Free Making Waves by Annie Dalton

break out in blisters! As the morning went on, I genuinely started to wonder if my best friend was plotting to poison me. Lola kept stopping to pick stinky plants she spotted by the track.
    “Dis herb good for mi skin, Massa,” she’d tell Brice, stuffing some obscene hairy root in her bag. And she’d shoot him this intimate smile. Sometimes she’d tell him it was a herb that would make her hair shine, or whiten her teeth, the scheming little minx. When Brice wasn’t looking, she’d dart spiteful looks at me. Like: “You better not cross me, girl, or I’ll put these babies in your stew!”
    I was relieved when Brice said we were breaking our journey in a place called Spanish Town. It was getting hot, plus my angelic backside was SO sore, my previous horse-riding experience being basically nil.
    In Spanish Town a lively street market was in full swing. Old ladies in vividly-coloured head-ties squatted in the shade beside heaps of yams, bananas and sweet potatoes, pots, pans and bales of cloth, singing out to passers-by.
    This was the first real town I’d seen since I’d arrived. A little girl ran alongside trying to sell us some freshly-picked oranges. Brice threw her some coins and we rode along, slurping at the greenish-skinned fruit.
    “Why’s this called Spanish Town?” I asked in a juicy voice.
    “The English captured Jamaica from the Spanish,” Brice explained. “It’s the perfect base for attacking foreign ships.”
    I was shocked. “Isn’t that piracy?”
    He grinned. “Piracy is exactly what it is.”
    “Sorry, I don’t believe you,” I said primly. “I can’t believe the British government would encourage pirates.”
    He laughed out loud. “Why not? The government gets the loot!”
    I could feel Lola fidgeting sulkily behind me. I was always trying to include her, but she totally refused to join any conversation I was a part of. The bottom line was: I wasn’t meant to be there.
    We stopped at an inn on the outskirts and seated ourselves at an outdoor table in the leafy shade of a passion-fruit vine. A slave-girl brought us our breakfast. She looked genuinely shocked to see two white people sitting at the same table as their slave.
    Brice and Lola spent the meal whispering to each other. I didn’t want to be a gooseberry, so I concentrated on trying to find something I could eat. It was a weird breakfast, I have to say. The stewed goat looked really stringy, plus there was this evil Jamaican green vegetable that someone had boiled to a slimy pulp. The coconut cake seemed the safest bet. Dry but edible if you washed it down with a beaker of fresh cane juice.
    While we ate, a vulture circled lazily overhead in a cloudless blue sky.
    Lola shook her fist. “G’way!” she threatened. “You nah get dinner today, John Crow!”
    How does she KNOW this stuff? I wondered, amazed.
    My friend had lived in seventeenth-century Jamaica for less than ten days. But when she hummed to herself, she sang authentic slave tunes! She knew which local plants made your hair shiny. She even knew how to tie a head-tie, African-style. And Brice knew all about sugar mills and pirates and stealing horses. It’s like my friends had plugged into some cosmic equivalent of the Discovery Channel!
    I was still puzzling over this when Brice went off to get supplies. The minute he was out of sight, Lola let me have it.
    My Lola has a way with words. But this Lola came out with stuff that made my eyes water. Even when she was insulting me it sounded like sheer poetry. Lola told me that young Massa Bexford might be taken in by my sweet innocent manner but she’d had me totally figured from day one.
    According to her, I was a little gold-digger determined to get my hooks into my rich cousin. I know! She was convinced I wanted to marry him for his inheritance! Also, according to Lola, I was just pretending to care about slaves. White people were all the same, purely out for themselves.
    By the time Lola had finished with me