“Mel and I want to keep working on the raft,” I said. “Will you help us?”
I’d found Betty at the borderland between Camp Summerbliss and the jungle. She tore off the skin of a kiwi, a fruit we had only recently found on the island. She pulled the brown-green pieces off bit by bit, as if the task required utmost concentration. Finally, she shook her head.
“I told Rittika I’d keep hunting the enemy. That’s more important than the raft.”
“Says who?”
She squinted at me, a furrow appearing between her eyebrows.
“You and Mel can finish the raft by yourselves,” she replied. “I don’t care.”
“But you and Chester know everything there is about it.”
“I doubt Chester would be interested either. He got up at dawn to make more spears. He’d rather kill the enemy and be a hero than leave and be a coward.”
Suddenly, I felt like I was talking to a brand-new person. “Betty, what are you saying exactly?”
She shrugged.
“Are you saying you want to stay here?”
The crease between her eyebrows deepened, and she stared at me defensively. “I like it here. I feel like I’ve got a purpose. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re judging me. I can tell.”
“It’s just—what about your family? What about home?”
“I guess this feels like home now.”
“Home shouldn’t be this dangerous.”
“Don’t act like you have all the answers, Sam. Don’t act like Mel.”
I was so frustrated I wanted to scream. I dug my fingernails into my palms. “Betty, it could all fall apart! Think about Anne Marie!”
She shook her head as though I couldn’t possibly understand. “Listen. Since we got here, I’ve climbed mountains. Hunted with spears. Woven fishnets. Held my breath and dived to the bottom of the ocean. At night I sleep in a tent that I made—all by myself. I never knew I could do those things. I never knew …”
Despite my better judgment, I felt a rush of sympathy. She sounded so self-assured. I didn’t know what I could possibly say to convince her that she was wrong. And then there was the little piece of me that wondered if maybe she wasn’t wrong. Maybe she really did belong here. Maybe her wanting to stay had less to do with choosing sides than with forging her own path. Maybe I was the one who was being shortsighted. It was an unsettling possibility.
I told Mel about the conversation. She was not nearly as emotional.
“Then it’s just us, you and me,” she replied stoically.
“What about Pablo?”
“Sam, if Pablo wanted anything to do with us, he would have come back by now.”
With a heavy heart, I nodded, knowing she was right. We walked to the beach where Betty and Chester had spent so many days raft building. Their latest and final prototype was a little bigger than the one I’d seen. It was also thicker. Dragging it into the water with Mel, I hoped its extra bulk would make it more buoyant. At first it floated just fine. But when we scrambled on top of it, it sank several inches. Water sloshed over the sides and through the cracks between the canes. Mel frowned. I knew what she was thinking. The sea was calm here, but out on the open water, it wouldn’t be nearly as forgiving. If we set out on the raft, here and now, we might as well sign our own death certificates.
“Betty once said we need pontoons. Looks like we still do,” I said.
“No kidding.”
“Would pontoons keep all this water from coming through?” I pointed to the cracks.
“Not necessarily. But I have a solution for that problem.” She squeezed water out of her hair, which had turned white blond from constant sunlight. “Let’s drag this monster to shore.”
Back on dry land, Mel told me we needed to revisit the tar pit. Honestly, it was the last place I wanted to go. The tar pit was now a bastion of bad memories. I’d never be able to erase the image of Anne Marie being dropped into that sticky black wasteland like a piece of trash.
“I think I’ll stay here,” I told her, shivering.
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t carry the trough with one hand.”
I gaped at her. “Seriously?”
The trough was another thing I’d sooner forget.
“Seriously.”
“God, I hope whatever plan you have in mind is better than the last one.”
She scratched at her healing arm and shot me an amused look. “Could it be worse?”
Slowly, soaking in sweat, we hauled the heavy trough through the jungle to the pit. By the time we arrived, my arms felt leaden from the effort. By the side of the pit, we scooped up tar with halved coconut shells and deposited it into the trough. We filled it a couple of inches, then dragged it all the way back to the beach. There, I collapsed on the sand and drank all the water from my gourd. I was so exhausted I could have gone to sleep, but Mel insisted that I help her make a small fire. We lit it beside the trough, then watched the tar begin to warm. Slowly, it began to simmer and bubble. I stirred the black brew with a bamboo cane while Mel collected handfuls of dry grass.
