The Raft (8 page)

I pulled myself up on one side of the upside-down raft, forcing the other side to tip up. I took the bailer and filled it, then tossed the water up on the back side as I watched underneath for any water dripping. The first ten times, I saw nothing. And I was getting too tired to keep doing it. Then, finally I saw a drip. I quickly filled the bailer again, aiming for the same area. And water came through.

“Max! I found it!”

Once I’d seen the pinprick hole, it appeared so obvious I wondered how I’d missed it before. I got out from under the raft and clambered partway up the bottom of the raft and found the leak. Carefully, I squeezed out some of the glue stuff and stuck the patch on.

“Nice job,” said Max.

Then I slipped back into the water and bobbed there, trying not to lose my mind.

There was an emergency valve, and I blew into that until the raft seemed completely inflated.

I wanted to crawl back inside so bad. Wet and shivering, I wanted out of the water. But Max made me wait a little more, just to be sure the patch held.

“Okay,” he said finally.

I had to shove the raft back over, so I held both hands on one edge. “One … two … three!” I grunted and shoved. The raft went up on its edge and started to flip, just as a gust of wind caught hold, rolling the raft end over end, like a coin on a floor, away from me.

“Noooooooooooooooooooooo!”

We watched helplessly as the raft finally came to a stop, right side up, about fifty yards away.

Max wasn’t strong enough.

I would have to swim for it.

twenty-nine

On my stomach, I started to stroke with my arms as I kicked. But I didn’t like the water coming up in my face, and the ditty bag on my arm hampered my progress. So I flipped over on my back.

Even as a kid, I had done okay on my back.

I breathed out. That was better. Much better. I didn’t feel like anything was dangling.

But I also couldn’t see where I was going, could only guess. I pulled with my arms and kicked for a count of ten, then stopped to turn and see where the raft was.

After doing that three or four times, I realized I wasn’t even gaining on the raft. I might even be losing. So I did the dog paddle, which seemed even slower than my backstroke had been.

Max was close behind me and called out, “You need to swim on your stomach. Just aim for the raft, hold your breath, and go.”

I didn’t want to.

Then he asked exactly what I’d been asking myself: “Do you want to be stuck out here, without the raft?”

No.

I took the ditty bag off my wrist and put the bungee cord around my neck, setting the ditty bag on my back. It was very tight, almost constricting, but at least it would stay put while I swam.

Turning back on my stomach, I took a deep breath, put my head in the water, and did a pathetic front crawl as fast and far as I could until I had to breathe. Then I paused, floated for a bit, just to the edge of panic, and then went again.

I swore
if
, no,
when
I got out of this, I would learn to swim properly. How stupid, to not know how to swim.
Everyone
knew how to swim.

I paused, floated again. Did the raft seem closer?

No. With no weight in it, the raft was cruising along, much faster than I was. If I didn’t hurry, it would be out of reach before I knew it.

I adjusted the ditty bag, held my breath, and stuck my face in the water.

My arms and legs were strong, I could do the strokes. But rhythmic breathing. I could never get the rhythmic breathing part. I’d tried and tried, through swim lesson after swim lesson.

I stopped again and bobbed, too weary to be panicked at the dangling of my limbs.

My breaths were deep and ragged, and my arms and legs burned. The raft was about twenty yards off, so I had gained.

But I had to keep going.

I had to make it to the raft. I had to make it. I had to.

Had to.

I sucked in a breath and went, pulling as hard as I could with my arms as my legs kicked until they threatened to fall off. My breath was used up, it was time to surface. I stuck my head up, tried to swim that way, but it didn’t work. Still, I kept stroking and kicking, as I took another breath and stuck my head in again.

Make it make it make it make it

My lungs were ready to burst but I kept going, my arms and legs burning, until I couldn’t do it anymore. I hoped the raft was there, hoped it was within reach. Because I couldn’t swim anymore.

I was spent.

I stopped, lifting my head to suck in sweet air. I hoped the raft was there, where it had to be.
Was it there?

