On the Island

  “Is that yours?” I asked.

  “Yep. I figured it would wash up eventually,” he said.

  We sat on the beach, the ocean breeze drying our bodies.

  “Why did your parents choose these islands?” I asked. “They’re so far away.”

  “The scuba diving. It’s supposed to be some of the best diving in the world. My dad and I are both certified,” T.J. said, digging his toes into the white sand. “When I was really sick, he made a big deal out of telling everyone that as soon as I got better, we’d take this major vacation. Like I gave a shit.”

  “You didn’t want to come here?”

  T.J. shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “Nobody wants to spend the whole summer with their family. I wanted to stay home and hang out with my friends. Then they told me you were coming and I had to make up all the work I missed or I’d have to do tenth grade over. That really pissed me off.” He looked at me apologetically. “No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “They didn’t listen to me, though. My mom and dad convinced themselves that this trip would be the greatest thing ever for our family. But even my sisters were mad. They wanted to go to Disney World.”

  “I’m sorry, T.J.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “How old are your sisters?”

  “Alexis is nine and Grace is eleven. They drive me nuts sometimes – they never stop talking – but they’re okay,” he said. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “I have one sister, Sarah. She’s three years older than I am and she’s married to a guy named David. They have two kids – Joe’s five and Chloe’s two. I miss everyone so much. I can’t imagine what they’re going through, especially my mom and dad.”

  “I miss my family, too,” T.J. said.

  I scanned the brilliant blue sky and stared out at the turquoise water, listening to the calming sound of the waves hitting the reef.

  “It’s actually very beautiful here,” I said.

  “Yeah,” T.J. agreed. “It is.”

  Chapter 12 – T.J.

  One of the hardest things about being on the island was the boredom. It took time to gather food and firewood, and go fishing two or three times a day, but we still had too many hours left over. We explored and we swam, but we also talked and it didn’t take long before I felt almost as comfortable with Anna as I did with my friends; she listened to what I had to say.

  She asked how I was doing emotionally. Guys are supposed to be tough, and Ben and I sure as hell never sat around talking about how we felt, but I admitted to Anna that I got a weird feeling in my stomach whenever I thought about whether they’d ever find us. I told her I got scared sometimes. I said I didn’t always sleep well. She said she didn’t either.

  I liked sharing a bed with Anna, though. Sometimes she curled up right next to me, with her head on my shoulder, and once when I slept on my side, she pressed her chest against my back and tucked her knees into the space behind mine. She did it in her sleep, and it didn’t mean anything, but it felt good. I’d never spent the whole night with a girl before. Emma and I had only slept together for a few hours and that was mostly because she was so sick.

  I liked Anna. A lot. Without her, the island would have really sucked.

  ***

  No one rescued us, so I missed my follow-up appointment with the oncologist at the end of August. Anna mentioned it at breakfast one morning.

  “I’m worried about you not being able to go to the doctor,” she said, handing me a piece of cooked fish. “Careful, it’s hot.”

  “I feel fine,” I told her, blowing on the fish to cool it before putting it in my mouth.

  “Yes, but you were pretty sick, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  She handed me the water bottle. I took a drink and set it down.

  “Tell me about it,” she said.

  “My mom thought I had the flu. I had a fever, and I started sweating at night. I lost some weight. Then the doctor found a lump on my neck that turned out to be a swollen lymph node. They ran some tests after that: X-rays, biopsy, MRI, and a PET scan. Then they told me I had stage III Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”

  “Did you start chemo right away?”

  “Yeah. It didn’t work though. They also found a mass in my chest so I had to have radiation, too.”

  “That sounds awful.”

  She cut off a piece of breadfruit, and handed the rest to me.

  “It wasn’t fun. I was in and out of the hospital a lot.”

  “How long were you sick?”

  “About a year-and-a-half, I guess. For a while, I wasn’t doing very well. The doctors didn’t know what to think.”

  “That had to be really scary, T.J.”

  “Well, they tried to keep me in the dark, which I hated. I only knew it was bad because suddenly no one would look me in the eye when I asked questions. Or they’d change the subject. That scared me.”

  “I bet it did.”

  “At first, my friends visited me all the time, but when I didn’t get better, some of them stopped coming around.” I took another drink of water and handed the bottle to Anna. “You know my friend, Ben?”

  “Yes.”

  “He came every single day. He spent hours watching T.V. with me, or just sitting in a chair by my hospital bed when I felt too sick to move or talk. My parents and the doctor would have these long conversations, out in the hall or whatever, and I’d ask Ben to try and listen. He’d tell me everything they said, no matter what. He knew I just wanted to hear it straight up, you know?”

  “Of course,” she said. “He sounds like a great friend, T.J.”

  “Yeah, he is. Do you have a best friend?”

  “Yes, her name is Stefani. We’ve known each other since kindergarten.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  She nodded. “Friends are important. I understand why you wanted to spend your summer with them.”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking about everyone back home in Chicago. They probably thought I was dead.

  Anna stood up and walked to the woodpile. “Will you tell me if you notice any symptoms?” She grabbed some wood and threw it on the fire.

