Badr skipped another stone over the water, creating six expanding splashes in a perfect line. She preferred to come to the water at night, when the adults were telling stories and reciting poems around the fire, especially when the moon shone straight down through the palm fronds and reflected on the still surface, a world in the water just beyond her grasp, but her father wouldn't let her. Too dangerous for a girl her age, or any age, he said. She wondered who or what could pose a danger to her here, where everyone was kin or clan, and none of the animals showed any interest in human flesh. But she conceded, for now, especially when she knew her father would find out, as he almost always did, and so she came during the heat of day, splashing her face and wrists occasionally with the cool water to make her outing bearable.
She held five stones in her hand, all smooth and cool and as close to the same size as she could find, all nearly white, and five more in the leather pouch tied to her waist, those just as smooth and cool but nearly black. Almost a shame to skip them all into the water, she thought, where they'd plummet deep below the surface and return slowly to shore, if at all, only decades after her death, when they'd no longer be of use to her. But skip them she did, if only because she was still three skips away from the record held by her cousin Hilal, whom she despised. How could anyone, she thought, have the meanness of spirit of Hilal, and yet the grace of body to fling a stone so it could skip nine times so elegantly across a body of water in the middle of the desert.
Two dates had fallen from the palms next to her. She squished one between her toes and picked up the other, sucked the fruit from around the stone, and spat the stone into the water. The date was overripe, but the sugar gave her the jolt she needed. Focusing to the exclusion of everything else, the palm trees, the heat, her own sweat, the sweetness in her mouth and her loathing of her cousin, she took one of the light stones, launched it across the water, and saw it jump seven times before sputtering to a wet and disappointing halt.
"Getting there," Hilal whispered in her ear.
Badr stumbled away from her cousin as the world returned around her. She felt the heat rising in her cheeks.
"Here, let me try," Hilal said, briefly scanning the stones along the shore until he spotted the perfect one, one Badr had missed, darker than the others, almost obsidian, perfectly smooth as it was perfectly round. He rubbed it between his fingers and then, squinting so tightly that his eyes were almost closed, licking the corner of his mouth, he flicked his wrist and the stone shot as if of its own volition out of his grasp, landing once, twice, ten times on the water before submerging with a flourish.
"Would you look at that," Hilal said. "I'll be." He chuckled, not unkindly, but to Badr it sounded mocking, malicious. He moved behind his cousin and reached out as if to glide his hand along her arm, almost touching her elbow, "Now if you adjust your angle a little bit..."
She twitched away. Her cousin was not even two years older than she, yet he had all the self-confidence of a man. His shoulders were more muscular than the last time she'd sneaked a look at them, when he'd been napping by the water outside his tent, which wasn't that long ago, and she hoped the muscles weren't the reason he'd just managed to increase his record by one.
She dropped the remaining stones in her hand into the sand. "I'm done for today," she said, and started to move back to the camp.
"Wait," Hilal said, grabbing her wrist, which she extracted as soon as she felt his fingers around her. "That hurt," she said, which it didn't.
"Sorry," Hilal said and shrugged. "Let's play something you can win."
"I can win at skipping stones," Badr said, "just give me time. You're older than I am."
"That must be it," Hilal said. "I'll take a nap while you practice. Wake me up when you're older. Much older." He sat down on the sand, letting the water lap his toes.
The way Hilal said that, and the way he sat there, made Badr feel something other than the usual envy disguised as hatred, and even though that something was even more infuriating, it was enough to keep her from leaving the shore just yet.
"Here," she said. "I have another game for us." She stepped in front of Hilal, and with her big toe, she drew a grid in the sand, five lines intersecting five lines, and, after losing her balance, she used her other big toe to draw out the diagonals. Hilal watched her feet as she drew. The grid was about a forearm's length long and a forearm's length wide, separating Hilal from Badr. She picked up the light stones she dropped, took the dark stones out of her pouch, and collected more from along the shore until she had twelve of each, none of them as perfect as the stone Hilal had just skipped ten times across the water, but perfect enough in shape and size. She placed them at each of the intersections on the grid, twelve light stones on her side, twelve dark stones on Hilal's side, leaving one empty hole at the intersection in the middle.
Hilal raised an eyebrow. "And now?"
"We alternate moves. Each move, we can either push a stone into an empty intersection, or jump over each other's stones if there's an empty intersection behind them."
"Sounds reasonable," Hilal said, pulling his feet out of the water and moving closer to the grid, crossing his legs, which were just as muscular as his shoulders, Badr noted.
"We can only move forward, not back. The goal is to move as many stones as possible to the other player's side of the grid. When you run out of moves, I win," Badr said.
"When you run out of moves, I win," Hilal said.
"I have the light stones, so I make the first move."
"Of course."
Badr crossed her legs on her side of the grid, watching as Hilal's gaze traced up from her feet to her calves to her thighs to the leather pouch, now empty, that draped from her waist.
Badr moved a stone into the center hole. Hilal stared at the grid for a few seconds, squinting his eyes and licking his lips like he did when getting ready to skip a stone over the water, and then jumped over the stone she had just moved. They alternated moves and jumps a few times until the playing grid started to clear.
Hilal was a quick learner, and Badr felt her sweat running down her cheeks, her arms, her legs, pooling in the crevices of her skin. He played aggressively, took risks, and even though she had moved first, she was on the defensive after the first five or six moves. Soon, Hilal was encroaching on her territory, moving closer and closer to her side of the grid, and by the time they'd cleared half the stones, Hilal was two stones ahead, as Badr's options were narrowing, her moves more forced, her stones claustrophobic. With each move, Hilal flexed the muscles in his arms, his chest, and his confidence grew. Badr and Hilal moved so quickly their fingers almost touched, and Hilal spent less and less time looking at the grid and more time looking at her, her fingers, her arms, her cheeks, her lips.
Badr was down three stones to five, her cause lost. Hilal would always beat her at skipping stones, and now he was beating her at her own game, a game he'd just learned. He would always be older, stronger, better than she was. And in the middle of all this, as she watched him make his moves, as she watched the sweat glisten on his skin, which seemed so much more elegant than her own sweat, she knew he was going to kiss her, and she wanted to kiss him first, and she knew she would hate herself for it, almost as much as she hated Hilal.
And then she saw it: Either he'd been careless, or she'd been more strategic than she thought. He'd left his stones exposed, empty holes between them, lined up just right so that with one flick of her wrist, she'd seized the stone in front of her that looked the least dangerous, the slightly misshapen, slightly smaller stone at the side of the grid, and she used it to jump over one, two, all five of Hilal's remaining stones, the grid now perfect, almost empty, with three of her light stones remaining.
Hilal looked at the grid, then at Badr, still smiling. He nodded, stood up, placed his hand over his heart and bowed slightly.
"Good game," he said. "We'll play again someday." He walked back to his tent.
Without getting up, Badr collected her three remaining stones from the grid. She chose the winning stone, the runt, and with just the right angle, with strength and grace, she shot it flat across the water. She closed her eyes and heard it splash, once, twice, eleven times.
Two years later, when Badr returned to the oasis with her new clan, the tribe her father had married her off to, she sat by the fire at night with the other adults, and heard from a traveler how her cousin Hilal had died, defending his family from a thief in the night. The thief had fought with a knife, Hilal with his hands.
Badr snuck away from the fire and sat by the reflection of the moon in the water, remembering the day she'd won.