I opened my eyes to see.

thirty

The raft was there, only a few yards away. I flipped to my back and kicked the rest of the way until my head bumped into it. I turned over and held on to the side until I caught my breath. I pulled the ditty bag from around my neck and dropped it into the raft. Then I tried to pull myself in, but my arms were too tired.

So I tried putting one leg over the side.

No luck.

No way was I staying in that water.

I put both my elbows up on the raft and pulled until my chin was there. Then, grunting, I heaved one leg up on the side. I wasn’t there yet, but I wasn’t going to lose the progress I’d made, so I lay there awhile, panting, waiting for my strength to come back.

At last, with a final burst, I pulled myself up and over, and I slid face-first into the raft, where I just lay, recovering. Then I remembered the whole goal of my ordeal. The patch.

Was anything wet?

Other than the water the raft had picked up in its tumble across the waves, there didn’t seem to be any more. As far as I could tell, there were no leaks. Realizing I’d been holding my breath, I let it out.

“One issue solved.”

I sat up. Max was already in the raft and sat opposite of me, where he leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

I hoped the patch job was enough to hold both of us.

Wiped out, I rolled over on my back and glanced up at the sky. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere. No rain meant no drinking water. My throat was so dry. And then I remembered my nose. Wincing as I touched the diamond stud with my fingertips, I twisted it slightly and nearly passed out from the pain. My eyes watered and I squeezed them shut, moaning as I tried to stay still, tried to will the pain away. I took deep breaths, like my mom had taught me when I was eight and broke my arm.

I hadn’t put alcohol on the piercing since before leaving AJ’s. Probably close to forty-eight hours. Could it already be infected?

Max wasn’t watching, and still sat there with his eyes closed.

I filled the yellow bailer with salt water, held my breath, and stuck my nose in it. It stung. And while I wasn’t sure, it seemed like salt water might help. Even though the guy had told me to stay away from the ocean, my mom made me gargle with salt water when I had a sore throat, so it seemed like there had to be something healing about it. I took a breath and dunked my nose back in a couple more times.

It seemed like weeks had passed since that day I’d gotten my nose pierced. How long had it really been? Two or three days?

I sighed.

I had been a different person, just thinking about stupid stuff like diamonds in my nose. Set on doing something my parents didn’t want me to do, simply because I could.

My parents.

I wanted to be with them, even if they didn’t always let me do what I wanted. I didn’t care. I would never care again if I could only get back to them.

My muscles still burned and I laid my head on the cushy edge of the raft, to rest for a moment, and shut my eyes. “I’m just resting for a little while, okay, Max?”

When I awoke, the sun was still high in the sky. My face was on fire, and I had a pounding headache. My thirst was becoming unbearable.

I pinched a piece of skin on the back of my hand and let go. The skin stayed up, in a little mound, before slowly going back.

Sick.

Normally, if you pinch the skin on your hand like that, it springs back immediately. But when you’re dehydrated it’ll stay up, take longer to bounce back.

I pinched the back of Max’s hand. I had to turn away when I saw his skin took longer to settle than mine had. So much longer.

Although, maybe he was always like that. I had no way of knowing.

I was stuck on a raft with a person I knew hardly anything about. I wondered if being there with someone I knew would have been easier. But there were plenty of adults I knew that I most definitely would not want to be stuck on a raft with.

I had my own theories about adults. Mostly, they fell into two categories. The first, the ones I called the Regurgitators, think you want to know everything about them. Even when they ask you a question, like “So what do you like to do?” they still find a way to turn it around and make it about themselves.

The second are the Hoovers, they keep asking and asking and asking about you, sucking you dry of every bit of your life story.

Of course, some adults ask and tell equally.

“Max, where are you from?” I waited a moment, but he didn’t answer.

And then there are people like Max. I put him in the couldn’t-give-a-crap category. I knew he was injured and maybe sick, but still …

Max didn’t seem shy. He didn’t seem to care what I was doing on the plane without my parents, why I lived out in Midway, none of that.

Maybe I was being mean, since he did save my life. But I was stuck in a raft with him. And I was beginning to think he might be the last person I ever talked to.

