Fractured Tide

by Leslie Lutz

  Felix looked up at her, smiling, as she played a clapping game with him I’d never learned as a child. Somehow that made me even madder. I threw our breakfast with perfect aim at the middle of her back.

  Bull’s-eye.

  She squealed and fell onto the sand. Felix laughed at first, but when Steph stood, her eyes full of venom, his smile fell away. He looked from her to me.

  She kicked the lobster away and it scuttled toward the surf. Felix grabbed it before it reached the damp sand, the creature flipping its tail and bucking in his hand.

  “Put it in the ham tin, please,” I told him. “Why don’t you go help Ben?”

  He ran off without a word.

  Steph took two steps toward me, stopping at the wave line as if afraid to touch the water. “What’d you do that for?”

  I took off my fins and stepped onto the beach. “I dunno, Steph. Maybe because you don’t do anything.”

  “I’m making a net.”

  “It won’t work.”

  “I’m making a shelter for us too.”

  That was actually a good idea, but I wasn’t about to say so. “You should be in the water, fishing.”

  “I do a lot.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “Not everyone has the same skills, Sia. I’ve got mine, and you’ve got yours.”

  “And mine put me in mortal danger. Not really equal, Steph.” And then I delivered my speech, the one you would give. About necessity. She listened quietly until I was finished, her eyes on the sand. When she met my gaze, the wounded look she’d worn since I first hit her with the lobster had given way to something else. Something hard.

  “You know, Felix has been telling me a lot about you, and your family.” She put air quotes around family in a way that made all the blood rush to my face. Her voice took on a mean girl lilt, the kind that sounds nice but isn’t. “I feel really sorry for him. What it’s like to visit your father in a room full of murderers and child molesters. With Dad behind bars and Mom dead at the bottom of the ocean, he’s got nobody now.”

  I couldn’t come up with a response to that. At all. Her smile became a shade sweeter.

  “That’s why I’ve been so nice to him. You should thank me.”

  I held out the fins and my mask and snorkel. “Your turn. Take your time.”

  She pulled her hands back, afraid to even touch my radioactive gear. “I told you, I’m sick.”

  “You don’t look sick.”

  “The sunburn is so bad I have a fever.”

  “The water is cool.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Water amplifies the sunlight.”

  “You can wear my rash guard,” I said.

  “It won’t fit. My boobs are bigger than yours.”

  Is this what life would’ve been like if I’d kept going to public school near our apartment rather than done the homeschooling thing? People like this, times one hundred, all making little digs at me in that special language I don’t get. Or maybe I’d be able to break the code if I’d grown up with them, or if I hadn’t been yanked out of school after only a few weeks of being a normal freshman. Maybe I would have understood their clapping games and the way they think. But it wouldn’t have been worth it. All those times I told you I wanted to go to pep rallies and football games, and asked why Mom made me miss out on all of it?

  I take it all back.

  Steph and I went quiet, standing on the wet sand, staring at each other. She couldn’t go join her horde of girlfriends and their ninety-dollar flip-flops, and I couldn’t get into my beat-up truck and drive away. We were stuck. On a beach. In the middle of nowhere. Together.

  Steph sniffed and tossed her hair over her shoulder, but the strands were so tangled they caught in her ragged nails. She finally got her fingers out of the mess and looked out over the waves, rising and then curling, breaking into a shock of sea-foam. “I can’t believe we’re fighting,” she said, her voice suddenly quiet and small.

  I could. I knew we would. Because I had this sense now. I could feel what was about to happen. The feeling had built in me for days without me realizing it. No, not that I knew what was going to happen. I was remembering what had already happened. A part of me was able to touch that now.

  “I can’t go,” she said, making fists, but she was trembling. She wouldn’t look at me; instead she dug her fingernails into her palms and watched the buoy in the distance. The fear was actually shaking her, like a dog with a rag doll.

  “You really hate the ocean, huh?” I asked.

