by Sandy Beech
Josh grinned at me, but not in a mean way. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “I almost did that myself a second ago.”
I smiled back. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
I guess both of us sort of forgot what we were doing for a second. We just stood there grinning goofily at each other. I couldn’t help noticing how cute he looked with a little bead of sweat dripping down his chin….
“Yo! What are you guys doing?”
I snapped out of it and saw Ryan jogging toward us, looking perplexed—and maybe a little suspicious? Or was that just my guilty conscience imagining things?
Brooke narrowed her eyes. No question about it, she definitely looked suspicious. “Yeah, what’s up, you two?” she asked. “Since when did this game turn into a staring contest?”
Oops. I winced, waiting for Kenny to start singing, “Dani and Josh, sittin’ in a tree.” But when I glanced his way, he was just standing there, not even paying attention to what was going on.
That wasn’t like him. When it came to noticing embarrassing stuff about me, he was like a bloodhound on a scent. Humiliating me was the only thing he liked even better than collecting creepy crawly creatures and watching TV.
“You okay, twerp?” I demanded, a little worried about him for a second.
He just blinked and stared at me. I wasn’t sure he’d even heard me.
“Is the game over?” Mr. Truskey wandered up to us. “Did I win?”
“Were still playing, Mr. T.’ Ryan stared from me to Josh and back again. “At least I thought we were….”
Josh shot me a slightly panicky look, then opened his mouth. “Uh—I—we just…,” he began.
I stared at him, my stomach flip-flopping nervously, suddenly sure that this was it. He was going to blurt out the truth. It was about time—
“Hi, everyone!”
That voice. That prissy, sugary, totally irritating voice. I recognized it instantly.
Angela.
Just like that the tense, interesting moment was lost, scattered like sand in a hurricane by Evil Angela’s untimely appearance. She strolled onto the court, ignoring my glare as she walked straight up to Josh, tossed back her shoulder-length blond hair, and smiled at him. Nobody believes me when I say she has evil powers, but it’s true. How else could she spend so much time shipwrecked on a deserted island and still look like she’d just stepped out of an air-conditioned mall after having her hair done and buying all new clothes?
“I heard you guys were playing basketball,” she said. “So I thought I’d come: down and cheer you on.”
Josh shot me a nervous look and took a half step away. “Oh,” he said. “Um, okay. Come on, you guys. What are we waiting for?”
Ryan clapped his hands. “Right!” he shouted. “Let’s play balL people!”
“Fine. Guys, I think I’ll play center for a while,” Brooke said to her team. “Josh, you guard Ryan instead.”
I bent down and grabbed the coconut from the sand, resisting the urge to fling it straight at Angela’s head. Why did she always have to show up at the worst possible moment?
We started playing again. But it wasn’t much fun anymore. I managed to keep from trying to dribble the coconut again, but I couldn’t keep from noticing Angela capering around on the sidelines. She hadn’t been kidding when she’d announced she was going to be a cheerleader—she’d even picked up a couple of palm fronds to use as pom-poms. The thing was, she seemed to be focusing all of her cheers on one person.
“One, two, three, four; come on, Josh, its time to score!” Angela cheered loudly, waving the palm fronds over her head and doing a little kick. “Five, six, seven, eight; keep it up, you’re doing great! Goooo, Josh!”
I gritted my teeth, tempted to march right over to her and tell her the truth. Josh didn’t like her, he liked me. He’d told me so in the middle of that hurricane … right before he almost kissed me. (Angela interrupted that, too … grr!) I could almost picture the delicious, delightful look of horror on her face when she realized the truth.
Like I said, I was tempted. But I bit my tongue and kept quiet. Josh didnt want me to tell anyone, and so I was just going to have to keep quiet until he changed his mind.
What else could I do?
“Good game, everyone. Good game.” Ryan leaped around from one of us to the other, grabbing our hands, whether we offered them or not, and shaking them enthusiastically. Mr. Truskey laughed and shook back heartily, and Kenny added a high five when Ryan got to him. Brooke and I rolled our eyes, but then Josh started shaking hands with everyone too, so we went along with it.
