“I tried to tell you!” Christy snapped back as Paula complained about her sunburn the next day. “You should’ve used sunscreen like everyone told you. Have you seen your lips? They look like they bubbled up overnight.”
“So, are you Little Miss Perfect?” Paula sat on the edge of the bed, holding a damp washcloth on her chest and letting her words fly fast and furious. “You can’t tell me you’ve never been sunburned in your life! You know what your problem is, Christy? You think you’re so right about everything.
“You weren’t like this before you got your Christianity, or whatever you call it. You used to be fun to be around. Now you’re just a spoiled little brat who goes around condemning everyone because that person isn’t perfect, like you.”
“I do not!”
“Yes, you do. You and your perfect little dream world. Who else writes letters to her future husband?” Her voice turned into a whine. “I’m saving my body for you, honey. It’s a perfect gift for you alone!”
Christy sprang from her bed and rescued her notepad, which she had left on the bathroom counter and Paula had obviously found this morning.
Wagging the notepad in front of Paula, she warned, “That was really rude, Paula! Stop being such a big snoop, and leave my stuff alone.”
“Hey, hey!” Mom broke up the confrontation. “What’s going on here?”
Neither of them spoke. Their eyes flashed the remainder of their angry messages back and forth where Mom couldn’t see.
Mom looked first at Christy, then at Paula, and with a calm, motherly voice said, “I suppose this was bound to happen. You two always were more like sisters than friends. Why don’t you each try giving the other some space this morning, okay?”
“Fine with me,” Paula said firmly.
Mom took a good look at Paula. “You must stay out of the sun today. You overdid it yesterday, and you’ll make yourself sick. Now you two settle your differences, and give each other some space.”
Mom folded her arms and waited for them to respond.
“Sorry,” Christy offered meekly.
“Sorry.” Paula mumbled the expected word like a young schoolgirl.
Satisfied, Mom walked away. Christy held up the notepad to Paula and whispered between her teeth, “Stay out of my stuff.”
“Don’t leave your stuff lying around.”
Christy grabbed her clothes and marched off to the bathroom to change. As soon as she soundly shut the door, the accusations came at her for being such a horrible Christian and a poor example of a best friend. She was supposed to be witnessing to Paula, not alienating her!
The guilt feelings hung on her all day. She went swimming in the pool and then in the ocean with David until about noon. Then without interrupting Paula, who had set up her own little camp on the couch, where she spent the day watching TV, Christy showered and changed and joined Mom and Marti for lunch in Lahaina.
They meandered through shop after shop along Front Street and ended up at an open-air restaurant, where they ate salads at a table right by the water.
Mom and Marti chattered about all the boats they could see in Lahaina Harbor. Then they started in about some uncle Christy didn’t even know who had had his gallbladder removed.
Christy tuned them out and watched the dozens of tiny crabs skittering across the rocks below them. The afternoon was kind of dreamy and the setting like something from a movie.
While shopping Christy had enjoyed the brightly colored tropical birds they had seen pacing up and down their perches like a pirate’s first mate. And she loved the plumeria trees down by the little public library. They filled the hot afternoon air with a heavy, sweet fragrance.
However, it didn’t matter how charming the town was or how exotic the afternoon air smelled. She felt miserable.
“It seems like a cruel joke,” she whispered to the uncaring crabs over the railing, “to be here with Todd and Paula—two people I consider my friends—and to feel so lonely. I know Todd had to paint today, and he didn’t go surfing this morning, so I wasn’t able to spend any time with him. But I want to find out what he was talking about last night. What was he trying to decide?
“As far as Paula goes, I wish she’d never come. I wish she’d stayed in Wisconsin, and we could let our childhood memories be the way we think of each other. We’ve both changed too much to try to be friends now. I wish Katie had come instead of Paula.”
“Ready for some more shopping?” Marti asked, breaking into Christy’s grumbling monologue.
“Don’t you need to get a few more gifts for your friends?” Marti prompted.
“Yeah, I’d like to find something to take back to Katie.”
“It’s too bad Paula couldn’t have come shopping with us,” Marti said, counting out the dollar bills she planned to leave as a tip.
“She needed a day to catch her breath,” Mom said. “What with the jet lag, time change, and horrible sunburn, I think she needed a day of complete rest.”
“Whatever you find for Katie, why don’t you get the same thing for Paula?” Marti suggested.
Christy didn’t want to. She didn’t want to do Paula any favors. After all, Paula hadn’t done any for her.