  “Who said I hated it?”

  “You did. Our first day. You looked out into the big blue and said, ‘I hate the ocean.’”

  “I don’t hate it. I deeply dislike it.”

  “Did you have a bad experience in it or something?” I asked.

  She sighed dramatically. “No.”

  “Almost drowned once?”

  “I can swim if I have to.”

  “You saw Sharknado and swore you’d never get into the water again.”

  “Seriously?” Steph said.

  We stared at each other, the roar of the surf taking up the space our words had left behind. Maybe it was low blood sugar, but all the fire in me went out. I broke eye contact and sat on the sand. Steph followed suit, which surprised me. She picked up the tiny shells scattered around her feet, giving her hands something to do. Her eyes were glassy, tired. Ready for a good cry. And it hit me why she was losing it, other than the dead cousin and the hunger and the fear. Since we’d all washed up here, Felix was the only person who’d been nice to her. I knew what that was like. Odd man out. It sucked. Just because she was a jerk with a capital B didn’t mean it didn’t suck for her too.

  Steph shaded her eyes, peering out into the waves. She had the look of someone trying to read a foreign language for the first time. “Why do you like it?”

  “Love it. I love the ocean.”

  She sniffed out an almost laugh. I followed her gaze. The white-tipped waves rolled in, crashed against the shore. The truth came out before I could stop myself. “The big blue is immense. Endless. It makes me feel small.”

  “That’s exactly why I hate it,” she said.

  “Small in a really good way.”

  “There’s no such thing.”

  I picked at my cuticles. Scratched at the grit in my hair. Thought about being small. “My mom can’t run that charter without me there,” I said. “She needs me to pick up Felix from school. Help him with his homework. Load the tanks. Return phone calls. Do everything.”

  “Poor baby.”

  “I’m just tired of being a lynchpin in the family,” I said. “Take me out and everything spins out of control.”

  “You certainly are full of yourself.”

  “You know, Steph, I’m just trying to talk to you like a human. What’s wrong with you?”

  She scattered the handful of shells she’d collected. “I have no idea what that feels like.”

  “Being human?”

  She shot me a look that stung. “No, being a lynchpin. If I weren’t around, there’d be one less place to set at the dinner table, and that would be about it.” She paused, as if thinking. “I’d probably get a spot on the mantle, though.”

  “For your urn?”

  “My picture.” She made a little half-snort laugh. “Mantle space is very high rent in our family.” She gave me a weak smile and looked at her toes, which she had been burying under a clump of seaweed. “You know what happens when the lynchpin goes?”

  “Disaster. Anarchy. Hysteria.”

  “Ha, ha. No. The family finds a new lynchpin.” She tossed her hair over her shoulder—more successfully this time—and met my eyes. “You’re a lot less important than you think you are.”

  Like you, I’m opposed to eye rolls. Hate it when other people do it. But that comment, it deserved an eye roll. “Look, you can wait a bit, maybe an hour to pull it together. But we agreed. We share the risk. That means you need to get in and get us a lobster.”r />
  Steph bit her lip and looked over her shoulder at Ben, who studied the water, the notebook in hand, twirling the golf pencil between his fingers.

  “Steph, his leg is getting worse. And if he doesn’t eat . . .”

  I stared at her until she looked at me. She closed her eyes, a martyr with her face upturned to the sky.

  “Okay, I’ll go in. Once. For Ben. And Felix.” She held up one finger. “But waaay down the beach, around the curve.”

  “Why?”

  “To confuse it.” She looked out into the surf. Trying a different spot on the island wasn’t a bad idea, although something in her tone told me I should go with her.

  She got up, took the fins from my hand.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  She froze, composing her answer carefully. “Your brother is terrified. And you’d rather hang around babysitting me? Real nice, Sia.”

  When Steph turned to leave, I didn’t follow. “Steph?”

  She turned back, her eyes expectant, as if she thought I might apologize or thank her or something.

