blond hair. I wanted to be as popular as she was and walk with the same kind of bounce. I wanted to have the same dimpled smile. I wanted her to like me and I wanted her to drop dead at the same time. I was in love with the boy she was dating but he wouldn’t even look at me if I bumped into him in the hallway.
I said “Hello” to them when they were standing together but my voice came out a whisper and she didn’t hear. He did, but his gaze slid off me like water and I hurried by.
His name was Brett and he was the handsomest boy I’d ever seen, although my older sister Sadie said he looked like a spic. She liked blond surfer types who could barely spell their own names, much less write a love-letter correctly.
It didn’t bother Sadie if ‘eternal’ was misspelled. She received love-letters from a boy named Murf who thought the word romance had two s’s.
Brett was the smartest boy in our class. He also played football and broke his collarbone in time for the mid-term exams when he scored the winning touchdown against the All-Saints team, our school’s archenemy.
  The whole class cheered when he came in to school on Monday. His arm was in a sling and his face was paler than usual. Lucie ran up and took his books from him. He took his history exam orally in another room while the rest of us perspired over our papers. It was abnormally hot that week. The exam room smelled of nervous sweat. I had long hair then, down to my waist. It was thick, heavy and drenched by the end of the day. I cut it all off Friday morning, the day of our algebra test. There was a huge storm. I came to school with my head shorn and strangely light, the back of my neck white as milk and feeling fragile.
There wasn’t a breath of wind but clouds piled up on the horizon. The ocean became agitated suddenly. Whitecaps dashed across the harbor and spilled over the waterfront. Just as we sat down, a huge bolt of lightning shot across the darkening sky and thunder shook the building.
Lucie gave a scream and leapt into Brett’s arms. I dropped my books, as did several other students, and we bent to pick them up glancing nervously at each other. Rain started to batter the tin roof and soon the electricity went off. We sat in the darkness. The sky was black as night and the only light came from the lightning bolts that blinded us when they flashed through the driving rain. The pounding rain deafened us. We couldn’t hear ourselves talk so we sat in uneasy silence. We jumped each time the thunder roared.
I caught sight of Lucie and Brett in the split second of a lightning bolt. She was still cuddled in his arms. His shoulder must have been hurting though because he was grimacing.
I thought the tempest would never end, but it blew over quickly like most of our tropical storms. The thunder grew faint and the sky became gray, then white. The sun came out and steam rose from the roofs and the blacktop roads. The palm trees shook themselves like shaggy dogs and the parakeets fluttered back into the sky like flocks of bright gemstones.