Desperate Measures

by Jeff Probst

  Jane was there now, too. She’d just come out of the tiny sleeping cabin the two girls shared.

  Jane was like the opposite of Carter. She could slip in and out of a room without anyone ever noticing. With Carter, you always knew he was there.

  “What are you looking at, Nessa?” Jane asked.

  “Nothing.” Vanessa flipped the laptop closed. “I was just checking the weather,” she said.

  There was no reason to scare Jane about all that. She was only nine, and tiny for her age. Vanessa was the oldest, at thirteen, and even though nobody told her to look out for Jane on this trip, she did anyway.

  “Dex said there’s a storm coming,” Carter blurted out. “He said it’s going to be major.”

  “Carter!” Vanessa looked over at him and rolled her eyes in Jane’s direction.

  But he just shrugged. “What?” he said. “You think she’s not going to find out?”

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” Jane said. She crawled up onto Vanessa’s lap and opened the computer to have a look. “Show me.”

  “See?” Carter said. “I know my sister.”

  Vanessa took a deep breath. If the idea of this trip was to make them one big happy family, it wasn’t exactly working.

  Technically, the whole sailing adventure was a wedding gift from her new uncle, Dexter. It had been two months since Vanessa and Buzz’s father had married Carter and Jane’s mother, but they’d waited until the end of the school year to take a honeymoon. Now, while their parents were hiking Volcanoes National Park and enjoying the beaches on Hawaii’s Big Island, the four kids were spending the week at sea and supposedly getting to know one another better.

  So far, the sailing had been amazing, but the sister-brother bonding thing? Not so much, Vanessa thought. The weather wasn’t helping, either. It looked like they were going to be cooped up together for the rest of the day.

  “Is that the storm?” Jane said. She pointed at the large red mass on the laptop screen.

  “That’s it,” Vanessa answered. On the computer, it seemed as if the oncoming front had gotten even bigger in the last few minutes. She started braiding Jane’s long blond hair to distract her.

  “It’s just rain, right?” Jane said. “If this was something really bad, we’d already know about it. Wouldn’t we, Nessa?”

  Vanessa tried to smile. “Sure,” she said. But the truth was, she had no idea how bad it was going to get.

  None of them did.

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