  “Sure. Just don’t ask me if I feel okay all the time. My mom did, and it drove me nuts.”

  “I won’t. But I’ll worry a little.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  Chapter 13 – Anna

  The bright sunlight woke me, illuminating the interior of the life raft. T.J. was already gone, out gathering firewood or fishing. I yawned, stretched my arms and legs, and crawled out of bed. My suitcase was in the lean-to, and I reached in and grabbed a bikini, returning to the life raft to change. Dressed, I lifted the nylon flaps to let in some fresh air.

  T.J. walked up with the fish he caught for breakfast. He smiled. “Hey.”

  “Good morning.”

  I checked the breadfruit and coconut trees, scooping up everything on the ground and bringing them back to the lean-to. T.J. cracked coconuts while I cleaned and cooked the fish.

  After breakfast we brushed our teeth, rinsing with rainwater, and I marked off the date in my datebook. September already. Hard to believe.

  “Want to go swimming?” T.J. asked.

  “Sure.”

  Last week, T.J. had spotted two fins, just outside the reef. We panicked and left the water, but as we watched they came all the way into the lagoon. Dolphins. We waded slowly into the water and they didn’t swim away, waiting patiently as we approached them.

  “They almost act like they’re here to introduce themselves,” I said in amazement.

  T.J. petted one and laughed when it blew water out its blowhole. I had never seen such social creatures. They swam with us for a while and then left abruptly, on some sort of marine schedule.

  “Maybe the dolphins will come back today,” I said, as I followed T.J. down to the shore.

  T.J. stripped off his shirt and waded into the lagoon. “That would be
cool. I want to ride one.”

  We entertained ourselves by using one of the collapsible plastic containers for a snorkel mask. There were schools of brightly colored fish – purple, blue, orange, and yellow and black striped. We spotted a sea turtle and an eel poking its head up from the ocean floor. I swam away fast when I saw that.

  “No dolphins,” I said after T.J. and I had been swimming for at least an hour. “We must have missed them.”

  “We can try again after our nap.” Suddenly, he pointed toward the shoreline. “Anna, look over there.”

  A crab leg stuck out of the sand, the pincer opening, and closing. We ran out of the water.

  “I’ll grab my sweatshirt,” he said.

  “Hurry, it’s trying to bury itself.”

  T.J. returned in record time, wrapped his sweatshirt around the crab, and pulled it out of the sand. We went back to the lean-to and T.J. shook it out onto the fire.

  “Oh God,” I said, thinking for a second about the crab’s violent demise.

  I got over it fast.

  We cracked the legs with the pliers from the toolbox, gorging ourselves. The crabmeat – even without hot melted butter – tasted better than anything I’d eaten since we’d been on the island. Now that we knew where they buried themselves, T.J. and I would have to check the shoreline daily. I was so tired of fish, coconut, and breadfruit that I could hardly choke them down sometimes, and adding crabmeat would provide a little variety, something that was desperately lacking in our diet.

  When the crab was nothing more than a pile of split shells, I took the blanket out of the life raft and spread it under the coconut tree. We stretched out next to each other. The shade from the tree helped keep us cool during the hottest part of the day, and it had become our favorite place to nap.

  A big, creepy, hairy spider – its body the size of a quarter – crawled lazily across T.J.’s shoulder and I flicked it off him with my finger. “That one even freaked me out,” I said.

  T.J shuddered. He hated spiders, always shaking our blanket out, checking for them before he put it back in the life raft. Personally, I hated snakes. I’d already stepped on one and the only thing that kept me from being completely traumatized was the fact that I was wearing my tennis shoes. I hated to think about stepping on one barefoot; whether or not they might be poisonous was too stressful to think about.

  I thought T.J. had already fallen asleep, but then he said, “What do you think’s gonna happen to us, Anna?” His voice sounded drowsy.

  “I don’t know. I think we just keep doing what we’re doing and try to hold on until someone finds us.”

  “We’re not doing too bad,” T.J. said, rolling over onto his stomach. “I bet that would surprise a lot of people.”

  “It surprises me.” My full stomach was making me drowsy, too. “It’s not like we had a choice, T.J. We either figured it out or we died.”

  T.J. lifted his head off the blanket and looked at me with a contemplative expression. “Do you think they had funerals for us back home?”

  “Yes.” The thought of our families holding memorials hurt so much that I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself to sleep, hoping to escape the images of a crowded church, an empty altar, and my parents’ tear-stained faces.

  After our nap we gathered firewood, an endless, tedious chore. We kept the fire burning constantly, partly so T.J. wouldn’t have to make a new one and partly because we both still held out hope that a plane would fly overhead. When it did, we’d be ready, our pile of green leaves sending up smoke signals as soon as we threw them on the flames.

  We added the firewood to the pile in the lean-to. Then I filled the container that had held the life raft with seawater, added a capful of Woolite, and swished our dirty clothes around in it.

  “It must be laundry day,” T.J. said.

  “Yep.”

  We strung a rope between two trees and hung the clothes to dry. We didn’t have much; T.J. wore shorts and nothing else. I spent my days in a bikini, sleeping in his T-shirt and a pair of shorts at night.

