by Sandy Beech
“Shut up, Dani,” Angela cried fervently. “Josh knows what he’s doing—that’s why we elected him our leader. If he wants to rebuild, I think we should totally support him.”
“Well you can waste your time trying again if you want,” I declared. “But I …”
My voice trailed off and my heart sank as Josh stood up, stared coldly at me, and stomped away without a word.
I took a few steps after him, not sure whether to try to catch up and apologize. It wasn’t that I was sorry about what I’d said, exactly. Now that it was out, I couldn’t believe I’d ever kept it to myself for so long. But I knew I could have said it in a much nicer way.
“Nice going, McFeeney” Angela called sarcastically from behind me:. “Very sensitive.”
For once I didn’t have a snappy response for her. I wandered a little farther down the beach, wondering exactly when I’d transformed into Tactfulina, Queen of the Big Mouths. Josh was still hurrying off along the beach, his hands shoved deep into his pockets and his head hanging low.
I chewed my lower lip as I drifted to a stop and watched him go. I was pretty certain that I’d just blown it once and for all. Why hadn’t I stopped to think before going off on him like that? The least I could have done was take him off in private to tell him his idea stunk. Then again, we all know how that worked out last time….
“Dani!” Kenny suddenly appeared at my side, panting and excited. He grabbed at my arm, accidentally scratching me with his fingernails. “C’mere!”
I yanked my arm free before he could draw blood. “Careful,” I snapped. “What’s wrong with you? Leave me alone.”
“Come on!” he cried breathlessly, totally ignoring my testiness. “Macy and Ned are telling the others about our fire. They need your help to explain it!”
I sighed. “So much for keeping me out of it, like I asked,” I muttered.
Still, at this point I figured I had nothing to lose by coming clean about my involvement with Kenny’s plan. Especially since Getting the Heck Off This Stinking Island had just gone from #1 on my personal priority list to pretty much the only thing on the list. Kenny was already dashing back toward the rest of the group, and after one last glance at Josh’s lonely figure, I turned and followed.
“Okay,” Brooke was saying cautiously as I rejoined the group. “So this fire you built—it’s up on the mountain, or what? How do you know it’ll be visible way out there at sea?”
“Yeah.” Cassie nodded, her eyes wide and worried. “Oh! And what if we set the whole island on fire by accident?”
“Hey, if the whole island was on fire, someone would definitely notice that!” Ryan joked.
Brooke rolled her eyes and frowned at him. “Be serious, Ryan,” she scolded in her best fourteen-going-on-forty voice. “This is no time for your goofy jokes.”
“Look, it’s not going to set the island on fire, okay?” I spoke up. “Ned figured out exactly how to set it up so that wouldn’t happen.”
The others glanced at Ned, several of them nodding thoughtfully. Before the trip I was sure most of the people on the island—myself included—had thought of Ned as little more than a TV-obsessed dweeb. That is, if we thought about him at all.
But we’d all learned that there was a lot more to him than that. For one thing he had a photographic memory for every obscure factoid he’d ever seen on TV or read on the Internet, which had made our lives on the island easier and saved our butts a time or two.
Despite their respect for Ned, though, the others still seemed a bit skeptical about the whole fire plan. I guess after just getting burned by the raft disaster, they were a bit cautious about throwing their energy and enthusiasm behind another plan.
As I was trying to figure out how to convince them to give it a chance, Ryan stepped forward. “Hey,” he said, his voice more serious than usual. “If Dani thinks this plan will work—urn, and Macy and Ned and Ken too—I think we should at least talk about it. Right?”
I shot him a quick, grateful smile. Even if it was only his crush talking, it was nice to have some support.
“I suppose.” Brooke shrugged. “So let’s—” She cut herself off. “Hi, Josh.”
I jumped in surprise. Josh had returned so quietly that I hadn’t even noticed him until Brooke said something. I stared at him so hard that it felt like my eyeballs would pop out of my head and tumble onto the sand. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was sort of staring into space, his expression wavering somewhere between dejected and sheepish.
