by Leslie Lutz
“Just be careful!” I yelled. Or tried to yell.
I stood with Steph’s help and leaned against the gunwale of our broken boat. The ocean stretched out, whitecaps, blue sky, forever and ever. The salt scent here was clean, green like seaweed. It hit me then. This place didn’t smell familiar, the way the Keys do.
“I feel like we’re . . .” At the end of the world, I almost said, but didn’t. It was strange and poetic and something a homeschooled kid would say.
Ben looked like he’d just survived the apocalypse, in his torn T-shirt, a nasty-looking bruise on one side of his face, his bandaged leg oozing blood. Shell-shocked is what you’d call him. Somehow that made me feel better. That the guy I’d sat next to on the charter—the distant, curious, perfect boy who wasn’t afraid of anything, even a dead body—wasn’t that perfect after all.
A dead body. The tentacled thing. The island appearing out of nowhere.
“Ben, how on earth did we get here?” I asked.
He turned to the waves, searched the horizon. “The current. It dragged the anchor while we slept.”
“That doesn’t happen.”
He gestured to the beach with an open palm and a little flourish. “Let me present Exhibit A.”
“I’ve been out on these waters a billion times. I know all the Keys. The Dry Tortugas. All of them. There is no island here.” I rubbed my face.
“The ship dragged the anchor,” he said. “It’s the only explanation.”
I pointed to the buoy. “That’s the wreck we dived on.”
“No way. There are buoys everywhere in the Keys. It’s a crab trap or something.”
“It’s our buoy,” I said. “I’d know it anywhere.”
Ben didn’t respond, and I wanted to shake him, tell him to listen to me. He played with the half-full bottle of water as if he couldn’t stop thinking about what was inside. Suddenly, neither could I.
“Ugh, Ben, stop,” Steph said, watching the water slosh in the bottle. “You’re making everyone thirsty.”
“Fine.” He handed it to her. “You hold it.”
“That makes me more thirsty.”
Ben sighed and closed his eyes. Holding his tongue, I realized, the way you used to when you fought with Mom on those first few visits, until you both got used to the new normal.
I took the bottle from Ben’s hand to stop the argument. “You’ve been here for a grand total of one day and you’re already fighting. That’s great.”
They exchanged a loaded look, one with history. It was only then I put it all together. Who she was to Ben.
“She’s the ex you were telling me about, isn’t she?”
Steph crossed her arms and glared at me. Ben pursed his lips and looked away. And I burst out laughing.
“Sia,” Ben said, “it’s not funny.”
“Yeah, Sia.” Steph crossed her arms and gave me a wounded look. I laughed harder.
“Come on. It’s a little bit funny. Trapped on an island with your ex.”
A ghost of a smile touched Ben’s mouth, and for the first time since I’d met him, I didn’t feel awkward.
“You done poking around in my personal life?” Ben asked. “’Cause we need water.”
We worked for the rest of the afternoon making fresh water converters out of whatever we could find. Beach pollution usually makes me sad, especially after Felix came home from school one day talking about all the plastic swirling around the Pacific. His little face so earnest as he told us we had to take the charter out and clean it up. If you were out of prison, you would have probably agreed with him, organized a beach cleanup fun run or something. Mom would sigh and go along with it—as long as Blue Dolphin Scuba Charters was splashed all over the charity swag. A big Gianopoulos family “save the ocean” day on the streets of Key Largo.
So you’re gonna hate what I’m about to say. At that moment, searching the beach for trash that would save our lives, I’d never been more grateful for how wasteful human beings can be.
While Steph, Felix, and I collected and sorted, Ben rested his leg in the shade of the Last Chance and made the most ingenious converters I’d ever seen. They looked a thousand times better than mine. Turns out it was him and not poor Teague who was the head of the science club.
Steph unloaded another armload of trash into the back of the boat and brushed off her hands. “Gah. I’m so sticky. I think I’m done.”
“I saw some more in the other direction.” I pointed down the beach.
“Why is there so much?” she asked, frowning.