“We’re going to use the tar to caulk the chinks between the canes,” she said.
I had suspected as much, but was glad that she’d confirmed her plan.
“Will it work?”
She nodded. “Sure it will. Shipbuilders have used tar for centuries. If we fill every crack and crevice, we can make the raft airtight.”
“Will we still need pontoons?”
“Probably. But at least this will be an improvement.”
As Mel explained what we needed to do, I could tell that she’d already thought through the process. She’d probably been thinking about it for days. First, we stuffed the dried grass into the chinks. Then we whittled sticks into thin, flat paddles with her knife. These were our “caulking irons,” Mel said. We used them to apply the tar in the stuffed chinks. When we finished that step, we let the tar cool a bit, then patted it flat with the soles of our oxfords.
Our methods weren’t very sophisticated, but they seemed to work. Once we got going, we moved swiftly. The slowest part was waiting for the tar to set. Mel said we should give it the night. The cool evening air would do the job, and by morning—if all went according to plan—the tar would be firm, rubbery, and leakproof.
We finished sometime after dark, then trudged back to Camp Summerbliss, feeling satisfied, but dead tired. We didn’t have the energy to dive for conch, so we ate a dinner of bananas. After that, I took a quick dip in Conch Lake. Near the outcrop, Rittika, Rish, Avery, Ming, Betty, and Chester were playing chicken, laughing and splashing raucously. Now more than ever, it was clear we were divided.
Mel and I went to bed soon after. I thought I’d fall asleep right away, but I found myself thinking about Alexa again. As if reading my thoughts, Mel told me she couldn’t wait to get back to her sisters.
“I feel like I’m missing a part of myself,” she whispered. She told me she’d written them notes, put them into capped water bottles, and tossed them into the sea—even though there was virtually no chance Drake, Gaspar, Tasman, or Leif would ever receive them.
“Still,” she said with a sigh, “you never know.”
Moments later, Mel fell asleep. I could hear the others still talking by the light of the campfire. They seemed to be reconfirming their commitment to finding the enemy. Not surprisingly, Rittika’s voice was the most strident. She said they’d look for him again tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that, if necessary.
“Sooner or later,” she said confidently, “he has to come out and play.”
The next morning, Mel and I woke up with the rising sun. Mel made another mark on the V-shaped tree and then we headed back to the beach to check on the raft. I touched the tar with my finger and was elated to feel it bounce back from my touch. We poured seawater onto the black seams and watched it bead up and roll off. Mel gave me a triumphant high five.
“What next?” I asked excitedly. “The pontoons?”
“I still don’t know how to make them.”
A little of the morning’s shine wore off.
“So what do we do now?”
She scratched her head, then smiled broadly. “We make sails.”
I couldn’t help but smile back. “With the nylon.”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s get to work.”
It had already occurred to me that we could make sails from the nylon. I had a hunch it had occurred to Mel, too—and maybe the others. But Mel had been so hell-bent on making her hot-air balloon, no one would have been able to wrangle the nylon from her.
We retrieved the damaged fabric from the supplies tent. Then I helped her spread what was left of it on the sand. It didn’t look promising. During the fire, the majority of the nylon had burned up, and what remained was smoke-stained and singed at the edges. But there was enough—just enough. And if I squinted hard, I could see it: two sails—small, but trusty and true. Sails that could catch and harness the wind, and take us all the way back to where we’d come from.
Mel and I drew in the sand with our fingers, imagining the fabric reincarnated: upright and triangular, straightened by a mast, by the tension of rope, reinforced by bamboo canes.
Mel’s attempts at a design were messy, and she soon grew frustrated. Her control of her left hand was getting better, but it was still a work in progress. More and more, I felt like I was her right-hand man. Literally.
After about an hour we arrived at a plan that we both agreed on, then got to work. We labored through the morning and past high noon, the scorching sun blazing down. I’d forgotten how hard and tedious it was to sew the nylon. How holding the needle for hours made my fingers cramp. Despite the discomfort, we had to be even more careful than last time. There was very little thread left, and no room for error.