  Later that night, after dinner, T.J. asked if I wanted to play cards.

  “Poker?”

  He laughed. “What, you didn’t get your ass kicked enough last time?”

  T.J. had taught me how to play, but I wasn’t very good. At least, that’s what he thought. I was starting to get the hang of it, and I was about to take him down.

  Six hands later – I won four – he said, “Huh, I must be having an off night. Want to play checkers instead?”

  “Okay.”

  He drew a checkerboard in the sand. We used pebbles for the checkers and played three games.

  “One more?” T.J. asked.

  “No, I’m going to take a bath.”

  I was already worried about our soap and shampoo supply. I’d packed a lot of each, but T.J. and I had agreed to only bathe every other day. Just in case. We stayed somewhat clean since we swam a lot, but we didn’t always smell the greatest.

  “Your turn,” I said, when I returned from the shore.

  “I miss showering,” T.J. said.

  After he bathed, we went to bed. T.J. closed the roll-down door of the life raft and lay down next to me.

  “I’d give anything for a Coke,” he said.

  “Me too. A big one, with lots of ice.”

  “And I want some bread. Not breadfruit. Bread. Like a big sandwich, with potato chips and a pickle.”

  “Pizza, Chicago style,” I said.

  “A big sloppy cheeseburger.”

  “Steak,” I said. “And a baked potato with cheese and sour cream.”

  “Chocolate pie for dessert.”

  “I know how to make chocolate pie. My mom taught me.”

  “The kind with the chocolate shavings on top?”

  “Yes. When we get off this island, I’ll make you one.” I sighed. “We’re just torturing ourselves.”

  “I know. Now I’m hungry. Well, I was already kinda hungry.”

  I turned onto my side and got comfortable. “Good night, T.J.”

  “Good night.”

  ***

  T.J. laid the fish he’d caught on the ground next to me and sat down.

  “School’s been in session for a couple weeks,” I said. I made an X on the calendar, put the datebook away, and started cleaning our breakfast.

  T.J. must have noticed my expression because he said, “You seem sad.”

  I nodded. “It’s hard for me, knowing another teacher is standing in front of my students right now.”

  I taught sophomore English, and I loved shopping for school supplies and selecting books for my bookshelves. I always filled a big mug on my desk with pens and there wouldn’t be any left by the end of the year.

  “So you like your job?”

  “I love it. My mom was a teacher – she retired last year – and I always knew I’d be one, too. When I was little I wanted to play school all the time and she used to give me gold stars so I could grade my stuffed animal’s homework.”

  “I bet you’re a really good teacher.”

  I smiled. “I try to be.” I placed the cleaned fish on my cooking rock and positioned it close to the flames. “Can you believe you’d be starting your junior year?”

  “No. It seems like I haven’t been to school in a long time.”

  “Do you like school? Your mom told me you were a good student.”

  “It’s okay. I wanted to catch up with my class. I had hoped to get back on the football team, too. I had to quit when I got sick.”

  “So you like sports?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Especially football and basketball. Do you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you play any?”

  “Well, I run. I ran two half-marathons last year, and I ran track and played basketball in high school. Sometimes I do yoga.” I checked the fish and pulled the rock away from the fire so it could cool. “I miss exercising.”

  I couldn’t imagine running now. Even if we had e
nough food to justify it, running around the island would remind me of a hamster on a wheel. Moving forward but getting absolutely nowhere.

  ***

  T.J. walked up with a backpack full of firewood. “Happy birthday,” I said.

  “It’s September 20th?” He threw a log on the fire and sat down next to me.

  I nodded. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get you a present. The island mall sucks.”

  T.J. laughed. “That’s okay, I don’t need a present.”

  “Maybe you can have a big party when we get off this island.”

  T.J. shrugged. “Yeah, maybe.”

  T.J. seemed older than seventeen. Reserved almost. Maybe facing serious health problems eliminated some of the immature behavior that presented itself when you had nothing more to worry about than getting your driver’s license, cutting class, or breaking curfew.

  “I can’t believe it will be October soon,” I said. “The leaves are probably starting to change back home.”

  I loved fall – football games, taking Joe and Chloe to the pumpkin patch, and feeling a chill in the air. Those were some of my favorite things.

  I stared at the palm trees, their green leaves rippling in the breeze. Sweat trickled slowly down the side of my face, and the constant smell of coconut on my hands reminded me of suntan lotion.

  It would always be summer on the island.

  Chapter 14 – T.J.

  The rain came down sideways. Thunder crashed, and lightning lit up the sky. The wind shook the life raft, and I worried it might relocate us halfway down the beach. I made a mental note: anchor life raft to something tomorrow.

  “Are you awake?” I asked Anna.

  “Yes.”

  The storm raged for hours. We huddled together with the blanket pulled over our heads. The thin nylon covering the roof and hanging down the sides of the life raft was all that protected us from the lightning, which was like having no protection at all. We didn’t say much, just waited for it to end and when it finally did, we went back to sleep, exhausted.