When Josh got to me, he stuck out his hand. “Good game, Dani,” he said loudly. As I took his hand he leaned toward me a little. “Want to meet up in like fifteen minutes?” he whispered. “Butterfly spot?”
Angela was already making a beeline in our direction, so I just nodded. A shivery little thrill ran through me, as if someone had just injected carbonated soda into my veins. Maybe this secret-romance thing was sort of fun after all!
“Catch you guys later” I said to the group at large. Without waiting for an answer, I turned and loped off toward camp, doing my best not to wonder if the Evil One was already clinging to Josh’s arm and batting her eyelashes in his general direction. What difference did it make? She wasn’t the one he wanted to meet up with in fifteen minutes!
When I reached the camp area, Ned Campbell and Macy Walden were huddled together over the makeshift wooden table in the food-prep area, probably pulling together something for lunch. Macy was dressed in one of her usual Little-House-on-the-Prairie dresses, though the small palm frond she’d tied around her head as a visor added a touch of little-hut-on-the-island. Ned’s fifth-degree sunburn was finally starting to morph into a tan, making his straight, bowl-cut blond hair look even paler than usual. They didn’t look up as I zipped past, and nobody else was in sight.
Inside the largest cave, which we used to store most of the luggage and supplies we’d salvaged from our sunken boat, I headed straight for the twins’ bags. I knew there was a big, battery-powered light-up mirror in Cassie’s makeup case, and she’d already told me I could use it anytime. Pulling it out, I switched it on and checked out my appearance. About half of my long, wavy, reddish-brown hair had come loose from its ponytail, leaving thin, frizzy tendrils flying in all directions. There was a streak of sand on my chin, and a dried leaf stuck in a clump of hair just above my left temple. Or maybe it was seaweed; I wasn’t sure. In either case it didn’t exactly scream “cool, sophisticated girlfriend,” so I yanked it loose and tossed it aside. Realizing there was an easy way to clean myself up—not to mention get rid of any also-not-so-cool-and-sophisticated lingering sweat aroma—I dashed down the beach and quickly rinsed off in the surf.
Back in the cave, I quickly redid my ponytail, then turned my attention to my face. Staring dubiously at my high forehead, sharp chin, and turned-up nose, I tried to remember what the twins had taught me over the past few days about makeup tips and such. My head spun with visions of scented lip gloss, compact face powder, glitter eye shadow….
“Whoa,” I murmured out loud, shaking my head to banish the visions. “What’s wrong with this picture?”
Switching off the light-up mirror, I sat back on my heels and stared at the cave wall. What was happening to me? Three days ago I was my regular old self—the same Dani McFeeney I had been for as long as I could remember. I was a normal person, a good basketball player, a loyal friend, and a decent student.
Then Josh had told me he liked me, and all of a sudden it was like I became a whole new person. A person who obsessed over how she looked and thought about glitter eye shadow and borrowed peoples light-up makeup mirrors without a touch of irony. How had that happened?
It wasn’t hard to figure out the answer. Everything since the hurricane had happened so fast that I hadn’t really stopped to think about any of it. Now that I did, it all seemed weird. Some of it was good weird, like the actual Josh par
t. But the rest? Definitely weird weird.
You need to get a grip, McFeeney, I told myself sternly. Having a boyfriend is one thing. Morphing into some wacked-out, Angela-type girly-girl because of it? Totally unacceptable.
I was slicking on a little Chap Stick when I heard footsteps entering the cave. It was Kenny. “Hey,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“None of your business.” I quickly tossed the Chap Stick out of sight behind the stack of suitcases. It clattered against the rock wall, sounding awfully loud for a tiny bit of plastic filled with strawberry-flavored goo. I winced. If Kenny figured out what I was up to, I’d never hear the end of it. “What do you want?” I asked, mostly to distract him.