“What are you guys talking about?” he asked the group at large.
Macy Ned, and I exchanged a quick, anxious look. I guess none of us was quite ready to speak up and tell him all about the plan we’d been concocting behind his back. Least of all me.
Luckily Kenny had no such qualms. “We’re talking about a new plan” he said eagerly. “See, we figured out that if we could build a big, huge fire up on the ridge …” He went on, explaining the whole thing.
Josh nodded along, his expression slowly changing from downcast to interested. “Cool,” he said when Kenny finished. “Let’s do it.”
I goggled at him. Was he serious? Did he really think the fire plan would work, or was he just eager to take the attention off what had just happened?
Finally he glanced over at me, briefly meeting my eyes. But before I could figure out what he was thinking, Kenny let out a yelp.
“Hey!” he cried. “What time is it? We don’t want to miss the boat!”
Everyone scrambled into action as we realized we didn’t have much time. If that boat stayed true to schedule, it would be chugging into view of our island in less than an hour.
“Come on,” Chrissie cried. “Let’s get up to the ridge!”
We all took off down the beach. As we passed close to camp on our way to the trail, Ryan raced on ahead and woke up Mr. Truskey to tell him what was going on. “What’s this I hear about a campfire, Counselor Bob?” the teacher burbled, staggering out of the shelter and grinning at us. He was dressed in a pair of jeans so dirty and raggedy that they would have made a scarecrow look underdressed, topped off with what appeared to be one of Kenny’s T-shirts.
I grimaced, realizing that any rescue would come none too soon for Mr. Truskey. I just hoped his sanity was still in there somewhere.
But there was no time to ponder that at the moment. “Hurry” I panted, leading the way into the jungle.
We made it up to the ridge in record time. Well all of us except for Mr Truskey, who only followed along for about five minutes before getting distracted by a passing butterfly and wandered off in his own direction. As I emerged out of the cool mistiness of the jungle into the midmorning glare of the sunny clearing, I heard gasps and exclamations from the others and saw the amazed looks on their faces.
“Whoa,” Ryan exclaimed. “This is going to be like The Towering Inferno!”
I guess the fire pile was sort of like a zit; if you see it every day you don’t really notice exactly how much its growing, even if you’re aware that its getting bigger. But now, looking at it through their eyes, I had to admit the pile really did look pretty impressive. Almost ten feet high, it first appeared to be nothing but a chaotic jumble of jungle junk. However, upon closer inspection it became possible to see that it was arranged in a definite pattern, an intricate crisscrossing network of layers, each one built upon the next. If you took away any of the large branches, or one soft nest of dry leaves, the whole thing would be a mess. But as it was, it was perfect.
“Wow” Josh let out a long whistle. “You guys have really been working on this!”
Ned looked shy yet proud. And no wonder—the whole thing was thanks to him. Without his input the fire pile would have been just that. A pile, nothing more.
“Yeah,” he said. “Um, thanks. We all worked pretty hard.”
“It was my idea!” Kenny spoke up, puffing out his skinny little chest proudly.
Ned laughed. “Yep,” he agreed. “You were the mastermind, Ken.
” He reached into his shorts pocket and pulled out a book of matches. “So Josh, you’re the leader—want to light it?”
Josh pushed away the matches. “No way, dude,” he said with a smile. “It’s all you. You do the honors.”
“Yeah, go for it, Ned,” Brooke said.
“Whoo-hoo, Ned!” Chrissie sang out. “You the man!”
“You the man, you the man!” Kenny repeated happily.
Macy smiled at Ned. “Go ahead. Light it.”
“Well … okay” Ned looked abashed by all the sudden attention. He flipped open the matchbook, revealing that there were only half a dozen matches left inside. “Um, here goes.”
“Hey, I feel like we should make a little speech or something,” I joked, feeling a little excited in spite of my worries. “Like, hereby we dedicate this fire to the castaway within all of us….”
Angela snorted. “Grow up, Dani.”
