Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel by Joy Jordan-Lake Read Free Book Online Page A

lined the banks of the Blue Hole. “In Sri Lanka, there is sand, beautiful sand, gold, and some brown, the color of king coconuts in my country. The color of …” She paused, searching for a more local example. Her gaze resting on me, she brightened. “Yes, the color of Shelby’s hair. Like this, the sand of Sri Lanka is beautiful.”
    Jimbo winked at me.
    “You see,” I told him, while pretending to pat my wheat-sheaf of ponytail into place, “I have one friend in this world.”
    Farsanna was inspecting the scene before her. “Who discovered it the first, this place?”
    Discovered it? I raised both eyebrows at Jimbo, who took up the question.
    “Well now, I don’t reckon nobody first discovers a place like this. You just know about it. Or don’t. Average folks don’t. And most folks are average.” He winked at her. “You got to have someone show you the way.”
    “What if,” her head came up then, like she was trying to keep a bead of sweat from falling off the end of her chin, “I had come by myself here?”
    Jimbo, who was struggling to strip off his landscaping khakis without losing his swim trunks beneath them, paused for a moment to consider the question. He held out his hand to Farsanna. “Then I reckon you wouldn’t be our honored guest.”
    She examined his face. And then smiled.
    I don’t suppose I’d seen her smile before, not a real one—maybe she hadn’t smiled since she’d moved to the Ridge. It was strange, that smile, and slow coming. Like a dark wave that swells and then crests, and splashes everything in its path. Her smile had that splash to it, whether or not I’d been looking to like her.
    It took me a minute to recover from the force of that smile. And maybe Jimbo a minute longer, or two. But I tried not to let this nettle me much, since Bo was a man, or almost, and they’re all weak, Momma said: the first lesson every Southern momma teachers her girls, just before the Why We Let a Man Think He’s Won.
    So I ignored Bo and took charge myself. “Follow me.”
    I led the way, a half-circle around the pond, leaping boulder to boulder, to where Emerson and the other boys had spread out their towels. We joined them out on the palm of our favorite rock, which could cup us all in close.
    As usual, the games had already begun for the doctors’ and lawyers’ and CPAs’ kids who didn’t work in the summers. Between Em and Jimbo’s landscaping and L. J.’s daddy’s Feed and Seed, our mangy pack rarely arrived during the most miserable heat of the day.
    Already well established for the day, then, were the rope swing competitions. Boys from all over Pisgah Ridge conducted wild contests of masculine prowess from the rope on the sweetgum tree. Scrambling up the scrap wood nailed to the trunk, the boys hurled themselves to the rope and down into the water from branches higher and higher.
    “Be a man about it,” they taunted each other.
    “Put some hair on your chest!” they called out to the arc of an upside-down spin.
    The day Farsanna first showed up with us, the banks of the Blue Hole were heavy with teenagers conducting the business of life from where they lay: long, lean bodies like big cats, stretching and sleeping and sunning and occasionally striking a particularly gorgeous pose for anyone who cared to admire. Farsanna Moulavi, walking last behind all of us, stepped from the shade of the hemlocks to a boulder soaked in full sun.
    She was dark all right—no mistake about that. Even skin the color of homemade cocoa was dark for our Ridge. Her hair turned under in stiff, shiny waves, laying like uncoiled black licorice on her shoulders, glistening with the heat of the day. Beside her, I felt wan and anemic, like I’d been shipped from the factory without my final glaze and firing.
    I remembered, there in the midst of admiring her, how just when you thought the world had gone still and soft, you could be blasted flat to the ground from behind.
    More to comfort myself than