I made it a point to check on Anne Marie at least once a day. She was barely at camp anymore. She returned only as night crept in, and kept to herself, alone in her new tent. I knew she was slipping away, the same way I’d seen my sister, Alexa, slip away, but I was determined to help her as best I could. Armed with food, I made the long walk through the jungle to the outcrop at the edge of the island. Usually, I found her sitting cross-legged on the lookout, perfectly motionless, gazing at the ocean.
But one day she wasn’t there. Instead, I found a tall column of round stones. The stones were balanced precariously, one on top of the other. I knew they wouldn’t stay there for long. One strong gust of wind and that teetering column would collapse, stones rolling like balls every which way, even over the precipice.
I wasn’t sure why Anne Marie had made that column—maybe for no reason at all. But it troubled me. With a sword in my hand, I wandered the jungle, calling her name. I tried not to think about the enemy, boars, or pits. I did think about Pablo, though. I hoped I would spot him. I wanted to tell him that I missed him. I wanted to ask him to come back to camp. But like so much else on this island, he’d become elusive.
Eventually, I began searching the area of the giant trees. This part of the island remained one of my favorite spots. The otherworldly size of the trees never ceased to amaze me. Tired, I took a rest and a long drink from my gourd canteen. Then to my surprise I spotted Anne Marie. She was leaning against one of the huge roots that slithered along the ground. Overhead, the tree it anchored seemed as tall as the mountain on the north side of the island.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” I called out. When I reached her, I tried to give her a hug, but she pulled back.
“Shhh! He could be listening,” she whispered.
“Who?”
She looked over her shoulder. “The beast.”
“Do you mean the enemy?”
“I’ve seen him here before.”
“You have? When? Why didn’t you tell us?”
She didn’t answer but instead began to climb the tree whose root she’d been leaning on. She had no trouble scaling the trunk, using vines and deep impressions in the bark as hand- and footholds. It was clear she had done it before, perhaps many times. I hesitated, then attempted to follow her, fumbling, scrambling, scratching myself. From below I marveled at how skinny her bare legs were. Skin and bones covered in mosquito bites. I doubted she weighed ninety pounds.
About fifteen feet up, she pulled herself onto a branch that ran nearly parallel with the forest floor. It was as wide as a park bench. With great effort I managed to join her. I had to catch my breath. My hands, feet, shins, and knees were so scraped they tingled.
“Nice view, huh?” she said.
I surveyed the jungle. The other giant trees blocked some of the view, but still it was fascinating to see the island from the level of the canopy. Everything seemed a little smaller, a little more manageable.
“Do you come up here a lot?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’ve got a spot. A special spot.”
“Right here?”
“I’ll show you.”
Nimbly, she scampered away from the trunk along the branch, stopping before a large cluster of leaves. I followed gingerly on my hands and knees. When she halted, I realized that the cluster was actually something else—a nest. Though covered in leaves, it had been constructed with many things: branches, vines, stalks, grasses, moss, even seaweed. These were braided together intricately—frankly, beautifully. There were even some feathers stuck here and there. Looking closer, I realized they might have been ibis feathers. My stomach felt suddenly sick.
The nest was large, big enough for a small person. Big enough for Anne Marie.
“You made this?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Is it, like, an art project?”
“It’s a nest.”
“I can see that.”
I looked at her blankly. Thankfully, she elaborated. “At school I have my dorm room and the art studio. Here I don’t have anything, so I decided to make my own place. What do you think?”
Weird. Bizarre. Off-the-wall crazy. “It’s … impressive.”
As she hopped from the branch into the nest, I noticed that her toenails were long, ragged, and unkempt. She sat down, cross-legged, in the middle.
“Anne Marie, what do you do here?”
“I relax, close my eyes. Bide my time, I guess.”
“Bide your time until what?”
“Until I figure out how to get home. I never thought I’d miss Drake Rosemont, but I do. I miss it a lot.”
“I really think you should stay with us at camp.”
“No offense, but I hate Camp Summerbliss.”
“Why?”
“You know why?”
“Is it Rittika?”
“It’s the beast.”
“He’s at camp?”
“He’s everywhere.”
At that moment, I was more afraid of Anne Marie than of the enemy. More afraid of what Anne Marie could do to herself. Clearly, she was losing her grip on reality. I couldn’t bring back her medication, but I was sure that being with other people was better than being isolated like this.
“Come on,” I urged. “Come back to camp for a little while. We’ll go swimming in Conch Lake.”
“I can’t. I’m working on a project.”
“Your nest?”
“No, something else.”
“Come on, Anne Marie. I miss you. Everybody misses you. Besides, you could use a good meal.”
“I can’t,” she repeated. “I have to make sure I can get away from the beast.” She clenched my arm. Her ragged nails scraped my skin. “You need to get away, too. He’s coming—and he’s not gonna stop this time.”
