

### Zander's Island

Copyright 2019 RL Martin

Published by RL Martin at Smashwords

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Table of Contents

Intro

Into the Water

Day Zero

Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Day Four

Day Five

Day Six

Day Seven

Day Eight

Day Eight – Afternoon

Day Nine

Day Ten

Day Eleven

Days Since

Intro

Somewhere around Neah Bay between Washington and Canada, while dad was at the helm of the Wayward Star he told me, "You should be glad you weren't born a girl. If you were a girl, your mom gonna name you Xantara." He chuckled at the thought and looked at me sideways, trying to gauge my reaction. I watched as we slowly glided past a giant cargo ship. I noticed it was flying the Taiwan flag, and dad got all excited. He blew the whistle several times. Taiwan was the place of his birth.

After the ship passed, I asked, "What's so special about the name Xantara?"

"Its mean _protector of Earth_."

"Oh," I said.

I hadn't heard that story before, but it didn't surprise me. My mom was like that. She was always wanting to do everything humanly possible to save the planet. That was like her only goal in life and the sole purpose the fates had given her: save the earth, save the oceans, recycle, save the whales, animals have rights too! It didn't really matter. She was gung ho about it all. And it seemed like it didn't matter what got in her way. Everything and, brothers, sometimes everyone—including yours truly—took second place to Mother Nature.

"Zander means protector of people," dad said. "I like that better."

I thought about that for a minute. I already knew that. Dad told me once before, back when I was younger, but the significance of my name didn't really sink in until I knew that I could have been named Xantara!

"How did you guys decide on my name?" I asked.

"For some reason, your mom like names that start with z sound. My English is not so good. So your momma. She have to make that final decision."

I knew dad hated hearing stories about how our oceans were dying, almost as much as my mom did. It bothered him, too, but his attitude towards it was different. "What can we do?" he said. "All you can do is your part and leave the rest up to God. Try to be a good person, Zander," he said. "Like Ghandi says, 'Live simply so that others can simply live.'"

He loved to quote Ghandi. I'm not sure why but his favorite Ghandi quote was, "Whatever you do will be meaningless. But it's very important that you do it." The saying never made sense to me when I was a kid, but I think I'm starting to understand it now.

His second favorite quote in the world was _not_ from Ghandi. It was some Irish joke and it goes like this: "I drives me boat and me wife drives me dinghy!"

I swear, I heard it a hundred times when I was a kid. Every time he said it, he'd laugh and slap his knee. "Hao hao shao" (so funny) he would say. It was the one good joke he could tell in English, but I always thought the joke needed a good Irish accent to make it work. I was kind of embarrassed when he said it. Actually, I was always sort of embarrassed by his broken English. And dad wasn't exactly shy. His voice could carry for miles no matter what he was talking about. He didn't care about what others thought of him. And he didn't let anything like a little language problem bother him. He kept his sense of humor, even when people started losing their patience with his heavy accent and bad grammar.

Dad always had a good sense of humor, but I am always losing mine. Unfortunately, I also lose my train of thought a lot. In middle school, the counselor in Tacoma said I had ADHD. I'll be a senior next year, but I still got it, I'm sure. I guess it wasn't bad enough for me to take anything for it. Or, maybe my mom thought the meds would hurt the fish or something because that's actually a problem these days. The medicines people take get peed out and end up in our drinking water cause there's no way to filter that poison out. I'm not kidding. It's just another stupid thing my generation has to worry about, like the environment. I'm not on meds, brothers, but maybe I should be. After I tell you what happens in this story, maybe I should be.

Dad gently turned the yacht in a southerly direction and we started heading down the Washington coast with the goal of hitting San Francisco in a few days. I went out on deck to wave goodbye to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and then Jenna snuck up and hugged me from behind. We sat on the deck holding hands and watching the seals play and the seagulls fly around us. We soaked up the sun, something we didn't see too much of in Tacoma, and talked about what it would be like to be thousands of miles from land.

I looked forward to seeing the stars at night in the middle of the ocean, away from light pollution on land. Jenna looked forward to pulling into the port in Oahu and seeing Waikiki Beach. She was nervous about the trip, and I have to admit, I kind of was, too. This was going to be my first time into the wide-open waters. Sure, I had been fishing with my dad off the coast, near Westport, Washington, but those were just day trips. I knew we'd be back each night. This was the real thing. Someday soon, we would be thousand miles from land. I kind of felt like we were pilgrims or something. I half wanted to call the yacht we were on the Mayflower, but she already had a name, the Wayward Star.

Jenna's cat, Mr. Jackson, jumped into her lap, clearly trying to get a closer look at the gulls overhead. I reached over and ran my palm slowly down his back, reminding myself I should wash my hands before touching my eyes after petting him. As I stroked the cat, I thought it was a miracle my dad and Estevan agreed to let the three of us aboard.

Here's how it all happened. You see, dad got hired by this guy named Estevan Campos to sail Estevan's yacht from Seattle to Hawaii. He was this rich retired software executive who probably retired because nobody liked him. And he wanted to move his boat to his summer home in Hawaii. And since he wasn't all that healthy and didn't have much experience sailing, he put an ad for a captain on one of those boating websites. My dad saw the ad and answered it.

Estevan wanted an experienced captain and at least one other hand on deck. When dad told me about the gig, I begged and begged him to let me come along. It was summer, and school was out and I didn't have a job. I knew a lot about fishing and sailing because of the time I had spent with my dad as a kid, and I had been working out (Well, sort of. I was in okay shape, but not as good as I let on like). I bombarded him with all kinds of reasons about why he should let me go with him, but what finally worked was guilt. Brothers, guilt always works. "You'll be away for over a month, and I won't get to spend any time with you, and I'm about to graduate high school and go off to Wazzu. This is our last chance," I said.

Dad looked down at the ground that day and then started nodding his head. "Dui le, Zander. You should come. Bu gou, hen wei shien."

Dad told Estevan about me, and eventually they both agreed that I could come. "You have to promise to be careful. Always wear a life vest on deck and use tether when you're on deck too," dad told me. "I will. I will," I said. I probably would have promised to donate my liver if that's what it took. That's how bad I wanted to go.

When I told Jenna I was going, she acted kind of hurt, like I was breaking up with her or something. It never occurred to me that she would want to go, but she kept saying things like, "Oh, you go ahead and have fun. I'll just stay here alone and work all summer." Guilt, brothers. I'm telling you. It got me. Of course, it wasn't just guilt. I wanted her to go, too. Really, can you imagine? I mean having a beautiful girlfriend with long brown hair and brown eyes along with you as you cross the Pacific Ocean? That's like crazy romantic, to me anyways. So, I started asking dad and Estevan to let Jenna be the second deck hand, even though they weren't sure they were going to take anyone else.

At first, Estevan was dead set against her. "It's too much of a liability. If we take anybody else, it has to be a man who can carry his weight," he said. But after I showed him some pictures of her and explained that she had been a lifeguard at the YMCA when she was like 14, he started to change his mind. I also mentioned her cat because I had heard him talk about how much he loved cats and the fact that his own cat had died not too long ago.

So that's how Jenna, Mr. Jackson, and I were sitting there watching the gulls fly overhead as we made our way south towards California. I stroked Mr. Jackson again, this ugly American Wirehair cat and reminded Jenna to be careful with him. He didn't have a tether on like we did. I looked around at the beauty of nature and understood why mom wanted to save it. It was all a miracle. The fact that her mom and my dad and Estevan agreed to all of this, an insane miracle!

I should tell you about the yacht, the Wayward Star. She was a beautiful 80-foot sailing yacht, with all the luxuries that you can imagine on it. She boasted an entertainment center with a big-screen TV, a full kitchen with gas stove and dining table, a main cabin where Estevan slept, and two guest cabins. Jenna had her own cabin while dad and I shared the other one. That was one of the things we had to agree on. Estevan and Jenna's mom insisted that the two of us have separate rooms. We were both okay with that. I brought my PlayStation, so when we weren't working, Jenna and I could play Call of Duty or Fortnite or something. Well, I played it more than she did. She brought a lot of books and it seemed like half the time her nose was in a book.

As awesome as the Wayward Star was, it turns out the owner, Estevan, wasn't all that awesome. He ended up being a rude and obnoxious show off. He seemed to enjoy repeating how much the yacht cost. "Four point two million," he said about fifteen times in that many different ways before we even left Elliot Bay in Seattle.

He had this lame, fake-sounding accent. I'd never heard anything like it before, and I've heard lots of accents. It was like some actor who you know is British but is trying to pass himself off as some southern American gentleman. He said he was from Brazil, but something seemed off about him. Maybe because he was so arrogant. Any conversation with him always somehow ended up being about all the stuff he had and all the hella big-deal things he had done.

Sometimes, he talked down to my dad. I know my dad knew it, but as usual, he didn't seem to care about it. It sure bothered me though. I guess it was kind of a sensitive spot. I wanted to protect my dad, who never really did anything all that big with his life. One time, after hearing Estevan ask dad, "Didn't you ever want to do something with your life?" I was about to say, "Didn't you ever want to go screw yourself?" but my dad must have read my mind.

"Zander, trim the sails," he said.

I fumbled with my life vest, so mad I could hardly see straight. But after getting to work on the sails, I started thinking what did it matter? I looked around at the beautiful design of the Wayward Star. Brothers, Estevan had everything. My dad had basically nothing. But they were both on the same boat, sailing the same waters, eating the same damn food, and watching the same freaking sun set. I guessed that's what Ghandi meant. It really _doesn't_ matter what you do. But it's really important to do it. So, I decided to just mind my own business and not let the old bottle of ape farts bother me.

Jenna came out onto deck as I was trimming the sails and gave me a hand. When we were finished, Estevan came out and stood across from Jenna and me and leaned against this old native American canoe that he was taking back to Hawaii with him. He kind of leaned up against it and caressed it like it was his girlfriend. "This is a dugout canoe made by the Makah Indians. Cost me $43,000. I'm going to put it in my vestibule," he said. I had to look that word up later. Who the hell talks like that? Vestibule. Who even has a vestibule in their house? He talked all about how it was made and how expensive it was. The whole time, he never made eye contact with me. He kind of rubbed the canoe up and down and then looked at Jenna, who pulled closer to me. He went on to talk about his collection of indigenous stuff in Hawaii and about how big a collection of it he had, like he could open his own museum or something.

Bling. It was all just bling. For some reason that word kept popping into my head. Now that I think of it, it's because I saw this documentary about pimps in Chicago or some crazy place like that, and they were wearing crazy amounts of gold and crap jewelry to show the world they were something special. I started to think of Estevan like that, like an old decrepit pimp or something who needs to show off his stuff to stay relevant. Not much difference. After a while, he went down to his cabin and left us alone on deck.

We sat down and Jenna cuddled up next to me and whispered in my ear, "I think you might have some competition."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Estevan." She whispered. "He keeps checking me out."

I knew it already, but when she said it, pins and needles ran up and down my spine.

"For real?" I said.

"Yes. It's disgusting. Every time I look at him, it's like his eyes are eating me up."

"Yien jing chr bing chi ling," I said.

"What?"

"Eyes eat ice cream." I said. "It's a Chinese way of saying you're lusting over somebody."

"This is serious," Jenna said pulling away from me, thinking I was joking but I wasn't. Mr. Jackson peeped his head out of a window in the galley but didn't come out.

"It's probably nothing. He's just an old man. Perfectly harmless. He let you bring your cat," I said after a minute, trying to make her feel better. She just shrugged her shoulders.

"I guess," she said finally. "I just wish he wouldn't look at me that way. And that tattoo on his leg gives me the creeps."

"Yeah. What is that thing anyway?"

Estevan usually wore jean shorts and a t-shirt and he always had on white socks pulled halfway up his calf. The left sock covered the body part of a tattoo of some kind of beast, but the head was always peering out over the top of the sock, staring at you, waiting to jump off his skin and into yours.

"I don't know," she said.

"Well, don't worry. He's just arrogant. That's all," I said trying to make her feel more comfortable and trying to keep myself from getting angry at him again about what he said to Dad. "He's just an old harmless ape fart."

A pod of Orcas came close to our boat and followed us for several minutes. Jenna and I held hands and watched in awe, waving at them. Eventually, they dove underwater and disappeared, but we kept watching the horizon for any sign of them as the sun was setting. Finally, they resurfaced far off in the distance. Jenna said it was like they had been wishing us good luck on our journey.

"It's a good sign," I said. "It's a good sign."

But it wasn't, brothers. It was more like a warning. I wish I could have understood what they were trying to say then. We could have turned back.

We made it to San Francisco in about six days and spent one day fooling around there waiting for Estevan to "conduct some business." Then we went on to Los Angeles where we made our final preparations for the open ocean. My dad had decided we needed to leave from LA because the high-pressure system called the Pacific High was farther south than usual that year. We needed to go around it if we wanted to use the sails and not burn all our diesel. We would have to use our sails for sure. There was no way that the Wayward Star would make it on diesel alone. We needed wind, and the Pacific High didn't have any of that.

In LA we stocked up with more supplies, topped off the engine, filled up some extra cans of diesel, and double and triple checked all the equipment on the boat. Finally, one morning, we said cheers to LA and headed out into open waters in search of the Hawaiian Islands.

Jenna and I were stoked! We were ready for the experience of a lifetime! I'm not kidding. We decided we weren't gonna let Estevan's weirdness and arrogance ruin the trip. We were just going to make the best of everything. We were even looking forward to doing our jobs, which included changing the sails, helping navigate, keeping watch, making sure the fresh water maker was working, keeping the deck clean, washing dishes, and all that kind of crap.

Watching LA disappear behind us and seeing the boundless ocean open up in front of us was an indescribable feeling! I was falling in love with the ocean. I remember thinking, "So this is what dad sees out here. No wonder." And I couldn't help but think that mom, too, was justified in wanting to protect it.

Jenna couldn't wait to see Hawaii and play on the beach. We were going to live it up out there and then fly back to Tacoma and rub our stories in to our friends, who were probably just sitting around all summer on their fat peegoos playing Minecraft and binge-watching Netflix. It was going to be a great story, the memory of a lifetime. Jenna wasn't even waiting. She was posting stuff about it on Instagram and Facebook all the time. We got our last sight of land, and Jenna let out a yelp as we waved goodbye to the continental United States. What a story it was going to be.

I'm telling you dishongs, we _did_ end up with a story. But it's not the one I wanted to tell. Not the one I wanted to tell at all.

Brothers, if you don't take anything else away from this story, then take this away. Don't be getting all mangly dangly. It's just not right. You'll see why. It's all on account of what happens at the end. All on account of my girl, Jenna. My angel. My wayward star.

Where should I start?

Into the Water

One minute I was sound asleep on the deck of a multi-million dollar yacht somewhere between LA and Hawaii and the next minute somebody undid my safety harness and pushed me overboard. I woke up when the hands started pushing me, but it was too late to fight back. I yelled as I splashed into the water and nearly inhaled as I went under. By the time I resurfaced, the engine revved up, and I watched the lights on the yacht getting smaller as the boat sailed away.

I screamed for dad and Jenna and begged for the boat to come back and save me and all that muck, but after a while, my mind went haywire. You, know, dishongs, the craziest things run through your mind when you're about to die. Of all the things I could have been thinking about, I started thinking about Starbucks.

Ms. Studvart, my eleventh-grade English teacher, had a mini-term once where we had to read summaries of five famous novels in one week. We sat around and talked about the themes and the symbolism and the deeper meanings of the novels, which included _Moby Dick_. A lot of it seemed like crap to me, but one useful thing I learned was that the name Starbucks came from a character in that novel.

In the story, there was another guy, a little kid named Pip who was a servant on a whaling ship with a bunch of grown men out there hunting for whales. He was terrified the whole trip because he was out in the middle of nowhere with some really bad dudes. He had to clean the deck all the time and one day he fell overboard somehow and the captain didn't turn around to save him. Just left his lame peegoo floating in the water in the middle of nowhere, just like me. Finally, a harpoon boat came up behind him and pulled him out, but the kid had already gone berserk. It was too late for him.

I started to think that was going to happen to me. I'm not kidding, my dishongs. I was afraid I'd go berserk because I was in the same situation only worse because it was pitch black and there weren't any harpoon boats around to save my own lame peegoo, and no sign of help, and no freaking life vest or anything to hold on to. All I had was the clothes I fell in with, which I might as well just tell you was a Washington State Cougars t-shirt, a pair of cargo pants, my favorite Vans old-school black and whites with a skull-face pattern on them, and my socks. I probably wouldn't wear that to school, but I was on a boat in the middle of nowhere at night. Who was gonna see?

I treaded water and screamed and yelled as the stern light finally disappeared completely into darkness. I flailed around hoping to run into something I could hold on to but there was nothing. Suddenly, I started thinking about the mummified lady of Lake Crescent. One time, when I was a kid, my parents took me to Lake Crescent in the Olympic National Park in Washington. In the lobby of our hotel, there was this book about a body that came floating up in the lake one day in the 1940s. Come to find out, the lady had been a barmaid in the 1930s and was murdered by her boyfriend. He had dropped her into the cold deep waters of Crescent Lake, wrapped up with ropes and bricks.

