Page 62 of Head First
Pippa nods in agreement.
‘I take it you didn’t have any big conversations last night?’ she whispers.
I shake my head. ‘Not yet.’
All of us have sea legs when we clamber onto the dock. Hugh is walking ten paces ahead of me, leading the way with Vanessa. He’s hardly looked at me all morning, which is technically what I was hoping for, but every minute that ticks by with us ignoring each other feels like a stab in the gut.
Hugh is off balance, teetering a little with each step he takes. I feel like the ground is rolling beneath me even though I know the dock is stationary. Derek has to steady himself by grabbing onto the wooden posts of the pier. Miguel, bringing up the rear, chuckles. Pippa and Andrew look like wobbly toddlers as we make our way towards the sand.
We walk up a gently sloping beach straight towards a dirt path that disappears into a thick forest. If I wasn’t so relieved to be on land, I would be spooked at how truly remote the island feels. Low mangroves and eucalyptus trees line the edge of the beach. As soon as we duck into the thicket, the air stops smelling like the ocean and instead smells like dirt. I take deep breaths of it, relishing a scent other than the tangy smell of seawater and sunscreen.
Vanessa leads us slowly through the low rainforest. The dirt path morphs into a wooden walkway. Birds call from branches just overheard and animals rustle through the bushes as we trudge forward. Occasionally, Vanessa points out the flora and fauna she recognises, directing our attention to a cockatoo with a bright yellow plume of feathers and a loud screeching squawk. We all fall silent as we watch a huge lizard – ‘A yellow spotted monitor,’ Vanessa informs us in a whisper – make its way through the bushes right next to the walkway. The air is humid and sticky, and I’m already starting to sweat.
Ahead of me, as Vanessa falls quiet, Natalie and Hugh begin to chat, their heads bending towards each other. Derek is busy taking pictures of the birds and the trees.
Pippa sees what I’m looking at and takes immediate action, elbowing her way past Andrew and Derek until she wedges herself in between Natalie and Hugh.
‘Natalie,’ she says loudly, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you about Texas, everyone in England is dying to go there.’
I remain at the back of the pack, lost in thought. I’m grateful to plod through the trees alone.
The wooden path winds around a corner and takes us deeper into a mangrove swamp. The giant exposed roots and dark water, so markedly different from the sparkling turquoise of the ocean, look exactly like the mangrove swamps of the Florida Keys.
I’ve only been there once – I was thirteen and Millie was fourteen and our parents agreed, after months of begging, to take us to Key Largo for spring break. That year, our trip to Florida was one of the only things we could agree on. We had grown apart since Millie started high school. She had new friends and liked boys whose names I had never heard of. I followed her around when she came home from school and desperately tried to hang out with her friends, usually only able to stick around for five minutes before Millie kicked me out, closing her bedroom door with a heavy seriousness because she and her friends needed to ‘talk about stuff’.
But as soon as our parents agreed to the trip, Millie and I got closer. I still wasn’t allowed to hang out with her and her friends, but something about me became interesting again. Key Largo was all we could talk about – Millie had just broken her arm playing soccer and even her injury couldn’t dampen our excitement.
It was the first time Millie and I had ever been to Florida. Usually, our family drove two hours to Cleveland and rented a little cottage on Lake Erie for spring break – it was always freezing. But that year we got to drive twenty hours to see alligators and snorkel in the great blue expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.
On our drive down we stopped at an Everglades National Park outpost where you could hike through the mangroves, go kayaking, and even go cliff jumping near man-made waterfalls. We traipsed our way through the humid jungle, working up a sweat before we arrived at a series of small pools borne from an arrangement of large, exposed rocks. There was a clear pathway up to the top, where there was about a twenty-foot drop into the deepest pool. Our parents went to the kayak stand to confirm our rental, and Millie and I loitered near the edge of the water.
There was a group of teenage boys around our age racing up to the top and jumping off. I fidgeted awkwardly, staring at them and at the cliff, wishing Millie didn’t have a broken arm so she could go first and tell me if it was fun.
Reading my mind, Millie nudged me with her elbow. ‘Go try it,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders, ‘it looks like fun.’
The spotlight was so rarely on me in our family that I balked. ‘But you can’t go,’ I pointed out, ‘I would have to go alone.’
‘So?’ Millie said.
‘All those boys are up there.’
‘So?’
‘Boys think you’re cool, but they’ll make fun of me.’
‘What makes you think that?’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘Andi,’ Millie said to me sternly, at age fourteen already able to sound exactly like our mother, ‘if you think it would be fun, do it. You don’t need me to babysit you, and you definitely don’t need to care aboutthem.’ She glanced at the boys with disdain, slightly sticking up her nose.
Something about the way she said it made me feel like she would think I was a loser if I didn’t go. I took a deep breath. I had never done anything without Millie before. She was always there, trying things first, making them look cool. I was comfortable following in her footsteps. But the jump looked so . . . fun. I kept staring.
Millie elbowed me again. ‘Just try it,’ she whispered. ‘You’ll love it, you’ll see. It’s OK that I won’t be up there with you. I’m right here. Show ’em how it’s done.’
I don’t know what came over me, determination or fear of disappointing Millie, or both, but before our parents could get back, I took a deep breath and charged up the stairs, launching myself straight over the cliff and cannonballing into the water below. When I got to the surface, Millie flashed me a huge thumbs-up from the side of the pool. I was thrilled.
For the first time in months, I felt like she wasn’t embarrassed about me. For the first time in months, I was proud of myself.
