by Sara Grant
I struggled to keep up. He was doing this weird race walk. I felt the weight of every mile I’d travelled and every ounce of my luggage. Sweat dripped down my temples and created dark polka dots on my T-shirt. I had hoped to change into something less bag-lady or at least wash my face before I met my grandma. Maybe the quick, accidental dip in the ocean had washed away a bit of the no-shower and airplane stench.
“Ariadne prefers the sun in the yoga studio at this time of day,” Artie explained as we walked to a pavilion with a veranda around it. Sheer white curtains fluttered in the ocean breeze from floor-to-ceiling windows.
That jittery, nervous feeling that had been building all day eased when I noticed the old woman reclining in a lounge chair on the veranda wearing a simple floral sundress and reading a thick novel. She looked like the text-book definition of grandma with white hair swept into a neat bun and glasses perched on the end of her nose. When we reached the veranda, I dropped my bags, stashed my sunglasses and checked my reflection in a window. I unlooped the rubber band and rumpled my hair until it was the good kind of messy. I tugged on the hem of my T-shirt to minimize the wrinkles, but it was no use. I looked exactly like what I was: someone who had been travelling for forty-eight hours then been dunked in the ocean, tossed on a boat and dragged across a sandy desert island.
Artie noticed I’d fallen behind. “What are you doing?”
The old woman looked up and gave me this warm, grandmotherly smile. I gathered my courage and stepped forward. “I’m––” I started but Artie interrupted.
“That’s not Ariadne.” He turned to the old lady. “Sorry for the interruption, Mildred.” Embarrassment singed me from the inside out. I should have known we weren’t related. She seemed too normal and nice to be my mysterious grandma. He grabbed my wrist and led me into the yoga studio.
In the middle of the room, reflected in the wall of mirrors, was unmistakably my grandma. It was as if I was looking at one of those apps that it ages a picture of you by fifty years. She had short-spikey white hair. Her legs were in a sturdy lunge and her arms extended straight over her head. I knew from my yoga classes in PE that she was striking the warrior pose. She wore black yoga pants with a neon green cami. There was not a bingo wing – or an ounce of flab – in sight. She was in better shape than I was.
She finally noticed me in the mirror. She didn’t flinch from her pose. For a long second, we stared at the other’s reflection.
“We meet at last,” she said.
I stood there, open-mouthed, like a stupid doll begging for a cuddle. What did you say to the grandma who didn’t pause her yoga to greet the granddaughter she’d never met?
“Artie’s doing me a massive favour by letting you stay on the island. I suppose Artie’s reviewed the rules with you.”
Her gushy, lovey-dovey welcome was overwhelming – NOT!
“If anyone asks, you are my new personal assistant.”
No one in a million years would believe I was old enough to have a job. “Sure.” I shrugged.
“Please do not,” she emphasized the not part of the sentence, “call me any version of the word grandma.” She made what was normally warm and fuzzy sound like a cuss word. “You may call me Ariadne.” She stepped back and shifted her position into an upside-down V. “Do you understand, Charlotte?”
“OK,” I mumbled. I’d travelled thousands of miles and spent hundreds of hours thinking about this woman. She obviously hadn’t wasted one minute thinking of me. Anyone who knew me for more than a minute knew I hated being called Charlotte. “Everyone calls me Chase.”
She craned her neck to look up at me. “Chase?” she asked. “Why would they call you that?”
“Dad said from the moment I could crawl,” not that she would know anything about my childhood, “he was chasing after me.”
“No, I don’t think I can call you that,” my granny said. “Not very respectable.”
So I had to call her Ariadne, but she wouldn’t call me Chase. That didn’t seem fair.
“Artie, be a dear, and take Charlotte to our bungalow,” dear ol’ granny continued.
“Chase,” I corrected. She ignored me.
Artie transformed into a big mushy puppy dog. “Anything for you, my darling.”
I thought I might actually vomit.
Ariadne inhaled and then loudly exhaled as she stood up. She faced me. Even after her cold-to-nearly-freezing welcome, everything in me still wanted to run over and hug her. I wanted to beg her to be my grandma, the kind that makes you feel special or at least liked a teeny tiny bit. But I didn’t move.