She sank to the very bottom of that lake where, over the years, her bodily fluids turned into the same stuff as what they make soap with. Literally. I'm not kidding. I forget what the stuff's called, but I never could take a shower with regular white soap after that. I used body wash after hearing that story.

Well, after a few years of being down at the bottom of that lake, the ropes wore off, and her body floated right up to the top, soap being lighter than water. She was a regular mummy. Brutal.

The funny thing is, a native American legend had it that a great battle was fought there and a bunch of warriors died. When the mummy floated up, they figured a curse had been lifted. I floated around about to die and my crazy mind alternated between images of Starbucks mermaids and Crescent Lake mummies.

For a minute, I hoped the Starbucks mermaid lady would find me and take me under the sea and give me a Frappucino, my favorite, and we'd sing that song from Little Mermaid "Under the Sea!" But that kind of crap is just Disney make believe. I figured I was more likely to meet the mummy than the mermaid.

The clouds were starting to move away, and I could see light in the sky. I looked up and saw the moon and a bazillion stars above me. Oh, why had I wanted to see those stars from the middle of the ocean? I suddenly recalled a preacher I saw one time when I was messing around on YouTube. He said, "Try this. Stand out under the stars some night and point up at the heavens and tell God 'You are God, I am not. Point at the stars,' he said, 'and say, you are God, I am not.'"

I don't think he meant that the stars are God, but if I'm honest I don't really know who God is. Just when I was thinking about it, the clouds finished moving away and the stars were in full force, so I figured I'd try it. I didn't point because I was trying not to drown, but I sure said it. "You are God. I'm not."

That's probably the first time I realized that I wasn't God. I mean of course I knew that I wasn't God, everybody knows that deep down, except maybe Estevan, but there was always something in the back of my mind that told me I was invincible, that I couldn't be stopped. I prayed that God would make the yacht turn around and my dad would pull me out of the water, and we'd live a happily-ever-after freaking life. But that didn't happen.

I tried to get my mind off crazy stuff like mummies and mermaids and dads reaching down from the sky and tried to figure out what happened earlier that night so that maybe I could figure out how to save my sorry butt.

I went through the events leading up to the moment. We had eaten dinner around 8:00. I checked our coordinates, like dad told me to every night. Then, Dad and Estevan went into the cabin about nine and were talking about something. I didn't pay much attention to what they were talking about, but now that I think of it, dad didn't seem very happy. In fact, he had been acting different the past few days, ever since we left Los Angeles. He was usually pretty light-hearted, but he seemed kind of quiet and worried recently.

Jenna had said she was really tired, so she had gone down to her cabin and went to bed early. I went onto the deck, snapped the safety ropes to my harness and watched the sunset. I must have been tired too, because I fell asleep a heck of a lot earlier than usual and started having this crazy dream. Me and Jenna were at the Space Needle and she told me she loved me. I leaned over and kissed her, only it turned out not to be Jenna. It was some other girl I didn't recognize. It started off all sick—and I mean the good kind of sick—and then it got all messed up on me.

I felt something bump up against my arm, but when I reached for it, it was gone. It didn't feel like a fish or anything, so I didn't really panic. I thought maybe it was something that fell off the boat, but I just couldn't find it. I flopped around like a June bug drowning in a kiddie pool looking for it, but eventually I gave up and just kicked my legs slowly, trying to catch my breath. I screamed real brutal again, "This is NOT funny. Hui lai!" Nobody was laughing. They were gone. I was starting to get tired, and the crazy thoughts started to filter out of my head into the ocean.

About that time, I touched my pants pocket to see if my cell phone was there. I always kept it safe inside a Ziplock bag in my cargo pants because dad said salt water plays havoc on electronics. I put my hand in my pocket to just hold it, and I realized that I also had a pack of chewing gum in the bag with it. I was getting thirsty and thought the gum would help, so I put a piece in my mouth and put the wrapper back inside the bag, keeping the inside nice and dry. The gum helped a little.

I thought about calling 911 but knew there was no service out there. Still, I checked anyway by pushing the power button and looking to see if I had any bars. Nothing. Knowing that I had my phone made me feel better. Kind of like a little kid who needed his blanket, I needed to know my phone was there. I don't know about you, dishongs, but I get nervous when I don't have my phone around me. Lots of kids do, I guess. I'm telling you, that's kind of sick, and not the good kind.

Probably like 30 minutes into this whole thing, a fire lit up the sky and I heard a big explosion in the distance. The fire cast the shape of Estevan's yacht. I went crazy, yelling for my dad and Jenna. But of course, nobody could hear me. I started swimming towards the fire, but it was so far away—and I'm not that great a swimmer, especially fully clothed. I didn't get anywhere near it until the flames were already hissing into the water. As I approached where the yacht had been, I could hear the circular vortex of the water spinning around sucking it down to the depths. I swear it sounded like a person I saw on TV once taking his last breaths. A giant air bubble came up, and I got the feeling the ocean was burping.

The horror of it all hit me hard when I heard that burb and realized that the sea had just swallowed my dad and girlfriend. I couldn't have cared less about that old bastard, Estevan, but I would have given anything to hear even his voice.

This is it, I figured. Wan dan le. My whole 17 years on planet Earth were about to end and I had no idea why. At least I didn't have to think about what to do with my life anymore. I won't lie, dishongs. I cried. Even though I hadn't had a very great life, I still cried, like a baby. I mean I was shaking and crying like serious boo-hoo baby stuff. You wouldn't have any respect for me if you saw me. I think I even messed in my cargo pants, not that it mattered.

I guess in an extreme situation like that, you don't stay scared forever. At some point, you just calm yourself down and face the inevitable. I found myself talking all soothing to myself and trying to conserve energy.

"Okay. Think, Zander. Think. What would dad do?"

I started remembering that boating class I had and all the times my dad told me about how to survive in the water. At least it wasn't the water in the Puget Sound, I thought. That's some cold-ass water. You practically have to have a wet suit to put your feet in it. My friends used to go dock jumping down at the Ruston waterfront, but I couldn't stand the cold. It felt like needles digging into me, and I hate needles. I wouldn't be telling you this story if all this had happened in water up north off the coast of Washington or Oregon. I would have died of hypothermia in about twenty minutes.

"At least the water is warm," I thought to myself.

Suddenly, I remembered a trick I heard of once. I should have thought of it sooner. I took off my pants and tied the ends of the two legs together. Then, I lifted them up out of the water and put the waist part into the water first so that I could trap air in the pant legs. It worked! My pants became a sort of life preserver. That gave me bit of a breather from kicking my legs.

I kind of curled up into a ball and held onto my air-filled cargo pants and just tried to float on my back like they said you should to preserve energy and body heat. Even though the water was pretty warm because it was July and we were down south, I knew you can still get hypothermia, even in 70-degree water.

I floated there and started crying again because I remembered my dad telling me all of this stuff. "Dad," I cried. "Ba Ba!" I probably said that a hundred time until the gum slipped out of my mouth and got lost in the water and I got lost in memories of him.

Dad had been a deep-sea fisherman for a long time before he met my mother. He loved the ocean. And I guess you could say my mom did, too. But my dad loved it in a way that he always wanted to be with it. My mom loved it in a way that she thought we should just leave it alone. They probably should have never gotten married because they didn't see eye-to-eye on anything. Mom always harped on how we were killing the ocean. She talked about how there were areas in all the world's oceans full of plastic. Some were way bigger than most countries and the fish and birds and marine animals were dying because of it, because of us. They would eat plastic and die.

"Every time we use plastic, we kill an animal," she said to me once when I was eight and we were eating at McDonalds. I was filled with guilt for having taken a straw and a lid for my soda. When I sucked on the straw, I felt like I was sucking the life out of a duck or something. It was hard to swallow.

As I clung to my air-filled pants in the dark, a picture that hung on her office wall came to mind. It was a dead albatross chick that had started to decompose. You could see its belly full of plastic bottle tops and rubber bands and crap like that. The parent Albatrosses thought it was food. Then I remembered the fights and how she yelled all brutal at dad about how bad deep-sea fishing was.

Long story short, my dad gave up fishing and started working as a janitor in one of the big buildings in Tacoma. "Wo Fang Chi" he had said one day. "I give up." He always tried to make me believe he quit fishing because he couldn't make any money at it anymore, but I knew that was only partly true. Eventually, he moved out of the house, bought a boat and lived in it down at the Tahoma Marina. I was about ten when this happened.

Sometimes, when I stayed with him on the weekends, we'd take the boat out and go fishing around Vashon island. One of our favorite things to do was watch Bear Grylls and Dual Survivor. It was better when we watched them on his boat. When he was still at home, my mom would come into the room when we were watching our shows and root for the planet to squash the guys trying to survive. "There's already too many of us," she said.

"Am I one too many?" I thought as I looked up at the stars struggling for life there in the middle of the ocean. "Is that why I'm dying here? Is that my curse?"

After a long time of just floating there and refilling my pants with air every couple of minutes, I started to think my mind was playing tricks on me. I could have sworn I heard a boat motor start up. It sounded like a small engine, like you'd hear on a little fishing boat. I yelled as loud as I could, but the sound slowly disappeared. "Estevan!" I yelled. "Please don't do this!" I cried. I'm not sure why I thought it was him, but I figured this whole thing had to be his fault somehow.

I never liked the old guy from the beginning. As we were leaving Seattle, he told us about how he was supposedly born in Brazil and immigrated to America when he was like three. He made it sound like he had done that all by himself. I imagined him one day walking out of his preschool class, flipping them the bird, and high-tailing it to America looking for a better life. He told us he started programming when he was like five. Self-taught, blah blah blah. I hate that kind of person more than anything. I probably would have hated Mozart if I'd met him while he was alive. I figure he came out of the womb singing a new symphony saying, "Write this down, dishongs!" I like classical music nowadays, though, but that's probably because of Jenna. I never touched the stuff till she came along.

The sound of that small engine disappearing in the darkness took my last ounce of hope with it. My mind went back to crazy stuff that I don't even care to tell you about. I would have cried more but I didn't seem to have any more tears. Occasionally, when I got tired of holding on to my pants and being curled up in a ball, I would swim around like a fish with its head cut off hoping to find something to hold on to besides my pants, which were losing air all the time. I had to keep putting more air in them and that was exhausting.

After several hours of this, I started to face reality. I knew I was going to drown at some point. "It's all hopeless," I said and my heart started pounding hard like it does when you're nervous about something like giving a big speech in front of some morons. "I'm gonna let go soon." Chills ran up and down my whole body and I started shivering like I'd just jumped off that dock there on Ruston Way, only there weren't any friends around and I couldn't just swim back to shore.

I started psyching myself up to go under just like our multi-million-dollar yacht just did and like the Crescent Lake lady had done so many years ago. For a moment, I wondered if the ocean would burp after it took me, too. "Hope I'm tasty," I whispered to the Pacific.

Maybe Jenna and dad were down there looking for me. Maybe Jesus was there waiting to take my hand like he did with that little kid who died and came back and they made that movie about him. All I knew was that I was about to take my last deep breath and fill my lungs full of water. I felt kind of like I do when I am about throw up, which I really hate. I'll do everything I can to avoid letting it happen. Like, I don't swallow my own saliva. I use mind control and tell myself happy thoughts. I think about anything besides throwing up. But eventually, if I'm truly sick, I just have to bend over the toilet and let it come up.

I knew that in a minute or two, I would bend over the proverbial toilet, take a deep breath of H2O and then, well, whatever. Who knows, right? I would be dead. I didn't know if my body would sink and my spirit would go up. Or if would they both sink down together into a cold, deep, dark nothingness.

I walked through what was about to happen a few times in my mind and tried psyching myself up to let go of life. I planned to exhale all my air, then let myself sink under water until my body couldn't handle not having air anymore and I would have to inhale. I wouldn't have time to swim back to the surface and that would be it. I would be with dad and Jenna and my grandparents and a cousin of mine who died when I was six.

As I started to take my last breath, I thought maybe I should try my phone again. I was sure I couldn't reach anyone. There's no service out in the middle of the ocean. In fact, I hadn't had service for several days, since we left LA. I took the phone out of my pocket anyway. My pockets had Velcro straps on them so that's how come it didn't fall out all this time. I carefully took it out of the Ziplock bag, trying not to get any water in the bag. Even though I knew I was going to die, I was still careful with my precious phone. Maybe I'd need it in heaven or wherever I was going.

It turned on nearly blinding me because the rest of the clouds had returned about an hour earlier, just before I heard that boat motor. I called my mom first, but of course there was nothing. I was kind of glad. I didn't really want to talk to my mom anyway at that time. If I was going to die, I would like my last conversation to be with Jenna. So, I called her. Of course she didn't answer.

Before turning the phone off, I checked to see if there were any WiFi spots around. Sounds kind of stupid, I know, but I thought there could have been a boat around me somewhere and somebody could have had a hotspot open. They weren't and they didn't. Anyway, I wanted to leave a message to people somehow. I laughed at the thought of snapping a picture on Instagram: "hashtag drowning" I said, sarcastically. I didn't use Twitter, and Snapchat was like a crazy app to use for your last communication. Like I'm going to Snapchat my dying pictures.

Finally, I decided to send an old-fashioned text message. It was a group text to everyone in my contacts list, even the people I didn't talk to anymore or even remember who they were. Anyway, I sent a text that said: "This is Zander. Boat went down. Explosion. Somebody threw me overboard. Must have been Estevan. Probably won't make it. Love you." And then I sent the last coordinates I could remember from writing them down earlier.

I had struggled as long as I could. I checked the time as I turned off the phone, 4:43 a.m. In Chinese, that's a pretty horrible number, but if I waited another minute it would be even more horrible. The number four is pronounced the same as the word die, in Chinese. 444 would be die die die! I shut it off real fast before it could turn to that terrible number. Then, I returned my phone to its safe Ziplock bag.

I must have been in the water at least five or six hours. You might not think that's a long time, but if you want to judge me just go ahead. You try treading water in the middle of a pitch-black ocean all night with nobody around and see how long you last. I put the phone back in my pocket and prepared to drown. Lots of other crazy thoughts came to mind, but they don't matter. It took a good while for my body to give in and agree to give up the fight, and I started to exhale.

Day Zero

Obviously, dishongs, I didn't drown just then. Otherwise, I wouldn't be telling you this story, or it would mean I came back from the dead, like that little kid they made that movie about. But none of that happened. Just as I was about to go under and fill my lungs full of water, I heard a cry.

My heart began pumping again like it did when I first hit the water and a surge of adrenaline shot through me, giving me more energy than any Starbucks Frappuccino I'd ever had.

"Jenna?" I cried out. It sounded like Jenna. "Jenna?" I was flapping my arms around and making so much noise that I couldn't hear her anymore. I could have sworn it was Jenna. But the crying stopped.

I went back to my floating position, put my pants back on so that my hands would be free if I needed to swim faster, and tried to bang the water out of my ears so I could hear better. There it was again. She couldn't be too far off, but in what direction? It sounded like she was behind me, so I started doing the backstroke. I did it all gentle and baby like so that I could hear, kicking my legs so as not to make too much noise. I paused and floated until I heard the cry again. This time the cry sounded further away. I was moving away from her.

"Jenna wait! I'm coming!" I yelled at the top of my voice as I turned around. I swam the opposite way about 20 yards, then stopped to listen for the cry. After probably ten or fifteen minutes, I finally heard the cry again; it was louder this time. I was closer. "Jenna? Hold on, I'm coming." I swam full steam in the direction where I thought I heard the cry. After just 10 or 15 strokes my right arm came down hard on a solid surface.

My right wrist must have been sprained but I hardly noticed. I was so excited to find something floating in the water. I grabbed on to it with my left arm and from the shape of it, I could tell almost immediately what it was, that crazy dugout canoe that Estevan was taking to Hawaii!

Like I said, Estevan was hauling this canoe made by the Makah tribe, near Neah Bay. It was going in his freaking vestibule, or he said he might donate it to some museum but I doubt he'd ever donate anything in his life. "Cost me $43,000," he had said that day when I was sitting next to Jenna. I remembered him running his fingers up and down the white canoe like it was some lady he was in love with, and I had noticed his eyes were on Jenna. As I floated there thinking about how much he loved his stuff, I had a hard time understanding what went wrong.

He told us the canoe had been made out of single cedar tree. The natives in the Pacific Northwest survived on the rivers and the ocean. They did a lot of fishing, so they made hella good boats. And at that moment, dishongs, I was glad they did, and I was glad Estevan had insisted on carrying the thing to Hawaii. How it ended up in the water with me, I didn't know at the time, but I was sure glad to find it.

There was only one problem. The canoe was floating upside down. It had capsized somehow, or maybe it was thrown off the boat upside down intentionally. I didn't know. I held on to the rim of the boat, which was underwater, and yelled for Jenna. This time, the cry was a lot closer, but to my shock, the voice was not Jenna's. In fact, it was not human at all.