But the others seemed to catch my spirit of silliness. “And we send forth this smoke to carry our voices to the world.” Josh picked up where I’d left off. “And to express our desires to be rescued and returned to our homes….”
“With liberty and justice for all,” Brooke added in a rather pompous tone.
That did it. Ryan started to laugh, and Kenny joined in. Soon the twins dissolved into giggles, and before long, everyone else was laughing too. Brooke tried to look insulted for a moment, but finally she grinned.
“Okay, okay,” she: cried over the laughter. “Go on, Ned. Let’s get this sucker burning already!”
We all cheered loudly. Ned scratched one of the matches across the igniter strip, and it flickered into life. “Here goes nothing,” he said.
Leaning forward, he touched the flame to a slender twig jutting out from the pile and carefully retrieved it. Moving quickly around the perimeter of the pile, he lit as many twigs as he could before the burning piece of kindling threatened his fingers.
Then he flicked the still-burning twig into the pile. “Okay everyone should probably move back a little,” he suggested, already moving to follow his own advice. “If this thing burns like it’s supposed to, it’ll get pretty hot pretty fast.”
We all stepped back to the edge of the clearing, our eyes trained on the tiny, sputtering flames as they struggled to stay alive in the breeze. I held my breath, hardly daring to hope that the fire pile would work.
It worked. Those first tiny flames ate their way along their twigs to a thick layer of dry leaves and other kindling, which began to smolder and then burn more vigorously. Soon the fire was crackling along the edges of the larger branches, and after that it was like a chain reaction, each layer of flame spreading upward and downward to ignite the rest of the pile. Before long the whole thing was aflame, crackling away loudly and sending great quantities of smoke pouring up into the air. It was a pretty impressive sight; if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought it was a volcano erupting. Of course, if that had been the case, I knew of a certain blond-haired girly-girl we would have been able to sacrifice to the volcano spirits….
“Excellent!” Josh’s eyes were trained on the smoke, which drifted and spread across the sky like huge gray tentacles.
I coughed as a sudden breeze carried some of the smoke directly into my face. “Yeah, awesome job, Ned,” I choked out between coughs.
Ned hardly seemed to hear the compliments. He was peering through the dense smoke toward the horizon. “The boat should be here any second now….”
Grabbing Macy’s wrist and checking her watch, I saw that he was right. I dont know about anyone else, but I hardly breathed for the next few moments as we all waited. My eyes were watering from the smoke, but I kept them wide open as I stared out to sea.
Finally Kenny let out an excited shriek. “There it is!” he cried, jumping up and down and jabbing his finger toward the horizon.
“I see it! I see it!” Cassie sounded so excited I was afraid she might start hyperventilating.
Everyone started jabbering at once, laughing and screaming and jumping up and down. “Wait!” I yelled above the clamor. “Chill out, okay? We don’t even know if they’ll see us.”
“Way to be optimistic, Dani.” Angela rolled her eyes.
But they all kept quiet for the next few minutes … as the boat chugged right on past and disappeared from sight again. I went limp, as if someone had just turned all my bones to Jell-O. So much for that.
“Don’t worry.” I could tell Ryan was trying to sound cheerful. “Even if they didn’t notice the smoke, the people on that other island probably will.”
“Yeah,” Brooke agreed, though she didn’t sound cheerful at all. “Anyway, we can try again tomorrow. I guess.”
“How?” Angela was still staring out at the empty horizon. “There’s no way we can get together another huge pile like this in one day. Not even with all of us working on it this time.”
“So maybe it won’t take one day.’ Macy’s voice was quiet but determined. “We still have to keep trying.”
I just sighed, not too sure about that myself. But I kept quiet as they started debating about what to do. After all the drama, the ups and downs of the past few days, I was suddenly just too exhausted to argue or plan or think anymore.
Josh stepped toward me, his face somber. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
My stomach clenched nervously. “Sure.”
We slipped away from the group, moving around behind a rocky outcropping near the edge of the jungle. It was only about chest-high, which meant we were still within sight of the others, but it was far enough away to give us a little privacy as long as we kept our voices down.
