by Sloane Tanen
“Let’s do it!” Cisco cried enthusiastically. “Good thinking.” He brushed Eve Larkin and the dirt off his jeans.
Although I was trying to stay focused, his body was unreal. I’ll never forget the way the sun trickled off the bleached hair on his muscular arms. It was just too much. And his wavy dark hair was so damn shiny it looked like it was still wet. I desperately wanted to touch it. That the wires growing out of my head were also called hair is a testament to the inequality of all things.
“Oh, come on! Please. SOS? Are you serious?” Eve asked us from the ground, shielding her eyes from the sun. “We’ll be here another few hours, max.”
“How do you know, Eve? We could be here for a week. Jonah Baron seems to think we are here for the night at the very least.”
“Jonah Baron is a dramatist,” Eve said.
“That’s the pot calling the kettle black.” Cisco laughed.
“What does that mean?” she whined, sticking out her lower lip like a little girl. I would have liked to kick her back over the cliff. I loathe girly girls.
Cisco didn’t answer but turned to me and asked what we should do, like I was the camp counselor or something. Again, I tried not to notice that his tone was a little patronizing. It was almost as if he thought I was suggesting a fun role-playing game. I couldn’t tell if his puppy dog enthusiasm was charming or annoying, sort of like Owen Wilson. In any event, I was starting to get that Jonah and I were the only ones taking this whole “our plane landed in the water and nobody seems to be coming for us” thing seriously.
“OK,” I said patiently, like I was talking to slow children, “Why don’t you and I go find some sticks to write with,” I said to Eve, “and you start laying out the letter points with these rocks,” I told Cisco, pointing to some stones along the runway. “The letters will have to be big when we start working on it, so make sure the points are at least twenty feet from top to bottom. We’ll have to push the sticks into the dirt so the sign doesn’t wash away if it rains.”
“Rains?” Eve asked, looking up at the cloudless sky.
“Just in case,” I said. Eve rolled her eyes.
“OK?” I asked Cisco, pointing to the stones. He looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language and then nodded. I knew if I had suggested that I stay and help Cisco, Eve would have protested. To my utter surprise, they both agreed. I made a mental note that actors like and need a director.
Eve and I left Cisco busy on the landing strip while we went our way in search of sticks. She sauntered behind me, dragging her feet and hunching her shoulders like Eeyore. It was pretty obvious she wasn’t going to be putting her all into this…especially since there were no cameras documenting the momentous occasion when Eve Larkin was forced to do something other than wait for somebody else to do it for her.
If I’d actually gone into the jungle, it would have been easier to find branches, but Eve wouldn’t go, and she didn’t want to be left alone. I tried to ease her in slowly, but she insisted that her tick allergy prevented her from entering grassy, wooded areas. I tried explaining that Lyme disease wasn’t an allergy, but she wasn’t having it.
“Look, I’ll just wait here alone,” she moped, plopping down on the dirt.
“Fine,” I finally agreed. I was already sick of her. I was fairly certain she’d take advantage of my absence to “regroup” with Cisco ASAP. Whatever. No wonder she hadn’t made a good movie in five years.
There was a little transitional wooded area that had a pretty good collection of fallen branches. The shade was an enormous relief. It was also strangely peaceful not listening to everyone snapping at one another for five minutes. I spotted a big piece of wood that I thought I could break apart pretty easily, but my left shoe was now falling apart from the water, so I had to break the wood with my hands while weighing it down with my knees. I got a massive splinter in between my thumb and forefinger. I hadn’t had a splinter since the summer my dad made me do Outward Bound after sixth grade. I’d forgotten how much they hurt.
The pain in my hand slowed things down. As I continued snapping twigs off the wood, I convinced myself that a band of starving cannibals was watching me. All kinds of strange noises soon had me absolutely obsessing on cannibals. Were there still cannibals in Africa, I asked myself, as sweat started dripping off my nose, or had they all eaten one another? I couldn’t remember a single detail about Africa, but I was having vivid flashbacks from a gory documentary I’d seen about Easter Island a few years ago.