I shimmied slowly along the outside of the boat, steeling my nerves to face some horrible deadly sea creature. But on the other side of the canoe was nothing also.

The clouds moved away, and I was able see clearly the decorations painted on the white canoe. I could see the body of a raven. Its head was under water reaching down along the pointed front of the canoe. I remembered that it looked like the Seahawks team emblem. Estevan had told us that the Seahawks logo was actually copied from the KawaKawa tribe or something like that. I can't remember. I imagined the upside-down underwater eyes of that bird were staring at me with pity.

Dishongs, when I heard the cry again, I really thought I had lost it because it seemed to be coming from one of the animals painted onto this crazy canoe. But I happened to look up on top of the boat, and there sat Mr. Jackson.

"Oh, MJ," I said and then started to cry again. I was really sad that it wasn't Jenna. And to be honest, I really didn't like cats. I had only told Jenna I liked them because she did. I shouldn't have lied to her, I guess. But I really liked her and I probably even told myself I liked her cat, too, just because it was hers.

"What's happened to us?" I asked reaching up to him. The stupid cat screamed and mauled the same poor hand that I had just banged into the boat. "All right, all right. I get it." I said, trying to be tough, but really I suddenly got the urge to hold that dumb cat and kiss it and cry on it.

"Where's Jenna? Where's dad? Where's, that snob? Did you see what happened?" I asked Mr. Jackson seriously, as if he could talk.

Estevan owned a software company that he had recently sold to Microsoft. I can't tell you how many times he told the story about how he went to Bill Gates's house one time. Like that made him God or something. And that story always led to the one about how he'd found out he was sick--he never did actually say what was wrong with him. He came home from the doctor's a week or so after his dinner with his dear old famous friend and decided life was short. He sold his company for 20 mil to his buddy Bill, bought the yacht, put an ad on the Internet for somebody to sail it for him, and found my dad, who as you know had been cleaning buildings in Tacoma and wishing he could get back out to sea.

As I hung on to the canoe, I started thinking I might have half a chance at surviving. My situation was getting better--now that I had that canoe. And even a stupid cat was better than no companion at all. I stopped crying and slowly reached up to Mr. Jackson again but stopped before touching him, letting him sniff my hand.

"Did you see who threw me overboard? It was that old man wasn't it?" I was using my cutesy cat voice and he was letting me pet him now that he recognized me. "Good cat. Good boy."

As glad as I was to have that cat, I knew that I had to get the boat righted. I couldn't hold on forever. If we were going to survive, I would need to rest soon and keep my body temperature up, but I couldn't just climb on top of a capsized boat. It would sink for sure.

I tried several times to push it upright, but I didn't have enough leverage in the water and Mr. Jackson hissed at me every time I tried. If only it was sitting higher, I thought. Maybe I could get it flipped over easier if it had more air underneath it. So, I started using my pants to trap air and transfer it under the canoe. I did this until I was exhausted and nearly passed out. It seemed to be working a little, though. I let myself float alongside the canoe. The moon was brighter now than ever, and I could see the canoe and Mr. Jackson very clearly. But when I looked around in every direction for miles, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Even if I could walk on water, I thought, I'd die of leg cramps.

Mr. Jackson looked down on me a bit. For a minute, I thought I saw him reach his paw down as if to pull me out of the water. But then, his back arched and he hissed at something behind me.

I'm telling you, dishongs, a fear that I had been pushing deep down inside of me this whole time floated right up to the top like that mummified barmaid. Somehow, I had pushed out all thoughts of any predators that might be swimming around. Until then, I had avoided even thinking about sharks or jellyfish or sting rays, or anything that could kill me, besides drowning. Maybe it was the mind's way of doling out fears one at a time, just enough that we don't go bat freaking crazy.

Nothing moved, nothing rubbed up against me, nothing jumped out of the water nearby. But the fear hit me hard just the same.

In my panic, I heaved the boat right side up with a power I didn't have before. Maybe all the air I transferred had actually helped. I don't know, but in the process, I sent Mr. Jackson back into the ocean. I heard him complaining, but there was nothing I could do. I felt bad, but at least the boat was right side up and I started to pull myself inside. But the canoe was so full of water that my added weight began to sink the whole thing.

I quickly jumped back into the ocean and felt Mr. Jackson's claws dig into my shoulders right through my WSU t-shirt I'd gotten on a college tour that summer with my mom and her new boyfriend when I was trying to figure out what I would do with my dumb life. The claws dug into my skin and I remembered why I hated cats. I reached back and pulled him off like he was a giant tick. His claws flailed around, scratching up my arms, but I managed to throw him into the canoe. It was still full of sea water, but he wasn't heavy enough to make a difference.

I threw my pants and shoes and socks into the canoe and began to feel a bit lighter, but I was still expecting to have a shark take a bite out of my leg any moment. I started to use my pants to soak up the water and then ring them out in the ocean. I did this probably five hundred times until the little canoe was nearly empty and floating pretty high up. Only a couple inches of water covered the bottom. My arms were so tired, dishongs. I left my pants in the canoe then rested for the next big battle, getting my poor cut up, in-shock, thirst-craved lonely body into that crazy a canoe so that I could lay there and die in peace.

If I got into it, I would be thankful that at least maybe my body might float to some shore and I could be buried on land somewhere. Dishongs, it sure would beat sinking to some unknown abyss. I didn't want to turn into soap.

The bow of this canoe had a long neck, with a raven head coming out on top so it seemed to me the front would be heavier than the back. I figured that if I was going to be able to get in without turning it over again, I would stand the best chance at the rear. And luckily, the rear was only a little higher than the sides. I figured the heavy bow would balance me out a bit. I was right. I heaved myself into the boat and wiggled my way up to the middle. Mr. Jackson backed into a corner and leered at me as if all of this was my fault, but I didn't care. I rolled onto my back and lay down in those inches of saltwater looking up at the sky that seemed to be turning colors.

I remembered my prayer, dishongs. I remembered my prayer. I pointed to the stars and said, "I am not." Then, I passed out.
Day One

I didn't sleep well. I came in and out of sleep but when I finally woke up for good, dishongs, the sun was beating down on me like crazy and I was burning up. I sure wasn't worried about hypothermia anymore. I'll tell you that much. I looked around the horizon for signs of dad and Jenna or a boat, but nothing. Naturally, the next thing I did was reach for my phone. I carefully took it out of its Ziplock bag and turned it on with my good wrist just long enough to see the time and to find out if my message had sent. It hadn't. No signal. I turned it off to conserve battery, only 35% remaining, then put it back in the bag.

Most of the boat was now dry and my throat felt like it would crack into dust. With every move my muscles ached from having to tread water for eight or so hours the night before. My right wrist was so sore that I remember thinking it must be broken. And the places where Mr. Jackson had scratched me were all swollen up. I struggled to keep my eyes open, but they were swollen, too. Then, I smelled the unmistakable smell of cat urine in the boat. I hate that smell. We had cats when I was a little kid. One of them sprayed in a corner under the island in our kitchen and the smell never went away, no matter what my dad tried. We ended up getting rid of the cats because I had developed allergies to them.

"Of all the pets you could have had, you just had to have a cat," I said to Jenna. If she had been sitting next to me, I wouldn't have said that, but the ocean is big, dishongs. The ocean is enormous. And I had no fear of anyone hearing me complain about them.

I looked at the wretched creature and then smelled something else at the other end of the boat. He had done more than just pee. Cat poop stinks to high heaven. If I'm honest, I think I hated that cat from the beginning.

"I should throw you overboard," I said. He gave me a dirty look, and both of us knew I wouldn't do it. Deep down I knew I wouldn't. That cat was my only link to Jenna. If she was still alive, she would never forgive me for killing it. I had to keep it alive.

"You just stay on your side and leave me alone. Don't want to have to eat you," I said only half jokingly.

My throat was so dry, and I was so thirsty I put my fingers in the ocean and tasted it. I knew better. I didn't drink any. I just splashed it on my face and felt the salt water on my dry skin. It reminded me of one time when Dad and I were out fishing and we had forgotten to bring water. He taught me a trick. "If you're thirsty and don't have water, suck on a button," he said, cutting one off his shirt with a knife and handing it to me. I put the button in my mouth and sure enough, my mouth started to water, and I didn't feel quite so thirsty. Unfortunately, I didn't have any buttons in the canoe, but I remembered my gum and popped another piece in my mouth, carefully putting the wrapper back in my Ziplock with my phone. I had three pieces left.

The sun was eating at my neck and I knew I had to protect myself from serious sunburn. I looked around the horizon for any sign of a boat but there was nothing, only open ocean in every direction. I lay back down and put my long tube socks on my arms and pulled them up as high as they would go, anything I could do to hide from the sun. I covered my face with my sock-encased arms and lay there for all of five minutes. It felt like I was baking in a toaster oven. I couldn't stand it. I had to jump in the ocean and get in the shade of the boat.

Except for the sting of all my cuts from butcher Jackson, the water felt good. I was able to find some shade under the head of the raven. I had to block out my fear of sharks and my worry for my dad and Jenna. Actually, I decided I preferred a quick death at the teeth of sharks to slowly roasting. I consoled myself by remembering that people kill 100 million sharks per year, and sharks kill about 4 people per year. Statistically speaking, there wasn't much chance a shark would get me. But believe me, that fear was still there.

Mr. Jackson was better off than me. He was small enough to fit under a ledge that made a seat in the front of the boat. So, he just hung out there while I held onto the boat cooling down. The water began to revive me a little, but my whole body screamed at me for, of all things, water. The chewing gum was not doing the trick.

I looked around the horizon and dreamed of seeing a passing cruise ship on its way to Hawaii. I'd be rescued and fed and comforted. There would be some beautiful girl on board who heard my sad story, and she would take to kissing me and all. She would turn out to be Jenna. I would give her her stupid cat back and she would love me even more. She'd brag for the rest of our beautiful happy-ever-after lives how I'd saved Mr. Jackson.

But there was nothing there. It was worse than being in a desert. At least in a desert you can walk. You can leave a trail. You can dig. You might find a tree. But there was nothing there on all horizons. And there wasn't a cloud in the sky.

I got back in the boat and did my same routine with my clothes to block the sun, until I got too hot. Then, I jumped back in the water. Even though I was staying out of the sun as best I could, I knew my exposed skin was burning. It was not fair for skin that was born and raised in Tacoma to be exposed to so much sun. I was probably in the sun more that first day than I had been for my whole life. Seriously. Not even joking.

Finally, after a long day, the sun began to slide away so that it was hitting the side of the boat and creating a bit of a shadow. I decided not to get back in the water for two reasons. I didn't want to be wet all night, and I was freaking exhausted.

My thirst was getting unbearable. I wasn't going to tell you this, but well, it's part of the story. And I know you won't judge me, dishongs. So, I remembered watching an episode of Man Vs. Wild when Bear Grylls skinned a snake and kept the skin intact so it would hold water. Then, he peed in it and kept his pee. A few hours later he drank it! That was some nasty stuff when I saw it, but now I totally understood why he did it. I didn't have a snake skin or any container other than my Ziplock bag for my phone. But I wasn't about to use that. I needed it to protect my phone for some reason; I just couldn't use it. So, I got myself into a certain position, you'll just have to use your imagination, and I drank.

I lay there in the boat resting, and after a while my stomach started to hurt like crazy. I don't think it was my pee. It was probably the stress and the fact that I hadn't eaten in 24 hours. The waves weren't all that bad and besides, I had gotten over seasickness by the time we passed Oregon the third day out on our trip down the coast towards LA.

I started to get lost in the memory of the dreams we had for the trip, for the adventure we thought it was going to be! I remembered how excited I was when dad agreed to take me. And when Jenna's mom said she could come, well that was just crazy. Jenna was younger than me, and I thought there was no way her mom would let her come. But promised her he would make sure we slept in different beds and that he'd take good care of her. I guess maybe her mom wanted the summer off. Everybody needs a break from each other at some point, I guess. You could say I was happy then.

My mom, now that's another story. She was against the trip from the start. Of course, she was. She was against anything my dad ever did. When I thought of dad, I started to get all emotional. Dad had wanted to get away from my mom so bad that he moved into a tiny boat in the marina. "Moorage is better than mortgage," my dad used to say. He had this old 27-foot 1970 Coronado boat with a cabin that he redid himself. It had a head (bathroom) and a kitchen, a berth with a bed, and everything a single guy could want. His refrigerator didn't hold much except for beers. We always went out to eat when I went to see him, or he would grill out on the deck if he was up to it.

I looked at my little Native American canoe and pictured where I'd put the grill. But as I did, I got a whiff of Mr. Jackson's crap again and remembered my aching stomach. I never had such pains before, dishongs. I never did. And I swore I'd never drink my own urine again. No way. There's Japanese people who drink their first pee of the morning because they think it's healthy, but man, I figure if my body's trying to get rid of it, just let it go! Never again. I won't drink pee ever again.

As the sun was going down, my stomach decided it was time to do something about its problem. Despite my best efforts to avoid it, I barfed over the side. Then, I knew I was in trouble. I was getting too dehydrated. If I started barfing and getting the runs, it was all over. As I wiped my mouth after throwing up, it occurred to me that it could be from the cat. I had cleaned his crap off with my bare hands and then washed them in the ocean without any soap. I'm sure I had touched my eyes or mouth or something. I never could keep my hands away from my face.

Thankfully, I felt a little bit better after throwing up, so I lay down and watched the sky doing its daily metamorphosis. Eventually, the stars were out, and the moon was shining, and I had made it through my first full day as a castaway. The boat rocked gently, and it seemed Mr. Jackson was in a better mood. He rubbed up against me and I felt his purr vibrating my side. It is weird, the blind trust stupid animals put in humans. I guess he figured I knew what I was doing. He was relaxed enough to be purring and rubbing up against me. I weighed the risk of allergies against the reward of cuddling. Even though I was mad at that cat, dishongs, I chose cuddling. I looked up at the stars again and pointed at them this time. "Please God. Water." I prayed. And as I faded off to sleep stroking Mr. Jackson's belly, I added, "And a cruise ship with Jenna on it."

A couple hours later, I woke up shivering. Mr. Jackson was still by my side and despite my allergies I pulled him closer hoping to steal his warmth. I tucked my arms inside my shirt and tried to go back to sleep, but I could have sworn I heard something scratching against the canoe. I waited but the sound didn't come back, so I closed my eyes again. I tried to remember what my dad and Estevan had been talking about before I had been thrown into the water. But I couldn't remember. They seemed to be arguing, and I swear I heard someone shout, "That's not part of the deal."

Just as I was about to fall asleep, I heard the noise again, faintly at first but then louder. My eyes widened even though they were fighting cat dander, and my ears perked up as if they were cat ears, and Mr. Jackson seemed to be feeding off my attentiveness. He was listening, too. The scratching came back louder, and Mr. Jackson cocked his head.

Whatever it was, I decided it couldn't be too dangerous. So, I sat up and looked over the side. There, bumping up against the boat was a plastic bottle. I lay back down, relieved that it was nothing serious. But suddenly I sat back up, startling Mr. Jackson back into his hiding place. I grabbed the bottle and don't remember for sure, but I think I started kissing it.

"I could use you," I said. "I'll need you for something."

I still remember that bottle, dishongs. It was a green Perrier bottle that was filled with lots of air. The bottle cap had been put on tight, and the label was faded but I could still see that the words were in Japanese. There was one swig left in the bottle, and boy I was tempted. But I got to wondering who had drank out of it, and maybe their spit (or maybe it was a pee bottle) had been in there for months or even years and it was like filled with bacteria. I undid the cap and emptied it into my hand to see if MJ wanted it. He lapped it up, so I guess it was water and fresh enough for a cat. At least it didn't have salt in it.

That bottle was like a gift from God to me, just like the boat and that stupid cat. For some reason, I thought of that old movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy" where a pilot threw a bottle out of his window. An aborigine in Africa saw it land in a soft patch, and he picked it up. After talking with his tribe, they decided he needed to return it to the gods, so he had to go on a journey to return it.

I knew better. This bottle was for me. I knew it was a good sign because I had heard that that kind of plastic doesn't usually float because it is denser than salt water. Lots of other types of plastic floats, but water bottles usually sink unless they have caps on and are full of air. And even then, the sun tends to make them brittle after a while. If I could find another one, I could make a solar still like I saw on a survivor show.

I lay back down and tried to sleep, dreaming of the fresh cool water that would flow from this bottle.

Turns out, I didn't need to find another bottle at that time. I woke up at about four something with a refreshing rain coming down in a nice steady stream. I opened my mouth and let the water trickle into it. When the water hit my tongue, it was a wonderful feeling. Have you ever done that trick with a straw where you sort of just crunch up the wrapper so that it gets all shriveled? Then, you take the straw and get a drop of water or soda or whatever and then you drop it on the wrapper and it expands? That's what it felt like. My tongue expanded in my head. And I cried with relief. I'm not ashamed, dishongs. I looked down at Mr. Jackson and saw him lapping up water from the floor. But I figured it was probably salty, so I held out my hands and tried to trap water to give him. The rain was so cold but otherwise perfect. I took off my clothes and took a shower. It felt so good to wash off the salt.