I felt a shiver run down my spine, but I ignored it. I told myself that she was crazy and that everything out of her mouth was crazy, too. She was roosting in a nest, for god’s sake.
I took a deep breath and willed myself not to raise my voice. “Anne Marie, I’m going back to camp and I want you to come with me. If we work together—all of us—I’m sure we can find a way off this island.”
Maybe I wasn’t convincing. Or maybe Anne Marie wasn’t capable of listening anymore. She began staring off into the distance, leaving me to study her profile: the bony jut of her chin, the protruding cheekbones. I noticed that her ear was full of goopy orange wax. It plugged the entire cavity. A healthier person would have been aware of the problem.
I pleaded several more times, but she tuned me out. Finally, I climbed down the trunk alone, sliding half the way. The rough bark scoured my skin like sandpaper. Biting my lip to keep from crying, I thought about not just Anne Marie but also Alexa. More and more, the two were blending in my mind. Two girls, wispy as ghosts. Two girls who could no longer help themselves.
Twice more that day, I revisited Anne Marie’s tree, to make sure she was still there. She was. She waved at me when I called to her from below. Her ability to stay in one spot for so many hours, motionless, struck me as both stunning and frightening.
When I got back to Camp Summerbliss, I found Mel and told her about Anne Marie.
“We have to get off this island,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” she replied. “The enemy hasn’t come for a while. He’s due.”
It took us a while to gather everyone. Our classmates were scattered all over the island—swimming, fishing, sleeping, gathering fruit. Doing just about anything but taking care of camp or one another.
Mel called a meeting. Rittika and Rish chose not to join, but everyone else did. The cubic-foot exercise had ignited in many of us a feeling of hope. Though Pablo was gone, I think we continued to cling to this hope. To the possibility that we could save ourselves. At night we brainstormed around the campfire, our faces hot as we leaned close to the flames. We needed a method of transport, something that could take us far away from the dangers of the island. Mel told us to put all our ideas out there. Nothing was off-limits.
“Think of the resources here,” she said, “and be creative.”
Though we talked for a couple of hours, Betty, we all agreed, had the most sensible plan: building a raft out of bamboo canes, which were light and hollow, but also strong. Mel took a vote. Unanimously, we agreed to give it the green light. She urged us to start building the very next morning.
“So that’s it? Our solution?” Chester asked her.
“Well, we’ll work on one other project, too.”
I wasn’t sure which one she meant, since the other ideas had ranged from impractical, to silly, to downright ridiculous.
“Which one?” asked Chester.
“My idea—the hot-air balloon,” she finished.
A murmur went through the group. Avery and Ming giggled.
“You’re kidding, right?” Avery asked, echoing the voice in my own head.
“Not at all,” she replied. “The parachute is made of nylon. It used to be called the miracle fiber. It’s versatile and hardy—perfect for a balloon.”
I admired her confidence, but this time it seemed out of place.
“You’re going to take apart the parachute and make it into a hot-air balloon?” Avery asked incredulously.
Mel nodded.
“How will you sew it?” Ming said. “How will you get the hot air inside? How will you get the balloon down once it’s up?”
“I still have some details to work out,” Mel admitted, putting up her hand to silence the naysayers.
That was the thing about Mel: She had the courage of her convictions. Once she had her heart set on something, she wouldn’t give it up. The more the others pressed her, the more obstinate she became. Come hell or high water, she was going to make that hot-air balloon.
The question was why?
I waited until later to speak with her. I didn’t want anyone else to hear what I had to say. After Mel and I had finished our shifts, I tried to break it to her gently. “I believe in you—you know I do. But I don’t know about this idea. You have to admit, it’s kind of … out there.”
“Rockwell, the pushback I’m getting is exactly what Earhart got when she told everyone she was going to fly around the world.”
“And look where that got her. Killed!”
“She was a woman before her time.”
“Forget about Amelia Earhart. We’re talking about you. You and your idea. And I’ve got to be honest. This isn’t one of your best.”
“Does that mean you’re not going to help me?” she asked.
I’d rather have been helping Betty on the raft project—call me crazy, but a raft struck me as less likely to get us killed than a hot-air balloon. But I didn’t want to let Mel down.
“Of course I’m going to help you.”
During the next few days, everyone began work on the projects. Though Chester initially wanted to help Mel, she convinced him to work with Betty on the raft. Sometimes Ming and Avery helped them, but just as often the girls hung out with Rittika and Rish—doing not much at all.
As for me, I spent that time exclusively with Mel.
The first thing she did was show me some sketches she’d made. According to her drawings, the balloon would be shaped like an inverted teardrop. It would consist of eight long pieces of nylon, wide at the middle, skinny at the top and bottom. These pieces would be sewn together, side by side.
As I studied the sketches, she gave me some background.
