Letters
West Island School, Margaret Yang, Fiction: Group 3
I
met him first when I was drowning in sand.
Young and naive at the age of six, I hadn’t taken Father’s word seriously about the ‘dry
quicksands that could drown you if you stepped into them.’ After all, we lived in a desert,
and didn’t quicksand need water to form?
So, I was drowning. I’d been taught that to escape quicksand, your best chance to survive
would be to lie still and float until your legs were up and you could slowly paddle with your hands
to the still ground. But no, I was panicking and decided to thrash around in hopes I would either
attract attention or manage to escape.
Of course, I started sinking even faster. Soon, I was encased in sand and I couldn’t breathe.
Sand was filling my lungs, I was drowning, and my eyes were stinging …
And suddenly, someone was next to me. I clung to the person like he was my lifeline, and
then, we were both pulled out by the combined strength of most of the men in our village.
Oh, Father was furious and Mother was so worried. I wasn’t paying attention to them, though.
The boy who had saved me was sitting alone a few meters away, rubbing sand out of his dark hair
and his eyes.
I crawled over to him, ignoring my parents calling me back. The boy ignored me until I asked
him why he’d ended up in the quicksand too.
“To save you,” he replied simply. I frowned.
“Why would you jump in quicksand to save me?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
We left after that, with me yelling farewells to the boy and him waving back slowly.
The next day, I went back to the quicksand pit. Of course, I didn’t step in it, and I wasn’t
worried that I would because the villagers had put up some warning signs around it so no one
would fall into the pit again.
The boy was there too.
“Hi!” I had chirped, and offered him the chocolate I had stolen from my parents’ bedroom. He
took it warily, not speaking.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” I whined.
He turned around and laughed quietly. “You’re funny.”
“Thanks!” I beamed.
From that day on, we were best friends. Three years passed. We were inseparable. I slowly
brought down his walls, brick by brick. I found out why he was so cold to people: his mother and
father had died a few months before I met him, and he had to live with his uncle and aunt, who
didn’t care about him that much. He was afraid of loving someone he could lose again.
I also found out he was allergic to chocolate. I was mortified when I found out.
Then, one day, he wasn’t at the quicksand pit, our daily meeting place. I walked past his house
deliberately, but no one was there. The house was empty, lifeless, and there was a big red sign that
said ‘SOLD’.
Later that day, I asked Mother where he went.
She just said, ‘He had to go.’
