Adrift: Chapters 10–18

I couldn’t remember a day with less humidity.

“I’m going to distill it,” Dri said.

“The idea is the water evaporates. It leaves the salt behind. The droplets condense on the inside top of the jug and drip out the nozzle.”

She stretched a flap of tarp over the top of the crate and tied it down with an elastic cord from the hem of JoJo’s sweatshirt.

If you press your finger down into the plastic, the droplets will run toward that spot, the way the droplets in our little distiller setup here are going to run toward the depression the battery is making in the tarp.

I didn’t see anything until he gave me the binoculars.

“Even if they saw it,” John said, “it’s just one of a billion glints on the waves.”

Dri tapped up JoJo’s compass app, but it didn’t work. “John, let me borrow your wristwatch,” she said. She pointed the hour hand of John’s Timex at the sun. “Midway between the hour hand and noon on the dial is south.”

“She feels a kinship with you, John, yet she doesn’t know why.”

“She takes a picture to commemorate every day,” JoJo said.

“You can’t acknowledge her, John?”
“I’m acknowledging her,” he said. “Or I’m acknowledging her pain anyway.

“Your grudge goes so deep?”

The only thing I can do to help her is keep a lookout, and that’s what I’m doing. Coddling her isn’t going to save her or us.

She told us yesterday morning that she was going out onto the water that night, and I didn’t do anything but laugh, even after she said she was serious. I think this provoked her, you see? She saw my laughter as a dare.

There’s no reason for them to think we’re in trouble without something like a flare.

It hung on the horizon like blood spray.

Stef looked more than asleep, nearer to comatose.

The water, the sky, the way Dri’s eyes caught the twilight and turned green-gold ... the colors were surreal, movie-like.

The heat radiated outward from where the bullet went in just below my left shoulder blade.

It felt like a betrayal to Mr. Costello, talking about the shooting with anybody except John or maybe my dad.

Payments were going to have to be made, favors returned, accounts reckoned, sacrifices honored, all the things John and I had managed to dodge until now.

I did freeze. I never thought I was this kind of person, that I would falter in an emergency situation.

I always imagined myself as someone who would be capable in a crisis.

Well, maybe not John. He is stonelike in his stillness at times. I mean this as a compliment. Perfectly steady, your friend.

It was a deliberate act, and it was harder to bear because I was the one who had provoked it.

The more I tried to push it away, the harder it pushed back at me, into my consciousness.

He tried to revive her, mouth to mouth, the way I had two nights before.

Her chest expanded unnaturally, too quickly, and collapsed just as unnaturally as JoJo hyperventilated her.

We funneled the rain into the milk crate Dri had lined with the plastic tarp.

Still, I didn’t dare to suggest that maybe we wanted to get the corpse out of the boat before the skin split.

It was just being what it was, a mindless, merciless star that would shine on whatever got in its way, beauty or horror, without prejudice, with equal heat.

I was stating a fact, that we got ourselves out here, and we’re the ones who have the biggest incentive to get ourselves back to land.

Relying on magical thinking, like we’re blessed or whatever, isn’t going to save us.

“I was famished yesterday,” she said, “but today not so much. Does that mean I’m losing it?”

“I used to think the ocean teemed with fish, but it’s like the land. Everybody wants to live in the prime spots, and the rest is desert.”

She died like she lived. She lived like she could die at any moment. She didn’t squander life.

She had opened up to me, had let me into her beautiful, shiny life, into Stef’s tortured one, and now it was my turn.

“The boat dumped a rotten carcass or a spoiled haul, right? The flies piggybacked on the dead fish until they picked up Stef’s scent.”

I regretted it now, my need to share or whatever, to infect her with the sense of loss that took hold of me under the train tracks that night and never let me go, as if talking about it would halve the pain instead of double it.

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Costello/Halloway
Date: Saturday, August 21, 12:50 PM—Day 4
MISSING PERSONS SUFFOLK COUNTY 314-0818 COSTELLO/ HALLOWAY
***EXPANDED***
Also presumed missing:
Gonzaga, Driana, 17, of Manhattan
Gonzaga, Estefania, 18, of Rio de Janeiro
Martins, Joao, 18, of Rio de Janeiro