Speedeet and Wilar are two twelve-year-old best friends from Pike Street, Kitty, Georgetown. Their stories are pure adventure — no politics, no current events, just the business of being twelve years old in Guyana.
DE DAY DE KITE GET AWAY
De kite was Speedeet idea.
Not de buying part — he didn’t have enough money for dat — but de BUILDING part. He had been saving newspaper and bamboo strips for two weeks, watching YouTube videos on he uncle phone when he uncle wasn’t looking, calculating angles.
“A kite,” Wilar had said, pushing up he glasses. “You want to build a kite.”
“Not just a kite. De BEST kite on Pike Street.”
“Speedeet, de last time you tried to build something, you spent three days on a go-kart and it only went sideways.”
“De kite gon be different.”
“How?”
“Because kites only have to go UP. One direction. I can handle one direction.”
Wilar considered dis. Wilar always considered things properly before answering. It was one of the things dat made him good at school and sometimes annoying everywhere else.
“Okay,” he finally said. “But I’m supervising.”
“You always say you supervising.”
“And things always go better when I do.”
Dis was, unfortunately, true.
Dey built it on a Saturday morning at Wilar back step, which had the best flat surface and was out of the way of Wilar mother who was doing her sewing inside and did NOT want newspaper and bamboo and glue on her kitchen table.
Speedeet cut the bamboo strips. Wilar measured them with a ruler he’d brought from his school bag.
“Dis one is four millimetres too long,” Wilar said.
“Nobody going to notice four millimetres on a kite dat’s going to be in de sky.”
“I’ll notice.”
Speedeet sighed and trimmed the strip.
They stretched the newspaper over the frame. They tied the string. They made the tail from strips of old plastic bag that Wilar mother had saved in a drawer because Wilar mother saved everything.
By eleven o’clock, it was done.
It was, objectively, a beautiful kite. Red and yellow newspaper, bamboo frame, long plastic tail. Speedeet had even drawn a face on it — two big circles for eyes and a wide grin.
“It looks like you,” Wilar observed.
“It’s SUPPOSED to look confident.”
“And it does. It looks very confident.”
They took it to the open ground near the end of Pike Street where the grass grew short and there was enough space to run.
Marcus, who had moved to the street three months ago from Berbice and had immediately become part of everything, saw them from outside his gate and jogged over.
“Kite?” he said.
“We built it,” Speedeet said proudly.
Marcus walked around it slowly, like he was examining something in a museum. “It’s… actually good.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I’ve seen you build things before.”
“DE GO-KART WAS A PROTOTYPE.”
Marcus grinned. Lil Suzie came out of her house across the street, saw the gathering, and also came over because on Pike Street when more than three people were standing around something, everybody came over.
“Dat’s a nice kite,” she said.
“Thank you,” Speedeet said.
“Did you make it?”
“Me and Wilar.”
Suzie looked at Wilar. Wilar adjusted his glasses. “I supervised the structural integrity.”
“He measured things,” Speedeet clarified.
Getting the kite up was harder than expected.
The first three attempts ended with the kite doing a dramatic dive toward the ground while Speedeet ran backwards as fast as he could. The fourth attempt got it maybe four feet in the air before the wind stopped cooperating. The fifth attempt — with Marcus holding the kite up and releasing it on Speedeet signal — got it genuinely airborne.
“IT’S FLYING! IT’S ACTUALLY FLYING!”
The kite climbed. The string in Speedeet hand went taut. The red and yellow newspaper caught the light and the grinning face swung up toward the clouds.
Pike Street stopped to look. Miss Doreen came to her window. Mr. Persaud next door shaded his eyes. Even the dog that always sat near the standpipe lifted its head.
“Let out more string!” Marcus called.
Speedeet let out string. The kite climbed higher. He could feel it pulling — actually pulling, like something alive at the end of the line.
“How much string you have?” Wilar asked.
“All of it.”
“How much is all of it?”
“About…” Speedeet counted what was left on the spool. “About dis much.”
Wilar looked at the amount of string. Looked at how high the kite already was. “That might not be enough.”
“It’s fine. It’s—”
The wind gusted.
The kite shot upward like it had been waiting for permission.
The last of the string unspooled from Speedeet hand in approximately one second.
And the kite, free now, continued upward, made a graceful arc over the street, and sailed smoothly and decisively over Miss Doreen’s fence and into her yard.
Everyone on Pike Street watched this happen in complete silence.
“Oh,” Speedeet said.
Miss Doreen was sixty-three years old, had lived on Pike Street since before Speedeet parents were born, and grew roses in her front yard that she was very particular about.
She was also, when she wanted to be, completely terrifying.
Speedeet stood at her gate for thirty seconds before knocking.
“Miss Doreen?”
The door opened. Miss Doreen looked at him over her reading glasses.
“I know,” she said.
“My kite—”
“I saw it come down. It’s in the rose bush.” She looked at him steadily. “The large one. Near the back.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Doreen.”
“Are you going to get it yourself, or are you going to stand at the gate until it gets dark?”
Speedeet went in.
The kite was in the rose bush. Getting it out required moving very carefully, apologizing to several thorns, and extracting the bamboo frame from where it had tangled around a particularly stubborn branch. The newspaper was torn in two places. The face was still grinning, which felt slightly inappropriate under the circumstances.
Miss Doreen watched from her step.
“You built it?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Yourself?”
“Wilar helped with the measuring.”
She was quiet for a moment. “My husband used to build kites,” she said. “Every Easter. He could get them higher than any other man on this street.”
Speedeet held the damaged kite carefully. “I’m sorry, Miss Doreen.”
“The rose bush will be fine.” She looked at the kite. “Can you fix it?”
“I think so. The frame is mostly okay. Just the paper is torn.”
“Come inside. I have newspaper.”
Speedeet sat at Miss Doreen kitchen table — a place he had never been before in twelve years of living across the road — and repaired the kite while Miss Doreen made lemonade without asking if he wanted any and put it in front of him.
The kitchen smelled like something baking. The walls had photographs. A man in some of them, younger than she was now, holding a kite. Very high.
“He was good at kites,” Speedeet said, looking at the photo.
“He was good at a lot of things,” Miss Doreen said. She sat across from him. “He was also twelve once, you know.”
“I know.”
“He put a kite through my mother’s window. On this same street.”
Speedeet looked up.
Miss Doreen looked back at him with an expression that wasn’t quite a smile but was something in that direction.
“The lemonade isn’t going to drink itself,” she said.
When Speedeet came back out through the gate forty minutes later with a repaired kite and a small container of biscuits that Miss Doreen had pressed into his hand “for the others,” Marcus and Wilar and Suzie were all still standing outside waiting.
“How bad?” Marcus asked.
“She made me lemonade,” Speedeet said.
Everyone stared.
“Miss Doreen made you LEMONADE?” Wilar said.
“And gave me biscuits for everyone.”
Suzie looked at the container. “What did you DO in there?”
Speedeet thought about Miss Doreen’s photographs and the story about her husband and the kite through the window sixty years ago on this same street.
“Nothing,” he said. “We just talked.”
He looked at the repaired kite in his hand. The torn paper was fixed with fresh newspaper. The face still grinned.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s see if we can get it up again. This time I’m tying the string to something first.”
“WHAT ARE YOU TYING IT TO?” Wilar asked, already sounding worried.
“I’ll figure it out.”
Speedeet and Wilar appear every week on the Guyana Daily Brief. They are twelve years old and from Pike Street, Kitty, Georgetown. Their adventures are entirely fictional and entirely their own.