I held my bottle up to catch the water and wished I had a knife to cut it open wider. I chewed on it a while and eventually worked the top off so that more water could come in. It rained about two hours and it filled up about a quarter of the bottle. I also broke down and used my Ziplock bag to catch some rain water.

Eventually, the rain moved away, and the sun began to come up. I lay down in the bottom of the boat and didn't even care that I was wet. I greedily drank all the water in my Ziplock bag and set it out to dry so that I could put my phone back in it. I felt refreshed. My sores still hurt me, my skin was still burnt, but I was alive. It was hard for me to believe, considering where I started the night before with nothing. I had a quarter of a bottle of water, I had a canoe, and I had a cat. I looked up and pinched myself thinking, "I am alive. I can't believe it." I lay down in the fresh water that had gathered in the canoe and tried to catch some sleep before the sun finished rising.

Day Two

My luck would continue the next day. I was baking in the sun around noon and listening to my stomach complain. I had realized it was too much effort to jump in and out of the boat to cool off, so I decided to just dip my clothes in the water. While taking off my shirt, I heard that same scratching noise I'd heard the night before. Over the side of the canoe, saw more plastic floating there. This was just a bunch of smaller broken pieces that were unrecognizable for the most part.

One of the bigger pieces that was kind of intact looked like it was a holder for a car battery. It couldn't hold water or anything, but I got to thinking maybe I should save everything I found because it might come in handy. That's one thing I learned from all those hours of survivor shows. You need to take advantage of all the resources at your disposal. So, I started to pull everything in. If nothing else, maybe I thought maybe I could light it all on fire somehow to create a signal.

I pulled in bits and pieces of plastic and studied them a while. There were lots of tiny pieces of all colors. It looked like they might have come from broken dinner plates or something like that. The water was full of small plastic particles, many of them too small for me to grab with my hands. Still I collected fifteen or twenty pieces that were pretty good sizes.

The sun was beating on me, and I dipped my shirt in the water. Off the port side, I saw quite a few larger pieces plastic floating not far away from the canoe.

If I had been on a scientific expedition or a big old fishing boat or a cruise ship and seen all that junk, I probably would have been upset about it. My heart rose and sank just like the little canoe I was on. It rose because I had no hope of turning on my engine and driving home, and this stuff could be a life line. It was almost as good as seeing land in some ways. It sank because, there was so much garbage where it shouldn't be. I started to get a feeling like I was familiar with this place, like maybe I knew what I was looking at. Then it hit me.

"The Great Pacific Garbage Patch," I said to Mr. Jackson as I looked out across the sea and saw bumps in the waves that indicated trash. "We must be in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Look at it, MJ! Look at all that trash!"

I had done a project my Sophomore year in high school on the GPGP because my mom suggested it to me. Probably, she was wanting to convince me that she was right and dad was wrong about deep-sea fishing and how we were killing the oceans. She had already told me a lot about ocean garbage so I figured it would be an easy project to do. I had to give a stupid speech about it, too. I remember standing in front of the class: "The GPGP is an area twice the size of Texas where plastic from all over the world gets trapped in a gyre and circulates. There are five different garbage patches around the world, but the GPGP is the biggest." I had memorized the first lines and used flash cards for the rest of the report.

Peering down into the water, I saw bottle caps and small bits of plastic floating around. In the distance, there were bigger pieces, globs of tangled messes that looked like they could be fishing gear. "A fishing net would be nice," I said. MJ seemed to agree.

To get closer to the bigger stuff, I jumped into the water, got behind the canoe, and then started kicking. It was rough going because the boat was kind of heavy, and the waves were picking up a bit—higher than they had been before, so I got back into the canoe and couldn't see what I had thought was a fishing net before. Instead I had made it into an area that was pretty thick with a variety of garbage.

I started pulling everything in willy-nilly. One of the first things I grabbed turned out to be a wheel off an old skateboard. I just had to laugh when I pulled it in. It was righteous. There I was floating helplessly in the ocean, and the mode of transportation I got was a skateboard wheel. LOL. It was too funny, dishongs. I still have that wheel, by the way.

To make myself more entertained, I guess, my weird brain started making up back stories about each piece. I found broken plastic cups and Styrofoam and drinking straws and plastic forks and spoons from a high school graduation party that had taken place on a long white sandy beach in California. The wind came up and blew a plastic tablecloth along with all the plastic utensils into the water.

There was a Taco Bell bag from some dude who had bought ten tacos in the drive through. After he ate them, he tossed the bag out his window driving on Highway 101 up the coast of California to see a girl who had just dumped him. I was so hungry I would have killed that guy for his tacos. I looked inside the bag, but of course it was empty, not even a packet of fire sauce. I found a half of a bicycle helmet from some dude who was riding his bike across a bridge and hit a rock and went screaming into the river below. He landed on his head and the helmet was torn in two. The half I ended up with must have broken off and floated down the river and into the ocean. And there was a pink girl's flip flop. I couldn't figure out where that was from. The backstory that popped into my head for that one was not nice, so I kind of stopped the backstory thing.

There were all kinds of tiny pieces of crap. It looked like some kid had poured his Lego set out into a bathtub. There were even random pieces of wood that I figured came from shipping containers. One piece was long and slender and I thought it might work as a paddle, so I set aside and kept on hunting for plastic treasure, hoping to find more useful stuff.

After several hours of plastic hunting, my boat was nearly full. If I had been on land, you would have taken me for a homeless guy, like the ones you see pushing around a shopping cart full of trash. I was getting tired, so I finally stopped to take a break. It was then that I heard Mr. Jackson crying out from his hiding place in the front under that seat. I had buried him under piles of garbage.

"Sorry, MJ," I said, moving some of the stuff away from his hiding place. "Come on out boy," I said softly coaxing him out from his hiding spot. He came out and I picked him up and put him on my lap, but he didn't want to stay there. He stepped out onto the side of the canoe and cautiously walked along the edge until he came to the front. There, he climbed up on top of the raven's head and sat down, suspicious of the garbage I'd just gathered, as if it was going to leap up and attack him.

"It's okay, MJ," I said through my dry mouth. "It's all good stuff."

He gave me the "What were you thinking?" look that my mom always used to give when I got some new shirt or something at the mall. And I looked down at all that shit in the canoe and then noticed that there was a million times more crap still floating out there and I had to admit he was right.

"I guess I got carried away," I said. My throat was really dry again. I wished I would have had more of that junk the night before. The several containers that I had found would all be full of fresh water from the rain. I pulled out the Perrier bottle that I had used to collect rainwater. To keep it from spilling, I had wedged it into the bench to keep it upright. My heart sank at how little I had left. "I'll just take a swig," I said to myself. But then I thought, what if bacteria or something starts growing in it? I should drink it now. So, I did. It felt good and bad dishongs. Like most things in life. Good and bad.

Mr. Jackson was glaring down at me. If he could have reached me, I bet he would have clawed my face.

"Sorry," I said feeling a bit guilty about drinking the last few drops of fresh water. "I'll get more, somehow." I found a small piece of plastic about the size of a button and put it in my mouth and sucked on it a while, but it didn't help quite as much as my dad's button had.

The plastic I had pulled in stunk, but I was still glad to have it. Looking at the garbage patch, I realized the ocean had changed to me. She once seemed pristine and invincible and untamable and cruel. Now, she looked kind of wounded. I hated that so much crap was there in the ocean, and even more, I hated to think my mom was right. I didn't know if the plastic would kill the ocean like she said, but I knew that the crap I had collected was going to help me survive somehow. Good and bad. I was glad to have it.

I stared off into the distance for a while feeling like the world had gone to hell in a cheap plastic dollar store handbag. Then I started to think about dad and Jenna. I got overwhelmed, so I tried hard to pull my mind back to that sophomore year project, trying to remember as much as I could about the GPGP. I remembered it was a giant gyre. It just floated around in huge circles day after day, year after year, and the gyre just keeps collecting more crap because people dump stuff into the ocean like crazy.

People throw crap out of their cars and it ends up in rivers, and rivers flow to the ocean. But that's not the only place it comes from. A lot of it comes from fishing boats. They lose their nets and fishing gear like crazy. And a lot of our recyclables are sold to third-world countries. If the stuff is dirty, they can't recycle it, so somebody said they dump our recyclables in the ocean. One statistic that I had in my project really shocked everybody, and I still can't believe it. Over 10,000 containers fall off of cargo ships every year. Can you imagine? One of these days I'll start a business that goes out and just recovers lost shipping containers. I started hoping I'd see a shipping container floating around out there with beef jerky and bottled water in it.

Anyway, I figured if the GPBP is twice as big as Texas, there should be no shortage of things I needed.

And what did I need? I thought about all those survivor shows. Water is always the most important, so I put that at the top of my list. The next thing I needed was shelter from the sun because, my skin was hurting like hell. Next was a more stable boat. I kept worrying that the little canoe would start to take on water. Then, I needed food. And after that, I could start finding a way to signal to other people. Or, maybe I should signal first and find food later. Or, do them at the same time. I didn't know. I've always been bad at making decisions when I'm hungry. That's why I don't like to go to Subway when I'm hungry. Too many choices. What kind of bread? What kind of meat? What kind of cheese? Toasted or not toasted? Vegetables? Dressing? Make it a meal? Used to drive me crazy when I was hungry. That's why I like MacDonald's. "Number one please." That's it. Of course, I sure would have killed the next person in line for a footlong at Subway.

In the distance, I saw what I thought might be a buoy that could be covered in fishing nets. I remembered one time when mom was complaining to dad about his job, she said that 40 percent of the waste in the ocean was discarded fishing nets. They're called ghost nets. I don't know why. I guess cause they look like ghosts floating around.

"Imagine how useful a net would be, MJ," I said to the cat who had settled down on his Raven's head perch and was looking off into the distance.

I grabbed my wooden board that I saved as a paddle and headed towards the floating blob. The paddle worked surprisingly well, but of course the canoe was hard to steer. I had to do two or three strokes on the right and then two or three on the left to keep from going in circles. Eventually, I got close enough to see that my eyes had not deceived me. It really was a round white Styrofoam buoy that had got caught up in some fishing nets.

I paddled as hard as I could to make sure I got that thing before it floated away, and when I did, I screamed for joy so loud and sudden that MJ almost jumped into the water.

"Sorry, boy." I said. "We're gonna have fish tonight!"

But the net was all tangled, and I couldn't get the dumb thing undone. I just couldn't make any progress on it with my hands all beat up. There was rope and everything mixed in together. I figured that if I could cut some of the rope, I could get it unraveled. It was wound up so tight and my wrist still hurt so bad that I had to give up and rest after a while. I decided to use my strength on more urgent matters, so I secured the buoy to the side of the boat and turned my attention to getting water.

An Australian guy on the Discover channel once talked about how to make mini-desalination plants or solar stills out of plastic bottles. All you do is take a big bottle and a small bottle. Cut the head off the small bottle, and then cut the bottom off the big bottle. Then, you fold the bottom of the big bottle up into itself about two or three inches. Fill up the small bottle about halfway with saltwater, then insert it into the bigger bottle. Keep the lid on the big bottle and set the contraption in the sun. As the water evaporates, it should collect on the side of the big bottle and then as it cools, it will run down and get caught in the fold where you folded the bottle. Then, you just take the big bottle, unscrew the lid and drink. It wouldn't produce too much water, so I needed to make as many of those as I possibly could.

But there were a few problems. First, I needed more of those kinds of bottles, you know the, coke or bottled water kind of bottle made out of PET plastic. As I said, they are denser than sea water, so unless the cap was put on them and some air was trapped, they would sink. Luckily, you'd be surprised how many people put the lid back on their bottles and toss them overboard. I found several. That gave me a real good start.

The second obstacle was cutting the bottoms off. I didn't have a knife, so I needed something sharp, a can or something would be perfect. I told MJ to help me keep a lookout for cans or some kind of metal. I didn't expect to find a knife just floating about, but my mind went wild with mental notes of what to look for. The holy grail, I thought would be lighter, and I remember my sophomore report said that there were cigarette lighters, lots of them, floating around out there. What I wanted most was a can (preferably full of tuna) that I could turn into a knife, and a cigarette lighter so that I could set signal fires for help at night. After all, there was plenty of stuff I could try to burn, but I wasn't sure if plastic would burn. I thought some of it probably does and some of it just melts. It would be worth a try, I though.

I started paddling along and looking for stuff on my wish list. It wasn't long until I pulled in three more water bottles that had the caps and air trapped. And, I swear this on my life, dishongs, Mr. Jackson meowed for the first time since he was trapped earlier that day. When he did, I looked down in the water and you won't believe what I found floating there: an unopened can of diet soda!

I reached in to grab it and the faded label read "Diet Coke." It was warm, but I opened it up and some of it spewed out. I took a cautious sip, and it tasted okay. So, I sat there and enjoyed a diet coke as if I was on some crazy cruise ship or something. I finished it off pretty quickly and started to think about how to turn the can into a knife. I burped and then smiled at MJ.

"That was good stuff, bro," I said, rubbing it in. "Thanks for spotting it."

I planned to break this can open and use it to cut the rope that was causing the net to be so badly tangled. If I got that done, maybe I could actually catch something to eat. And once I had that thought in my mind and the calorie-free soda in my belly, my stomach started to roar. It was so loud I swear MJ thought it was a dog growling at him.

But my heart was overflowing with hope so much that I could ignore my hunger pains. I flattened the can and started bending it back and forth until I was able to tear it in half. I got a sharp edge exposed, and I started gently working on cutting some of the thinner rope that was keeping the net intact. The can kept bending, so I found a small piece of wood to steady the sharp part of the can.

It was slow progress, and I started thinking I should be working on my water project instead. So, I turned my attention to cutting up plastic bottles. That wasn't easy either because my can knife was so flimsy. But between my teeth and my knife I was able to get the bottles cut up. Eventually, I had three desalination machines ready to set to work. I folded them and put sea water in the bottom bottles, but to my dismay, it had already been four or five hours since I was in the GPGP, and the sun was no longer beating down on me like it was before.

I would have to wait until the next day to get the true benefit, but I went ahead and put water in them and set them what remaining sun was left that day. I had to get rid of some of the junk that was in my boat to make room for my desalination contraptions, and I was in desperate need of figuring out a way to make them stay standing up when the waves get bigger. I had been really lucky that day. The sea was calm and giving, but I knew that I had to work as fast as I could. Mother nature is fickle, my dishongs. One day she gives and the next day she takes and takes.

I figured I should take advantage of everything while I could, so I spent the rest of that day paddling around looking for anything I thought would be useful. In order not to get too much crap in my boat, every time I found something that might come in handy, I traded the ocean for it with a piece of crap plastic that I didn't see any real use for. My boat was just too small to keep everything. I found an awesome piece of rope and traded like three small flat pieces of plastic for that one. You don't know how useful rope can be in a survival situation.

Every time I found a plastic bag, I pulled it in and cut myself some slack on the trading part because I could crunch the bags up and they didn't take up too much room. I started thinking about how my mom one time used plastic shopping bags to create a big plastic cloth, like a tarp, and I thought how great it would be to have that tarp to block the sun.

I remember watching her lay the bags on top of each other on a big piece of paper on the floor. She spread them out in a staggered pattern and put another big piece of paper on top and went over it with a hot iron. The bags melted together and created a big cloth, which she used to make my Halloween costume. I can't remember what we called it. I think I was Earth Avenger or something. I'm surprised she didn't call me Xantara then. Dad once told me that before I was born, mom was going to name me Xantara if I was a girl. It meant protector of the earth. But since I came out the opposite sex, she named me Zander, which means defender of the people. LOL. You'll see why that's funny at the end of the story!

Anyway, my third-grade costume was really third-rate. My cape was made from plastic bags, my mask from cardboard, the knife I wielded was cut out cardboard with used aluminum foil wrapped around it. Really lame costume, I admit, but as I pulled in another bag, I got kind of choked up, dishongs, and started to think maybe my mom wasn't so bad after all. She had spent that time with me, at least. And she is right. We really are screwing up the ocean.

But if we weren't screwing it up, I'd probably be dead. For real, dishongs. At least I sure wouldn't have had the hope I had that all that junk gave me. If nothing else, it was a reminder of civilization. It said that I was not alone, that there were millions of others out there who all liked hella stuff. We all liked good food and fun, and we all had to live somehow.

I kept finding pieces of scrap wood and I pulled them in, too. I didn't have to trade anything for wood, because it would lay flat across the canoe and actually gave me a shelter to get under and a platform to put things on. And I knew for a fact it would burn if I could get it dry enough. I got the idea that I would put my desalination plants on the boards and secure them somehow. If only I had had a drill, I would have made holes the size of the bottles. That would have been awesome, but of course I didn't have a drill or an iron or any other tools for that matter.