When we’d finished, we were as spent as we’d been yesterday. Mel said she’d forage for fruit; I volunteered to fetch more fresh water from the outcrop at Conch Lake. We agreed to meet back at the beach in a little while to test the sail, but on my return, I became distracted. I remembered how Mel had said she’d written to her sisters, tossing plastic water bottles back into the ocean. I thought about how those bottles had already traveled hundreds, maybe even thousands of miles to reach our shores, and how they could probably travel many more. Plastic bottles, naturally light and sturdy.
Naturally buoyant.
The full gourds sloshing in my hands, I ran to the supplies tent. My fatigue vanished suddenly, replaced by a swell of adrenaline. Inside the tent, I stared at Rittika’s heaping pile of water bottles. There had to be a couple hundred. Enough, I thought to myself.
Before, I’d felt revolted by that gleaming tower of litter. But now I saw the bottles in a new and redeeming light: not as garbage polluting our oceans and killing our planet, but as an unusual way to stabilize the raft.
I grabbed one of the bottles, the gourds now forgotten, and dashed all the way to the beach, back to Mel. Catching my breath, I excitedly explained my idea.
“Crappity crap crap. That’s brilliant!” she said when I’d finished.
With new momentum, we talked about how to make the pontoons. The best idea, we decided, would be to stuff the water bottles into large, missile-shaped mesh bags woven from vines.
“I’ve watched Betty,” I said gamely. “I think we can do this.”
After another high five, Mel set out to find long, slim, sturdy vines. She cut them with her blade and brought them back to the beach, where I tried my best to weave them together.
Hours of trial and error passed. The sun began to descend all too quickly.
“I can finish,” I said stubbornly, squinting through the dim light.
Mel saw I wasn’t going to stop. Quietly, she set about making another fire so that I could work into the night.
The stars were shining by the time we finally finished. The nets were messy-looking, like quickly-cobbled-together craft projects. But they did their job. They kept the water bottles together. Under the constellations Pegasus and Pisces, Mel and I rolled one of the pontoons across the beach and into the water. It performed as we’d hoped, bobbing like a giant buoy, staying well above the waterline even when we climbed on top of it and rode it like an inflatable pool toy.
We laughed with happiness, than hauled it back onto the sand and stared at it.
“I guess my father was right,” Mel said.
“What do you mean?”
“All the tools we need really are right in front of us.”
By the time we reached Camp Summerbliss, everyone else was already tucked inside their tents. We didn’t sleep very well that night. We were too excited. We were so close to our goal. All we had to do was attach the pontoons to the raft and gather some supplies.
“We’ll do a test run tomorrow,” Mel said into the darkness.
I knew what she was implying. If the test run went well, we could leave. I’d thought about this moment for so long, yet now that it was almost here, I didn’t know what I felt more—relief or anxiety. Anything could happen here on the island, but anything could happen out on the water, too.
The next morning, we didn’t talk about what was to come, only about what had to be done in the here and now. We attached the pontoons to the bottom of the raft with homemade rope and more vines. With only one hand, Mel tied knots that would have made her father proud.
Betty had already made rough oars. With these in hand, we climbed aboard the raft and pushed off. As we glided over the shallows, watching bright fish flit through crystal-clear water, I knew the raft was going to work. With the addition of the pontoons, it barely sank an inch. The tar had set nicely, and it was as waterproof as a rain slicker.
I was feeling a hundred percent confident until we reached the underwater marker of the reef. As we crossed that dark threshold, I felt my stomach drop. I tended to see the ocean as bisected: the part inside the reef being safe, the part beyond it, not. I didn’t like the look of the outer ocean: its dark color and choppy breakers, the way it seemed to stretch on forever. I was alarmed by the rugged whitecaps and the sharp fins that occasionally sluiced through the surface.
Mel pulled in her oar and adjusted the sails, which rustled and flapped. The wind grew stronger, pulling us away from the island more rapidly than I expected. The raft began to bounce and jostle, holding its own against the current, but making me queasy. I motioned to Mel that we needed to turn back. She nodded and adjusted the sails again. Seconds passed and our raft headed farther out to sea. A horrible thought seized me: What if we couldn’t turn the ship around? What if we became stranded out on the water with no water or provisions?