She ended up buying a white shell bracelet for Paula at the very first shop they stopped in. Actually, Marti bought it. She picked it out too. To keep Marti happy, Christy agreed that Katie wasn’t a bracelet kind of person, but Paula would probably be thrilled with it. So Marti bought it, and Christy hoped that would be the end of that.
A few shops later, Christy found a University of Hawaii T-shirt for Katie. Marti insisted on buying three of them so Paula, Katie, and Christy could all match. Christy agreed as long as she could pick out three different colors, which she did, reserving the light blue one for herself.
For fun, she also bought a grass hula skirt to take back to Katie.
With hands full of shopping bags, they headed back to where they’d parked the van. They passed an old, two-story white house with green trim and a sign in front that said, “Missionary Home of the Rev. Dwight Baldwin, 1834, Museum Open Daily.”
“Could we go in there?” Christy asked.
“It’s only an old house turned into a museum,” Marti said. “Missionaries built it when they first came here. I don’t think you’d find it very interesting, Christy.”
“Yes, I would. It looks like a neat house. I’d like to go on the tour.”
“So would I,” Mom said.
For some reason, Marti looked annoyed.
“Go ahead. You have to pay for the tour; it’s not free.” The way she said it, Christy thought it must be a huge fee. “I’ll wait here on the bench.”
Mom and Christy paid their admission fee of a few dollars.
You are so funny, Aunt Marti. You left more money than this on the table for a tip!
The inside of the house looked very American, not tropical at all. There were wooden floors, four-poster beds, blue and white china on the large wooden table, and handmade patchwork quilts on the beds.
The tour began in the bedroom, where Christy noticed the large mosquito net over the bed. The tour guide explained that the missionaries were not popular with the sailors who harbored here every winter because they discouraged the sailors’ immoral lifestyle.
“It’s said that no mosquitoes were on the islands,” the guide stated, “until some sailors tried to get back at the missionaries by dumping a barrel of brackish water into the canal that used to run behind the missionaries’ homes. The barrel came over on a ship from Mexico and was teeming with mosquito larvae. Hence, mosquitoes made their home on the islands.”
One of the women in their little tour group snorted. “What a foolish thing to do!”
The guide went on. “The missionaries were fired on as well but survived the attack. Mind you, this was not the Hawaiian natives attacking them, but their fellow Americans.”
“How did they respond?” someone in the group asked. “Did they retaliate?”
The guide smiled as if she’d been asked that question before. “You must keep in mind, these were God-fearing New England Christians. They stood their ground on what they believed to be right, morally and biblically. It’s been said their only retaliation was to pray for their enemies.”
During the rest of the tour, Christy only took in parts of the guide’s sentences. She had become absorbed with the thought that as God-fearing Christians the missionaries prayed for their enemies.
Todd said he prayed every day for Alissa, and he had told Christy she should pray for Paula. Even though she had agreed with Todd and thought it was a good idea, she hadn’t prayed for Paula once since then. Not that Paula was truly an enemy. She was a friend, just like the American sailors should have been friends with the American missionaries, but their moral standards separated them. In a way, Christy had felt that separation from Paula over her choice of bathing suits and her goal to lose her virginity.
When they rejoined Marti and strolled back to the car, Christy imagined Lahaina’s streets alive with crusty, drunken sailors hurling insults at a pious missionary woman in her long-sleeved dress with her bonnet tipped down, praying for them as she passed by.
All Christy could think about was how much she wanted to talk to Todd about all this, to get his perspective on how to pray. It was one thing for him to tell her she should pray for her friend and another thing to teach her how.
When they arrived at the huge, shady banyan tree, Marti insisted they cross the street and enter Lahaina’s Wharf Cinema Center. She led them to the lower level, marching like a woman who knew right where she was going. Apparently she did, because they entered a shop labeled “TCBY”—The Country’s Best Yogurt.
Marti briskly announced, “This is the only frozen yogurt I’ll eat. Their white chocolate mousse is absolutely divine. Order what you like. I’m paying.”
Christy ordered a small chocolate from the friendly dark-haired guy behind the counter.
“Would you like a topping?” he asked, his white smile peeking out from under his mustache. “The macadamia nuts are really ’ono on the chocolate yogurt.”
“ ’Ono?” Christy asked.
“The best.” He lifted the ladle, ready to scoop the nuts onto her yogurt.
Christy hated nuts. She had always hated nuts. She used to suck the coating off Peanut M&M’s and throw the peanuts away. At this very moment, though, Christy felt adventuresome. “Sure, go ahead. I’ll try the macadamia nuts.”
The guy was right. The macadamia nuts were ’ono! As she scraped the last spoonful out of her cup, she felt proud of herself for trying something new. Todd would be proud of her.