“No cleanup crew.”
“What?”
“The people who take it all away before the tourists come. So we can all pretend this isn’t happening.”
“Huh. I never thought about that. Must be a suck job.” She put her hands on her hips and sighed as if she’d accomplished something amazing by picking up one armload of trash. Then she peered down the beach with a curious expression. “This island looks big.”
Ben leaned against the hull, making a desalinator out of an empty can of beans and a scratched-up scuba mask. “The island is big. Wow, you’re a real Sherlock Holmes, Steph. Thanks for that.”
She ignored his dig, kept looking down the shoreline. “Like, Hawaii big.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe we’ll find a beach house or something. Maybe someone lives here.”
“Someone does live here,” I said, peering into shadows between the trees again. “The gun-toting Robinson Crusoe who almost shot me yesterday.”
Ben caught my eye and tilted his head toward Felix.
“Someone has a gun?” Felix said, his gaze going to the palm forest. “Here, on the island?”
“It’s just an expression,” Steph said. “When people are thirsty. They call it gun-toting Robinson Crusoe.”
Felix squinted and scratched his head. “No, they don’t.”
“You’re seven. There’s a lot of stuff you don’t know.” She patted him on the shoulder, her usual scowl softening.
Ben and Steph were right. I had no idea what they’d done to make him “gone,” as Ben put it, but if they didn’t want Felix to hear about it, neither did I.
I kneeled next to him. “Can you look down in the head of the Last Chance to see if anything useful survived?”
As soon as he was out of earshot, I turned to Ben and Steph. “So?”
Ben looked up from the desalinator he was assembling. “There’s no guy.”
“You said he was gone.”
“You were out of it,” Ben said. “I was humoring you.”
“No, really. A guy lives here.” I looked from Ben’s face to Steph’s. “He pointed a gun at me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He said he’d kill my family.”
Ben gave me a measuring glance. “You. Almost. Died. Your synapses cooked up a psychedelic treat for you. There’s no one here but us. Unfortunately.” Ben looked back at the converter, his long, slim fingers fitting medical tape along the edge. “Let’s just focus on clean H2O.”
“But—”
“Sia,” Steph cut in, “just stop. Really. Before you scare your brother half to death. Pull yourself together.” Then she turned and wandered down the beach in search of more manna from garbage heaven.
Worst luck ever. Wrecked on a desert island with a hot guy (you heard right, Dad. Hot. Your little girl is all grown up), and he thinks I’m nuts. As does his horrid ex-girlfriend.
I don’t know if you’ve ever questioned your sanity during those long nights listening to the rats in the prison walls. I like to think you have. Does it make you blush and stammer? Make you feel like your body isn’t yours? Like it’s just something you’re wearing, clothes that don’t fit?
Yeah, I know. Totally irrational. But it would all start making sense soon, why I felt this way. Why all of us felt this way.
Felix came out of the charter waving a first aid kit he’d found. Ben’s bad mood disappeared long enough to high-five him—when Felix
is happy, it’s contagious—and I kissed the top of my brother’s sweaty head. Then I wandered away from Ben and Steph and spent my time keeping an eye on Felix as he played a few yards back from the wave fingers and the wet sand. I searched the surf for sea monsters, scanned the palms for a sign of the strange, shipwrecked man-boy. The one with the gun. The one nobody believed existed. I wondered: If I had told them before their little nerd club cruise that sea monsters exist, would they have believed me?
ENTRY 11
I WAS SURE, AS THE SUN SET on my second day on the island, it wouldn’t be a sea monster or hunger or a mystery man with the gun who would put me in a shallow trench. It would be the water. Whether we had it, whether we didn’t.
By nightfall, Ben had made three more converters. We had enough water to barely keep three and a half people alive, about eight ounces each. I gave Felix a little of my ration, and he didn’t argue.
Felix and I made a camp not far from a string of three boulders that sat in the surf. We made a fire, castaway-style. In the three years you’ve been gone, I’ve taught him everything you’ve taught me, and you would’ve been proud. He was the one who got the first spark. Some dry driftwood, a good stick, and some coconut fuzz, and we had a raging bonfire, right there on the beach. Our glow slicing through the dark so high, so big, I was sure they could see us in Key Largo.