But I shouldn’t have doubted my friend. Moments later she got us turned around. Slowly but surely, we began to sail back to the island.
“This baby’s unsinkable,” she shouted to me gleefully, a spark in her eyes.
“Don’t jinx it!” I shouted back, knowing very well that our raft was anything but.
“We could leave today,” Mel said breathlessly when we reached the shore. Together, we dragged the raft out of the water.
I felt an electric pulse run up my spine. “Do you want to?”
She nodded. “For our sisters.”
We left the raft and oars high on the beach, beyond the tide line. As we began walking back to Camp Summerbliss, I asked a question I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to.
“Mel, what do you think our odds are?”
She rubbed her bad arm. “Do you really want to know?”
I nodded.
“Fifty-fifty, at best. But realistically? A lot lower.”
“And if we stay on the island?”
“About the same.”
“Are you going to feel bad,” I asked. “Leaving everybody?”
“We’re not leaving just for ourselves, Sam. We’re leaving to get help.”
“But they don’t want help. They don’t want to be rescued. Betty told me that.”
“Sure, she says that now. But can you honestly see Rittika here a year from now? Five years from now? She’ll be totally unhinged. They all will. Bad things will happen. Very bad things,” she finished ominously.
I stared at her, not sure what to believe. Not sure of anything. I knew only that we were about to take the biggest risk of our lives. We were silent for a time, then Mel began to discuss preparation. It was easier to talk about the logistics of leaving—how many water gourds we’d need, how much conch meat, coconuts, and seaweed, what the currents and winds and weather conditions might be like—than to reflect on the right or wrong of it.
“A tarp would be nice. To catch water, if it rains. But we already used up all the nylon.”
“We could use our tent as a tarp,” I said. “It wouldn’t catch water, but at least it would give us shade.”
She smiled at me appreciatively. “Not bad, Sam. Not bad at all.”
We locked eyes, and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was. There was one question we’d so far avoided. Maybe the hardest question of all. How were we going to tell the others?
Back at camp, I didn’t expect to see my classmates. I figured they’d be out in the jungle, continuing their futile search for the enemy, but to my surprise, Rittika and her brother were swimming in Conch Lake.
I went to the shore and rinsed off my hands and face. There, I watched her lean body zip through the water, her long dark hair trailing after her like a mermaid’s. She surfaced, appeared to take a breath, then dove under. She was gone so long I couldn’t help but think of our arrival on the island, when she’d dived off the outcrop. Then, we’d all thought she’d drowned. This time, I knew better.
She surfaced eventually and called to Rish. I watched him eel his way to her, his strokes swift and elegant. When he looked at what she was holding, he whistled. Eventually, they swam to shore. We greeted each other perfunctorily, like strangers. I wondered how it had come to this.
What Rittika had found was a conch shell. The biggest yet, almost twice the size of any we’d previously caught. She turned it over, declared it hollow, and then did something none of us had ever done before. She put the spiral tip to her lips and blew. I didn’t know what she intended to accomplish. But then I heard the sound: a deep, lonesome boom that seemed to spread out over Conch Lake and through the jungle, ricocheting off the trees and the peaks of the mountain. She blew again. This time a bass note, a plaintive cry at the lowest octave, solemn and penetrating.
Mel came stumbling toward me, as awed as I was by the sound.
“How did you do that?” Rish asked. Rittika looked at him, then at Mel and me.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “It just came out.”
The jungle seemed to go quiet. I wondered if every bird, boar, lizard, and monkey was listening.
Rittika blew the conch again. Chester came running out of the jungle as if lured by the sound. Minutes passed and the others came, too. They gathered around Rittika in a circle, leaving Mel and me beyond the periphery.
Since everyone was together, I resolved to tell them that Mel and I intended to leave. But just as I made that decision, I heard a distressing noise. Avery began to scream, just as she had the night after the crash, when she’d complained of a man touching her in her sleep. To my horror, I saw two more figures crossing the threshold between jungle and camp.
A very old man, hunched and wiry. And someone familiar. I froze, wondering if what I was seeing was real.
“Man, Pablo, is that you?” Chester asked tremulously.