Free The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson Page B

They lined up beside the school buses with beach towels and beach chairs, coolers brimming with ice and drinks, long aluminum pans filled with food, napkins, and paper towels and painkillers, diapers, and changes of clothes. They were wearing outfits they had waited for weeks to show off, only to shrug off compliments with words like “this old thing” and “just something I had in my closet.” Looking at the hill people assembled, you would have thought they were leaving on a long journey to see Jesus Christ himself, even though it took at most two hours to drive from Bird Hill in St. John to Folkestone Beach on the west coast.
    Trevor offered Dionne a ride in his father’s air-conditioned car, but she declined, citing plans to take the bus with her new friends. She was glad she could give them as the reason for saying no, because the truth was that Trevor’s pouty, accusing looks annoyed her; and his mother, who insisted that she be driven because she couldn’t tolerate noise, was just too much to be around. If she were being honest with herself, Dionne might have said that Mrs. Loving’s sullenness reminded her too much of Avril, that she felt naked beneath the microscope of her intense gaze.
    Dionne boarded the bus, muscling her grandmother’s giant pan of potato salad to the back where the other girls were sitting. Accidentally on purpose, she knocked her sister in the head.
    â€œOw,” Phaedra squealed.
    â€œYou know I didn’t hit you that hard,” Dionne said.
    Then Dionne asked Chris, who was sitting next to Phaedra, “And you, how’d you manage to weasel your way out of the family caravan?” Dionne kept walking when Chris started to say that he was there to help Phaedra carry Hyacinth’s pan of fish cakes.
    The excitement that day was infectious and even Dionne, with her practiced nonchalance, found herself giggling with her new friend Saranne and the hill girls who stuck to them like honey. The teenage girls, minus Clotel Gumbs, who sat next to her mother, huddled together so that they could gossip and squeal when the bus hit bumps and potholes. The girls listened as Saranne spun tales about her boyfriend, a big-time record producer in Port-of-Spain who she bragged not only called her every evening at her aunt Trixie’s house, but also had written her love notes every week since she arrived. The girls sighed with envy at each turn in Saranne’s romantic fable. And because Saranne—with her eyes spaced far apart in a way that would have been ugly on another girl, her skin the color of wet sand, hair that ran down her back, and slim thighs that never rubbed together like the Bird Hill girls with their legs grown thick by yard work and cornmeal—because Saranne was beautiful and had a Trini accent that made words tumblefrom her mouth like song lyrics, no one poked holes in her story or mentioned the rumor that this very same boyfriend had gotten Saranne pregnant and that this was the reason her mother had sent her to live with her cousin Jean and her aunt Trixie in Barbados for the summer. Everyone was in a light mood that day, and listening to Saranne’s stories, and Dionne’s tales of her boyfriend Darren back in Brooklyn, whispered just loud enough so that the girls could hear but the adults could not, made the hill girls feel like they could borrow some of what boys saw in Dionne and Saranne.
    The trip ended when the bus rumbled up to Folkestone and let its passengers out in a dense cloud of diesel exhaust. The church people unloaded their things and stood staring at the grove of manchineel trees, two new public washrooms and tennis courts, and beyond them, the sea. Then they seized upon the picnic tables, acting as if someone else were fighting them for space at ten on a Saturday morning. Dionne and her crew stood back, trying to distinguish themselves from the country ways of their mothers and grandmothers and brothers and