Steph pulled a cushion from the boat and sat cross-legged on it by the fire. She was wearing shorts, and her pale legs glowed in the warm light. Ben lay on one side in the sand, twirling a smooth piece of driftwood between his fingers, the way kids do in class when they have a problem sitting still. He and Steph had apparently signed a truce, as they actually exchanged a few weak smiles. Ben even cracked a joke that was good enough to make Steph and me laugh together for a rare second. I was starting to feel hopeful that everything, as Matt would say, gonna be alright.
Felix had fallen asleep on the other side of the boulder, next to the spiral notebook he’d pulled from the charter. His legs had apparently run out of doodling space. His mouth was slightly open, his arms splayed up above his head in a surrender position, the way he always sleeps. Mom and I joked about it sometimes, that he got this one from you. No offense, Dad, but we always laugh, because it’s not too soon anymore.
I mounded some sand behind me as a makeshift pillow. It felt cool and solid. The stars peppered the blackness above the island. The crackle of the fire drowned out the ocean swell. A beach cookout sound, like the one we had the night before my first day of high school. Mom, smiling as she pulled hot crab legs out of the stockpot and piled the plates high. Then you, chasing her with a crab claw and a fake horror movie voice until Mom wrestled the thing out of your hand, giggling like a little kid. Me, holding my four-year-old brother’s hand and laughing on the beach with my family.
I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands, my mouth watering at the thought of hot crab, my heart aching at the picture of the four of us, together.
Ben put the stick down and tipped his head up toward the ceiling of stars. It hadn’t taken me long to realize he looked at home beside a campfire. And the way he surveyed the beach from time to time, like a seasoned hiker who’s always orienting himself. One more mental checkmark on my list of reasons why Ben would make the top five list for desert island companion. I tried not to stare, but even in torn clothes with a bloody bandage on his leg, he was one beautiful dude. And his eyes . . . Intelligent, warm.
Watching him, my heart stopped aching over that perfect picture of us, one week before you went away. Then, between beats, I felt it constrict. Actually squeeze. I guess that’s why they call it a crush.
Steph’s next words swept the good mood right out of me.
“We ever gonna talk about what happened out there?” she asked.
Ben lay down on his back and folded his hands over his stomach. “I’d rather not.”
“Why?”
He didn’t answer at first, his gaze still on the sky. “Weird,” he finally said.
“Weird what?” I asked.
“I can’t find any satellites.”
We fell silent and I looked up too, searching the sky for those unnatural pinpricks of light, hiding there among the constellations. Before I could think about what their absence meant, Steph spoke again, her voice small.
“I’m worried it’ll come for us. Here.”
“I’m still trying to figure out what ‘it’ is,” Ben said.
Steph picked at her peeling sunburn. “I don’t care what it is.”
Ben turned to look out at the dark water, lost in thought. “Lot of weird stuff in the Mariana Trench. Maybe it came from there.”
“I saw it when we were diving,” I said.
Both of their gazes fixed on me.
Steph looked incredulous. “And you waited to tell us until now?”
“I’ve been a little busy staying alive, thank you very much.” They waited for me to go on, and the spotlight made me nervous. So I kept talking, homeschooled-style. Babbling, really. “So yeah, that morning before you guys showed up, I saw it down in the USS Andrews.” I swallowed, although I didn’t have much spit left. “That’s what happened to Mr. Marshall, although it didn’t cut him. Just . . . drowned him or something, I don’t know . . .”
I choked down a lump in my throat and went quiet. Saw Marshall in my head, his blond hair floating in the current, giving me the okay with his gloved hand. He was on the bottom now, along with everyone else, littering the ocean floor. Or inside that thing. I put my hands over my face as the grief swept over me. Mom. All those people. Oh God, Mom. I would never see her again.
“Captain Matt said it was a diving accident,” Ben said.
