“¡No mas!” I say in my instantaneous bad Spanish, pushing him away. But he is almost too strong for me, and I am tiring of this little game he has been playing. My words land on deaf ears, so I attempt again to get my point across.

“¡No lo quiero!” I pry his dark skinny arm off the top of my swimsuit – where the straps meet the breast padding. From there I drop under water and swim towards my cousin, Emily. At 15 she is a year younger than I am, and her brother, Daniel, a year older. My other cousins and little sister are also swimming nearby in the cove, and I expect that being near any of them might halt his uncomfortable actions.

As I swim a form of breast stroke along the sandy bottom, I feel his hands gripping my ankle and instinctively kick away, but as expected it makes no difference, so instead I push off the bottom and move towards the surface. I now feel his hands once again on my shoulders, but now his skinny legs are wrapped around my waist and he is shifting so that rather than clinging to my shoulders he is clinging to my chest. I break the surface of the water just in front of Emily, and push Bryan away.

“Bryan can not be 14 like he said! He would know better – I hope. He was trying to kiss me on the lips!”

“Now that you say that I think that's what he was doing to me earlier. I mean he was really close to my face and was pinching my cheeks. I said 'no mas' but he wouldn't go away so I got out of the water.”

“He is such a little pervert!” I am shocked to come to this discovery, after-all, Bryan looks so innocent, and he appeared to be only 10 or so. When we first met him earlier this morning, we explained that we were playing “tocar,” or tag, and did he want to play? He had nodded, and when we began we realized quickly that he didn't really understand tag. Once Bryan was it, he tagged everyone, and stayed it. Eventually we had dropped the game, and Bryan had succeeded in a fluent language of gestures and motions, to explain that he wanted to have a Chicken Fight. This was the very game that we had vetoed before because of the language barrier. Bryan didn't speak a word of English, and our Spanish was not remotely all-inclusive. When Bryan had commandeered Daniel’s shoulders as his personal taxi, and directed him towards Anna and I, an innocuous game of Chicken transformed into an awkward hour in which we wanted no part.

Just then Sam, my 12 year old cousin Sam, and his younger brother Jake, approach to investigate why Anna and I are sitting in such shallow water. Upon hearing, one of them decides to tell Daniel, who can’t seem to believe his ears. “How do you know?” he asks Sam over and over again.

I held out my fingers about an inch apart. “He has come this close several times!” Daniel looks shocked, and doesn’t seem to know what to do, but he no longer acts as Bryan’s personal taxi, and looks uncomfortably at Anna and I whenever we are near Bryan.

When we first met Bryan, I felt bad for leaving when we had to go eat lunch, but by the end of the day, I felt little sympathy for him. As we were leaving, he was flirting with another girl – who spoke Spanish as well as he did – who was closer to his age. As we closed the gate on our pretty rented house in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, I watched the two on the beach – kissing full on the lips, their bodies intertwined in the shallow Caribbean water. If I could I would have warned her.

“Watch out sweetie, do you really know that boy?”