Though I was sure the Red Cross would show up soon, I still couldn’t help wondering which of us would get eaten first if it actually came down to that. I decided quickly on Chaz, as he was both meaty and dispensable. Then I realized that with those criteria, I’d be dinner the following night. I tried not to think about it and had gotten back to breaking the wood into strips when I heard a definitive rustling of leaves. Enough jungle time for me.
The sun was a blaze of cotton candy pink by the time I was in the clearing. I realized I must have been gone longer than I’d thought. Naturally, Eve wasn’t there. I half hoped she’d be a little worried and feeling guilty about ditching me. Anyway, that’s how I justified my four-hundred-meter mad sprint back.
I saw Cisco—and, of course, Eve—as I approached the landing strip. Chaz and Joe were back too. I waved the sticks in the air to announce my return. Like anybody cared.
“I told you she’d get them,” I heard Eve say to the group. “What’s her name again?”
“Here,” I said, tossing the last two hours of work on the ground.
“Did you find water?” I asked Joe.
He shook his head.
That’s when I noticed that Cisco’s SOS rock points were written backward. Well, at least the S’s were—the O looked OK, obviously. Cisco looked really satisfied with his work as he stared down at the markers with his hands on his hips. He looked at me for approval.
“Um, it’s backwa—” I started to say.
“Let’s get started,” Joe interrupted.
“But, we have to…”
“Franny, you and Joe write out the first S, and Chaz will do this one. Cisco, you do the O,” Eve ordered. Did she just call me Franny?
“But,” I said, trying to point out that we needed to fix it before we started to write, but everyone seemed to be dead set on shutting me up. Chaz looked at me and mouthed, “He’s dyslexic,” like Cisco had a life-threatening disease they didn’t want him to know about yet. And that’s when I realized how totally coddled somebody like Cisco Parker was. Screw that! I mean, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice being rescued because nobody had the balls to tell Cisco that he’d written out 202 instead of SOS. Forget it. That wasn’t my style, and I wasn’t in the ass-kissing business. What had he ever done for me? This wasn’t finger painting for your self-esteem class. This was serious, even if I was the only one who thought so. Plus, this guy got over five million dollars a picture. He could use a dose of reality.
“Cisco,” I said, looking at him with all the conviction of a school guidance counselor, “we need to turn the S’s around because… because…” as he looked at me with his wavy dark hair and his huge, liquid green eyes, I found that I, too, was a big, fat, yellow chicken. “Because when the planes come, they will be getting an aerial view, and it’s almost like a mirror effect, so we have to write the letters backward.”
I could hear the collective sigh of relief. “Of course,” Cisco said. “That totally makes sense. You’re really smart, Francesca.”
Eve seethed as I sent her my best smile. He didn’t like me, but I liked that she thought he did.
The five of us spent the next half hour correcting Cisco’s points. Everybody blew off my suggestion about pushing the sticks into the dirt. “Not a cloud in the sky,” Chaz hummed as he started directing everyone on how to best engrave the letters into the soft dirt.
When we were done, we had an impressive SOS sign. It would definitely be visible from a plane. Then the pink sky suddenly turned s
teely, and a rainstorm the likes of which I’d never seen poured down on us. The transition was supernatural. I could almost hear God laughing as our SOS turned to mud. Chaz stopped singing. On the upside, it was raining so hard nobody heard me say “I told you so.”
“So now what do we do?” Cisco shouted to be heard, looking directly at me. I’d opened the barf bag in the hopes of using it to collect some drinkable water. I knew it was important to stay hydrated. In seconds, the force of the rain ripped the bag apart.
“I don’t know,” I said, crumpling the barf bag and trying to hold back my tears of disappointment. “I guess we sit and wait here.” I leaned back and opened my mouth in an attempt to catch a little drink.
“It’s pouring!” Eve cried. “You want to squat here like a herd of stupid birds?” She started digging through Milan’s bag in search of a specimen collection cup.
“If we move, Jonah and Milan won’t be able to find us,” I explained, swallowing what little water I could get and using my hands to whisk away the rain like windshield wipers. “Let’s just stay put.”
Girl Gone Vile
It wasn’t long before Milan and Jonah reappeared in the rain. The sight of them was oddly reassuring. At first.