He shrugged and let out a loud sigh. “I don’t know,” he said, kicking at the stony cave floor with the toe of one grubby sneaker. The interior of the cave was dim, and it was hard to see his expression as I peered at him, but he already looked pretty distracted. “I’ve just been, like, thinking about stuff. Like my zoo, and the hurricane, and how you and Josh had to come rescue me …”
Did I forget to mention that part? The reason Josh and I ended up alone together during the hurricane was because of my brother. Kenny had spent a couple of days putting together what he called McFeeney’s Magical World of Island Wildlife and what most people would call “a disgusting collection of creatures only a professional exterminator could love.” In other words, a bunch of bugs, toads, rodents, and lizards. This little zoo was located in a clearing about two-thirds of the way up the smallish mountain in the center of the island, and when the hurricane came howling down upon the island, what did my brilliant little brother decide to do? You got it—he took off up the mountain without telling anyone, determined to rescue his creepy crawlies from the storm. Josh and I wound up racing after him like a pair of demented marathon runners. We got lucky—the hurricane didn’t drop a tree on our heads or wash us out to sea, and when we got back to the beach, Josh pulled me aside just long enough to tell me he liked me. Oh, yeah, and to almost give me my first real kiss….
I sighed at the memory, momentarily forgetting about Kenny. Then he started mumbling again about whatever it was he was mumbling about, and I snapped back to the present.
“… and I probably should have figured out about the storm and warned everybody, and—”
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever,” I interrupted him in mid mumble. “Uh, I mean, that’s okay. Nobody holds that against you or whatever. So you can chill.” I was doing my best to hide my impatience. I could almost feel the seconds ticking away. Why hadn’t I checked my watch back at the coconutball court? I had no idea when that fifteen minutes Josh had mentioned had started, or how much time I had left.
Then again, I couldn’t help being a little worried about Kenny. He definitely wasn’t acting like his usual obnoxious self at the moment. Thinking back to his earlier weird nonteasing behavior at the basketball game, I hoped he wasn’t coming down with the same personality-altering choo-choo disease that had already struck Mr. Truskey.
“Hey,” I said, interrupting him as he started to mumble again about his zoo and the storm. “You haven’t eaten anything … weird lately, have you?”
He stared at me blankly. Then he smirked. “Yeah,” he said, a little bit of the usual Kenny gleam returning to his eyes. “I ate that fried coconut you made for dinner last night. It tasted like roof shingles.”
I rolled my eyes, not bothering to ask how he knew what roof shingles tasted like. I really didn’t want to know. “Look, I have to go. Since you’re such a food critic, why don’t you go help Macy and Ned fix lunch?”
“Okay,” Kenny said, sounding surprisingly agreeable. “Hey, Dani?”
“What?” My mind was already more than half out of there.
“Do you think we’ve ever going to get rescued?”
I stopped short, staring at him. “What?” I exclaimed.
“Don’t be a moron. Of course we’re going to get rescued.”
I didn’t even bother going into detail. We all knew the drill. The second chaperone on the trip, Ms. Watson, had gone back to the mainland early with a sick kid. She’d probably started the search party about ten minutes after we didn’t show up on time. It was just taking a while to find us, that was all. For one thing, thanks to our own stupidity (see Decision 5B above), we were probably miles and miles from where anyone expected us to be. In addition to that there was some kind of weird wind pattern over the Esparcir Islands that made it dangerous to fly a helicopter over most of the chain, so all the searching would have to be done via boat. When you considered that the hurricane had probably set things back at least a couple of days, it was no surprise that it was taking a while to track us down.
But rescue was coming. No doubt about it How could Kenny even question that? Did he think Ms. Watson, our parents, and everybody else was just going to give up on us?
Kenny shrugged. “Okay Just wondering.”
Rolling my eyes, I brushed past him and hurried out of the cave. Outside I squinted as my eyes readjusted to the bright sunlight. When I could see again, I checked my watch. It had stopped, probably because I’d forgotten to take it off earlier when I went for my morning swim in the lagoon. Oh well.
Deciding that a little early was better than a little late, I started walking briskly up the beach toward the jungle. My stomach was doing a funny little Mexican-jumping-bean sort of thing, kind of like it does after I eat a whole tub of popcorn and then go on the Rock-’n’-Roller Coaster three times in a row at the boardwalk back home. I took a few deep breaths as I walked, trying to calm myself down.
