Mel ticked off on her fingers what we needed to do. One, find water. Two, find food. Three, take shelter. Four, build a fire. Five, ensure our safety. One, two, three, four, five. The steps of survival. If only it were that easy.
“The boys don’t even make your list,” Rittika hissed.
“If we build a big fire, everyone within a mile will be able to see it. Rish included,” Mel replied.
Mel enlisted me and Anne Marie to help her. We spread out and collected pieces of kindling and pats of brown moss—anything that counted as tinder. Mel tore a few pages from a notebook in her backpack and crumpled them into wads. With these items she built a small pyramid in a crevice between two boulders. Scouring the area, she found two pinkish stones, which she proceeded to bang together above the pyramid. Soon there was a spark, followed by a tiny glow atop the peak. Mel waved her hand above it and blew at it gently. Gradually, it transformed into a plume of smoke, then a lick of fire.
I was impressed, but not surprised. Mel was the most self-reliant person I knew. Or maybe the second-most. First place would have to go to her father, Amis Sharpe. He could survive anywhere, from the African savanna to the Arctic Circle. Mr. Sharpe was as impressive as Mel’s mother. He called himself a naturalist, but what he really was was an adventurer. A man obsessed with desert, ocean, mountain, and valley. A man determined to see as much of this world as he possibly could before he died. I’m sure he spent at least half of every year jumping from shore to shore. He favored those places hard to access and little traveled. He didn’t like the idea of following in someone else’s footsteps.
So great was Mr. Sharpe’s love of adventure that he’d named Mel and her older sisters after famous explorers: Drake for Sir Francis Drake, who led an expedition around the world; Gaspar for Gaspar Corte-Real, the Portuguese navigator who sailed to Greenland; Tasman for Abel Tasman, discoverer of New Zealand; and Leif, for Leif Erikson, the first European to land in North America. Mel was the only Sharpe daughter named after a woman: Amelia Earhart, the famous aviatrix. Her father, the fifth time around, had shown some restraint and given his youngest a prettier, more conventional name.
The funny thing was my friend never went by “Amelia,” though she loved her namesake. She preferred “Mel.” She said it was just easier to say. Me—I think she wanted to be like her sisters, who had been named after guys.
I dropped a pile of kindling beside the fire. Fanning the flames with a palm frond, Mel told me to get more. “Everything you can find,” she said.
I obliged, passing Betty and Ming as I looked around. They were busy cracking coconut shells against some boulders that shouldered the lake. Betty motioned for me to come over. She gave me a sip of warm, sweet water straight from the shell. It tasted like heaven.
“Every coconut has only a little bit of water, but we’ll get what we can,” Betty said determinedly.
Making my way around the lake, I watched Avery and Rittika dive for more conch shells. Mel had told them to find ones with meat. They obeyed, I think, because they wanted to be in the water. Normally, Rittika would never follow Mel’s orders.
As the sun began to sink, everybody returned to the fire. Rittika and Avery carried five shells—they claimed they all had meat.
“Nice!” Mel told them.
“There are a lot down below the waterfall,” Avery replied.
“I think that’s the deepest part of conch lake,” Rittika added.
The name—Conch Lake—instantly stuck. Probably because it was Rittika who said it. She was always starting trends. Even now, we were all wearing the same chipped nail polish we’d seen her wear a month ago. Orange Crush, it was called.
Avery licked her lips. “God, I’m thirsty,” she complained. “The water’s so salty.”
“You drank out of Conch Lake?” Mel asked, her eyes widening.
“Just a little.”
“How much?”
“Like a soda can’s worth?”
“You stupid, stupid girl!”
Appalled, Avery stared at her.
“Salt water relieves your thirst only at first,” Mel explained. “But then you have to pee to get rid of all the extra sodium. You’ll be dehydrated soon, if you aren’t already.”
“So what do I do?” Avery demanded. Her hands were in knots again.
“To start, stop drinking from Conch Lake.”
“I get that. But what do I do about what I’ve already drunk? Am I—am I going to …”
“Get sick? Die?” Mel let the questions linger in the air. “Probably not,” she conceded.
“So what do I do?”
