Best friends

The skipping rope snapped with its lazy rhythm against the almost sticky asphalt. The playground was full, but slightly quieter than usual, the children seeming almost becalmed by the heat.

Por Wordflow - Jo Carter | Cádiz | 05/07/2014

The oldest girls, in the limbo which sets in before secondary school, were sitting and standing in small groups. The sultry weather made little difference to them, they were too old and sophisticated to be playing games; they had more important things to do. They had lots to talk about. They had lots of problems that needed talking about ‘ad nauseam’.

It was a younger group who were skipping, chanting the rhymes one after another.

“Your turn Ava, come on.”

“How - many - boys - did - you - kiss - last - night? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven and OUT!”

Ava was eight. She had white blonde hair which fell in a startlingly silky waterfall around her sharp-featured face. She was a serious girl who rarely smiled but frequently laughed. Her laugh, however, was equally startling; a metallic peal of bells, a somewhat unhinged laughter; too loud, too often. Her face looked stern when she was called out of the game, but it changed immediately with her staccato outburst which rang through the humid air, causing Miss Fraser, Ava´s class teacher, to turn slowly towards her. She saw the swinging, shocking whiteness of the girl’s hair as she turned her back on the game and stood rigid, poised. Another girl was now jumping the rope, rather heavily-footed, clumsily raising her arms at each jump to counterbalance her displaced weight. Miss Fraser frowned, ignoring Joe who needed desperately to tell her about Sam not letting him get the ball. Rachel, the skipping girl, was Ava´s best friend and that’s why it all suddenly seemed frighteningly wrong. The girls did everything together, they were, as the Head put it, ‘joined at the hip and as thick as thieves’. No-one came between them, not physically nor figuratively.

Rachel continued to jump, her coal-black hair forming coils on her dampening forehead.

“But they always jump together…” thought Miss Fraser. She hesitated only seconds before she kicked off her sandals and started to run, picking up her long skirt to free her legs to run faster.

Ava had turned back to the rope. It smacked one last time on the tarmac as the slight and skinny figure leapt on top of her friend, the force of her anger knocking the heavier girl to the ground. Ava grasped that black head, lifted it slightly as if to nestle it to her breast before slamming it down onto the equally black surface of the playground.

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Joined at the hip - as thick as thieves - inseparable - best friends

'Skipping girl MET' by Andrew Brannan on Flickr

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Jo Carter

Jo Carter is from England but has been living in Spain since 1999. Up till then she was a primary school teacher and enjoyed inspiring young children to love books. She has spent a lot of her life reading and writing (in between work, three children and lots of cups of tea) and intends to write a novel (one day!).

The idea behind the column is to highlight what is beautiful in the English language... Thus the column: idiomatic expressions in English woven into a short piece of creative writing.

Read more articles by Jo Carter here.