“The beach is about two miles off,” Jonah started to explain, shouting in order to be heard above the rain.
“What the hell are you doing?” Milan suddenly asked Eve, who she’d just noticed had taken advantage of her absence by emptying out a prescription pill bottle from her Balenciaga bag and using it as a little cup to collect rain. Everyone looked at Eve nervously.
“I’m sorry. We’ve been waiting for you guys forever, and I was so thirsty. I needed something to drink from. Besides, there was nothing in the bottles but ocean water.”
“Did I say you could go through my stuff?” Milan screeched as she snatched the bottle out of Eve’s hand and pushed a mat of wet hair off her face. Milan looked seriously pissed. She reached for one of the sticks I’d found and jumped Eve, holding the twig under her chin like a knife. I kid you not. “You listen to me you washed up, snotty tragedy. You touch my stuff again and I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you!”
I could understand why Milan was less than pleased at having Eve go through her things, but after all, this was an unusual set of circumstances, and Eve hadn’t taken her stupid pills. The rain suddenly stopped, and the pink sun reappeared like a painted on smile.
“Dear God! Help me!” Eve peeped as her eyes bulged out of her moon face. “Get this psychopath off me.” Eve definitely didn’t strike me as the sort of girl who had been in a lot of bar fights. In fact, she sort of seemed like she’d spent most of her life curled up inside a satin jewelry box.
Joe rolled his eyes as he peeled Milan off Eve and calmly motioned for me to see if Eve was OK. I reluctantly sat down next to her. She buried her head in my lap and started weeping and heaving. It was obviously making me super uncomfortable to have Eve Larkin sobbing hot tears of injustice in my crotch. You know how I feel about touching.
“That’s the one and only Academy Award–winning performance I’ve ever seen out of you,” Milan hissed as she finally broke free of Joe’s grasp and looked down at Eve crying.
“Bravo, bravoow!” she continued in a fake British accent. She clapped demonically as she stared down at Eve. Milan was a terrifying girl. So tough. Probably all those chick bar fights over Jared Leto. Or maybe it was growing up in the back of her mom’s station wagon, driving from audition to audition. Either way, Eve was definitely out of her league. Something told me the girls hadn’t gone quite this wild in England. Even the Americans.
“Give it a rest, Milan,” Joe ordered.
“Do you not get that I need my pills, you asswipe?”
“I didn’t take them!” Eve pleaded.
“I think pills might be the last thing you need,” Jonah said.
Milan’s head snapped around like the girl in The Exorcist before she pointedly told Jonah, “Go to hell!”
“Don’t say that, Milan. Please.” Jonah looked seriously wounded. His reaction was totally weird and disturbing. Nobody said anything for a minute or two.
“Oh no, are you gonna go all Ted Haggard on us?” Chaz asked Jonah, finally breaking the silence.
“Let’s just calm down, hold hands, and pray,” Jonah said, looking at our six disbelieving faces like we were his fallen disciples.
“Dude,” Cisco groaned, holding up both hands in mock protest.
“Please, are you serious?” Eve asked, wiping the tears from her eyes with my pants and leaving gigantic, unapologetic splotches of black mascara all over them. She didn’t look like the polished Spanish princess from the airport anymore. She looked like a billboard for one of those horror movies starring demonized children. Chuckie-etta.
“I don’t pray, you freaking freak,” Milan yelled.
Jonah looked all business now. “If you won’t pray with me, then plan with me. We need to collect some water and food. The sun is going to set fast. It’s going to get dark quickly now.”
Jonah glanced down at the remains of our SOS sign. “Nice work,” he laughed with a condescending lilt. “Would have worked better if you drove the sticks down.”
“I tried to tell them,” I started, in what came off as a lame attempt to both impress Jonah and blame everybody else. Chaz rolled his eyes. Jonah looked at me blankly.
“Oh man,” Milan cried, still digging through her bag for evidence of theft. “My metabolism pills were in there too. If I gain one pound, you loser, I…”
“Come, pray,” Jonah interrupted, holding out his long hands.
“Aren’t you enjoying yourself a little too much, Skipper?” Joe asked Jonah. “Are you planning on building a colony and converting us?”
