She climbed back up easily, the well-toned muscles in her arms and legs flexing with the well-practiced movements. “We have to spread out, though. I’ve just scared the fish from this pool, so we have to move. You guys make sure you have at least one empty rock between you, that way you won’t scare each other’s prey away.”
They followed Candi’s directions and spread out, examining the water for potential dinner candidates. The first one to try their hand at spearing was Kevin.
“I see one,” he said in a loud stage whisper.
“Okay! Remember to spear a bit behind where you think the fish is.”
“Raaah booyah!!!!” was the next thing they heard, then a big splash.
“What the hell?” Jonathan turned around to see what Kevin was doing.
Kevin came up with an empty spear. “Dammit, missed that sucker. Hmm.” He looked confused, staring into the water and then at the top of his spear. “I think there’s something wrong with my spear.”
Candi laughed. “There’s nothing wrong with your spear, it’s your technique.”
Kevin looked hurt. “What’s wrong with my technique?”
“Maybe next time use a little less Rambo and a lot more stealth.”
Kevin frowned at her but didn’t say anything.
Jonathan was next up, but he didn’t have any better luck, even though he was less enthusiastic with his war cry.
“This isn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be.”
Candi looked at him crossly. “Of course it’s not easy. Why do you think it took me two weeks straight to figure it out?”
Jonathan shrugged his shoulders, “I don’t know. I guess because you’re a girl.”
Jonathan never saw it coming.
WHACK!
“Owww, Sarah! What the heck was that for?” He bent down to rub the welt that was coming up across his calves, staring daggers at a very satisfied looking Sarah.
“That’s for being a chauvinist pig. Sex has nothing to do with it. It’s skill and determination, something we girls have tons of, right Candi?”
“Right.” And with that, she turned lightning quick and speared another fish, holding it up for everyone to see while shaking the water out of her hair. “That’s two for me!”
Kevin just grumbled to himself, staring out into the water.
Jonathan kept rubbing his legs, shooting dangerous looks at Sarah. Sarah pretended she didn’t notice. She had already given up on mastering the art of spear fishing, now focusing all of her energy on her cuticles.
“I think two fish is enough, if you guys are ready to go back … ”
“Fine. I need to go rest my bruised calves anyway.”
“Yep, I’m ready to go back. I want to work on another rat cage,” said Sarah, already climbing down from her rock, heading for shore.
“You guys go ahead. I’m going to stay here and work on this some more,” was Kevin’s reply.
“Oh boy,” said Sarah, as the trio walked back to the treehouse.
“What?” asked Candi.
“He’s going to be out there for hours. Right now, I guarantee you, it is making him crazy that you can do this and he can’t. This will now be his number one project – becoming the best spear fisherman in the northern hemisphere.”
Candi laughed. “Good. I’d like the company.”
***
Once back at the treehouse, Candi cleaned and prepared the fish for cooking. They took the guts she had removed and put some of them on the end of a piece of plant rope and hooked it up in the cage, the rest they buried far from the treehouse. They put the contraption off into the bushes, deciding they’d leave it alone until the next morning. It seemed like the rats came out at night anyway.
Kevin came back an hour later, very sunburned and without any fish. He was grouchy until dinner, refusing Candi’s offer of help. She laughed to herself. Either he’d figure it out like she had, or he’d break down and ask for her help eventually. She was just glad she wasn’t going to be the only one out there anymore.
The group sat on their cushions around their dinner table and had their first almost normal dinner since they arrived a month ago. They laughed at the jokes Kevin told. They giggled at factoids that Jonathan shared, and as usual, he wondered what was so funny. Sarah was as relaxed as Candi had ever seen her, and it made her unable to stop smiling. She missed her parents a lot – sometimes unbearably so – but this new family she had wasn’t bad. In fact, it was pretty awesome. She’d never felt this comfortable with someone outside of her real family ever before.
“We need to find something else for our bed covers,” said Sarah as she popped the last hunk of cooked coconut into her mouth.
“I know, those ponchos make me sweaty,” said Candi.