There were a few things I could figure out on my own. He was a pilot. He was definitely new in the G-1 job, and he probably just got his pilot’s license in the last few years. And he had to go to some kind of aviation school to do that, so he must be smart. Pilots had to know math and physics and other difficult subjects.

He probably had a girlfriend. No ring, so no wife. Although he could have lost it or maybe just didn’t wear it. Or he could be divorced. There really wasn’t any way to tell much at all. Which brought me back to the silver thumbprint. It had to belong to a girl. A girl that meant enough to Max that he wore her print around his neck.

My eyes went to the ditty bag and that spiral notebook with handwriting in it. A journal? Max didn’t seem like the journaling type.

Just as I was seriously thinking about invading his privacy, he moved. “That’s mine,” he said.

“I know, sorry.” I didn’t want to hand him the bag. If he hadn’t seen me freaking out in the water over the Skittles, he’d only have to look in the bag to see they were gone and then he’d know what I’d done. So I put it back in the corner of the raft.

“It’s my journal.”

“I didn’t read it.” It was the truth; I couldn’t feel guilty about that.

“What do you want to know?”

Was he going to open up and actually talk about himself? I shrugged. “I’m not nosy, I just … I mean, we’re stuck here, together, and it’s weird I don’t know anything about you really. Like where you’re from.”

He shrugged. “I don’t like to talk about where I’m from. People have a way of making you feel stupid when you aren’t from somewhere they’ve heard of. Like being from a city everyone knows about makes you better than other people.”

I nodded. “Sometimes I feel that way too. No one has even been to where I’m from.”

“I’m not from anywhere that anyone has ever heard of. I grew up on a ranch in the high desert of eastern Oregon, middle of flippin’ nowhere. Nearest Walmart was two hours away.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’ve got that beat. On Midway, my nearest Walmart is thousands of miles away.”

“Our town was okay. Not much there, that’s for sure. A McDonald’s. A farm and ranch store. Subway. Rite-Aid. An old movie theater. But the screen was dark and the sound sucked.”

I smiled. “We have an old theater on Midway.” My nose wrinkled. “It smells musty. There’s a DVD player rigged up so we can play movies on the big screen. Once I was in there by myself, watching an old World War II movie. All of a sudden, I felt like the theater was full, full of people. I turned around to see, but there was still only me.”

Max went on. “At school, sports were pretty big, but I wasn’t, so I wrestled. Even though my natural weight was closer to a hundred thirty, I wrestled one twelve because seniors had the other slots all sewed up.” He paused. “That whole season, I was hungry. Starving.”

My stomach rumbled. I knew how he felt.

“Every night when I got home, dinner was a banana and fifty push-ups.”

I shook my head. “That sounds barbaric.” But the thought of a banana was almost heavenly.

“Not getting to drink as much water as I wanted was almost worse.”

As dry as my throat was, I had to agree with that.

“But the absolute worst was Christmas. I didn’t get to eat any of Ma’s cookies. She made fudge, divinity, caramel pretzels, cookies with chunks of Snickers in them, some with Rolos. Spritz. My favorites were the frosted snowmen sugar cookies.”

I licked my parched lips. I wanted one of those snowmen. So
bad.

He continued. “Once, the night before a tournament, I went down to the kitchen after everyone was asleep. I told myself I was just going to get a glass of water. But instead, I went into the pantry where all the cookies were. I thought, just one. One Spritz wreath. A hundred fifty calories. I could run those off in a half hour. But it was so good, I ate another. A blue diamond. Another, a green cross … then the snowmen … the snickerdoodles.” He stopped for a moment. “Peanut-butter cookies with the chocolate kiss in the middle.”

“I make those with my mom.” I teared up a little.

“How many calories? Ten thousand? And I had to make one twelve in less than eight hours. I started to sweat, maybe from all the sugar … maybe from panic. There was only one thing to do: I went over to the backdoor and stepped into my work boots without tying the laces. Got a jacket on and scuffed outside to the nearest snowbank. Snow was falling, and the flakes sparkled in the moonlight. I admired the night for a moment. Then, I stuck my finger down my throat.”