Mel looked at her in exasperation. “Have a seat,” she said, pointing to a boulder. “Maybe you’ll learn something.”
Avery did as told. Then Mel aligned the five conch shells in a row. “You have to be firm about it,” she said, picking up the first one in line. “The conch has a strong hold on its home. It uses a muscle with suction power. To get the meat out, you have two choices: smash the shell or break the seal.”
Rittika took a seat next to Avery. She picked up a conch and touched the shiny-slick animal that poked out of the mouth. It retracted immediately. Her finger retracted with equal speed.
“That’s just gross,” she said.
“It’s a mollusk,” Mel said matter-of-factly.
She took a second shell and banged its sharp tip into the spiral of the first. After a few direct hits, and a couple of wayward ones, she made a hole.
“Okay, that should do it.”
She proceeded to dredge out the meat with a thin stick. Free from its shell, it looked pretty disgusting. I’d been hoping for something like a supermarket chicken breast: pale pink and clean-scrubbed. This, by contrast, reminded me of the pig’s heart that our biology teacher kept in a jar of formaldehyde on his desk.
Mel pointed out the mud-brown “foot” that the conch had used to creep along the bottom of Conch Lake. She showed us the thick, rubbery outer skin and the digestive system with its blue-purple membrane. Each part was less appetizing than the last. She then laid the conch meat on a boulder and attacked it with a round stone.
“What the hell are you doing?” Rittika demanded.
“I’m simultaneously killing it and tenderizing it,” she replied, nonplussed.
Rittika and Avery stared at each other in dismay.
When Mel was through, she washed the meat in the lake, poked two sticks through it, and told me to hold it over the fire. I did what she asked without question. In truth, a part of me felt like I was in the middle of a dream, that none of this was quite real. I guess I was still in shock.
I turned the makeshift kebabs as Betty stoked the fire. Both of us watched Mel retrieve and clean the rest of the meat. She put these on skewers, too. When Betty offered to cook them, Mel took off her socks and shoes and headed for Conch Lake. I wondered why—I doubted she’d find more shells now. It was getting dark. From a distance I watched her lean over and drink water from cupped hands.
“Didn’t she just yell at Avery for doing that?” I said.
Betty nodded and shrugged.
Mel proceeded to move around the lake, drinking water from several different places. Then she made her way to the outcrop. I could tell from the way she moved—slowly and cautiously—that the outcrop was slippery.
At the top, she wobbled, then knelt. Cupping her hands again, she drank once more. What was going through her mind? I wondered. It was anyone’s guess. Finally, she returned to the fire. She looked at the browning conch, which was beginning to smell good, despite how it looked.
“How much longer?” I asked.
“A few more minutes.”
“What about those?” I asked her, nodding to the sticks. They were charred and ashy.
“They should hold up. Don’t let the meat fall into the fire. If you can do that, we’ll not only have dinner, but plenty of drinking water.”
“Are you kidding me?”
She shook her head.
“But I thought Conch Lake was salty,” I said.
“It’s brackish—part salt, part fresh. The ocean is reaching it. I don’t know how—maybe through underground springs. But the waterfall’s coming from a different source. That source is nonsaline.”
“Nonsaline? You mean drinkable?”
“Yup.”
I smiled widely, feeling glad for the first time since the crash. I handed the brittle sticks to Mel before she could object. Kicking off my shoes and socks, tugging off my blouse and skirt, I made a run for the outcrop.
“Hey!” she yelled in my wake, but I didn’t turn back.
I’d been right about the outcrop being slippery. I nearly fell as I climbed up. Slimy algae covered many of the boulders. The rocks wobbled underfoot. One actually rolled right out from under me, careening loudly down the bluff and into the water. The splash suddenly made me the center of attention. I scrambled up the last few rocks awkwardly, conscious of my scrawny butt, padded bra, and the big discolored patch on my shoulder—a birthmark I’d always been embarrassed about. It wasn’t like me to showcase my body. In fact, the words showcase and my body didn’t even belong in the same sentence. Flushed with embarrassment, I teetered on the outcrop. I was pretty sure I’d meet the same fate as that tumbling rock.