“Dani! Yo, wait up!”
Glancing over my shoulder in mid inhale, I saw Ryan waving wildly as; he raced toward me. Swallowing a sigh, I turned and waited to see what he wanted, wondering if Josh might have sent him with a message or something.
Ryan skidded to a stop in front of me, still all sweaty and red faced from the coconutball game. “Hey” he said, grinning. “What’s up? You ran away pretty fast after the game.”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
“It was a good game, wasn’t it? You were showing some pretty fancy moves out there.” He danced around a little, pretending to fling an imaginary coconut toward an equally imaginary hoop. “If Mr. T hadn’t accidentally passed the ball to Brooke like three times in a row, we might’ve won.”
“Maybe next time,” I said, trying to hide my impatience. “Listen, Ryan. I’ve got to—”
“Hey!” he interrupted. “I almost forgot to tell you. This morning I caught three of those fish you like so much.”
“Fish?” I said blankly. “What fish?”
“Those reddish-colored ones. Don’t you remember?” He leaned a little closer, peering into my face. “Yesterday at lunch you said they tasted better than the other kind. Anyway, I guess the hurricane must’ve stirred them up or something, because I barely had to put the hook in the water when bam! They were, like, practically fighting each other to grab the bait….”
He rambled on eagerly for a few more minutes, punctuating his fishing story with lots of fish imitations and other miscellaneous jumping around. I did my best to stay out of the way of his flailing limbs, wondering when he was going to shut up. Didn’t he know I had somewhere important to be?
No, I reminded myself. He didn’t. And I didn’t want him to know either. So I just stood there, letting the seconds slide by and trying not to reach out and strangle him.
“Well, okay,” I said when he finally paused for breath. “Lunch will be ready soon, so before then I guess I’ll go and—”
“Oh! Speaking of lunch, did you notice anything funny about our chefs today?” Ryan waggled his eyebrows and grinned.
I glanced over my shoulder. Macy and Ned were still hard at work a little farther up the beach. Macy was standing at the food-prep table, her long brown braids almost touching the surface as she carefully sliced a papaya. Ned was nearby at the: fire, stirring something that was cooking in a big pot. “Le
t me guess,” I said wearily. “They’re cooking that fish you were just talking about?”
“No!” Ryan exclaimed. “Well, I mean, yes. Probably. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Didn’t you notice that Ned and Macy aren’t even on the same work team?” He waggled his eyebrows again.
“Yeah, I guess.” I shrugged, not sure what he was driving at and not really caring too much. A few days earlier, when it first became clear that we might be stuck on the island for a while, we’d divided ourselves into three work teams to make it easier to split up the chores. “Ned’s on my team,” I added. “We had meal duty yesterday’
“Exactly.” Ryan smirked. “Now, you didn’t hear it from me, but I think we might have a secret island romance brewing.”
My heart stopped. I swear it did. “Wh-what?” I stammered.
Okay, maybe I should have seen where Ryan was going with his comments. It wasn’t like he was being exactly subtle, what with all the eyebrow waggling and leading glances. But I was only half listening to him. Maybe not even half. So when he said the “secret island romance” thing, the first thing that popped into my head was me and Josh.
“Listen,” I blurted out, instantly going on Full Panic Alert. “You can’t tell anyone about this, okay? Its supposed to be a secret, and—”
“You mean it’s true?” Ryan sounded delighted. “Awesome! Yo, I was just messing around, mostly. Way to go, Neddie-boy!”
“Huh?” I stopped short in mid panic, belatedly rewinding the tape in my head. “What do you mean, ‘way to go, Ned’?”
Ryan shrugged. “Dont you think it’s kind of cool? Ned’s barely ever even talked to a girl before, and now he’s, like, totally hooking up with a seventh grader!”
“Oh.” As the warm, comforting light of reality finally dawned on me, I sighed with relief. My secret was still safe. Better yet, maybe I could use Ryan’s gossip to make my escape. “Hey, that is big news,” I added brightly. “I don’t know if it’s true, but the twins probably do—you know how they keep up with that kind of stuff. I’m going to go check with them about it right now. Later!”