I wiped the corners of my eyes, trying to remember the last thing I said to her. “That death wasn’t an accident,” I managed. “I didn’t get a good look at it, but I saw something.”
Ben tilted his head, the firelight playing over the planes of his face. “And you let them call our charter out there?”
“My mom said I was narced. Made sense at the time.”
Their blank stares reminded me most people don’t dive twice a day, three hundred times a year, like you and I do. Well, like you used to.
“Sometimes, when you go deep,” I said, “and the USS Andrews is deep, some people get this thing. Nitrogen narcosis. Divers call it being narced. Makes you see phantom lights sometimes. Makes you take over-the-top risks.”
Ben watched me for a few uncomfortable seconds. “Do the effects, you know, hang around for a while?”
“No,” I said, although I couldn’t remember if I was telling the truth.
He exchanged another loaded look with his ex, and I bristled. But at least he left off blaming me. I hadn’t yet. I should’ve pushed Mom to pull anchor and head home, rather than wait around for another charter. I threw a stick into the fire and watched it burn.
Steph wrapped her arms around her legs and stared at me across the flames. “I didn’t get a good look at it, you know, when it was . . . Not really. Just something gray, and moving . . .” She shuddered.
Ben shifted with a grimace and threw his arm over his forehead. “None of us did. We were too busy dying.”
“I saw it glowing in the hallway of Andrews,” I offered. “It’s phosphorescent.”
Steph gave me another blank stare.
“It glows in the dark,” Ben translated. “You should know this, Steph. And that means my Mariana Trench idea’s not far off. A ton of creatures down there have bioluminescence.”
Steph let out a tired sigh. “Have you met me? In case you’ve forgotten, I hate the ocean. Why would I bother learning about what swims in it?”
I blinked a few times, trying to process that thought. She hated the ocean. I felt like she’d just slapped my mother or something. “What kind of person hates the ocean?” I asked.
Steph turned her eyes on me. “I can hate anything I want, and I don’t have to explain myself.”
The look on her face sugge
sted her feelings didn’t stop at the ocean. “Do we know each other or something?” I asked.
“Really? You don’t remember?” She shook her head slowly, her expression indignant.
“No, I . . .” I searched my memory again, but before I could ask her anything, she turned to Ben. “And despite what you think, I didn’t come on the trip because of you, Ben, or to learn about the ocean. I came because Mrs. Barnes is my cousin. She told me it would be fun.” Her voice lost all its sugar on the last word.
Ben must’ve caught my confused look. “The teacher,” he said, his voice softening.
I turned back to Steph to say something. A knee-jerk “I’m sorry” for whatever I did that I couldn’t remember. She was digging her toes into the sand and staring at the troughs, trying not to cry. Suddenly all the nasty thoughts I’d been having about her felt really heavy. I hadn’t considered that they’d lost people too. Truth was, I hadn’t thought about anyone but me and Felix and Mom. And well, okay, Ben.
“Maybe she’s okay,” I said. “Maybe on the other side of the island. I mean, none of you knew I survived, and I did.”
Steph stood up and walked toward the surf. Quick, like she had something to do there.
“What?” I said, turning to Ben. “It’s possible.”
“She’s not Felix. You can’t lie to her.”
“Mrs. Barnes could be alive.”
“The thing got her. We watched it happen.”
I followed his eyes to where Steph stood at the edge of the surf. Her white tank top glowed faintly under the moonlight, her skin only a shade darker. The big, black ocean stretched out in front of her, endless. Her shoulders shook.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“That’s right, you shouldn’t have.”
“I got knocked out when the boat capsized.” I paused, scared to ask but dying to know. “Who else?”
Ben shifted his leg and winced. “The waves were high, so I couldn’t see most of the people.” He looked out, his voice blowing back to me in the wind. “But I heard them.”
Hope washed through me. He didn’t see Mom die, not like he saw Mrs. Barnes. “So tell me what you could see. Anything. Maybe I can figure out which direction everybody else drifted. We could look for them tomorrow.”