“So it’s like this,” she began. “In the seventeen hundreds, there were these French brothers, the Montgolfier brothers. They figured out if they filled a bag with heat, it would float.
“The brothers kept experimenting. Eventually, they made a huge balloon out of fabric and paper. It was held together by two thousand buttons. When it was filled with hot air, it rose into the sky, just like they imagined. They got more ambitious and added passengers: a chicken, duck, and sheep.”
“That sounds like a bad joke.”
“It’s not.”
“So what happened?”
“The balloon flew about a mile from its starting point, then crashed. The chicken broke its leg. The others were okay.”
“Is this story meant to reassure me?” I asked dubiously.
“The ride will be dangerous,” she admitted. “But no more dangerous than boarding a raft in the middle of the South Pacific.”
I nodded, although I wasn’t sure I agreed with her.
She filled me in on each step, how we would sew the balloon using the needles and thread from the sewing kit. The hot air would come from burning tar from the tar pit. As for the basket that would carry the passengers—people, in our case—she figured Betty could teach her how to weave one.
“To be honest, my main concern is weight,” she said. “To carry just one or two people—plus fuel, water, and provisions—the balloon will need to be, I don’t know, twenty thousand cubic feet? That’s much bigger than what we’re working with.”
By the ocean, we spread out the tattered parachute on the sand. We weighted down the edges with stones and got to work cutting and sewing. It wasn’t long before I realized how hard the task would be. Despite our lack of knowledge and experience, Mel insisted on expert seamwork: even stitches, no raw edges, perfect knots. The hours were long and tedious. My fingertips tingled, turned numb, then throbbed with blisters.
My eyes, like my fingers, grew exhausted by the strain. Sometimes they ached so much I closed them and sewed blindly. The resulting stitches were invariably crooked. Mel would tut-tut, make me rip them out and start all over. Other times I got in a zone and sewed for a long time in a state of near-perfect concentration. It was liberating to be so completely immersed in something that I lost myself to it. Sometimes while writing, I got in the same zone, able to churn out page after page, almost automatically. But most of the time, in writing and in sewing, every minute was a labor. With the balloon, I was painfully aware of each stitch I made, and how many more were needed given the yards of nylon spread out before us.
Even though we caked our bodies with mud, the sun was a problem. The red skin on Mel’s ears and the back of her neck began to crack. My skin was as dark as it had ever been.
Grateful for any reprieve from the heat, Mel and I welcomed the rain. As always, the storms came suddenly and torrentially, and the cloud cover that accompanied them felt like a small miracle. So did the cold droplets on our skin.
Once, through the drizzle, I thought I spotted Pablo. I even called out his name. I still thought about him constantly—what he might be thinking or doing. But then I blinked and he—or whoever it was—was gone.
As we got closer to finishing our sewing, I started to come around to the possibility that Mel’s whacky scheme just might work. The nylon had undergone a dramatic transformation. Cut, sewn, and repurposed, the fabric didn’t look so sad and pathetic anymore. In fact, its new shape held promise. But of the eight pieces of nylon we’d cut, two still needed to be added—and we were running out of thread.
“We can always unravel our clothes,” Mel reasoned. “Steal whatever thread we can from here or there. Or maybe some kind of plant fiber would work.”
Fortunately, we finished the whole balloon without resorting to drastic measures. We even had a bit of thread to spare. I felt hopeful when we spread out the nylon once again. Admiring its new shape and form on the beach, I glanced at Mel. I expected her to be just as pleased, but she frowned.
“It’s way smaller than I thought it’d be,” she said. A light wind rustled the crinkled fabric. “I don’t know if it shrank as we stitched it, or if I misjudged the size from the beginning.”
The parachute looked fine to me—and quite large, there on the sand. But I couldn’t intuitively gauge things the way Mel could. All I could see, as I stared at it, was the hard work and hours we’d put into it.
“Maybe it’ll be all right once it’s inflated,” I said.
“No, it won’t. I can tell. It’s too small.”
“It’s only for one or two people anyway. You said so yourself.”
During our hours of sewing, I’d tried to picture who would be on board, waving hopefully from the basket as the contraption rose up in the air. I’d also tried to picture who would be left behind, watching from the island as the balloon ascended. In my mind I imagined different combinations of people, but mostly I imagined Mel and me up high, and everybody else below, a huddled mass shouting desperate good-byes.
“The balloon is for us, Rockwell,” Mel said, as if reading my mind.
“So we’d just leave the others?”
“We wouldn’t leave them. With celestial navigation, I know I could get back here. We’d bring help.”
“I don’t know …”
“I do,” she replied firmly. “That would be the most logical thing to do. But there’s no use thinking about it now. We still have plenty more work to do.”