I found an old tennis shoe and traded an old chewed-up soap bottle that had holes in the bottom for it. I didn't know why I needed the shoe, but I wanted it. At least the shoe strings would come in handy for sure, but I found out later that they were rotting and too brittle to be any good for anything except maybe kindling for a fire.

It was hard to tell because the shoe was so old, but I think it was a Nike. I thought maybe it was one of those from that famous accident back in the late 80s or early 90s when Nike lost around 60,000 pairs of shoes in the ocean. Several containers full of brand-new Nikes slid off into the ocean, and one container broke open, sending those 60,000 pairs floating out over the surface. Months later, a lot of them started washing up on the Oregon coast and the California coast. People would gather them together and then put an ad out for their matches. When they found a match, they could sell the pair. Turns out the shoes floated upside down so the main part of the shoe was protected from the sun. And the sun didn't seem to hurt the soles any. The shoes were still like new, even a year or two after the accident, once they got dried out and stuff.

So, I kind of just wanted to keep the shoe because I thought it might be one of those Nikes. I guess we all need some things that aren't all that useful. Estevan collected that Aborigine stuff and the canoe I was in. People collect all kinds of things they don't need. I kept that old the skateboard wheel and the old shoe not because I needed them, but they became luxuries that kept my mind busy and distracted, I guess. I didn't need them, but I wanted them and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

Anyway, I found a couple more water bottles, more wood and even a couple of nets. The sun was starting to set, and I checked my water bottles. There was a very small amount of condensation. I tapped the bottles and the fresh water ran down the grimy inside and collected in the folds that I had made. I took the small bottles out that still had sea water in them, then I turned the big bottle and poured it into my mouth. It was just a drop or two in each bottle, and it tasted of seaweed and plastic. The good news was that there wasn't a lot of salt in it, and it helped quench my thirst, a little. I had wiped them out with my shirt when I was making them to get as much caked on salt out as possible. I got a couple good drops from each bottle. It was not nearly enough to satisfy me or keep me hydrated, but it did help make my mouth feel not so dry. And it was a good sign that the things actually worked. As the sun began to set, I told myself I would have to get a lot more water tomorrow, or else.

Mr. Jackson came down off of his perch and rubbed up against my legs as if asking for a drink.

"Sorry, buddy. I did it again didn't I? I drank all of our water. Just hang in there, bro. I'll get us some more tomorrow. I promise."

I picked him up and put him on my lap. We watched the sun dip below the horizon. The sky became a deep red and the reflection of a few pieces of debris floating between me and infinity looked like a seals sticking their odd-shaped heads out of the water. That's the first time I'd ever seen a seal with a square head.

The sun eventually disappeared behind the horizon, and the oddly shaped sea creatures went along with it. I looked around my canoe at all the new trash treasures I had and tried to be thankful. But even though I had scored a whole bunch of valuable stuff that day, my dishongs, I have to admit that my heart sank along with the sun. The hope of that day faded with the light, and I didn't look forward to the long cold wait until morning. My body ached, the skin on my neck and forehead felt like it would fall off. I couldn't even touch it. I put MJ in his hiding place that was now covered with boards. Despite my depression, I didn't want to lose the stuff I had gathered if the waves were to get bigger at night, so I took the rope I found and secured the boards as tight as I could. By the light of the moon, I made myself a hat out of a red plastic laundry detergent bottle, hoping to keep my face from the sun the next day. When that was finished, I decided to lay down and try to rest.

My stomach was yelling at me all brutal, dishongs. I figured it was already at least two days since I had eaten anything, and that diet coke just made me hungrier that ever. I don't think I had ever gone more than a few hours without eating in my entire life. I heard about people in Africa who starved to death. That must be the most painful way to go. I'd rather drown and let my body sink to the bottom than die of starvation. I thought about Ghandi who went on a hunger strike. He made it like 40 days, so I knew it could be done. "People fast all the time," I told myself. A friend of mine who went to church a lot said Jesus went 40 days, too. My friend even fasted some every year around Easter. That was weird to me, but I tried to tell myself if he can do it, so could I. I even remembered Estevan tell us the natives Americans who built my canoe had fasted before they started to work on it. "It's possible," I told myself. "I just need to hold on. It'll be okay."

I rearranged my stash of trash so that I could lay down under it because there wasn't any place to lie down anymore. Once I got settled, I shut my eyes, but I never could fall asleep on an empty stomach. I always needed a midnight snack or something around bedtime. When the food hit my digestion system, I would fade off to sleep like a baby. But there was no food, and I really didn't think I would ever fall asleep. I tried to just watch the sky turn to see how many stars would come out. They had to be as many of them as there were pieces of the trash in the ocean. I started counting them, but I still couldn't sleep.

About an hour or two after sunset, the smell of something horrendous crawled into my nostrils. At first, I thought it was Mr. Jackson doing his business again, but when I sat back up, it was clear the smell was coming from outside the boat and we were downwind from it. I inhaled the most God-awful stomach-turning odor you can ever imagine. It was like the dead rat that we found in our crawlspace at my mom's house a year before. It had probably eaten the poison we put out for it and then died. Its body was decomposing in the warm, airless place. If you've never smelled anything dead, count yourself lucky. I knew that smell. I knew it wasn't a rat, but something was dead. That was for sure.

I started to gag. When I tried to breathe through my mouth, I could taste the stench on my tongue. I pulled my shirt up over my mouth and tried to ignore the taste. The moon was bright, and I ended up being able to see the source of the smell. A few feet away from my canoe floated the decaying body of a sea turtle. Its neck and legs were caught in a fishing net, its eyes bloated and popping out of its head. I stared at it for a few minutes, breathing through my shirt-covered mouth and feeling like I was somehow responsible for its death. In its mouth was a piece of a plastic bag. I tried to hide from it but couldn't help wonder, did the net kill it, or was it the bag he swallowed?

I noticed Mr. Jackson was next to me on the ledge peering down into the water at the same thing I was looking at. I think he probably had been there the whole time and had discovered it before I did, but I just hadn't noticed him. He looked like he was about to pounce, but like a typical cat, he hated water. I looked at him as I shoved my shirt further into my mouth.

"Seriously?" I said, my voice muffled through my shirt.

"I wouldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole," I said taking my shirt out of my mouth and pinching my nose. I grabbed my paddle and was about to push the dead turtle away, but I stopped and looked at MJ who seemed to be reminding me of the two times today I had robbed him of water.

"So, you're going to keep food away from me, too?" he asked.

I looked at him dumbfounded. He really wanted that turtle. I was still a long way from being that hungry. I knew that even if I could get it in my mouth and down my throat, it wouldn't stay there. It would come back up and I'd lose valuable hydration. A cat could probably handle it, though, I figured. I didn't know. He looked back at the dead turtle, and I could see he was trying to figure out how he could reach it.

"You're sick, bro," I said. "That'll make you sicker than a dog. And you don't want to be a dog do you?"

I took my wooden scrap paddle and used it to pull the turtle closer trying not to gag. "I guess it's either this or let you starve to death. And it looks like you want it."

I put MJ on the board and extended it out like a plank so that he was able to walk out to the turtle. It was gross. Disgusting. Horrible. I held the board out there and Mr. Jackson ate for several minutes until I'd just had enough of the whole vulgar business. I pulled him back in and tossed the disgusting feline to the front of the boat. Then I took my paddle and rowed as far away from the decaying corpse as I could. When I finally reached fresh air, I stopped and lay back down in the bottom of the boat feeling betrayed by an old friend.

"You just stay on your side," I told Mr. Jackson. "You're nasty." I swear, I could smell his breath from the other end of the boat.

"Whatever," I could just hear him say. "At least I've got a full belly."

After a few moments and some good fresh air, I started thinking about my next steps. I had a fishing net that I would hopefully get untangled the next day. I think there was even some fishing line wrapped up in the net. I had some pretty decent equipment, but I was missing one thing: bait. One of those thoughts came to me, you know the kind you want to push away and wish you never had because they're so bad you just can't stand it? But the idea makes so much sense, it keeps coming back to you so that you can't ignore it.

In a survival situation—I said this before, dishongs—you need to use everything that you have at your disposal. I needed something for bait. I didn't want to use MJ. Well, part of me did. I have to admit. That cat was more trouble than he was worth so far. But not far away from me was a rotting carcass of a small sea turtle that would be perfectly good bait, assuming fish like to eat rotten stuff like cats do. At first, I protested. "No way. I am NOT going back there..." But you know, you're capable of a lot more than you know.

I started looking around for some container to put the smelly thing in. I didn't want to touch the dumb thing because I didn't want to get sick from it. I had a few plastic bags that I thought it would probably fit in. Lucky for me, the turtle was fairly small, probably a baby. I go to this crazy high school in a big park in Tacoma. Some of our classrooms are in the zoo, so I go to the zoo just about every day. In my Marine Biology class we learned how big sea turtles can get. Some of them are massive, six feet, if you can believe it, well leatherbacks anyway.

So, I started psyching myself up to go back into nastyville. I wrapped my shirt around my face, took three breaths of fresh air, and started paddling back in the direction of the turtle. When I got there, the stench was still bad, but I guess I was already used to it our something. I took one of my bags and opened it as wide as it would go, but I could tell this wasn't going to be easy. Even though it was a small turtle, the shell was still too big to fit in the bag.

I noticed that pretty much all of its extremities were gone. That was a good sign, I thought. "Maybe the fish have been eating on it. This might work." There's no way MJ had eaten that much. Just out of curiosity, I felt MJ's belly. It was pretty full. "No way you ate that much, buddy," I said. I looked around for some way to break through the shell so that I could get it in one of my bags. But there wasn't anything. A knife would have made life so much easier. I really wished somebody had dropped one of those knives that have a hollow handle and can float. My Coke can knife was too flimsy. That's for sure.

I looked around for something bigger to put the thing in, but everything was too small. After a while, I just decided maybe I could deal with the smell until tomorrow when I got my nets ready. Not sure how I did it, but I put the bags on my hand like they were gloves. Then I reached in and grabbed the thing with both hands. It was pretty heavy, a few pounds at least, I'd say. Anyway, I heaved the thing inside the canoe.

MJ looked at me like I was crazy. I could tell what he was thinking. One time, I ate a whole pizza by myself and it nearly made me sick. After that, it took a long time for me to want pizza again. MJ actually raised his back and hissed at it. LOL. What a stupid cat.

The smell was horrendous of course. I pushed the carcass to MJ's side of the boat and then covered it up with all the plastic bags I had. MJ was pretty upset. He decided to climb up on the raven's head and sleep there that night.

"It's just for a little while, bro," I said. "I'll use it tomorrow as soon as I get the nets ready."

I looked up at the stars once again and breathed through my mouth. I was getting used to the smell. Clouds were starting to lay down a thin film high up in the atmosphere. Suddenly, I remembered the night before when I sent out what I thought was my last text. My phone was still tucked safely in its Ziplock bag in my pants pocket, which had Velcro to keep it shut. Great invention that Velcro. I hated to take my precious phone out for fear of dropping it somewhere, but I decided to make it an evening ritual. I remember survivor shows talk about how you need to have a routine and something to look forward to. I would look forward to five minutes every night before I sleep to turn on my phone, check for signal, write a quick text and then turn it off.

So, I booted it up and logged in with my thumb, which still stunk of rotten sea turtle. There must have been holes in the bags I used for gloves. I still had 34% battery life. I turned off every background program I didn't need, deleted a few things that were not necessary. I checked the time, 11:30 p.m. June 27. I opened the group text and typed.

"Found a boat and Jenna's cat. Floated into GPGP. Found a fishing net and other stuff. Will try to fish tomorrow. Starving and thirsty and hurting, but still alive. Still alive."

I hit send. Of course, it didn't send, but I expected that. At least I might have a record of what I did if I ended up getting out of this situation alive. I told myself I might have about as much chance as I had battery life.

Before I turned it off, I debated leaving it on so that somebody could track me down. But if I left it on, I'd be out of battery life in a day or so. I decided to turn it off as soon as I could. I'd give myself 5 minutes a day before going to sleep. As the screen closed, it said I had 33% battery life. "Not bad," I thought. "33% chance of survival. One in three. That's a hell of a lot better than where I started."

I secured my phone back in its bag and stuck that in my Velcroed pocket and looked up at the sky again. The clouds were getting thicker high up, and I started to worry about the weather tomorrow. Please, God, I said. Let me have another good day tomorrow. And my stomach put in its request for something to eat. Then, I fell asleep with the stench of the rotting turtle crawling through my nose, and I'm pretty sure I heard MJ barfing over the side of his perch.

Day Three

I remember waking up with high hopes for this day, but my body was just not feeling good. I woke up well before dawn but just lay there trying to sleep as long as I could. Eventually, I sat up and put on my new red laundry detergent hat just as the sun was coming up. I scanned the horizon for boats, but I didn't see any. I could tell I was still surrounded by trash. Mr. Jackson was already awake and rubbing up against my leg. "You seem happy today," I said with a dry voice. "I hear rotten turtle for dinner is all the rage in some countries."

"Yeah," he said. "You should try it."

"Hit the spot, eh? I'm going to call you Mr. Nasty from now on. Just don't lick me."

I was dizzy and weak but decided the first thing I should do was get my desalination bottles started. I went ahead and set up the three I had made yesterday and set to work making more. The waves were a bit higher than they were the day before, so it made working more difficult. My can knife slipped almost as soon as I started working, and I cut a deep gash in my left index finger. Blood started to gush out everywhere. "What a way to start the day," I thought. I had to stop work and fix my finger. The only cloth I had was what I was wearing. I tore a strip off the bottom of my shirt which was already ripped from a couple of days before when I was still on the yacht. I had gotten it caught on a clip as I was raising a sail. I used that strip from my shirt to wrap around my finger and tied it in a good knot so that it wouldn't fall off.

"Now I've got to worry about infection. Great." I started getting paranoid about the germs that were in my boat from that dead turtle. So, at the top of my "find-floating" wish list, next to a floating knife, was a bottle of hand sanitizer...and some sunscreen.

I went back to making my desalination bottles and was able to get two more done, so I had a total of five. But they kept falling over because of the waves, so I had to switch my focus on somehow creating a holder for them so that they wouldn't keep spilling. I worked hard, but the wind picked up and the waves grew higher. By noon, I had given up hope of getting any water and I just held on tight to the boat. I wedged myself under the seat of the boat and pulled in the net so that I could get it untangled while we bobbed up and down in steep waves.

I made some progress with my mangled hands and was able to get about 10 feet of rope untangled. This was good strong plastic rope. I got the buoy separated from the net and then I tied the buoy back to the side of the boat to give it more stability. I'd say the waves varied from three to five feet high. It was difficult, but I still made some progress. By about noon, I had the net free and was able to spread it out. There were a few holes in it, but otherwise, it was going to be usable.

The waves began to subside, and I looked around to find that I could see no plastic floating. Had I floated out of the GPGP? I didn't see any trash, and I began to panic. Off in the distance, I could see something big floating, so I grabbed my paddle and started off in that direction. After probably thirty minutes or so, I was back in to some pretty thick areas of trash. I stopped rowing. The water calmed down, and I was able to set up my bottles, all five of them. I used some of the rope to wrap around each one to make sure it didn't fall over.

Then, I turned my attention to food. I had to eat, I had burned way too many calories and I was getting too weak. I had noticed earlier that sometimes little fish liked to congregate under bigger floating pieces of plastic. I saw something that looked like a dishwashing crate—the kind restaurants have that you put dishes in before you run it through the wash—just floating there, and sure enough, there was a bunch of little fish under it. They were too small for my net, and they were too fast for my hands. So, I took off my red laundry detergent hat and poked holes in the bottom to let the water pass through it like a net.

Believe it or not, it worked. I caught a small fish about the size of a baby's fist, only skinnier. I sat there looking at it as the water drained out of the jug through the holes I'd made. The water went down and the fish started flopping around inside the empty jug. I hoped the fish wasn't poisonous, but I was definitely hungry enough to take my chances. The only fish that I knew were poisonous were the puffer fish, and this wasn't a puffer fish. I reached in and grabbed the slimy thing carefully. When it stopped struggling, I threw it in my mouth and swallowed without chewing. I could feel it flipping around in my esophagus.

My dad used to make me eat seafood, even though I didn't like it. I learned that the best way to eat something you don't like is not to think about it. Don't breathe through your nose while it's in your mouth, swallow and then follow it with something to drink. The little fish's fins scratched my throat. I should have chewed it, but I didn't have any water to wash it down and if I started to gag on the flavor, I'd never be able to swallow it. I just wanted it in my stomach.

It slipped into my upper intestine, and I couldn't feel it flopping around anymore. I guess my stomach acid got to it. I waited for some reaction, but nothing happened except that I found myself wanting more. But, when I went to find more with my hat, they were all gone. I thought I must have scared them all off, but then I saw Mr. Jackson leaning over the boat slapping at the water with his disgusting paws. The little things were gone. I got my net ready and prepared to jump into the water to see if I could see any bigger fish nearby that I might trap with the net I had got untangled.