Back at the condo, Christy found Paula napping and Todd still painting, so she joined David on the couch at Bob and Marti’s condo and watched the end of some cartoon. Within minutes she dozed off and was awakened almost an hour later by Marti, who suggested they all go for an evening stroll on the beach.
Christy shook herself awake and, with a string of yawns, found her flip-flops and joined Marti, Mom, and David by the front door. Todd, freshly showered and in clean shorts and a T-shirt, stepped out of the kitchen as Christy was smoothing down her hair.
He gave Christy a smile. “Looks like you had a good nap.”
She could have taken his comment as an insult to her appearance but decided not to take offense. “I was really wiped out.”
“Bob is going to stay and clean up,” Marti said, “and Paula said she’d rather not go this time, so we’re all set.”
Todd walked next to Christy to the elevator. As she began to wake up, all her afternoon thoughts came back to her, and she was anxious to talk them through with Todd. Even though it was a little thing, she couldn’t wait to tell him she had eaten nuts on her yogurt.
“I think I’ll stay behind,” Todd suddenly announced as the elevator door opened and they all filed in. “I’ll check on Paula and help Bob finish up.”
With that, the door sealed, and the elevator lowered them to the ground level.
“If Todd’s not going, then I don’t want to go,” David stated. “I’m going back up.”
“You don’t need to go back, David,” Mom said. “Stay with us. Help me find some shells.”
“I don’t want to go!” David whined. “Can’t I go back up, please?”
“Of course you can,” Marti answered for Mom.
The elevator stopped at the bottom floor, where Mom, Marti, and Christy exited and David shot back up to the sixth floor. Christy could feel Mom watching her, trying to read her feelings, but Christy kept them hidden.
It was impossible, though, for her to enjoy the sunset or the way the warm sand slipped between her toes knowing that Paula and Todd were alone together. It seemed like a very long walk. Mom and Marti contentedly collected tiny shells, and Christy followed them along, bending occasionally to snatch a shell and drop it into her shorts pocket without even looking at it.
When Marti stopped by the condo pool on the way back and began to talk to some people, Christy went up to the condo. Bob was washing out paintbrushes.
“Hi,” she said, hiding her anxiety and distrust. “Where is everybody?”
“I sent Todd across the street for pizza. Paula may have gone with him. David’s in the shower.” He added with a grin, “But then, you weren’t really worried about David, were you?”
Christy smiled and went back to her room to check her appearance in the mirror. A little more makeup, a few more brushes to make her hair fuller, a squirt of perfume. There. If Todd was trying to make a decision between the two of them, she would do her best to make it an easy choice.
“Pizza’s here!” Christy heard Mom call, and she stepped out of her room to find everyone gathered on their lanai to eat.
Paula, apparently revived from the day’s rest, had turned back into her bubbly, fun-loving self and was sitting on the arm of Todd’s chair, gingerly biting into a slice of pizza.
Christy plopped a slice of pizza on a paper plate and took the only spot left, the lounge chair. She felt as if she were separated from the rest of them by an invisible screen. Lively conversation hummed around the table, but no one directly addressed her.
How can I sit here with my family and friends and feel hopelessly lonely?
Todd excused himself as soon as he had downed three large slices of pizza. “See you all in the morning.”
Bob looked at his watch. “Nine o’clock already! No wonder I’m so tired. Todd, why don’t you take tomorrow off? We pretty well finished up the painting today. I can do the rest myself tomorrow.”
Todd stood by the sliding screen door. “Cool. Might be a good day to go to Hana. Good night, everyone.”
How can you do that, Todd? How can you go a whole day without saying more than one sentence to me?
Todd had spent the whole day around Paula. Was it part of his decision-making process? Maybe he had planned to spend all that time with her to get closer to her so he could decide who he liked more.
The rest of Christy’s pizza went uneaten.
“Where’s Hana?” Mom asked.
Bob explained that Hana was a small community on the other side of the island and that Todd had mentioned that his dad had taken him camping there years ago.
“Sounds like a fun trip for the kids,” Marti suggested. “They can take the Jeep, and Margaret and I can get some more shopping in.”
“Settled,” Bob stated, eyeing the last piece of pizza. “Anybody want another piece?”
Christy excused herself and went to bed, choosing the agony of loneliness over the chance of another confrontation with Paula. She knew she should read her Bible and pray before she went to sleep, but she didn’t want anyone to think she was awake. She lay still for a long time, with her face to the wall. When she did fall asleep, she dreamed about the lonely life of the virtuous missionary woman in Lahaina long ago.