“I’m sure we’ll get along just fine,” she said.
“Yeah,” I muttered but I wasn’t sure she was right, and by the flat tone of her voice, I guessed neither was she.
I whipped around scattering sand over the gleaming wooden floor. I wanted to get out of there as fast as possible and end this awkwardness. I liked her better before we met.
By the time I reached my bungalow on the opposite side of the island at the end of a long wooden pier, I was drenched in sweat and speckled with sand. I was glad that Artie basically shoved me inside and ran away. On the outside, the bungalow appeared pretty basic – like a hut made of driftwood with a grass roof – but inside it transformed into something more like the best suite in some fancy hotel. A speck of dust didn’t dare rest on the glass-topped nightstands. No thread frayed from the five-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. The curved sofa and overstuffed armchair looked like no one had ever flopped on them or spilled a drop of orange soda on the creamy magnolia fabric.
I stepped on to my own personal deck. I scanned the island and the lagoon; there was not another person in sight. The only sound was the lapping of the waves against the concrete pillars that held my bungalow over the ocean. I couldn’t believe that the hazy sun that made the corn grow in Indiana was the same brilliant glowing ball that was shining down on me now.
A tsunami of self-pity washed over me. I’d hoped that when Ariadne saw me in person she would stop her lifelong granddaughter boycott and actually be pleased to meet her own flesh and blood. Obviously not.
I picked up the room phone and punched in Dad’s number. I had never wanted to talk to my dad more than I did right now. I took a deep breath as the phone clicked and buzzed. I needed to make my voice sound normal. He could usually tell my mood in an instant. I didn’t want him to know that I was miserable and desperate to be beamed back to my stupid, old, boring room in Indiana.
An automated British female voice answered, “I’m sorry, but your call cannot be completed.” Then the rude lady hung up on me.
I was sure I’d dialled the right number. I tried again. The lady delivered the same message.
I definitely needed assistance. I dialled zero as the note on the room phone instructed.
“Hello, Miss Sinclair,” another British lady answered but this one was real. “How may I assist you?”
“Um, I’m not Miss Sinclair, I’m Miss Armstrong, I mean, I’m Charlotte but everyone calls me Chase…”
“Hello,” the lady said again. “Is everything OK?”
“Yes, I guess,” I replied. “I want to call the United States, but this phone won’t connect me.”
“The phones in the rooms are for internal island calls,” she said. “The manager’s office has the only external phone on the island.”
“Oh…” Why would anyone voluntarily come to an island so cut off from the rest of the world? Without my phone and no access to the internet, I was no better than a prisoner in solitary confinement. My friends would think I was ignoring their texts, chats, messages and posts. I’d have zero friends when Dad broke me out of here.
“Miss Armstrong?” the woman prodded me.
“Oh, nothing.” I hung up. I swallowed down my sadness. I could sit here and sulk or … I had a whole ocean out there to explore.
I slathered myself with sunscreen and slipped on my swimsuit. I kept trying to convince myself that it wasn’t
so bad. I was in this amazing place, and I could do whatever I wanted. But no matter how hard I tried, the ache of my grandma’s rejection wouldn’t go away.
I found the snorkelling gear in a wicker basket on the deck. Suck it up! I told myself. I’d never been snorkelling before and I was determined to enjoy this once-in-a-lifetime experience. That vast blue ocean was my new playground. Thinking about things would only make me miserable. Doing stuff always made me happy.
As I climbed down the ladder to the lagoon, I felt the same adrenaline rush that I did each time I launched my bike up a ramp for another jump. My feet touched the bath-warm water. I hung the goggles and snorkel around my neck and tugged on the bright yellow flippers. I prepared to fling myself into the water when two eyes blinked up at me from the sandy bottom of the lagoon. I lost my grip and toppled into the water. I curled into a ball so I didn’t squash whatever it was below me. A stingray shook away the sand, flicked its arrow-shaped tail and flutter-swam away.