I paused a moment to watch MJ pretend he was fishing. Suddenly, I realized he was looking at something I hadn't seen. A nice big fish just swimming back and forth around my boat. It would come up to the surface and then dive back down, disappear and then come back at the boat. It was a good-sized fish, too, I bet around two pounds. That would hold me over a while, I figured.

"My net will be just right for this guy," I said to MJ. I got my net ready, but just as I was about to throw it, Mr. Jackson leaned too far over and I kind of moved the boat on accident and he fell in like a dope, scaring the fish away.

I waited and looked around for the fish, but it never returned. Something about that really made me mad at that stupid cat. I just let the dumb thing swim around in circles for a while and claw at the canoe, meowing and begging for me to pull him in. "You need some exercise anyway," I said to him. I sat there and watched him struggle and whine for a while. I guess I get mean when I'm hungry.

And the hunger pains I had were terrible. I swear to you, I started wondering what cats tasted like. I remember a bumper sticker I saw once that said, "I love cats. They taste like chicken." And boy, I was wondering if they did or not. After all, the cat was there. I started to think maybe I should let him drown so that I could eat him. I couldn't kill him myself, I was sure of that. I never could kill an animal, except a fish. I always figured if I had to kill my own cows to get beef, I'd probably be a vegetarian.

I wouldn't have to tell Jenna about how MJ met his end. I could make up something about him getting eaten by a shark or something. But how would I cook him? I wouldn't want to eat raw cat. Raw seafood is something different, but raw cat? Nah. Not after what he ate last night. MJ was pawing at the boat and begging hard to be lifted back in.

"I'll think about it, stupid cat," I said.

But just then, I saw something move a few feet away from the boat. I realized it was a fin sticking out of the water coming right for MJ. I reached in and grabbed Mr. Jackson, who was pretty pissed at me. He scratched me with his stupid razor claws as I threw him towards the front. I'm pretty sure he called me an asshole.

The shark swam near the surface where the cat had been and knocked against the boat. I figure he was just after easy prey and was attracted by MJ's frantic swimming. That and my own blood. I noticed my bandage had slipped off and my finger was still bleeding a little from that cut earlier. I scanned the water while I re-wrapped my finger. The shark had passed under the boat and was on the other side now. He turned and started swimming back towards us, but he never got up much speed. I braced for a big impact, but he didn't ram us again. He just glided under the boat, and I got a good look at him, all four feet of him.

Since he was a smaller shark, I started to figure that maybe I'd have a chance at catching him. I unwrapped my cut again, and put it in the water so that some blood would be there. Then, I started patting the water trying to make like there was a distraught fish floating around the boat. I actually thought about throwing MJ back in there, but then I remembered the rotting turtle. I grabbed stinking thing and realized that the smell had only gotten worse because of the heat from the sun. I threw the whole thing in, no time to cut it up. It seemed to work. The shark turned around again, and I could see his fin start heading back towards me faster and faster.

As he passed this time, he came up to the turtle and snapped at it, grabbing the whole thing and taking it under. He disappeared with it.

"Damn it," I said, thinking it had just got away with all my bait.

I grabbed my net and, dishongs, I stood up in my little boat. Not a good idea. Here's the quote of the day for you. Don't stand up in a small boat when sharks are feeding. Pieces of the turtle floated up to the surface, including one large chunk about the size of my hand. I stood as quietly and steadily as I could, holding my net and rope and hoping the dumb shark would come back up for the rest of the parts.

After a few minutes of cursing my luck, he finally showed back up. He was going after the rest of the turtle. I went to throw my net at it, and I tell you, I had perfect timing. Just as the shark had opened its mouth at the surface, it got a big bite of both turtle and my net. He didn't let go and as he turned back down I could see the net wrapping around its pectoral fin. I held on to the rope that I had attached to the net and that I had tied to the front of the boat. It pulled through my poor bare hands leaving me with rope burns. As the shark dove, it pulled the rope, shaking the boat and sending me into the water face first. It was MJ's turn to laugh now.

I opened my eyes under water and felt the sting of salt in them. But I could see well enough to know the shark was struggling to get out of the net. He saw me and stopped fighting the net and just stared me in the face. His dorsal and one of his pectoral fins were caught. I couldn't see his tail fin. If it was still free, he could still come after me. I could practically read the thoughts running through his primitive brain. "Eat ugly land creature? Belly already full. Nasty rotten turtle meat. Swim away?"

Since I was holding my breath, I floated straight back up to the top without needing to move. We had a staring contest as I floated back up. If he had read my mind all he would have heard was "Oh shit, oh shit!" Cause that's pretty much all I was thinking. I swam as fast as I could to the back of the boat. As I pulled myself in, I expected to have a big bite taken out of my leg. But nothing happened. I made it back in and Mr. Jackson was laughing hard.

"Screw you," I said.

I finished pulling myself back into the boat, and once I realized I had all my body parts, I went to the front of the boat and grabbed the rope. I gave it a tug. It was heavy. The shark was still trapped. The tug made him angry and he started to dive. The front of my canoe was being pulled down and the back was starting to rise out of the water. My little canoe was about to capsize!

I dove to the back and threw my weight to the helm. The canoe came back to level with all of my 155lbs, but I could still feel the shark fighting. It was almost like he knew to capsize me. Maybe that was one of the things they studied in shark schools. How to capsize a stupid canoe in the middle of the Pacific.

The shark was only a four-footer. Any bigger and I would have been boat-less again for sure. I untied the rope as quick as I could and ran it through the hole at the top of the buoy I had found. Then, I wrapped the other end of the rope around one of my pieces of scrap wood. This way I could hold on to it without burning my hands. And if it got away from me, the buoy would follow him. I could follow the buoy. The shark went really quiet. I thought maybe it had gotten away, so I checked by pulling on the rope slowly. I could tell it was still there. It would let me pull it up a little ways, but then it'd start fighting. It got angry and started diving, pulling the buoy down with him so that the whole thing was almost submerged. Then he took off swimming. I held on to the board and buoy and we went for a ride.

This went on for probably an hour or more, I guess. I had to rest, so I let go of the rope. When I did, I could only watch the buoy get pulled away from my boat. After a short break, I started paddling to catch the buoy. I guess the shark was getting tired, too, cause he stopped about 30 yards from the boat. I reached the buoy and grabbed on to the rope again. Eventually, he let me pull him up high enough that I could see him through the water. I grabbed the board I'd been using as my paddle. When he was finally right up next to me, I raised my paddle up and came down as hard as I could on the shark's head with a crashing bang. He flapped around a second then started diving.

The buoy was being pulled down but only so far and then it floated back up and I figured the shark must have gotten loose. Otherwise, the buoy would be sinking in a bit. I started to shake, and I'm not going to lie. I cried. I was so weak from not having eaten anything, and after all that struggle, my dinner was gone. The battle was for nothing. I lay down on the floor of the boat with all my trash and just curled up in a ball wailing like a baby. I didn't have any food. I was going to starve. I would never catch anything. MJ wasn't laughing anymore because he knew how hungry I was. I looked at him through my tears and my mouth started watering.

I looked around for my can knife and was all but ready to reach for the cat and slice its neck. But, I saw the buoy was sunken in a little bit. It was like those floats you use when you go fishing. When you see the float go under water, you know you've got a fish on your line, or at least a bite. I wiped my eyes and remembered that sharks aren't like other fish. They don't float when they die. They sink.

"They sink!" I said to Mr. Jackson. "Sharks sink! You lucky stupid cat!" I pulled my shaking self up and grabbed the rope and started to pull. It was heavy.

"He's still there!" I yelled to MJ.

I pulled hard and finally the shark appeared. It seemed to be dead. That blow to the head had actually killed it. It took all my remaining strength, but I pulled it into the boat and just sat there staring at this beautiful creature that was only a foot or two shorter than me. I couldn't believe how lucky I was. All the fins had really been trapped in the net. "No wonder so many sharks get caught in these things," I thought.

It was like some of those pictures my mom had shown me once of a bunch of sharks that got caught in fishing nets even though fishermen aren't trying to catch them. Bycatch, they call it. They usually just kill the shark and throw it back overboard. Or the Asians like to cut the fins off and make soup out of them. It's illegal but they still do it. I sat there wondering how to cut into to the thing when suddenly I remembered one of the fights mom and dad had when he was still fishing. She was yelling, "Bycatch this, bycatch that...You may not mean to kill sharks, but 50 million a year are caught on accident and just thrown overboard."

I started to feel sorry for the thing, but I was also freaking starved! And I couldn't believe I actually had something to eat. I wasted no more time cutting into it. I took my can knife I had just about used on MJ and figured I'd see what all the fuss was about with those fins.

I was in for a big surprise, though. When I dug my can knife into its dorsal fin, the thing woke up and started flopping around. Man, those things are tough. I almost died of a heart attack. I guess the hit over the head had only shocked him. I pulled out my paddle and started beating it.

I won't lie, I got carried away. I didn't stop beating the poor creature until I had blood and bits of shark skin on my face and all over the boat. I probably lost about half of the plastic I had collected cause it kept falling out of the boat, but it was worth it.

Dishongs, after I pummeled it all brutal, I didn't hesitate. I reached in and grabbed some meat and started eating out of my dirty fist. Blood has a lot of water in it and protein, so I made sure to drink as much of the blood as I could. I remember dad telling me a story about guys who survived by drinking shark's blood. It was really gross, and I almost puked trying to get some of it down, but I swallowed as much as I could. After eating, I just wanted to lay down and rest, but the shark was there, its blood draining out onto the floor of the canoe, and I started to worry that it might seep through the boat and attract some bigger sharks. Mr. Jackson, of course, got in on the action. I let him feast while I grabbed some plastic bags to put under the meat to catch the blood, but I figured it was probably too late. Should have thought of that sooner.

I closed my eyes and must have dozed off immediately. When I woke up, I was groggy and disorientated, but I could tell the shark meat had done me some good. My strength was starting to return and I wasn't shaking anymore. The sun was getting low and I tried to gauge how long I had been asleep. It must have been several hours at least. The aftertaste of shark was still on my breath and I wanted nothing more than to brush my teeth and take a shower. I could have drunk a gallon of water just to get the taste out of my mouth. My black and white Vans and cargo pants were ruined, all splotched with blood. MJ had finished eating and was propped up on top of the raven's head, like he was captain of the sea.

"So you forgive me now for drinking all the water?" I asked as I stood up carefully to take a leak over the edge of the boat. He climbed down and rubbed against my leg to let me know he did. I sat back down and patted him on the head a minute. I took a good look at him and thought his collar might be making him uncomfortable.

"You probably don't need this thing anymore," I said, taking it off of his neck. As I went to put it in one of my Velcro pockets in my cargo pants, I noticed the thickness of it and remembered that Jenna had bought this special collar because it had a GPS tracker embedded into it. She could track the cat wherever it went. "Maybe she's out there looking for you, cat. Knowing Jenna, if she's alive, she's looking for you. I got no idea what she sees in you." I paused a moment and said, "Or saw." Like it was past tense. Like she was dead, and I started to feel depressed again.

The seas were calm and there were lots of small pieces of plastic floating around me. I looked at the shark and thought it would be nice to get it out of the boat, so that I could stretch out. I didn't want to dump it overboard because I could eat on it for a few days, but I didn't want to sleep with it either. One night with that rotten turtle was already too much.

I would need some sort of platform. The idea occurred to me that maybe I could build a little floating island out of plastic. I had seen somebody on Youtube do that. He created his own island with plastic trash that he tied together with ropes and strings. Then he planted some trees on it. The tree roots helped to hold the whole thing together. He even built a house on it and lived there for several years. I knew I didn't have time or trees, but I did have most of the materials I would need. So, I started gathering everything from my boat that hadn't fallen out when fighting with the shark, and I looked for anything else that was floating nearby.

I jumped in the water and it felt refreshing. It felt good to be swimming in the water, knowing this time that I had some food. I found some really good stuff floating nearby. There were a couple of wooden shipping pallets and a gas refill tank if you can believe that. The cap was on it tight. I shook it and couldn't hear anything swishing around in there; it was basically empty, so I put it in the middle near the buoy and tied it in along with the pallets.

It didn't take me too long until I had a pretty good-sized island, about five foot by three foot, just big enough to hold my shark and maybe some solar stills. I went ahead and lifted the shark remains out onto the island and then draped my fishing net over it and tied it nice and tight. Then, I tied my floating island to my canoe.

The floor of my little antique canoe had a lot of shark blood, but the canoe itself was back to being almost empty. Most of the plastic I had gathered, I used for the floating platform or for my solar stills or desalination bottles, which, by the way were not functioning very well, but that didn't matter too much. I had drunk the shark blood, so I wouldn't die of dehydration, not for a while anyway.

As night came, I decided to get my desalination bottles ready for the heat tomorrow. After all my tasks were done, I lay down in my boat. MJ came down and took his spot under the ledge where he felt safe. I scanned the horizon for ships, but there was nothing as far as the eye could see in any direction.

I pulled out my phone and turned it on. Somehow, I only had 28% battery life left. The night before it was still at 33%. I had lost a lot of battery life that day and I didn't even have it on. Anyway, I did my routine. I checked for signal and wrote a new text. "Day 3: Rough start this morning. Cut my hand. But killed a shark and ate it. Built a platform out of plastic. Tomorrow will start building a bigger one."

I hadn't thought of that before, but why not? Why not keep building on my own island? I could certainly use the space. Tomorrow I would start collecting more stuff. And I would build a separate pile to burn for a distress signal. If I was ever going to get out of there, I had to get noticed by some other boat. I fell asleep a little bit hopeful, and I said my usual prayer, "You are God, I am not. I'm alive. Help."
Day Four

I woke up when it was still dark, probably around 4:30. I had had a good dream and remember waking up feeling pretty good about myself. I had a boat, a small plastic island, food, and a companion. It seemed like every day I was making some progress. But as the saying goes, sometimes it's two steps forward, one step back. Life's like that, my dishongs. But today, the saying was reversed. Today would prove to be two steps backwards and none forward.

I didn't realize it at the time, but the reason I woke up so early was that something was occasionally ramming into my boat and splashing around, making waves outside. I became fully aware that the boat was rocking when I saw MJ was standing up with his back arched.

"What is it, MJ?" I asked hesitantly, not wanting to look over the side. It sounded like my plastic island was getting torn apart.

"Oh crap," I said. "Is it more sharks?" MJ just kind of whined and crept slowly back into his cubby where he thought he would be safe.

Pretty soon, I worked up the courage to look over the edge. In the moonlight I saw what I figured was a Lemon Shark at least 10 feet long and as big around as a car tire. It was trying to take a bite out of my island to get at my leftovers. "Brutal," I said. I guess whatever blood was left in that little shark dripped down through the island and filtered on out into the water. I had been announcing to the ocean that dinner was being served. Sharks have an incredible sense of smell, and the blood must have attracted it. I should have put a bunch of plastic bags under it, but I thought most of the blood had already drained away. Anyway, this big old shark was tearing up my island that I'd worked so hard to build. I started calling Moby, because he was a big dick!

This was a big shark and I was getting really scared. My heart was racing like it did the first night when I was thrown into the water. I grabbed my paddle and tried hitting the water to scare if off, but I must have just made him mad.

He came right at my boat and hit it so hard that I went flying into the water. I looked back and couldn't believe what I saw. My poor native American canoe, the one that had saved my life and had gotten me this far, was broken. It had cracked on impact and was taking on water fast. The bird's eye on the side of the canoe looked like it was crying, and the little raven on top appeared to be trying to break loose and fly away. I grabbed on to it and kicked my legs frantically, trying to keep the thing from sinking. But of course, I didn't have the strength or the leverage. As I was kicking my legs, I got worried maybe I was attracting that big beast again. Poor little MJ was crying inside, and as the water flooded his safe place, he climbed up on the raven's head.

"I'm sorry, little buddy," I said. "Get on the island." I tried to tell him to get on the island, but he didn't understand.

I couldn't hold the boat up, dishongs. The thing was under water in less than a minute, and MJ was paddling around frantically. I heard the shark swim around me, so I left MJ to his own devices and grabbed on to the little island I had made. I pulled myself up and found myself right on top of the dead shark I'd had for dinner the day before. He was smiling at me. I caught my breath and looked around for MJ. There he was about 20 feet away swimming in the wrong direct.

"MJ, over here," I called. "This way boy!" But he kept swimming away from me. I grabbed my paddle and started heading towards him but, dishongs, something terrible happened.

Just as I got my paddle in the water, MJ disappeared into the mouth of Moby. "No!!!" I yelled all brutal.

That really set me off. I was pissed, dishongs. I mean at that point something snapped in me and I wasn't even scared or anything. I was just hella mad. I grabbed that paddle and stood up on my little island.

I waited for Moby to come back and when he came up to take a bite out of my island, I beat the living crap out of him. I came straight down on the nose as brutal as I could twice before he let go of the island. He sank away, and I yelled at him, "Come back here you son of a b--! I'm gonna tear your f'n heart out." Oh dishongs, I cursed. I cursed that big fish out like nobody's ever been cursed out before. After standing there and waiting for him to come back for probably twenty minutes, I collapsed. I just lay down on the little island and screamed.