Ever so carefully, ever so slowly, I knelt. I cupped my hands as Mel had. With my back hunched, I took a sip of water. Clean, good, safe, lifesaving. After that first taste, I forgot that the girls were staring. I didn’t care how stupid I looked. All I cared about was getting more water into my body. I gulped and gulped. I must have drunk a gallon’s worth.
The girls, realizing what was happening, ran over to the waterfall. The coconut water had barely made a dent. Their tongues were still parched. Back on the ground, I told them about Mel’s find. Quickly, they formed a human chain up the boulders, holding hands so that no one would slip. It was a beautiful display of collaboration, but it made me uneasy somehow. Maybe I was still thinking about that premonition.
When I came back to Mel, the sun was almost gone, and the horizon was white-hot and ringed with lavender. Mel had just finished cooking the rest of the conchs. They lay on a palm frond.
“Go ahead, Rockwell. You must be starving,” she said.
I cringed a little at the sound of my nickname. “Don’t you want the first bite?”
“Who said I didn’t take it?”
Cautiously, I sampled a piece of conch. To my surprise, it was delicious: smoky and tender, chewy but not tough. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. I took a bite, then another. I had to restrain myself from eating more. There were seven of us girls; I couldn’t be greedy.
Mel called the others. They arrived in seconds, propelled by hunger and the mouthwatering smell. I watched with amusement as they devoured the meat. At Drake Rosemont, we were expected to eat like ladies. Entering students had to take a seminar on dining etiquette: how to cut meat correctly, which fork to use for which course, even which topics constituted passable mealtime conversation. It was entertaining to watch my classmates forget everything they’d learned. They licked their fingers and ripped the fibrous meat apart with their teeth. When Avery spit out a piece of shell, all I could think of was Miss Peck, the etiquette teacher. She would’ve fainted.
All too soon, the conchs were gone. Rittika declared she was still hungry—and she wasn’t alone.
“I’m going to look in the jungle,” she said. “I remember seeing banana trees.”
“But it’s dark now,” warned Avery.
“There’s still a little light. I’ll be fine.”
“I don’t advise it,” said Mel. “Why don’t you eat some coconut meat? We have plenty of that.”
Rittika looked at her contemptuously. “Who died and made you my mother?”
With a flip of her hair, she vanished into the jungle. Ming and Avery looked at each other, then ran after her.
I whispered to Mel that it wasn’t a bad idea—to look for fruit.
“I didn’t say it was,” she said with a sigh. “It’s just that—we might be in danger here. Wherever here is.”
I knew what she meant. The jungle looked much more ominous now that darkness was falling. Everything lay in shadows. Still, it was hard to ignore my rumbling stomach.
“Can’t I look right around Conch Lake?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “It’s up to you.”
Betty joined me in foraging the jungle in an area behind the outcrop. It didn’t take long before Anne Marie came, too. To our surprise, we spotted not only bananas but wild mangoes. We took as many as we could and trekked back to the fire. We ate the bananas quickly, but the mangoes were tough to peel. In the end, we smashed them against the rocks to split their tough skins. The fruit inside was tart, but I dug in anyway. Pulp ringing my mouth, juice running down my chin, I thought again of Miss Peck.
The others returned soon after. They, too, had found bananas. Our stomachs finally full, we felt revived. For a time we sat around the fire, adding sticks and leaves, and watching smoke drift steadily into the air until it blended into the night sky. Though we didn’t speak much, I knew we were all thinking about the boys. I wondered if they would ever find us—if they could find us.
I was glad when Mel whistled suddenly. Glad to have something to focus on other than worry. She stood up and held the conch over her head. By the light of the fire, it gleamed, demanding our attention.
“I know you’re tired,” she said, “but there are things we need to do.”
“Like rest,” Avery complained. “I feel like my body’s falling apart.”
“We’re all bruised and sore,” Mel replied. “But we can’t focus on ourselves. We still have to maintain the fire. Not to mention keep a lookout for the boys, rescuers, maybe even intruders. We should take turns. Then everyone will have a chance to sleep.”
I nodded but could see that Mel’s speech hadn’t motivated everyone. Avery lay down beside the fire and shut her eyes. Rittika sulked. The words have to and should didn’t apply to her. She might very well have been thinking about ways to find her brother, but the decision to act wouldn’t come from Mel.
