brightly through the trees five thousand feet up the lava slopes.
The rules had never bothered Benny the way they did some of the other children. Silence came more easily to him than words.
Mouth shut, eyes wide open, he followed Nicole. She went to her favorite place, a little point of land where lava had licked out into the ocean at one end of a crescent-shaped beach. At the upper edge of the coarse black sand, coconut palms swayed and dipped in the breeze like stately dancers. The ocean was radiant with every tint, tone, shade, and combination of blue and green. Surf smiled, curled, and laughed whitely over the lava beach.
Though Nicole enjoyed the beach, it wasn’t the isolation or beauty that kept bringing her back. It was the flowering trees that had been planted just up from the beach by Benny’s great-grandmother when she was only nine. All of the trees except the scarlet-blossomed ohia came from other continents, yet each tree seemed to reach a peak in Hawaii’s gentle Eden.
Coral trees blazed with color, their clusters of red flowers rising from each naked branch tip like a fistful of flame. Next to them, shower trees lived up to their name, producing fantastic cascades of blossoms that covered their branches. In other lands shower trees came in single colors—white or yellow or pink or pale orange. In Hawaii the trees had cross-pollinated until they transformed themselves into what the natives called a rainbow shower, a tree that produced flowers of all colors in soft-petaled rainbow drifts that had no equal anywhere else on earth.
Yet even the rainbow shower trees couldn’t draw Nicole’s eye away from the cluster of jacarandas that rose above all others. With their smooth, dark trunks, fernlike leaves, and delicate lavender flowers, the jacarandas pleased her in ways she couldn’t describe, only feel. She loved to lie beneath the trees at the height of their bloom, to see sunlight glowing through thousands of pale purple blossoms, and to have sweet, spent petals swirl down around her in a fantastic amethyst snow.
But that particular glory was in the future. Today the jacaranda branches were naked of leaves and gleaming in the moist air. The trees were smooth-barked and had a dancer’s grace. At the tip of every twig, buds were swelling almost secretly against the sun-washed sky.
Once, when she was much younger, Nicole had thought of herself like that: a bud swelling in silence, waiting only for the right conditions to bloom. Once, but not for a long time. She had learned that, for her, the sensual flowering was simply an aching dream.
For her, the years from thirteen to seventeen had been a nightmare. Other girls had budded and bloomed all around her, while she had simply grown tall and then taller still, with no more curves than a slat fence. She hadn’t been pretty in the way of other girls, petite, blond, and blue-eyed or dark-haired and curvy with mystery lurking in even darker eyes. The final insult had been delivered by the whims of fashion. Her light golden-brown eyes, pale skin, and fiery hair didn’t blend at all with the pastels that were popular with the popular girls.
Other girls had boyfriends and admiring glances and bathing suits that revealed an intriguing feminine flowering. Nicole had simply kept on growing taller and taller, until she felt like a redheaded clown on stilts.
Then her body had begun to change in a wild rush, as though it realized that the blooming season was almost over. She was far too intelligent not to understand the connection between her increasing bra size and the increasing male attention.
Unfortunately, boys were no more interested in her as a person than they had been before her breasts grew. After the novelty of attracting whistles wore off, she decided that having a well-filled bra was as bad as being flat. Either way, she felt like an unwelcome passenger in her own body. The boys who noticed her breasts weren’t interested in anything about her but
The rules had never bothered Benny the way they did some of the other children. Silence came more easily to him than words.
Mouth shut, eyes wide open, he followed Nicole. She went to her favorite place, a little point of land where lava had licked out into the ocean at one end of a crescent-shaped beach. At the upper edge of the coarse black sand, coconut palms swayed and dipped in the breeze like stately dancers. The ocean was radiant with every tint, tone, shade, and combination of blue and green. Surf smiled, curled, and laughed whitely over the lava beach.
Though Nicole enjoyed the beach, it wasn’t the isolation or beauty that kept bringing her back. It was the flowering trees that had been planted just up from the beach by Benny’s great-grandmother when she was only nine. All of the trees except the scarlet-blossomed ohia came from other continents, yet each tree seemed to reach a peak in Hawaii’s gentle Eden.
Coral trees blazed with color, their clusters of red flowers rising from each naked branch tip like a fistful of flame. Next to them, shower trees lived up to their name, producing fantastic cascades of blossoms that covered their branches. In other lands shower trees came in single colors—white or yellow or pink or pale orange. In Hawaii the trees had cross-pollinated until they transformed themselves into what the natives called a rainbow shower, a tree that produced flowers of all colors in soft-petaled rainbow drifts that had no equal anywhere else on earth.
Yet even the rainbow shower trees couldn’t draw Nicole’s eye away from the cluster of jacarandas that rose above all others. With their smooth, dark trunks, fernlike leaves, and delicate lavender flowers, the jacarandas pleased her in ways she couldn’t describe, only feel. She loved to lie beneath the trees at the height of their bloom, to see sunlight glowing through thousands of pale purple blossoms, and to have sweet, spent petals swirl down around her in a fantastic amethyst snow.
But that particular glory was in the future. Today the jacaranda branches were naked of leaves and gleaming in the moist air. The trees were smooth-barked and had a dancer’s grace. At the tip of every twig, buds were swelling almost secretly against the sun-washed sky.
Once, when she was much younger, Nicole had thought of herself like that: a bud swelling in silence, waiting only for the right conditions to bloom. Once, but not for a long time. She had learned that, for her, the sensual flowering was simply an aching dream.
For her, the years from thirteen to seventeen had been a nightmare. Other girls had budded and bloomed all around her, while she had simply grown tall and then taller still, with no more curves than a slat fence. She hadn’t been pretty in the way of other girls, petite, blond, and blue-eyed or dark-haired and curvy with mystery lurking in even darker eyes. The final insult had been delivered by the whims of fashion. Her light golden-brown eyes, pale skin, and fiery hair didn’t blend at all with the pastels that were popular with the popular girls.
Other girls had boyfriends and admiring glances and bathing suits that revealed an intriguing feminine flowering. Nicole had simply kept on growing taller and taller, until she felt like a redheaded clown on stilts.
Then her body had begun to change in a wild rush, as though it realized that the blooming season was almost over. She was far too intelligent not to understand the connection between her increasing bra size and the increasing male attention.
Unfortunately, boys were no more interested in her as a person than they had been before her breasts grew. After the novelty of attracting whistles wore off, she decided that having a well-filled bra was as bad as being flat. Either way, she felt like an unwelcome passenger in her own body. The boys who noticed her breasts weren’t interested in anything about her but
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