“Yeah, you’re right,” said Jonathan. “I assume it’s going to get colder at some point. I mean, I’m not sure what latitude we’re on, but judging from the angle of the sun, I’d say we’re farther north of where we were on the cruise ship, so it’s probably going to get cold here in the winter.”
“Do you guys hear that?” asked Kevin. His head was cocked at a funny angle as if he was listening to something out in the trees.
“What?” asked Sarah, whispering.
“It sounds like … a squealing or something or a very pissed off bird.”
He looked at Jonathan, and Jonathan’s eyes lit up.
“The rat trap!”
They all scrambled up from the table and rushed over to the ladder. Kevin was the first one down, followed by Jonathan. They rushed over to the trees where the girls had put the trap, Sarah and Candi right behind them.
“I can’t see anything,” said Jonathan, frustrated.
But now they could all hear the squealing; they had definitely caught something.
Candi came over with a piece of bamboo that had palm canvas wrapped around it, tied in place with thick layers of plant rope. She had dipped the end in the hot coals left over from dinner, catching it on fire so it burned brightly. It made a decent torch, although it wasn’t going to last very long.
“Here, does this help?” She held it up to illuminate the area where the trap sat.
There, under the bars of the now overturned bamboo box, sat a very unhappy brown rat. Its tail had somehow gotten caught between a rock and the edge of the cage. It sat glaring out at them, the light of the torch reflecting off its shiny, red eyes.
“Holy shit, it worked!” yelled Sarah. She held her hand up for a high-five, which Kevin immediately returned. Jonathan realized what was expected of him a split second later and gave her an awkward high five too.
“So cool … Sarah, you are an expert builder of furniture and rat traps,” congratulated Candi.
“Yeah, well, he ain’t no monkey, I can tell you that,” said a critical Sarah, staring at the small, scrappy-looking rodent who was giving the distinct impression that he was not happy with his circumstances.
“So, what do we do now?” she asked.
“Well, we have to bring him over to the fire so we can see him better. Then we have to figure out how to hold him permanently.”
“I made a cage I think will work.”
“A cage? When did you do that?” asked Kevin. “I thought this was the cage.”
“When you were out there playing Poseidon,” responded Sarah, a little too casually.
Kevin gave her a suspicious look but didn’t say anything in return.
Sarah went to her workshop, returning with a cage that was made of bamboo, held together at all of its joints with the plant rope. It had a lid that lifted and latched using plant rope ties.
With some coaxing from a small bamboo stick and some clever maneuvering, they transferred their guest from the trap to his new home.
“What do we feed him first?” asked Candi. She was anxious to find some new ingredients to cook with. She was getting tired of steamed fish with coconut.
“Give him some of those berries we found yesterday. They look yummy,” said Sarah.
Candi went to a basket hanging from the tree roots where she kept her cooking ingredients, locating a small palm canvas packet of the berries that they’d been finding everywhere.
“Here you go, Ratatouille,” she said, as she dropped them through the bars into the cage.
They all leaned over, watching the rat ignore the berries.
“Well, that was exciting,” said Sarah, sarcastically.
“Come on, let’s go to bed. He’s nervous; he’s not going to eat in front of us. Leave him down here on the ground and we’ll check on him in the morning,” said Jonathan, yawning for effect.
“Okay, everybody up, so I can get the ladder secured.” Kevin waited until they were all in and then climbed up himself. He muscled the ladder up onto the rope loops attached to the side of the treehouse that caught the poles on each end, securing the ladder sideways against the side of the treehouse.
The breeze made their new home cool and comfortable. Sarah and Candi had done their best to clean the one sheet they had. They placed it over a pile of cushioning fronds and palm canvas for the guys’ bed. The girls had their bamboo cots, which for now they had put next to each other in their room, sharing a poncho as a cover to keep warm.
“G’night, Sarah … g’night boys,” called out Candi.
“Night, Candi and Sarah,” said Jonathan.
“Ditto,” said Kevin.
“Good night, subjects; Queen Candi,” said Sarah.
Candi snickered.
Sarah giggled.
Candi felt an uncontrollable urge to laugh out loud and gave in to it. It was infectious. Sarah started laughing too – softly at first and then more loudly. Soon they were both hysterical, their laughs quickly degenerating into snorts and cackles.