“Listen.” Josh took a deep breath. “I just wanted to apologize. You know—for before.”
“What?” For a moment I was confused. “You mean the raft? That’s okay, there’s no way you—”
“Not the raft,” he cut me off. “After that. I kind of acted like a baby. You know, when you said the raft was a total disaster.”
I winced at hearing my own words again. “No, I’m the one who should say I’m sorry. I was totally rude.”
“That’s okay. Anyway, you were right. The raft was a disaster; I should’ve realized that sooner. This was a much better idea.” He waved one hand in the direction of the fire. “So how come you didn’t tell me about it sooner?”
I didn’t really have an answer for that, so I just shrugged. “So what does this mean?” I asked tentatively. “You know—for us.”
“What do you mean?” Suddenly Josh looked uncomfortable. “I thought we already talked about that. You know”
I wasn’t sure I did. “But are we still …” I swallowed hard, realizing I might be heading into territory I didn’t really want to visit. Then again, wasn’t it better to get it out in the open? “Like, at first I sort of understood why you wanted to keep things a secret. You know—about us. At least I thought I did. But then I started to wonder if, well, you weren’t really sure about the whole thing, and that’s why—”
“Hey!” Kenny’s shout interrupted whatever I was trying to say, which was just as well, since I wasn’t too sure it was coming out right. “Check it out! The boat! Its coming back!”
Josh and I both gasped. “Really?” Josh cried, hurrying back around the outcroppping. The others were staring off toward the horizon, babbling in confusion and/or excitement.
I followed Josh around the rocks, already squinting in the same direction as everyone else. “Where?” I demanded. “I can’t see anything through all this smoke.”
“There!” Josh pointed. “Look, Kenny’s right! The boat’s coining back!”
I finally saw it then too. The boat was chug-chugging along in the opposite direction from its usual path. As I stared, hardly daring to believe my eyes, a tiny pinprick of reddish brightness sailed up into the air, arcing over its decks.
“A flare!” Ryan shrieked. “They’re setting off a flare! They see us! They see us!”
“They see us! They see us!”
Cassie chanted.
Josh laughed out loud. “They see us,” he repeated in amazement. Turning to stare at me, he grinned. “They see us!”
Before I quite knew what was happening, he threw his arms around me and planted a big, juicy kiss right on my lips. I kissed him back, open-eyed and smiling, so startled and happy at first that I couldn’t focus on anything else.
Then my gaze shifted slightly, and I saw something that made me even happier. Angela was staring right at us, her mouth hanging open in shock and horror.
“Ugh,” Michelle groaned as she slammed her locker door shut. “I can’t believe I totally forgot to study for my English quiz.”
I grinned at her. “Bummer and a half,” I said. “Guess you were too busy studying for that math quiz you flunked yesterday.”
“Nice.” Michelle rolled her eyes. “Good to know I have the sympathy of my best friends. Not.”
We entered the stream of students pouring down the hall. Tina was walking on my other side. “So tomorrow’s Friday, guys,” she said. “Want to hit the mall this week-end? My sister said she’d drive us.”
“I’m in,” I said immediately.
It felt good to think about quizzes and shopping rather than hauling water or cracking open coconuts. It was only a little over a week since we’d been rescued from the island, and it was kind of surprising how most of my life was already totally back to normal. For the first few days I’d felt like some kind of celebrity—everyone at school and in our hometown had wanted to talk to us about being stuck on the island for so long. A bunch of TV news teams and newspaper reporters from nearby cities turned up to talk to us, and we even did a satellite interview with one of the national morning shows from New York. That was pretty cool, even though Angela managed to plop herself right in the front row and hog most of the camera time.
Anyway, all the attention faded almost as quickly as my sunburn. Within a few days other things happened, and people started to lose interest in hearing our story for the fifteenth time. My parents were still being extra nice to me and Kenny, but otherwise it was almost as if we’d never been gone.