“Wow,” I whispered, and snapped the goggles in place. The flippers took a lot of getting used to. They weighed me down and made it more difficult to swim. I fitted the snorkel in my mouth and spluttered at the salty taste. I floated on the surface and practised breathing through the tube. My breath was magnified by the snorkel and drowned out any sound.
Within a few strokes, I was hovering over a huge lump of coral. Creatures of every shape and colour darted around. The coral was nothing like the holey bleached rocks I’d seen in fish tanks. This coral was alive with vibrant greens, pinks and yellows, and swayed in the current.
Every time my brain tried to trick me into feeling sorry for myself, I swam faster and dived deeper. I floated through a school of thousands of tiny nearly see-through fish. As I approached the reef, it was as if my goggles turned into a kaleidoscope. The coral and fish multiplied by the hundreds. I didn’t think the colours could be more brilliant, but they were. I surfaced and was surprised at how far away I was from my bungalow now. I’d almost reached the yellow flags Luke pointed out earlier.
The lagoon was about six-feet deep, but the canyon on the other side of the reef seemed dark and endless. I hovered near the flags. My mind did that annoying thing it always does – it thinks of the exact worst thing to think about. It flashed to that old Jaws movie poster. The one with the girl splashing happily above, completely unaware that this ginormous shark is heading, jaws open, straight for her.
Sometimes an overactive imagination was a very bad thing. I told myself in my best dad impersonation that I was being silly. I wanted to swim further into the canyon. But my brain kept flipping through images from a shark attack catalogue.
I trod water as a battle between sanity and imagination raged in my head. I was out here alone, and I didn’t like the way the depths of the canyon seemed to drag my flippers down.
I didn’t feel safe in the water any more. I shut my eyes and swam straight for my bungalow. I pretended I was in the city pool swimming laps. In no time my arm clunked against the railing of the ladder.
I looped the goggles, snorkel and flippers on my arm and climbed up, up, up the ladder. I landed with a splat on the deck. Suddenly my body seemed heavy from the lack of sleep and excessive exercise.
Grandma, I meant Ariadne, must have finished her yoga by now. The sliding door to the bungalow was open and the biggest and fluffiest towel I’d ever seen was tossed on the bright green sunbed. I wrapped the towel around me and collapsed on the lounge chair. I closed my eyes and let the sun warm me.
I was never ever going to get used to calling that woman Ariadne. No one I knew or had ever heard of had that name. It felt unnatural. I practised again. Ariadne. Nope, still sounded strange.
The deck creaked. Ariadne must have walked out to check on me. I wanted to open my eyes but I was drowsy with the sun and the swimming and the hours of travel. I needed a nap and to forget that my grandma was as cuddly as a shark and as warm as an igloo.
I stretched to sitting, slowly opened my eyes – and screamed!
The person looming over me holding a laptop above her head, ready to strike, was not my grandma. The girl was a foot taller than I was, with dark brown skin and spirally reddish-brown curls framing her face like a saint-sized halo. “If you leave now, I won’t hurt you!” she shouted with a posh British accent, which made her seem less threatening – that and the fact that she was wearing a bright-red designer bikini.
I scrambled to my feet. She was model thin and perfect except for a jagged scar on her neck. Super-pretty girls didn’t usually do daredevil things that left scars. She stepped away but cocked her arms back further, preparing to leave an imprint of the Apple logo on my forehead. Even armed, this girl looked fragile. If push came to shove, I could take her in a fight. “Just relax, Wonder Woman,” I said with a nervous laugh.
Big mistake. She narrowed her gaze and screwed her mouth into a threatening scowl. I stepped closer to the ladder.
Then I realized… “What are you doing in my bungalow?” She was the intruder, not me! I twisted the towel between my fists. I could give a pretty good wet-towel burn if I needed to.
“Your bungalow?” she screeched. The sound actually hurt my ears. There was something odd about her expression. I thought she was angry until I recognized that look in her eyes. She was scared. “This is my bungalow, and I demand you leave this instant.”
The bungalow was the mirror image of Grandma’s – Ariadne’s. But the twin beds weren’t made, and several empty potato chip bags and candy wrappers were scattered on the floor. Her fancy Barbie-sized clothes were thrown everywhere.