“They’re nuts,” said Jonathan.
“You don’t have to tell me that,” responded Kevin.
The guys fell asleep before the girls had quieted down. Soon a light snoring could be heard coming from their end of the treehouse.
Candi slowly calmed down, now completely out of energy and slightly dizzy from all the deep breaths she’d been taking. Sarah sighed long and loud, as if trying to calm herself down.
“Man, I needed that,” said Sarah.
“Yeah, I guess I did, too. I feel like I just drank one of those margaritas again.”
Sarah was quiet for a minute, thinking about that fateful night. “Remember that? The night we had margaritas and then went dancing? That was fun.”
“Yep,” said Candi. “That was the last day of our lives as normal teenagers.”
“Do you miss it? Being a normal teenager?” Sarah asked in a more subdued tone.
“Actually, no.” Candi was surprised at her own answer, but it was true. She didn’t miss being unsure of herself. She didn’t miss constantly trying to impress some nameless, faceless person or group. She didn’t miss always trying to reach some unattainable goal – to be accepted by the people who she thought were better than her. Just acknowledging that this was something that used to be important to her was kind of embarrassing.
“Me neither. I was just thinking about how much easier life on this island is – which is kinda effed up when you think about how every day here it’s pretty much life and death. I mean, it’s not ‘am I going to win homecoming queen’ or something empty like that … you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, in a way. I mean, whether I was going to be homecoming queen was obviously not on my list of worries, but there were other things. Like how can I start hanging around with the cool people? How can I improve my social status?”
“Who are the cool people at our school, anyway?” asked Sarah.
“Are you being obtuse?”
“No, I’m serious. I mean, all the people I knew were pretty fake. I thought Gretchen was my friend and then she went and slept with my boyfriend – who I also thought was a good guy. Seriously, when I think about it, the only cool people that I knew at our school were you guys – and I didn’t even really know you.”
“That is so sad,” said Candi.
“Why is that sad?”
“Because to me, the cool people were you and Gretchen and Barry and all those people who you now tell me are fake a-holes. I’ve spent I don’t know how much of my time obsessing over or worrying about how I was going to get those jerks to like me. And now you’re telling me that I never should have bothered in the first place, and that apparently, I’m the coolest girl in school.”
“Well, yeah, except for me of course. I’m maybe just a little bit cooler than you, but you’re pretty cool too.”
Candi reached over and smacked Sarah on the arm.
“Ouch, what’d ya do that for?”
Candi could hear the smile in Sarah’s voice.
The conversation stopped, but the contemplation didn’t. Each girl was lost in her own world, thinking about the fundamental shift they’d come to make – when it had happened and how it had happened, neither of them knew. But that it did happen was certain. The question was, what were they going to do with this newfound knowledge? And would it last when they got back to the ‘real world’?
***
“Son of a bitch!” yelled Kevin. He could hear the almost instantaneous response to his frustration coming from the treehouse above his head.
Candi called out, “Kevin? Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m down here with our rat cage.”
“Is there something wrong with it?”
“Well, only that it apparently doesn’t really make sense to design a rat cage that’s held together with something a rat can chew through in about five seconds.”
“Dammit,” said Sarah. “Now I don’t know if we can eat those stupid berries or not.”
“Back to the drawing board,” said Jonathan as he climbed down the ladder. “If any of you has any ideas for a new design on our cage, let me know. I’m tapped out right now.”
“I’m not going to worry about it,” said Kevin. “I think we need to get going on those platforms. Maybe there are some other fruits or nuts or something over on other parts of the island. We need to start doing some exploring.”
“Yeah. Why don’t we all gather together this morning over breakfast and talk about our plans. We have lots to do, but I want to make sure we’re all in agreement on priorities and stuff,” said Jonathan.
“Priority one,” announced Candi, “is Sarah dread-locking my hair.”
Kevin could hear Sarah scrambling around above. “Really?! Yay! I’ll go get my stuff right now.” She was going into the bathroom area where she kept her makeup case. He could tell by the banging of her feet on the floor.