Mel collected scrap metal from the plane wreck and began to construct a large, rudimentary trough. It was so heavy we could barely lift it. We ended up dragging it across the jungle to the edge of the tar pit. Mel ladled tar into it with halved coconut shells. Then she set the tar on fire. A terrible smoke filled the air—much worse than the odor of sulfur. Just breathing it made me sick to my stomach.
“I feel like I just smoked a thousand cigarettes,” I said, though I’d never smoked even one. I took a long drink of water from a gourd, but that didn’t help.
Mel ignored me, too distracted by the goopy, molten-hot tar seeping out of the seams of the trough. “I have to seal these somehow,” she said. “The tar’s leaking out so fast, there’ll be nothing left soon. Besides, any leak would burn right through the bottom of the basket.”
I had no answers, and so said nothing.
“Why don’t you go ask Betty to help you with the basket?” she said with a deep sigh. “Or you help them with the raft. I’ll figure this out.”
I did as told, but first went to check on Anne Marie. These last few days, I’d barely seen her. All I’d done was work with Mel, then return—exhausted and light-headed—to Camp Summerbliss to sleep.
In search of her I traveled first to the giant trees. I found the nest and called her name, but she wasn’t there. I decided to walk to the far side of the island, to the lookout. No luck. I didn’t see her or the column of stones. There were only a few left on the flat rock where Anne Marie liked to sit. The rest, I guessed, had toppled into the ocean.
I assumed she was somewhere in the jungle, or maybe at Camp Summerbliss. But I didn’t want to waste any more time looking. There was too much to be done. Crossing the island again, I joined Betty on a band of beach. She was working alongside Chester. Together, they gave me a progress report.
Motioning to a large pile of wood atop the white sand, Betty explained how they had been selecting sticks, branches, and bamboo canes. Unfortunately, the pickings in the jungle were slim.
“Mostly, we need long, thick pieces of bamboo. But a lot of what we found is rotted,” she complained, “or bug-infested.”
“And we can’t saw fresh bamboo—it’s too hard,” Chester said. “So we have to use what’s on the ground.”
“Have you tried cutting it with Mel’s knife?” I asked.
“It wouldn’t work,” Betty replied. “The canes are too tough.”
“Dude, I wish we had an ax,” Chester added.
“Or a chain saw!”
“You’ll find a way,” I assured them.
Scattered on the beach were also small rafts in various stages of completion. All had proven defective in one way or another, Betty explained. This one too heavy, that one too leaky.
“We’re still experimenting.” She sighed. “Do you want to see the one we’re working on now?”
She led me to a rectangle on the sand made of four long bamboo canes. Two were roughly fifteen feet long and the other two were roughly ten. Betty showed me her construction technique: laying more canes within the rectangle, side by side, and moving them around like jigsaw pieces. When the canes were tightly fitted, Betty lashed them together with rope she’d made out of braided vines. As always, I was impressed by her skill.
“One of the things we’ve learned,” she said, “is that we’ll need pontoons for the bottom—to stabilize the raft and give it lift. Otherwise, it’s easy to overturn.”
“But we haven’t figured out how to make them—the pontoons,” Chester added.
“Another issue,” Betty continued, “is size. We’re not going to be able to make a raft big enough for everybody—not with what’s available.”
“How many people will you be able to fit?”
“I don’t know—four or five? Six at the most.” She sighed and rolled one of the bamboo canes with her foot. “I don’t want to reenact Titanic.”
“How’s the hot-air balloon coming along?” Chester asked.
“It’s got the same problem as the raft,” I replied. “Not big enough.”
“How many people are we talking?”
I flashed two fingers, like a peace sign.
Chester whistled. “Is Mel worried?” Betty asked.
“A little.”
“I could try to help her,” Chester said.
“I think she needs some time alone—to think things through.”
Suddenly, a monkey came out of the jungle and skulked around Betty’s shoes, which she’d left on the sand. When it noticed us staring, it hissed.
“I’m not positive, but I think that’s the same one that followed me, Rish, and Pablo on the day of the plane crash,” Chester said.
“He doesn’t seem very friendly anymore,” I replied.
“True. I used to think he was kinda cute, but now he freaks me out.”
“Does he come here a lot?”
“All the time.”
The creature and I locked eyes for a few seconds. I remembered all too well the way the monkeys had attacked Anne Marie in her tent. I knew I’d never trust one again.
With one more hiss, the monkey disappeared back into the jungle. I shifted uncomfortably and noticed Betty doing the same. Even though we’d been busy with our escape plans, none of us had let our guard down completely. Nor had we forgotten, even for a second, the reason we needed to get off the island. As Mel had said, the enemy was due for another appearance.
“I know you and Chester have your hands full,” I said to Betty, “but Mel and I don’t know how to make the basket—for the balloon. Can you help?”
She gazed with concern at the jumble of canes and raft prototypes strewn on the beach. Then, with her typical can-do spirit, she smiled and shrugged. “Sure, why not.”