“Look, as I see it, we can sit on the dirt complaining or go get some supplies to make the night pass as smoothly as possible. And we need to build a signal fire. It will be easier to keep it going on the beach.”
Everybody paused to absorb Jonah’s words, and much as I hated to admit it, he was making sense. And then he ruined it by saying:
“It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark, you know.”
“Do you always talk in bumper stickers?” I asked him.
“Extreme times demand extreme faith.”
I took that as a yes. He was so self-righteous. That’s when I remembered Joe’s pilot speech back in New York and decided these two had more in common than they realized. They were both know-it-alls. I hate know-it-alls. Especially know-it-alls who obviously know nothing. Like Captain Water Landing and his baby Jesus.
“If you think God’s gonna get me through the next two hours without a Klonopin,” Milan said, “you’re not just a Jesus freak, you’re also an ignoranus.”
“Ignoranus,” Chaz laughed. “That’s rich!”
I held back a laugh. Those two were like fifth graders.
“You are the reason I hate religion!” Milan continued, ignoring Chaz and pointing a finger at Jonah. “And it’s just such a waste because you could be pretty hot if you were normal.” She paused as she eyeballed his black skinny jeans with a look of outright disdain. “And hired a stylist.”
“You don’t hate religion, Milan, you’re just afraid because you’ve strayed,” Jonah said calmly.
“Shut up, you poser douche!” she snapped. The inability to pop a pill was clearly rattling her nerves.
“Stop it, Jonah! That’s enough already,” Joe shouted. Jonah looked at his father and delivered a withering smile.
“Look, can we all just work together until they find us? Maybe we can catch some crabs for dinner.”
“I do love a crab cake,” Chaz cooed, smiling at Jonah lustily.
“I don’t eat shellfish,” Cisco said.
“Neither do I,” Joe agreed. “And besides, maybe we should stay put for the night. Since this is where we landed, it makes sense to stay here in the event that they catch a signal from the black box.”
“Why don’t y
ou stay here?” Jonah suggested antagonistically.
“Alone?”
“If you’re right, then it wouldn’t hurt to have a fire going here too. All you have to do is keep it flaming so the rescue plane sees it. We can use the extra wood Francesca gathered to make it. Can you handle that? You can rest up your leg. It’s a good two-mile walk to the beach. It might take an hour in the dark.”
Joe’s mouth formed into an angry, tight line before he managed a slight nod. He looked furious, and I didn’t blame him. But he had gotten us into this mess, so whatever. Frankly, I wasn’t sure he’d have enough wood to keep the fire going that long, but I was so psyched Jonah Baron knew my name I didn’t really care.
In retrospect, Joe was right about us all waiting at the landing site, but for whatever reason we followed Jonah’s instruction. It wasn’t so much that we thought Jonah actually knew what he was doing, but his passion was mildly contagious and, like I said, this was a group of people in need of a director. Joe might have been right, but Jonah’s “vision” was more convincing.
“Okeydokey,” Chaz said as he pushed himself off the ground and sidled up next to Jonah to gather dry kindling for the fire. “What other snacks will Jesus be offering? I’m famished, and I hope the Lord is in a ‘givethy’ mood.” He paused. “Mmmm, I’d love some Chicken McNuggets with sweet and sour sauce. Does our savior like white meat or dark?” he asked, looking Jonah up and down. “I like white meat myself. Tall, hairless white meat.”
After the signal fire was going, Jonah used it to light one of the larger wood sticks to act as a guiding torch. It didn’t work the way it does on TV. Ours blew out in about fifteen minutes. I happened to know that it needed to have a wick—courtesy of Mr. Krauss’s eighth grade science class—but I was pretty sure nobody had any paraffin, and I didn’t want to insult Jonah’s masculinity. So, as I privately predicted, we were now walking by nothing but moonlight. It was amazing how quickly it got dark. I was behind Eve and kept getting whacked in the face with the tree branches that Cisco held for her but which she didn’t feel necessary to hold for me. Nice. My left foot was red and blistered. I think we’d been walking for about thirty minutes when we heard a welcome sound.