“Don’t look now,” my niece Malaika whispered, looking directly at him.

Across the sand, Daniel was coming towards us with six teenagers from her school. Malaika was sixteen. She had spent the entire drive from Kampala telling me she had no interest in Daniel whatsoever.

She had also asked me three times whether her hair looked all right.

“Your neck is going to give you away,” I said.

She turned to the lake so quickly that her sunglasses fell off.

Daniel greeted us, and within minutes the two groups had become one noisy crowd. Somebody found a volleyball. Somebody else bought roasted maize. Malaika, who normally had an opinion on everything, laughed at Daniel’s jokes half a second before he finished telling them.

I sat under an umbrella with a soda and watched a very capable young woman temporarily lose access to her own personality.

Then Daniel held out his slippers and phone.

“Can you watch these? We’re playing.”

“Of course,” Malaika said.

“You were going to join us,” her cousin Ayo reminded her.

“I wasn’t.”

She was. She had spent the previous evening practising her serve in our compound and accusing Ayo of cheating whenever he won.

Twenty minutes later she was still beside the slippers. The others were shouting over a disputed point. Daniel had forgotten she was there.

“I have seen security guards with better uniforms,” I told her.

“He asked me to watch his things.”

“Yes. A heavy responsibility. If a wave reaches those slippers, Entebbe may never recover.”

She gave me the look nieces reserve for uncles who think they are funny. Unfortunately for her, I am funny.

“Go and play,” I said.

“He might think I’m being rude.”

“And what do you think?”

She picked up one slipper and turned it over as if the answer were written underneath.

When the game ended, Daniel came back, thanked her, and asked whether she wanted to walk with the group to buy ice cream. Malaika stood up at once.

Then she saw the sign beside the swimming area. The supervised beginner session she had been talking about all week was starting in ten minutes.

“I’ll come for ice cream,” she said.

Ayo stared at her. “What about your lesson?”

“I can swim another day.”

“You said that last time,” he replied.

Daniel looked surprised. “You’re learning to swim?”

Malaika’s face changed. “I’m trying.”

“That’s brave,” he said. “I’m terrible at it.”

She looked at the sign again. Then at Daniel. The poor boy had no idea he was standing in the middle of a national examination.

“I’m going to the lesson,” she said finally. “You can tell me whether the ice cream was worth it.”

Daniel grinned. “I’ll give you a full report.”

She walked towards the instructor. Ayo followed, carrying her towel.

“Don’t smile,” Malaika warned me as she passed.

“I am drinking soda,” I said. “My mouth has to do something.”

Later, she came back with wet hair and sand on one knee. She had learned to float for a few seconds. She described those seconds three times, each version longer than the last.

Daniel returned too. The ice cream, he reported, had been disappointing. They sat talking while Ayo and the others argued about volleyball again. Malaika disagreed with Daniel about the music playing from the café. She did not soften her answer when he defended it.

On the drive home, she was quiet for a while.

“I really do like him, Uncle.”

“I know.”

“I thought you were going to tell me I’m too young.”

“You are too young to guard slippers professionally.”

She laughed and leaned against the window.

After a moment she opened the notes on her phone. At the top of a page she had written months earlier were three promises: Learn to swim. Keep making my drawings. Say what I actually think.

She read them once, then added a fourth.

I can like someone without putting my own life on hold.

I did not ask to see what she had written. An uncle should occasionally mind his own business.

But when we reached Kampala, I noticed her goggles were on top of her bag, ready for next time.