“Does anyone know what time it is?” Ming asked absently.
“This says three, but I think it’s broken,” Anne Marie said. She was glancing at a gold watch she liked to wear. She’d told me once it had been her great-grandfather’s. As she held it to her ear, she looked ready to cry. “It stopped ticking,” she whispered.
“Who will take a turn?” Mel asked, running her finger around the spiral of the conch.
“I will,” I said.
“So will I,” Betty added, after a beat.
Sniffing a little, Anne Marie agreed, too.
Mel waited, staring at the other three girls, the ones who hadn’t answered. They ignored her. Looking back at Mel, I saw that her face was red. I figured she was steaming mad at the girls who refused to participate, but then I realized she was sunburned. Badly sunburned. A great pink banner waved across her pale forehead. The apples of her cheeks were on fire. I felt my own cheeks, relieved that they felt cool to the touch.
“So it’s the four of us, then,” she said softly, looking at Betty, Anne Marie, and me. She tilted her head and stared at the sky above Conch Lake. “At least it’s a clear night. A plane might be able to spot our fire.”
A ripple of hope went through me. After seeing Jeremiah’s body and the pilot’s eye and leg, I needed something positive to cling to. “You think they’re already looking for us?”
“Definitely. I’m guessing we’re big news back home. Think about it: a bunch of private school kids missing after a plane crash? The networks will be all over it. And don’t forget how famous Mr. Singh is. His name alone will make headlines.”
“Maybe no one knows we’re missing yet.”
“Don’t be silly. Of course they do.”
“How do you know?”
Mel looked at me as if I’d been born yesterday. “Sam, technology for tracking is very sophisticated. Satellites and radar monitor almost everything.”
“You said ‘almost.’ ”
“They know we went down,” she insisted.
I didn’t argue. What did I know about airplanes and radar anyway? Nothing. Mel was probably right. I decided to trust her. Even if I still had a bad feeling, I desperately wanted to believe everything was going to be okay.
“What I’m really concerned about is where we are,” she said. “Don’t you wonder? Is it a continent or an island? I have no idea, only that it’s somewhere in the South Pacific. I should have been paying better attention.”
I could understand Mel’s sense of bewilderment. It felt bizarre to have no sense of place, of context, almost like we didn’t exist at all—or rather, like we’d been reborn somewhere else, somewhere completely new.
“We’ll probably find out tomorrow,” I said.
“I hope so, Rockwell.”
I smiled at her weakly. Mel had started calling me Rockwell years ago, upon meeting my family over a Thanksgiving break. In contrast to her eccentric parents and siblings, she’d found mine as wholesome and all-American as a Norman Rockwell painting. She couldn’t get over our collective appearance: my dark, handsome father; my blond mother with her perfectly bobbed hair; my sister, Alexa, who was exceptionally pretty, if frail.
My mother set a simple but inviting Thanksgiving table. She covered our scuffed dining table with an old lace tablecloth, put out our good plates (unmatching, but unchipped), and decorated the place settings with cheerful little baskets of acorns and pinecones she’d collected herself. Thanksgiving was my mother’s favorite holiday. She liked the ceremony of it: the presentation of a perfect bird, saying grace, passing each dish around the table in a clockwise direction. Thanksgiving was one of the few days of the year when she wasn’t bitter.
Surprisingly, Mel didn’t see through the facade. She looked at us and listened to our polite, impersonal conversations and fell for the act. She didn’t notice that my mother was a little slow because she was doped up on Xanax. She didn’t realize that Alexa moved things around her plate but didn’t put anything in her mouth. When my father said that Alexa was home for Thanksgiving break, Mel didn’t dig deeper to find out the real story. Alexa was home indefinitely. She’d lost so much weight while at college that she’d passed out a couple of times. The administration told her to take time off and get treatment. She wouldn’t be able to restart school midway through the year, so she would be bumped back to the next graduating class.
The college probably thought it was doing Alexa a favor, but the truth was, it was making her situation worse. My parents were ignoring her problem. Alexa told me they thought therapy was expensive and indulgent; what she needed was willpower. So now she was stuck at home, in the middle of the usual family dysfunction, too weak and depressed to fend for herself.