  “I’m glad we’re finally talking. Really. But if you ever talk about my family that way again, you’ll have a lot more to worry about than a sunburn and a—”

  Click. It came from behind us.

  ENTRY 15

  BOTH STEPH AND I FROZE.

  “Don’t move,” a voice said.

  The wind changed, and I smelled sweat, heard someone shift in the sand.

  Robinson Crusoe was back. Definitely not a figment of my imagination.

  I exchanged a quick glance with Steph. The soft push and slur of his feet reached my ears as he tromped closer. Toward the lobster in the ham tin. I cut a quick glance to my right, and I saw my brother far down the beach, his back to us as he talked to the small things that lived in the surf. Ben was nowhere to be seen.

  The footsteps behind came closer, circled us, and stopped.

  Mud-spattered feet. Dirt encrusted under his toenails. He’d rolled up the white pants to his knees. I thought about tackling him. It’s what you would do.

  “On your knees, both of you.”

  Both of us dropped without a word.

  I finally looked up. The guy looked more haggard than the last time I saw him, his face not much cleaner than the rest of him. So young. A baby under all that grime. The desperate glint in his eyes sent a pulse of fear through me.

  He moved the gun from my forehead to Steph’s. In his other hand he held the ham tin. The lobster scratched and tapped against the corrugated sides.

  “What else you got?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He turned the pistol back on me. “I’m asking the redhead.” He pressed the barrel between her eyes. “Your food. Where is it.” A statement, not a question.

  “You’re holding it,” Steph snapped back.

  “Hey, dude, everything we get, we get from the ocean,” I said.

  He pushed the gun into my face again. “I didn’t ask you!” He turned back to Steph. “Equipment. All of it. Show me.”

  Steph hesitated a moment. “But we only just met.”

  I almost smiled. Almost. But I was hungry and scared and a scary guy with a gun wanted our lobster. And then the Sense came again. The feeling I knew what was going to happen, or what had already happened. It scrambled my brain, made the world swim. It also told me what I needed to know. Odds were this guy wasn’t going to kill us.

  “Desalinator. Knives. Weapons,” he said as he glanced around the area, looking for our stores. “Where’s the guy you were with?”

  Neither of us answered. The glint in his eye sharpened. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was losing it. Maybe I needed to channel you and try to wrench the weapon from his hand and end him. Then a flash—dark hair, dark skin, ratty T-shirt, bloody bandage—entered the corner of my vision.

  Ben. At the edge of the palm forest. He made hand gestures I didn’t understand, like a cop communicating with his partner in an action movie. Totally incomprehensible. But I got the gist. Distract him.

  “Weapons?” I asked him. “My mom hates guns, so she’d never let them on the boat, and this girl”—I gestured to Steph—“came here with a bunch of science geeks. The best she’s got is a PH kit and a microscope.”

  Steph had seen Ben as well. “Both at the bottom of the ocean. Sorry.”

  Ben crept up from the forest shadows, limping far too slowly. He held a fist-sized rock. I kept talking, fast and loud to cover his steps. “Look. I know you’re hungry. I am too. But that doesn’t mean you go all Lord of the Flies on us.”

  “Lord of the what?”

  “Really?” Steph said, in a tone she usually reserved for me.

  Robinson Crusoe decided at that moment to clock her on the side of her head with the butt of the pistol. Steph squealed. Ben stumbled, shock registering on his face.

  “Enough! Weapons, now.”

  Steph held her head and moaned loudly to cover Ben’s approach.

  “I swear we didn’t have weapons on the charter,” Steph said. “Things have gotten bad in Florida, but they don’t let us take guns on school field trips.”

  Robinson Crusoe blinked as if recalculating. “Florida?”

  Ben limped closer, rock ready.

  I raised my voice and babbled to give him cover. “Well, technically, we might be in the Bahamas now, because we might’ve drifted off course because of the currents, which were really pushing us around, and—”

  Our captor waved the gun. “What are you talking about? We’re nowhere near Florida.”

