Beach Blondes

by Katherine Applegate; Michael Grant

  “That’s something, at least,” Marquez said.

  He laughed bitterly. “Marquez, if they’re in serious trouble, that information is worth nothing. They probably went down with about an hour of air. An hour.”

  “I know,” Marquez said, “but I have to try, right?” She jumped up to try to find a shirt and pants for him to put on.

  J.T. managed a small, wistful smile. “You getting in the middle of other people’s problems, Marquez?”

  Marquez concentrated on digging through a pile of dirty clothes. “I guess staying out of other people’s problems doesn’t always work out that great, either.”

  The patch of blue was no more than a distant memory. Now only two faint stars were visible through the hole above. Summer was hungry and thirsty, despite the fact that Seth had showed her how to lick condensation from the rocks.

  Worse than hungry or thirsty, she was afraid.

  It was dark in the cave. Totally dark, since they were conserving their precious flashlight. So dark that Summer could literally not see her hand in front of her face.

  There was no way out. They had spent hours trying to think of a way to escape. But there was no escape. None. And it was too easy to conjure up images of two rubber-clad skeletons being found down here someday.

  “I wonder which stars those are,” Seth said.

  He was just a voice, nearby in the total darkness. Not a happy voice.

  “Someone told me once that stars weren’t really far away,” Summer said. “That they were right here.”

  “I guess that’s true of the starlight,” Seth said. “It’s right here.”

  Summer smiled sadly in the darkness. Poor Diver. He’d wonder what happened to her. Or would he? He’d have the stilt house all to himself again.

  “This summer vacation is not turning out quite the way I had planned,” Summer said. There was a plopping sound in the water. Summer was used to it now. A fish, coming by to take a look at the odd phenomenon of two humans trapped like goldfish in a tank. “I kind of had this image of it just being sun and surf and parties.”

  “Sorry,” Seth said softly.

  “Sorry? Why are you sorry?” she said crossly.

  “I got you into this,” Seth said. “I helped get you into the mess with Ross and Adam. I’ve single-handedly ruined your life.”

  Summer thought for a while. “No, you didn’t ruin anything. You’ve been the best part of this whole thing so far. Marquez and Diver, too, but mostly you.”

  “Don’t be sweet to me,” Seth said grimly. “I swear if you’re nice to me I’ll start crying.”

  “Crying wouldn’t be so bad,” Summer said. “I won’t tell anyone. Ever,” she added with deliberate dark humor.

  “So much for my big theory that you and I were…” He sighed, an audible sound in the profound silence.

  “That we were what?” Summer asked.

  “You know,” he said. “I told you already.”

  “Tell me again,” she whispered.

  “I had this feeling,” he began. “It was so strong I was sure it had to be real. It was like I could see the future, and I knew, totally, beyond any doubt, that you and I were going to be together.”

  “We are together,” Summer said, trying to interject a weak note of levity.

  “I had us going to college together and traveling around the world together, and I don’t know, it sounds pretty idiotic now.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Summer said.

  “I even had us married someday, with kids and all that. A dog. I was thinking a Labrador. Maybe a mutt. It seemed so real. That first time, when we kissed, it was like ‘Wake up, Seth, this is her. This is your one great love.’”

  Summer stretched out her hand, searching for him. She touched his leg and from there found his hand. They linked their fingers together.

  “You kind of scared me when you talked that way before,” Summer confessed.

  “It doesn’t scare you now?”

  “I have better things to be scared of,” Summer pointed out. “But at the time I thought, you know, that if I got too involved…Jeez, I don’t even know what I was thinking. That all seems like it was a completely different world. I was worried, you know, about committing. I thought if I didn’t watch out I would fall totally in love with you, and then naturally it would end up in some kind of mess. That’s how it always works.”

  “How it always works? What do you mean, like no one ever gets to be happy?”