At one point, Alexa took me into her room to hide. That was our Thanksgiving tradition: Escape the ’rents as soon as possible, for as long as possible.
“I knew it would be bad to be home,” she told me. “But it’s even worse than I thought.”
“Why?”
“They don’t even speak to each other anymore,” she confessed. “They’re either arguing or silent, one or the other, every day. I wish they had the balls to divorce once and for all.”
“You know they never will. They live in their own warped little bubble.”
Alexa nodded. “Listen, from now on, I think you should stay away. Find somewhere else to go during school vacations. It’s not safe here.”
“What do you mean ‘not safe’?”
“You know what I mean,” she replied pointedly. And I did. I knew our father took his anger out on Alexa, sometimes with words, sometimes leaving bruises and welts on her skin.
Seeing my sister this way, I didn’t want to leave her all alone. I offered to drop out of Drake Rosemont and return to my old high school so she’d have an ally, but she shook her head.
“I say this because I love you: You got away, now stay away.”
“I don’t want to stay away. I want to be with you.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Of course I’m going to worry!”
She wrapped her arms around herself—maybe because she was cold (she was always cold), maybe because she needed to comfort herself. “I don’t have to stick around here forever, you know. I’m eighteen. I could go anywhere.”
“Where would you go?”
That’s when she faltered. Her bravado had more holes in it than Swiss cheese.
“Just don’t worry,” she repeated.
But I did.
That Thanksgiving, Mel didn’t know about my conversation with my sister. She was too busy chatting with my father about this and that. He could be charming when he wanted to be—that was his trick. How he fooled people. So she remained ignorant of certain things, the most important things. She didn’t even suspect anything when I asked her if I could start staying at her place during breaks. She just figured I preferred the wildness of her house to the formality of mine. Ironically, she clung to the idea that my family was some stereotypical ideal. A Rockwell painting. I knew she meant it as a compliment, but still I was embarrassed. And upset. Though she was my best friend, she had no idea how many skeletons I hid in the closet.
“Did you hear me?” she asked, shaking me into the present. “I’m going to take the first shift—patrolling the area. Betty and Anne Marie said they’d keep an eye on the fire. So you’re free to sleep for a while, if you want.”
“I think I’ll go for a swim,” I replied, getting up. “I’m too stressed to sleep.”
“Suit yourself.”
Though the night had cooled the jungle, Conch Lake was still the temperature of bathwater. It sloshed gently around my face as I floated on my back, kicking my feet, watching stars flicker in the sky. They were much brighter here than they were at home, almost like they were different stars altogether.
Water plugged my ears until I heard nothing but the lake itself: lapping, lulling, alive. I felt shut in. Cradled. I loved the feeling—it reminded me of swim lessons at Drake Rosemont. At the end of our sessions, the instructor usually let us have a few minutes to ourselves. I always looked forward to that time, when I could just float. In the water, I didn’t think or worry. It was as if I were suspended above my problems.
The air felt brisk when I emerged and rejoined the other girls. Ming and Avery had given up trying to sleep. Now they were sitting around Rittika, who was standing. She spoke animatedly. All eyes were fixed on her long limbs, caramel skin, and flashbulb-bright teeth. She was like Helen of Troy, the definition of perfect female beauty.
Staring at her, I felt a familiar gnawing of envy and admiration. I wasn’t sure which I wanted more, to hate her or be her friend—or maybe both? All I knew for sure was that in the world of teenage girls, Rittika’s looks gave her staggering power.
Google revealed that Rittika wasn’t the only gorgeous girl in her family. Her mother was a former Miss World. When I looked at old pictures of her on the web, I saw that Mrs. Singh had been every bit as stunning as Rittika was now. It seemed unfair that any family should have such good genes.
I was still studying Rittika when the newcomers arrived. They came from the jungle, drawn by the smoke, our voices, and the moony glow of bare skin, the glisten of Rittika’s in particular. From behind the trees came three—tall, broad-shouldered, smelling of moss, musk, blood, and earth. We identified them first by the long shape of their shadows.
“The boys!” Ming screeched.