I screamed at the stars, I screamed at the moon, I screamed at the God who made them, but when I had no voice left to scream with, I threw things at them. All of them. I blamed them all. I wanted the stupid shark to come back and finish me off, or me to finish him off. I rolled over and saw the carcass I had caught yesterday staring me in the face with that stupid grin. It was like he was laughing at me. "Screw you," I said.

I took a rest for a while, giving myself time to process what had just happened. At that point, I was furious about everything. I wanted to just lay there and die. And that's what I planned to do. I wouldn't move again. I'd just lay there until the life ran out of me.

But that island was absolutely the most uncomfortable thing you can ever imagine lying on. And eventually the sun started to come up, and I started getting hot. That pissed me off even more. I started to remember I was crazy thirsty, and that life wasn't just going to walk away on its own that easily. My little floating island had taken a beating, but somehow three of the desalination bottles I had put on the island were still jammed in tight where I put them the day before. I tried them but all the water was all salty. Moby had shaken it up too much. He never came back. Maybe MJ was enough of a snack for him, or maybe I beat him hard enough. I don't know but I started to miss that stupid cat.

I started to take inventory of what I had. Cell phone (first things first, right?), socks, shoes, cargo pants, chewing gum, shirt. I put my last piece of gum in my mouth. I had always stayed in my clothes at all times. I figured that if I fell overboard, or if something terrible like what just happened, happened I would at least have something on me to help me survive. They say you're always supposed to have your life vest on. Well, my clothes were my life vest. I had MJ's collar in one pocket, and I had stuck my aluminum can knife in my pocket, too. I had a floating island that I could keep building on, like I had planned the night before. I just didn't know I would need to do it without the help of my boat, or my cat—not that he was any help, but it's always nice to have someone to talk to.

I also had my paddle and as I think about it now, I probably gained something that I hadn't had before. I now had a deep-seated anger. Moby had pissed me off, and I started turning that anger into something positive. I figured what the hell? I might as well keep fighting. Why should I let anything nature had to throw at me, beat me? I decided I was going to do everything in my power to get my sorry butt back home. I was going to show no mercy to anything else, dishongs. And if I died out there, I didn't even care. But I had to give it my best.

So, I set my desalination bottles to work and then started collecting more trash for my floating island. The area I was in didn't have a lot of good stuff, though. What little I did find was small pieces of crap, but I figured they floated, so even the small stuff that I could grab I put on top of the island. Maybe it would fill the holes and make the thing more comfortable to lay on. I did find some big stuff, like one of those Rubbermaid storage totes that old ladies keep sweaters and moth balls in. It must have been out there a long time because it was brittle and kept cracking every time I tried to tie it to the island.

The sun breaks down plastic, and in the ocean, it just floats around getting sun baked. After a while, maybe a month or two, the waves crack it up into smaller and smaller pieces. The little pieces of plastic start looking like plankton and whales can't tell them apart. Luckily, I'm not a whale. And luckily, I had tucked away a few strong plastic bags on my island and started collecting the small shit. When the bags were full, I tied them to the island. I found a few more boards and a couple more fishing nets with a ton of fishing line attached to one of them. I swam around collecting stuff, not afraid of anything, not really caring if something came after me, actually daring the stupid sharks to try something. I guess I was back to feeling invincible or something.

Sometime in the early afternoon, I came up from one of my plastic gathering dives and suddenly my hunger and thirst hit me like never before. So, I dug into my leftover shark meat. After a few bites, I started to realize it was already starting to taste pretty spoiled. And dishongs, the blood had either dripped out or coagulated so there was nothing to drink from it. The shark wouldn't be edible for much longer, probably even now. I was taking a risk of food poisoning for sure.

I hated to throw the whole thing overboard, though, so I decided to try something. I pulled out my soda can knife, which was pretty flimsy, but if I went slow enough I could use the sharp edge to slice through the meat pretty well. I cut a lot of the meat into thin strips, as thin as I could make them. My hand was still hurting from the deep gash, and as I sliced up the shark, I noticed my finger was really starting to get infected.

"Nothing I can do about that now," I said. "Toughen up little finger."

Then, I took my desalination bottles and drank the fresh water that had been collected in each one. I got about a good mouthful from each one, so that was nice, but not enough of course. Then, I took the concentrated salt water from the desalination bottles and dipped each slice of meat into them. I figured the salt would help to preserve the meat. Then, I lay the pieces out across the island so that they could dry in the sun, leaving just enough room for me to lay down.

When I was done, for some reason, I can't say why, maybe I was still angry, but I cut off the shark's head and put it in the middle of the island on top of the buoy. Then, I took the rest of the body parts and put them in one of the smaller nets that I found earlier. This net was made for smaller fish, so the gaps in it were smaller. I tied a rope around it and threw it into the water. It floated until the rope was fully extended, only about six feet away.

After all that, I figured I'd take a rest. I lay down in the only spot where I wasn't making shark jerky, but I couldn't get comfortable. The island was bumpy. It felt like I was camping on top of a rock pile. Some pieces of plastic were jutting up into my skin, no matter which way I lay down. I tried laying on my side, but that didn't work. Finally, I got into a position where I wasn't hurting too bad, and I thought maybe I could relax a minute. My face was nearly in the water and I just lay there peering into the deep. A fish that looked like a flounder floated by beneath me, but I didn't move. I didn't care if he was eating the stuff in my net. I would check that later. I saw a few little fish, about a foot long each. They were very colorful. I'm not sure what they were called. Some kind of cod, maybe. There was either a jelly fish or a plastic bag, I couldn't tell. It made me think of that turtle. No wonder they mistake bags for jellyfish, their favorite food. If I couldn't tell the difference, how could they?

Anyway, I was almost asleep, but suddenly I opened my eyes for no reason, and I saw a large shape floating about 15 feet down below me. At first, I thought it might be a whale. I thought he might surface and send me toppling over into the water, but I was so tired I just whispered, "Whatever. Come get me." I closed my eyes again and tried to sleep, but then the thought came to me.

"Why is that whale square?" My eyes sprung open. "That's not a whale, Moby Junior. That's a tarp!" I was actually talking to the fish head propped up on my buoy. I looked back at the water and studied it. "Large, rectangular. I don't know of any fish like that in the sea," I said. The more I looked, the more I realized it really was a tarp, just floating there under the surface waiting for me.

A tarp had definitely been on my wish list the whole time, along with sunscreen, hand sanitizer, a lighter, and a bag of fresh tacos, none of which I'd found yet. With a tarp, I could cover myself from the sun, or I could wrap up any catch I had made and not worry about blood, or I could use it to cover my island and make it more comfortable. "A million uses," I said. "I gotta have it," I said. Even though it hurt to get up, I pulled myself out of my kind-of comfy spot and dove in head first.

Turns out the tarp was deeper than I had realized, and I had to turn around about halfway down. I got back to the top and decided to do a real straight dive with a much deeper breath. So, I climbed up on my island, then jumped up and in the air and turned straight down so that my dive would take me deeper. Then I just went for it. It must have been really deep because my ears were popping, and water pressure was getting bad. But finally, I grabbed onto the thing and started pulling it back towards the surface. It was too far up, and I was running out of air so I had to give up. I didn't realize how heavy the thing would be.

It took me three of four dives, but finally, I was able to pull it up. It was a great big blue tarp, one of those you can get for cheap in one of those discount tool stores. I wadded it up into a ball and put it on my island, getting some of my shark jerky wet. Then, I lay down on top of it. Dishongs, that was luxury. It helped make the island more comfortable and I could hardly feel any pieces of plastic digging into my skin. I lay there all wet and used a part of the tarp to cover myself from the sun. Then I fell asleep.

I probably didn't sleep very long. I could hear something splashing around by the net that had the leftover shark parts in it. "What is it this time, Moby Junior?" I asked the shark head as I lay there, not wanting to get up. I chuckled because I realized that Moby Junior's initials were MJ, too. I laughed through my dry throat. "Ah. MJ. That's hilarious. You're back." I think after the canoe sank, that's when I started losing it. I started talking a lot to MJ, the new MJ. I was really shocked by that coincidence, though. It wasn't on purpose, either, dishongs. I had no idea the shark's head would end up with the same initials as Mr. Jackson.

At the same time, I saw what must have been making that splashing noise. One of the most beautiful and majestic fish I'd ever seen just floated right under me. It must have been about five feet long and had one of those prehistoric-looking big foreheads and one long blue fin that ran from its head all the way to its tail. Its tail was kind of yellow and it split apart to make a Y shape. It was all lit up by the sun, and I can't even describe the colors that came through. It was like each scale on the fish reflected a different color, and as it swam slowly by, those colors could change. He paused for a while about ten feet away from me and not very deep. He seemed like an alien who had come to my planet to study alien life, in this case, me. I could tell he was curious about me and my floating contraption, but he was too careful to get closer. I just lay there and watched him and started to cry because I realized what kind of fish it was and it brought back all kind of beautiful memories, dishongs.

"Look, MJ. It's a mahi-mahi!" I said.

"Mahi-mahi? That's good eating!" He said.

"Yeah, but I can't eat him, even if I could catch him."

"Why not? Are you losing it? You're out in the middle of the ocean. You gotta make do bro. Make do!"

"Nah. I can't. It's a mahi mahi."

"What's so special about that? I think you're just a coward. You don't have the guts to try and catch it."

"Who asked you, anyway?" I said.

"Well, if you're not gonna catch him, I will."

"Don't be stupid," I laughed. "You don't even have fins. You're just a head. Just shut up. You don't even know what kind of fish that is."

"It's a Mahi Mahi, you numbskull."

"Cause, I just told you already. What's the other name for it?" I said quizzing MJ. "If you're so smart, what else is it called?"

He was quiet a minute. "Don't know, do you?" I said. "Dorado. It's a Dorado. Now who's a numbskull?"

MJ didn't respond anymore. I got lost in a memory about my dad.

I must have been 11 or 12. He took me to Pike Place market up in Seattle and showed me all kinds of fish. He could identify them all. He pointed out the long slender geoducks, the fresh salmon, the halibut, the crab, Pacific cod, ling cod, sole, prawns, swordfish, clams, squid. Some of them he knew in Chinese but couldn't translate into English. I figured everything that was edible from the sea was there, but he told me in Taiwan they eat a lot more variety than we do.

We had lunch at that crazy restaurant where they made a scene in that old movie "When Harry Met Sally," and dad ordered some Mahi Mahi for me. He knew I wasn't a big seafood eater and I might like Mahi Mahi because it didn't taste so fishy. He was right. I loved it. But then, he started telling me about the fish. He said it was one of the most beautiful creatures on the planet. It could change its colors depending on the mood it was in.

"If only women can do that," he said as he chuckled and took a sip of his tea without ice. My dad had a good sense of humor. I was only 11 but I knew what he was talking about. My mom would change moods at the drop of a hat. One minute she was perfectly happy. The next minute she was yelling about something. And you had no way of knowing what kind of mood she was in. If only she could change colors.

"Kind of like a mood ring," I said.

"Exactly." Dad said the weird thing is that when the Mahi Mahi or the Dorado is reeled in, its color changes. When you get it in the boat, the color is already fading. And by the time it reaches the shore, it's just a dull grey color. You can literally see the life getting sucked out of it.

I swallowed the bite of Mahi-Mahi I still had in my mouth but couldn't finish the rest of it. My dad asked if I didn't like it.

"No. It's good. I'm just full. Wo bao le," I said. "Must have been the fries."

I lay there on my plastic island staring back at that live Mahi Mahi for I don't know how long. He just sort of gazed at me as I cried, putting more salt into the ocean.

"No. I won't eat him, bro," I said to MJ. "Even if he's the last thing in the ocean to eat."

"Your loss," MJ responded.

"I'll eat you before I eat him," I said turning to MJ real brutal and all.

MJ shut up for a while after that.

I sat up and then looked back at the water, but the fish was gone. I probably scared it away. I must have been light headed. Maybe my blood sugar was low or something, I don't know. But I swear I felt my dad's presence there for a minute. MJ was back and my dad was there and then, you won't believe this, dishongs. I'm telling you, you won't believe this not in a million years. They say truth is stranger than fiction, and this is one case for sure. I didn't believe it either, still don't really. A piece of plastic was floating not far from me and it seemed like something good I could add to my island, pretty good size. Turns out, it was the door for a refrigerator freezer. Want to guess what brand of fridge it was?

Jenn-air.

The logo was loose and brittle. I pried it off with my fingers and held it in my hands like some sacramental holy object. I read it over and over about fifteen times, wiping my eyes every time and it was still the same logo. Jenn-air. Dishongs, my mind read a lot into this. It was a sign. For real. MJ was here on board with me, my dad was in the water in the form of the Mahi Mahi, and Jenna was in the air that I breathed!

I tell you I freaked out. I stood up on my flimsy plastic island and danced. I did. Forgetting that I was trampling my shark jerky, I just stood up and danced and raised my hands up to the sun and weird words started coming out of my dry mouth. I have no idea what I was saying but dishongs I was high. I felt like I was being held by some invisible hand, and I was loved. That mattered more to me than anything I'd ever thought to put on my wish list. I hadn't even known I wished for it, but that feeling was better than lip balm, or sunscreen, or hand sanitizer, or even another freaking plush yacht sailing by. I was high. I felt loved, and I was high.

I fell back onto my tarp with a big smile on my face. I wrapped myself up the tarp and held the Jenn-air logo to my heart and just rested.

I don't remember anything else about the rest of that day. When I woke up, it was already dark. I turned on my phone and the time read 2 a.m. I bet I had slept 12 hours. My back was all wet because some of the plastic from my island had broken away, and I was kind of sinking in a little. I must not have tied it tight enough. But I didn't get up to fix it.

I just stared at my phone wishing I could call someone. No signal. The high from earlier was starting to wear off, but I still hugged the Jenn-air logo as I looked into my phone. My battery was down to like 19%. If you're like me, you start to get anxious when your battery gets below 20%. It's like a drug. You start looking for your next fix. Finding a charger is the only thing you can think about. I looked around for sure, but there were no outlets. I was going through withdrawals and I couldn't bring myself to turn the thing off, even though I knew I needed to save battery. Actually, the fact that the thing would still turn on was pretty amazing. Electronics are always the first thing to go out in the ocean. The Ziplock bag had done its job so far.

I typed my daily text. "Big shark. Lost boat. Lost cat. Stranded on floating island of trash I made. Saw a dorado and found a Jenn-air fridge door. Not sure I'll make it, but that's okay. I am okay with that now."

I held the power button down and as it was turning off, something lit up the sky.

It was a red flare, and I saw the whole thing. It went up into the night sky and its reflection followed along the water in an exact opposite path and spread out wide on the water. It was just like I was watching fireworks again off my dad's boat in Commencement Bay.

The sky went dark again once the flare hit the water. But I had seen where it came from, pretty much. I knew the general direction anyway.

I tried to yell, but I don't know if any sound came out of my mouth. I had only had a few sips of fairly salty water that morning. I started getting ready to move towards where the flare had been as fast as I could. There wasn't much moonlight, so I turned my phone back on and turned on my flashlight and realized I should shine it in the direction where the flare had gone off. I shined it out into the darkness, hoping that they would see me.

If they were shooting off a flare, it meant they were in distress, too. I knew they were in trouble, but it would be nice to have someone else to be in trouble with. And, of course, I figured it might be dad or Jenna. If it was the bastard Estevan, I'd just kill him on the spot, I figured.

I used my flashlight to find all the pieces of shark jerky that I hadn't trampled before. There were about 10 pretty good size pieces that I put in my pocket. I checked my desalination bottles and they were full again, so I drank it all, another four or five good mouthfuls, this time pretty fresh. I pulled the net back in and found that all the shark leftovers had been eaten.

"That's good. I hope it was the Mahi Mahi," I said.

MJ just kind of sneered at me. "Let's go, man," he said. "Let's go."

Once I had everything secured and my paddle in hand, I realized I had lost the direction of the flare. My island had drifted some and I was probably facing a slightly different direction, but I had a really strong feeling about which way to go, so I just started paddling.

I kept my flashlight on, but it was too hard to hold it and paddle at the same time. So, I lodged it in MJ's mouth and found that the teeth were just far enough apart to hold it perfectly. It was like I had a little headlight. I tried to remember how to do SOS signals, but I couldn't remember. We talked about it once in the boating class, but like usual, I wasn't paying attention. So, I just kind of put my hand in front of it and took my hand away to make it flash a little bit every now and then. Hopefully, they would understand it was an SOS.

After drinking that water, I was able to yell a little bit. But I wasn't very loud. My vocal chords were all dried out and seemed to be stuck together. I tried to whistle, but couldn't make a sound with my lips and the air just dried my mouth out even more. I put my chapped fingers, including the one that was getting infected, in my mouth but I never could whistle like that anyway.