  “Not on TV,” Summer said. “Anytime a couple is happy it just means something terrible is coming. I mean, my parents were happy. They had my brother. And me on the way. And then suddenly it was time for something terrible to happen, and so it did.”

  “But, Summer, that doesn’t mean it’s a law of nature or something,” Seth argued.

  “Maybe not for everyone,” Summer allowed.

  “Not for you, either.”

  Summer hesitated before telling him any more. Wouldn’t it just hurt him? Then again, they were probably going to die down here. If this wasn’t a time for honesty, when was?

  “See, it did happen,” Summer said. “I was kind of falling for Adam. And look what happened.”

  There was a long silence. She wondered what his face would show, if she could see it.

  “Yeah, but nothing happened to you,” Seth said. “I mean, it might have, but it didn’t. Whereas this is a real mess.” Again he was quiet for a while. “So if your idea is that being happy and in love is what leads to terrible things happening—”

  “Then that would mean that I was in love and happy before this happened,” Summer completed the thought. “See? Proof.”

  “Are you saying that—What are you saying?” he asked.

  Summer sighed profoundly. “I tried not to let it happen,” she said. “But it did. I fell in love with you, anyway. And then, boom, total disaster.”

  “You love me?” he asked, his voice soft and hopeful.

  “Yes,” Summer said. Then she raised his unseen hand to her lips, kissed it, and pressed it against her heart.

  Seth shifted closer and put his arm around her shoulders. “Excellent timing, Summer,” he said. “You couldn’t fall in love with me after we went cave diving?”

  “Sorry,” she said, turning to him.

  “Are you really sorry?” he asked, his lips close to hers.

  And for a long time, no more words were spoken.

  19

  I Believe the Point Here Is…Never Give Up.

  In her dream, Summer sat beside the tarot lady again. The tarot lady seemed not to want to meet her gaze, so in her dream, Summer was annoyed.

  “So,” she said accusingly, “you tell me all this stuff about these guys I’ll meet, and you can’t mention that maybe I should avoid small, damp, confined spaces?”

  The tarot lady shuffled her cards. “Who knew?”

  “Not you. Duh.”

  “The future is always shifting.”

  “Oh, that’s perfect,” Summer said. “Nice way to weasel out of it. You know what? No one can tell the future. All this stuff is just baloney. A big baloney sandwich. With cheese and mayonnaise and mustard and lettuce. And maybe it’s a sub, one of those big Subway subs, what are they called…B.M.T.’s, yeah, all this different meat and you can have it with everything, even hot peppers—”

  “You’re hungry, aren’t you?” the woman asked.

  “I guess you can tell that from the cards,” Summer said. “Let’s see them. Turn them over. Stop keeping secrets from me.”

  The woman turned over a single card. It was the figure of a small boy, dressed all in white. He was holding something in his hand. A red ball.

  “That card scares me,” Summer said.

  “Why?”

  “You know why,” she said. “Death. That’s why, because he’s dead. You’re showing him to me because you think I’m going to die.”

  Suddenly Summer awoke. Her hair was standing on end.

  She was in the cave sti
ll, she could tell from the sound of the water. She was in Seth’s arms. The taste of his lips was still in her mouth. There was no light but for two stars far overhead, peeking through the hole in the roof.

  Then she saw him—the boy in white. He was standing a little way off.

  “Who are you?” Summer asked him in a whisper.

  “I don’t know,” the little boy said. “I’ve been looking for you. For a long time.”

  Then the little boy threw a red ball, high, straight up. The ball flew up through the hole in the roof of the cave.

  To her great surprise, Diana awoke.

  She had not closed the curtains the night before because she had not expected to be worrying about being awakened by sunlight. But now the early-morning light was beaming directly into her eyes.

  Diana blinked and squinted and looked around, confused. Why was she still here? Impossible. She’d decided to kill herself. She’d made up her mind to do it, at long last.

  Diana realized she was holding something, clutched in her right hand. The brown pill bottle, the cap still securely in place. She opened her cramped, aching fingers, and the bottle rolled off onto the sheet.