  Steph and I exchanged a glance. Ben was only steps away, the rock raised high, ready to strike. Robinson Crusoe pushed the gun into my face.

  “I don’t know who you people are”—he said this in a quiet, rational voice—“or how you got here. But this here is the South Pacific, and I don’t give a rat’s—”

  Thunk.

  Steph let out a short scream. And Robinson Crusoe slumped to the sand.

  ENTRY 16

  I FOUND A SLIMY LENGTH OF ROPE in the corner of the Last Chance, and Steph began some weird Girl Scout knot that she half remembered. I ripped it out of her hand and started to tie that handcuff knot you taught me. And yes, you’re right, the one I said I’d never need. She glared at me and pulled the rope out of my hands. I yanked it back.

  “So I was hallucinating, huh?” I said, finishing my wrap-and-cinch double-column knot. Robinson Crusoe lay on the sand like a dead fish.

  “Can’t blame us for not believing you,” Steph said.

  “Sure I can.”

  The sun was behind Ben, so I couldn’t see his expression. Then I stood up, and the corona around him disappeared. He was watching me with a half-curious, half-amused expression, the kind of look he gave me back on the Last Chance when he first met me.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,” he said.

  “Two apologies in one day,” I said. “Wow.”

  Steph looked from his face to mine, trying to figure out what she’d missed.

  Ben broke eye contact first, lowering himself carefully onto to the sand while gritting his teeth. The blood seeping out of his bandage was hard to miss.

  I kneeled beside him to get a better look. “Oh no, did you—”

  He pushed my hand away. “I’ll do it myself. Later.” A shadow passed over his face, and the warmth I’d seen in his eyes earlier this morning shut off. I got a hint of it then—what he was hiding from us—but I brushed it off as some kind of don’t-touch-me-when-I’m-wounded guy thing.

  Ben turned Crusoe’s head to get a better look. “Who is he?”

  The prisoner lay curled on his side, hands and feet bound. He was so filthy he looked like some ugly thing that had crawled out of the ocean and died.

  “Someone who thinks we’re in the South Pacific, apparently,” Steph said. “I’m thinking keeping him tied up is a good idea.”

  “He must have been on your boat,” Ben said, looking up at me. “He wasn’t on ours.”


  “We had ten divers,” I said. “This guy wasn’t with us. And look at his clothes. He got here long before we did.”

  Ben shook his head. “No, he came from one of the boats. Doesn’t make sense otherwise.”

  “Look at how frayed the edges of his pants are, and the sleeves,” I said.

  Ben examined the ragged hem. “Coulda just had a rough first day.” He nodded at Steph. “Occam’s razor.”

  Steph caught my confused expression. “When you have competing theories,” she explained slowly, like I was five, “the one with the fewest assumptions is probably true. Simplest explanation here? He came from one of the boats.”

  “There were twenty people with us,” Ben said. “I only knew half of them. We were from different schools.”

  Steph nudged the prisoner with her toe, clearly afraid he might bite, and picked up the gun. “But where did he get this?”

  I reached out to take it from her before she blew my head off, but she pulled away, frowning. Then she squinted and fiddled around with the release on the side. The magazine fell onto the sand. “Gah! It’s loaded!” She took a step back. “Okay, okay. Those are bullets. Real bullets.”

  “You know what this means?” Ben said.

  I looked from the unconscious guy trussed up on the sand to our limited supply of water. “Our time on the island just got way more complicated?”

  “No,” Ben said, weighing the gun in his palm. “We have something other than palm trees and scuba tanks now.”

  It took me a moment to put everything together. “You think you can kill that thing with a handgun?”

  “Of course not. But maybe we could use it to set off some kind of trap, or . . .” He turned the pistol over and examined it, eyeing the weapon like someone would examine a harmless piece of wood. It was obvious he’d never touched a gun before.