Sam was a year older than us, and was fairly tall for a ten-year-old. Sam had short, straight, dark brown hair; hair so dark that if you weren’t in the right light, you may think it was black, but it wasn’t, it was more like dark chestnuts. On that first day, Sam was wearing faded bell-bottom jeans, and a greyish-white T-shirt with a picture of Max Headroom on it. Sam’s hazel eyes seemed to have a touch of magic in them. Truth be told, I liked Sam right from the get-go, not that I ever admitted that to anyone, particularly not Sam. No, even if Billy felt the same way, he didn’t admit it either. Sam was an outsider, Sam didn’t live in the park, Sam was just here to spend the summer. Even with all that, that wasn’t the biggest reason we played shy to the newcomer. No, the primary cause of our wariness around Samara Jhuli Frayson, was that she was a girl.
Now, Billy and I had gotten past the “girls have cooties” stage, but were still in the “girls aren’t cool” phase. Girls didn’t usually do boy things. They played with dolls, and had tea-parties and dressed up in dresses and other girlie clothes. How could that be cool? Girls didn’t play with G.I. Joes, didn’t like wrestling, and didn’t play cool games like cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, or Timelords and Daleks. The worst of all though, the most uncool thing about girls, was that most girls didn’t like exploring the wilderness (Lexi being an annoying exception.) Thing is, Sam wasn’t like most girls. Of course, we didn’t know that yet, and how could we? We hadn’t even given her a chance. No, on that first meeting, we assumed that Sam was just another un-cool girl who would be fun to tease while she trespassed upon our trailer park.
And tease her we did; after the way we treated her at first, it still surprises me she was so willing to forgive (although perhaps not forget.)
It was not until two weeks after she’d first arrived that Billy and I fully realized how different Sam was from most girls. I mean, we’d noticed that she didn’t wear girlie clothes, and didn’t seem to hang around with many other girls. If anything she seemed to have befriended Jeremy Fisher! The big kid who normally wouldn’t be caught dead with anyone under 12, seemed to have no problems being seen with this girl! When we asked him about it, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Eh, she’s cool, ok?” He gave no further details about how Sam was “cool”, and it wasn’t until the day at the little lake that we changed our opinion.
Now as I have mentioned, there were several lakes of varying sizes around Sands Hill. One of these was a secluded water hole, nestled around some sharp cliffs. It wasn’t well known about, and that was probably one of the reasons that Billy and I liked it. It was early July, and boy was it a scorcher. People always talk about global warming, but I don’t think I’ve seen any summers as hot as that one in the many years since. We’d decided it was a great day to go for a swim, so off we’d gone, to the little lake. We didn’t bother with swimming suits, why bother? Nobody ever came to the little lake; everyone else swam at one of the larger lakes. So, there we were, naked as the day we were born, splashing and laughing in the water, when we heard the voice.
“Hey,” the voice said. We looked up, automatically covering ourselves and dipping lower into the water. It was Sam. She was standing at the top of a small hill overlooking the lake. She smiled. “The water looks lovely.” Neither Billy nor I knew how to reply. She didn’t bother waiting for one. Instead, she stripped down, tossed her clothes in a pile, climbed the steeper hill to the top of one of the cliffs, and jumped off. Splash! She landed in the water. I had a dreadful feeling she would be hurt; it wasn’t a deep lake--even at the deepest parts you could easily swim to the bottom--and the cliff was fairly high up. My fears were for not however, as not long after splashing into the water, her head popped up, and she swam over to the shallower area, closer to where we stood. She swam down under the water, threw herself upwards into the air, and shook her hair like a dog. She looked over at us, smiling. “The water is great! You two think you could hog all of this nice lake to yourselves?” She stood up and started walking toward us. She didn’t even bother to cover herself, not modest at all, not Sam, no sirree. I spoke first, “We... um... we didn’t know you knew about this lake, everyone else swims at the big one with the docks...” Billy remained silent. Sam laughed, “I know, and that’s why I went exploring to find one a little more private. It’s much nicer here, less people, less rules, less faking.”
“Faking?” I asked. She smiled, then answered, “Pretending to be what everyone expects you to be. When there are lots of people around you need to put on a show, especially if there are groan-ups.” She pronounced grown-ups with a drawn out emphasis. Groan-ups.
The conversation continued, for how long, I can’t say for certain. Memory, as I may have mentioned, isn’t like a photograph or film, but more like fragments of history--faded and clouded by the passage of time. Regardless, we talked. Standing in the shallows of that little lake, naked to the world, and caring not-a-bit, we talked. Well before our conversation was over, I knew (and I’m sure Billy did as well) that we’d met a new friend. Sam must have thought so as well, as after that, it was the three of us (sometimes joined by Jeremy, othertimes by Lexi) who wandered the trailer park in search of adventure. It was also the three of us who went exploring into those strange lands outside the boundaries of the trailer park, and indeed, the boundaries of the known.