  She’d failed. She’d meant to kill herself, and instead she’d fallen asleep before she could take the pills. Fallen asleep before she could take the sleeping pills.

  It was almost funny, she thought bitterly.

  In fact, it was funny. She tried not to grin but couldn’t help herself. She’d fallen asleep before she could take the fatal dose of sleeping pills.

  “See, the thing is, I was going to kill myself,” she said aloud, “but I was just too sleepy.” Diana laughed. “If only I’d had another cup of coffee, I could be dead now.”

  Now what? Should she go back to sleep? Get up and take a shower? Kill herself?

  She laughed some more. Shower or suicide? Hmm, there was a choice. And it brought up the question of whether, even if she was going to kill herself, she shouldn’t take a shower first. “Who wants to die with morning breath and that grubby, unwashed feeling?”

  She jumped out of bed and went to her porch door. She opened it and went outside. A slight morning breeze ruffled her sheer nightgown. It was almost cool out, not too humid, and the sun was still so low that it had not become the terror it would be by noon.

  The water looked good. Maybe she should go for a swim.

  “Then I can kill myself,” she said, and immediately began laughing again.

  “What is the matter with me?” she wondered aloud. Yesterday she’d been beaten down, falling back into the hole of depression. It was just too clichéd to think that because it was a nice day out she didn’t want to kill herself. It was a nice day every day.

  But it was too simplistic to think that she had just fallen asleep before she could carry out her plans. No. Something had to have changed her mind. Something had to have let her slip safely away into normal slumber.

  The truth was, right now, with the warm deck under her feet and the sun on her face, she just didn’t feel like killing herself.

  “There. I admit it,” she said to no one but herself.

  She tried to think back to the night before, to lying in her bed, the bottle of pills in her hand, dark, dramatic images playing in her mind. The depression had been all around her then, had swallowed her whole. She remembered thinking that she couldn’t ever trust her mother again. That she couldn’t count on anyone or anything. That she had no one to turn to. That she was alone. Totally alone.

  “That’s right,” she murmured, smiling sadly at the realization. She was totally alone. Maybe everyone was alone. Maybe that was the point. Maybe that’s what she’d had to learn, that in the darkest times there wasn’t anyone to turn to but yourself.

  “What a sad thought,” Diana whispered.

  Let’s face it, Diana, what are you? she asked herself. A sad, weak, screwed-up, inadequate person. No great genius. No great beauty. No perfect specimen of kindness or decency or morality. Sometimes a fool. Sometimes a jerk. Sometimes humiliated and pathetic.

  All of it was true.

  And yet, down at the bottom of that deep hole of depression, at the very end, whom had she found but herself? All alone. All alone with a messed-up person named Diana.

  You’re the only person I have, Diana told herself. The only person I am.

  I guess you’ll have to do.

  She went back inside and retrieved the bottle of pills and carried it to the bathroom. She emptied the contents into the toilet bowl. “Bye,” she said, and flushed.

  She caught sight of herself in the mirror. The same reflection she’d looked at with loathing so many times. The memory brought tears to her eyes. She pointed a finger at herself. “You and me, kid.”

  For a long time she stood there, watching herself watching herself. Not bad-looking. Good hair. Not a complete idiot. Weak? Yes, she had been, for a long, long time. The reasons why she’d felt that way were tedious and obvious and probably unimportant—her absent, half-forgotten father, her unfortunately not absent mother…Ross. And Adam, the one guy she’d ever loved. Even more recently, the reproach represented by Summer and Seth—people she would never be, or have.

  A long list of reasons to feel bad.

  Her mouth twitched into a smile. Time to shorten up that long list.

  In her bedroom she found the hideous shoulder bag. She poked her finger through the hole she’d cut into the fabric, the hole that was concealed by the awful pattern of the fabric.

  She opened the bag. Yes, it was still there. Summer’s video camera. The lens was duct-taped up against the hole.