I held up my hands in surrender and dropped the towel. “Hey, I’m really sorry. I just got here and I think I used the wrong ladder.”
The girl lowered her laptop. “You think?” She relaxed a bit, but her scrawny body still seemed pumped up.
Her room looked like a geek’s lair with at least two computers, a printer and some blinking boxes with loads of cables twisting across the floor. A tablet rested on her pillow and was playing something on YouTube. “Hey, I didn’t think there was wifi.”
The girl switched off her tablet. “Uh, there’s not in the bungalows. I found out that the manager’s office has it so I’ve rigged something so I can tap into his wifi for a few hours each day. I’ve got work to do before I lose my connection.” She gestured to the deck. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” I snapped. Maybe this island emitted some radiation that made everyone rude. I wished I could have cannonballed off the edge of her deck and soaked her and her stupid computers. Instead I lobbed the wet towel at her and made a clunky exit down the ladder, stubbing my toe as I stomped down.
I eased up the ladder and peered on to the deck of the bungalow next door. Yep, this was the right one. Grandma Ariadne was waltzing around the room in a frilly white sundress that accentuated her golden suntan. She looked completely different than she did in the yoga studio. Her silvery-white hair was feathered towards her face. Her eyes were closed as she swayed to an imaginary orchestra. I didn’t really want to interrupt.
“Oh!” Ariadne gasped when she saw my head lurking at deck height like a wet and wild groundhog in search of its shadow. “There you are. It’s almost time for dinner. Can you hurry and make yourself presentable?”
I climbed up on to the deck and hugged myself, suddenly self-conscious of my Walmart swimsuit and, well, everything about me. I stood there dripping, unable to speak.
“Well, get on with it,” she said, checking her watch.
I hauled my duffle into the bathroom and did as she had instructed. I returned fifteen minutes later in white combat shorts and my favourite neon-green Little 500 bike-race T-shirt. My wet hair was slicked back into a ponytail. The only jewellery I owned were watches, and I’d packed seven of my favourites to bring with me. I was wearing a matching green chunky plastic watch with numbers that glowed in the dark.
“Maybe you could wear a dress?” Ariadne asked.
“Uh, I don’t reall
y do dresses,” I said with an apologetic shrug. Dad had tried to buy me a dress a million times for special occasions. I had one jean skirt, which was the closest he’d ever come to making me somewhat girlie. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be fashion-mag pretty. Dresses felt weird on me.
“Oh.” Ariadne looked as if she’d been dunked in a vat of disappointment goo. That happened a lot to adults when they were around me. “I can’t let you go to dinner looking like some football hooligan.” I was pretty sure that was an insult, but I wasn’t about to ask her to explain. She rummaged in her closet. “How about this?” She waved a sequined emerald-green, short-sleeved blouse at me.
It wasn’t too horrible. I pulled it over my head and wiggled out of my T-shirt. The blouse felt heavy and slightly prickly from the sequins. “Can I wear it with these shorts?” I dug around in my duffle. “And I’ve got sparkly flip-flops.” I held them up for her approval.
“I suppose that will have to do,” she said.
As I checked myself out in the hall mirror, Ariadne inspected my appearance too. She took a step towards me. Her delicate perfume whispered that I would never live up to her expensive standards. I froze as she reached up as if she was going to touch my hair. “You look like her,” she whispered and lowered her hand.
She said it so quietly, I don’t think she intended me to hear. She meant my mom. I stared at my reflection. This tiny spark of information twinkled in my brain. This was my chance to find out something about the other half of my gene pool.
“What is,” I swallowed hard, “she like?”
Ariadne squinted at our reflection. I waited and hoped she wouldn’t make me ask again. She fidgeted with her hair as if that was more important than my question.
“Tell me about my mother.” It was more of a demand than an ask this time.
She walked to her jewellery box and fumbled with a tangle of necklaces and bracelets. “What did your dad tell you about her?”
“Nothing.” My voice squeaked. I sounded as desperate as I felt. “He won’t talk about her. I don’t even know her name.”