  She popped out the videotape. Now to figure out how to make a copy. She wanted to keep the original.

  Summer woke hungry. She woke hungry with her head resting on Seth’s bare chest. She could tell from his breathing that he was already awake.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  She slid up his body to give him a kiss. “Good morning,” she said, several seconds later.

  “I don’t know how good a morning it’s going to be,” he said regretfully. “The night was good, though.”

  “Mmm,” Summer said. “I’m starving.”

  “Well, there is the sushi option,” Seth said. “We have the speargun, and we know we have fish trapped in here with us.”

  Summer shuddered. “I guess they eat sushi in Japan, right? And they seem to be doing okay.”

  “They eat it in Los Angeles and New York, too,” Seth said. “Not so much in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.”

  “Or Bloomington, Minnesota,” Summer said.

  “What? Not even in the home of the Mall of America?” Seth joked.

  “I wish I were there,” Summer said. “They have all these fast-food places overlooking the amusement park. Hamburgers. Stuffed potatoes. Pizza. Mrs. Fields cookies. Fried chicken.”

  “Don’t even say fried chicken,” Seth groaned.

  Summer forced herself to look around their hard, stony prison. It hadn’t changed. It hadn’t become any more comfortable. It was still a trap, and there was still no way out.

  At the top of the dome, the same irregular patch of blue, lighter and brighter now than it had been yesterday. Outside in the world it was morning. Only this one small slice of morning made it inside of this cave, but it was still morning, and it was hard not to feel a little surge of hope.

  “Okay,” Summer said, “sushi it is.”

  Seth held her in his arms. “Do you still love me?” he asked.

  “Still,” Summer said.

  “It isn’t just because we’re trapped and there’s almost no hope of escape?”

  Summer sighed. “That’s how it’s been since that first kiss in the airport, Seth. I’ve been trapped, and there was almost no hope of escape.”

  Seth grinned. So did Summer.

  “Was that the corniest thing anyone’s ever said to you?” Summer asked him.

  “I believe it was,” he said. “Now I’ll tell you something even cornier—all this is wor
th it, because it brought us together, and that’s worth anything.”

  “Even eating raw fish?”

  He made a back-and-forth gesture with his hand.

  It took an hour for Seth, wearing a wet suit and with just a snorkel, to spear a fish. He filleted it with his knife, laying out small bites of glistening white flesh on a clean rock.

  The two of them stared at it.

  “The Japanese love this stuff,” Seth said.

  “That’s what I hear,” Summer said.

  The warm afterglow of early morning had worn off. Now Summer was facing a breakfast of raw fish, washed down with trickling condensation licked from the smooth rock walls of the cave.

  “Seth, are we ever going to get out of here?”

  “Sure,” he said with hearty and phony enthusiasm. “Someone will see the boat, then they’ll see the rope and dive down and realize that…” His optimism collapsed. “They’ll figure even if we were diving here that we’re dead by now. That’s what they’ll figure.”

  “Or the boat could have slipped its anchor and could be drifting on the current a hundred miles from here,” Summer said.

  For a while neither of them spoke. At last Seth picked up a piece of the fish. “I hear it’s best when it’s fresh,” he said. He screwed up his face and popped it into his mouth. Slowly his expression changed. “Hey, this isn’t bad.”

  “Yeah, right,” Summer said.

  “Seriously. It’s no cheeseburger, but it’s not gross, either.”

  Summer picked up a piece. “I guess I don’t have much choice.” She swallowed the piece whole without chewing. It wasn’t awful. As long as she didn’t think about it.

  “Well, I guess we can survive awhile down here,” Summer said grimly. “Licking the walls and eating raw fish. That’s exactly what I had in mind for my summer vacation.”

  “Arrrrrggghhhh!” Seth suddenly exploded.

  “What’s the matter?” Summer cried.

  Seth was pointing up at the patch of blue overhead. “What am I? An idiot? A moron?”