Wish I had thought of a noisemaker before. I should have been trying to figure out how to whistle or how to make a whistle. But I couldn't change the past. I just had to make do, like MJ had just told me.

I kept paddling and trying to make any noise I could. But the flare never shot up again. And I never heard a response. After a long time, I was getting tired and I figured I might be moving away from them just as likely as I was moving toward them. So, I just gave up trying. I sat down on my tarp and took my phone out of MJ's teeth and turned off the flashlight.

"5%?!" I said. "Shit."

I turned the phone off and just lay there trying to get comfortable, but I didn't dare close my eyes. I kept them wide open the rest of the night watching for another flare. I chewed on some shark jerky, which wasn't all that bad, I realized. Unfortunately, it was salty and nearly impossible to swallow because of the dryness. I refilled my desalination bottles for the next day and did what I said I'd never do again. I peed into a bottle and, well, you know. I will tell you, there wasn't much there to drink, and it was pretty dark.

Eventually, the sky started to brighten, and I'd never been so disappointed at seeing the sunrise in my entire life. I had hoped to see another flare, but nothing. It was too late. Just another false hope, I told myself. I didn't feel like doing much but I did make my bed more comfortable and rigged up a way to make the tarp cover me like a tent. The wind was blowing pretty mildly, but it still made it difficult to set up. Finally, I secured the tarp and I felt my eyes getting heavy.

"It's just about over," I told MJ.

MJ didn't respond. He just stood there with his stupid mouth gapping and I cringed at how much drier his mouth was than mine. I flashbacked to that straw I had gotten at McDonald's when I was a little kid and mom said I was killing animals. I shut my eyes and faded off to troubled sleep.
Day Five

I woke up about noon as a little squall was passing over head. I heard the falling raindrops hit my tarp and I got up and started arranging the tarp to catch as much rainwater as I could. My poor cut-up finger was turning red all around, and the middle of the cut felt like it was on fire. It was starting to ooze some weird looking puss. The salt water kept getting in it and making it hurt like hell, and it was no use to wrap it. I didn't want to tear up any more of my shirt, and besides, it probably wouldn't help anything.

The rain was nice. My tarp was filling up. And I was able to drink some kind of fresh water. The only problem was that the tarp was already caked in salt, so it took the first bunch of fresh rain water to rinse it off. It looked to me like the rain would continue for a while. I poured the water I had gathered so far into my desalination bottles. I figured it would be better than water straight from the sea, even if it had some salt from the tarp. I filled each one up with the tarp water. And then set my tarp again to catch more rainwater.

It was a good steady cool rain, but it wasn't very long. It was over in just about ten minutes, just long enough for me to have rinsed myself off and to collect a nice puddle in the tarp, maybe a gallon or so. I found a decent, relatively clean jug for it. Nothing ever is really clean out there in the ocean. There's always this film over everything it seems. I drank about half of it and saved the rest. Normally, that would have refreshed me, but dishongs, I was feeling really lousy. Maybe I had a fever or something. My hand was really in brutal shape. The skin on my neck and face and arms had been so sunburned that it felt like it was going to fall off, all of it.

And there's something else I forgot to even mention so far. Every day out on the water, the sun reflects into your eyes. It comes at you from up above and the reflections come from down below. If you look at it too long, it can burn your retinas. My eyes were really starting to feel bad. I almost felt like I would go blind. To top it off, my stomach was hurting something awful. I had a bit of diarrhea. I could hardly think straight and really didn't want to do anything. Honestly, I just lay down and basically got ready to die.

But as I rested, I decided there was one last thing I should try. One last-ditch effort I could make to save my sad lame self. I could try to make a fire signal for tonight. But to do that, I would need to gather another pile of plastic to burn. I needed to get as much crap as possible, pile it up as high as possible, let it dry out as much as possible, and then figure out some way to light it on fire. Impossible! In the shape I was in that day, I honestly didn't think I'd be able to do it. But, I decided that was how I would like to spend my last day alive. I would spend it gathering trash for my fire heap. And when the end came, when night fell and I had no fire, I would say, "Well, I tried. I gave it my damndest." Then I'd say a prayer and give up.

I forced myself out of my somewhat comfy spot with my head spinning, my skin groaning, my stomach growling and my hand screaming at me, and started trying to work. I found a wooden shipping crate, I guess it's called a pallet, and put a bunch of Styrofoam under it so that it was floating out of the water pretty high up. Anything I put on them would stay dry. Then, I started gathering larger pieces of plastic and any debris that I thought might dry out and burn.

I came up with a few ideas about how to start the fire while I collected burnable crap. I was hoping for a cigarette lighter of course, but I didn't want to rely on luck like that. I remembered survivor shows talk about using batteries to light a fire. My phone battery still had 5%. It might be enough to get a little spark if I was able to cross the positive and negative terminals. But I would need some fuel. I recalled the gas can that I'd found which was at the center of my island. I started trying to dig it out, but I had wedged and tied it in pretty good, so it wasn't easy to get out. When I finally got it out, it kind of weakened my island so that it started to slip apart. I had to figure out a way to tighten it back up and found an old milk crate to use in place of the gas can. That took a while.

I was exhausted, dishongs, but I opened the gas can and there were lots of fumes but only a very small amount what appeared to be gasoline. I wasn't sure if it was gasoline or diesel. Most boat engines run on diesel which doesn't catch on fire as easily as gas. I know that because one time, I was at my uncle's farm in eastern Washington. His tractor started leaking diesel like crazy, but my uncle just started working on it while the tractor was still running. I backed away from it because I thought the thing would explode, but my uncle told me it was okay since it was diesel.

So, I hoped this was gas, even though I knew in my heart it was probably diesel. All the boat engines I'd ever heard of used diesel. I thought maybe I could pour it into a small cap and then use the glass part of my phone to focus the sun's light to catch it on fire. But then I realized that if I relied on the sun, I would have to light my pile before night, maybe even a couple of hours before nightfall. I didn't really know how fast plastic would burn. I figured it would be pretty quick, though and that it would burn out before anybody could see it. I would have to figure out a way to keep the fire going for a long time, in which case I'd need wood, and the only wood I had was the pallets and my paddle.

I didn't really want to sacrifice either one of those, and I honestly didn't think they would dry out before night. They were really soaked. My only other option was to use my battery to light the fire after the sun goes down. Either way, it didn't seem likely I'd succeed.

I had gone camping a few times with my dad, and I tell you, making a fire isn't easy, even on land when you have dry wood. I never could understand how forests catch on fire. It's actually really hard to get fires started, at least to me it is. And trying to start one out in the middle of the ocean in my situation? Like I said, impossible.

MJ sat on his perch on the central buoy and looked down on me and laughed.

"You're wasting your time," he said.

"Yeah. I know. So what? What are you doing, butthead?" I said, not in the mood for his crap.

"I'm keeping watch," he said.

I stopped a minute and thought maybe that's what I should do. But when I looked out over the water, the sun and reflection made me continue working on my bon fire.

"Even if you see a boat, you need to be able to signal it, you dipstick," I said.

"You can just use your phone to reflect the sunlight at them."

"You don't think I already thought of that? You know how many hours I've spent out here waiting to see a boat ready to flash it with my phone? Hours, and days and probably weeks!" I yelled at him. He didn't respond. He just sat there on that buoy with his dry mouth open.

After a minute I said, "As long as you're keeping a lookout, help me find stuff to burn."

"Whatever," was all he said.

I spent the next hours looking for plastic and swimming out to gather it and then swimming back with it. It seemed if I kept moving, I was okay. But if I slowed down, I'd feel sick and just want to give up. One time I spotted a jar floating about 40 feet away. When I swam out to it, I realized it was a half-full jar of peanut butter. Most people would be happy, right? Well, I wasn't. It was like the final clue I needed to know that God hated me. You see, dishongs, I'm deathly allergic to peanuts. For me, that jar of peanut butter was equal to finding a bottle of cyanide to most people.

I thought. "Maybe I'll eat it and die if the fire doesn't work. Maybe that's the best way to go."

So, I brought it back to my two floating islands. By early afternoon, my burn pile was about three feet high and I had found lots of crazy stuff, including an old coke bottle with what looked like Thai words written on it, a hockey glove, a barbie doll, and something that I swear looked like a, uh, adult toy, not that I know anything about that. It was weird. I just threw it back. I covered my burnable island with a net and decided to rest while it dried out.

The ocean was really calm. Just some nice smooth rolling waves that promised not to topple my burn pile or splash it with ocean spray. The water kept getting calmer and calmer. In fact, I started wondering if I had drifted into the Pacific High. That's the reason we had gone so far south. My dad had told me about this huge high-pressure system between Hawaii and California called the Pacific High, which is responsible for the trade winds in Hawaii and the dry summers in California. I hoped I wasn't in it because I know a lot of sailors try to avoid it. There is no wind for their sails. In fact, they say there can be spots, especially in the middle where the sails would just sit idle, no breeze at all. And the water looked more like a smooth flat mirror. Dad said there was some old poet who wrote about it hundreds of years ago. I remember the poem was called "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner." "As idle as a painted ship on a painted sea." But don't quote me on that.

I couldn't remember how big the Pacific High was, but I guessed you could probably fit the entire United States in it. And I hoped I hadn't floated into it. There would be less chance for me to get discovered. I looked at my phone and remembered when I had a 33% charge. I figured I had about a 33% chance. Now, I only had 5% battery, and I gave myself a 2% chance.

My hopes were waning.

I lay down and told myself I would start experimenting with ways to light the fire after my rest. The jar of peanut butter was about to fall off my island, so I sat up and put it under MJ and it felt like I was making an offering to some foreign god, like I'd seen my dad do in a Buddhist temple once.

"Ya hungry?" I asked.

"What do you think?" he said.

"Have some peanut butter," I laughed.

"What's that?"

"Hell if I know," I said. "I hear it gets stuck on the roof of your mouth. But you don't have to worry about that. Seeing as you don't really have one anymore," I said. I kill myself sometimes. I died laughing but MJ didn't think it was funny.

"Aren't you going to eat any?"

"Maybe later."

"You should just give up," MJ said.

"Yeah. I think so, too."

"It's hopeless."

"For sure. I said."

"You're hurting. It's too much pain. Just give it up."

"Yeah." I said. "I will. But maybe later. Think I'll just rest now."

"Whatever. It's just a matter of time."

"If that's the case, might as well wait a while, don't you think? No sense in rushing it. Now shut the fuck up!" I said.

"Your choice."

I lay there under MJ next to the peanut butter and closed my eyes. I was really tempted to open that jar and just dig in. I'd always wondered what it tasted like. My parents told me that one time when I was a little kid, my mom rushed me to the hospital because my throat had swollen up and I couldn't breathe. They figured out the cause was a chewy milky candy bar that my uncle had given me. It was full of peanuts. They ran tests and told my parents they'd have to keep me away from peanuts and, therefore, peanut butter, forever.

I decided for sure, if the fire didn't work, I would try it. I'd reach in and dig it out with my infected finger and suck down whatever was inside. All of it. I'd make up for all those years in elementary school of watching other kids eat PBJ sandwiches while I ate my nasty vegan sandwiches on whole bread that my mom always insisted on making, even though I didn't like them.

I fell asleep, dishongs, and when I woke up, it was already probably six o'clock or so.

The sun didn't feel quite so hot, so I was worried I wouldn't be able to focus enough of it to light anything. I was really dizzy and could hardly move, but I started trying to pull the cover off my phone, but I couldn't break it apart.

"Well, looks like plan B," I said. "I have to use my battery."

I knew how because I had seen it on YouTube and I had actually done it before. A friend of mine did it in the public bathroom at Point Defiance park after school one day. He was such a pyromaniac. All you need is your phone battery and some foil paper, like the kind that chocolate or chewing gum comes in. You just take the foil paper and cut it up into a really long, thin pieces. Then, you wad it up so that in the middle of the long strip there is a ball of foil. Use the right and left pieces of the wad to connect to the + and – terminal of your phone battery. You have to have something long and pointed, like a pair of needle nose pliers to push the foil side of the paper up against the terminals. Then, hold it there for a couple of seconds and the thing will catch on fire.

I had been holding on to those chewing gum wrappers that I had kept with me in the Ziplock bag with my phone. I pulled the gum wrappers out of my pocket and set to work on creating the foil paper strip I would need. It seemed like it would work, so I set it aside in a nice dry, secure place. Then I took out my phone battery and studied it to see where the positive and negative terminals were. I practiced connecting the terminals with the Ziplock bag instead of the foil paper so that when the sun went down I could do it in the dark, even if there was no moon. As the sun was setting, I took the gas can and carefully poured out the last few drops of fuel into a green bottle cap.

The water was still really calm, unbelievably calm in fact. It wasn't as calm as a painting but nearly. If I ever needed a calm moment, this was it, and the Ocean was coming through for me. I whispered a prayer of thanks and watched the sun go down, not knowing if it would be the last sunset I might ever see. I waited until it was fully dark. After a couple hours, the moon was out and there was plenty of light for me to see what I was doing. All that was left for me to do was to push the foil into the terminals, light the foil paper on fire, stick it next to the fuel then start putting small burnable plastic on top. I had created a sort of tepee shape where I would put the small fire so it could catch the bigger stuff on fire. I had it all planned out and rehearsed it several times before the sun went down. Conditions could not have been better.

The memory of some soccer players crossing their hearts before a game came to me, and I did that too. Then, I decided to go for it.

Dishongs, my hands were shaking so bad. I was nervous. I could hardly hold the battery still. I almost dropped the dumb thing in the water. I had to take a breather. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths to calm myself. Guess that's why they call it a breather. I thought about home and wondered what my mom was doing. I vidied her in her kitchen, washing some kale and getting ready for dinner. Then a strange man walked in and grabbed her from behind, and I lost that vision. I wondered if she had heard about the accident and if she was worried about me. She must have. She must be. Somebody must have heard by now. I'm sure my dad put out a distress signal or something before the boat went down.

"You gonna do this, or what?" MJ said interrupting my revelry.

"Yes."

"What are you waiting for?"

I opened my eyes and went right after it. I held the foil to the terminals. It caught on fire in about two seconds. I put it over the fuel in the plastic lid, and it took a second but that too burst into flames. It was a bigger burst than I expected, and it burned my poor crappy hand that had been abused so much the last few days, but I kept going. Now that I think of it, maybe I should have cauterized the wound. I lit the smaller thinner plastic, then moved on to the bigger stuff. Pretty soon, the whole floating island was on fire. It really lit up the night sky. I pushed the fire island away from me and watched it burn.

Some of the plastic burned, some of it just melted. All of it stunk. The chemicals blew back on me. The only light breeze was blowing in my direction, and I nearly choked. I cried as the last flame flickered and I cut the floating fire island lose. I didn't want to deal with the smell anymore. I put my phone and battery back in the bag and into my pocket. I lay down on my back and reached up over my head and grabbed the jar of peanut butter and just held it on my chest as I lay looking at the stars.

"That's it?" MJ said.

"That's it." I said.

"Wasn't much of a fire."

"No. It wasn't."

"What now?" he asked.

I sat there for a while not answering.

"What now?" he repeated after a few minutes.

I sat up slowly and said: "We die. You first."

I threw the stupid talking shark's head into the water.

Then I tried opening the jar of peanut butter. I remember the lid was on so tight and my hand was hurting so much, I almost gave up. But finally, the lid came loose and I dug my fingers in and licked them off. I ate it all. As I closed my eyes, the sky lit up red for a few seconds, but I didn't have any energy to care. And I could feel my throat start to tighten and I was starting to wheeze. It won't be long now, I thought. I gave it my best.
Day Six

The Catholics say we all have a guardian angel and we can get to know his or her name. His or her? I guess angels have some sort of sexual identity. I don't know. I never really thought about it. They say we can talk to them and ask them for help. I don't know if I believe in all of that, but you know, dishongs, I believe in something. After what happened to me on the sixth day, I tell you, I believe in something.

Sometime that morning, I felt something grabbing my ankle. I struggled to open my eyes and saw through my squinted eyelids a floating orange triangle that I was being drawn into.

Then, I saw my guardian angel and I already knew her name: Jenna.

She was trying to pull me into a lifeboat that had a tent over it. I heard her scream at me to wake up. "Zander! Zander! Are you alive?"

I felt her pull my sorry fat peegoo into the boat and I must have helped somehow. I probably slithered into the boat like a snake because I didn't have any energy for anything else.

She rolled me over onto my back and saw I was having trouble breathing. I tried looking at her and talking but my eyes just would not open and my tongue and lips and throat were all stuck together.

"I've got you. How did you...?" I could hear her say.

I only responded by throwing up on her. My head hurt so bad and my skin was so hot. I was dizzy and my heart was racing. I remember Jenna trying to give me water and putting some sort of lotion on my burned skin. The comfort of knowing that someone had found me gave me permission to slip away from reality. I fainted and was out the whole day.

Day Seven

God rested on the seventh day. And dishongs, so did I. I only remember waking up once or twice because of my chills or because I was burning up. Now that I think about it, it's hard to separate what is real from what was a dream.

I think this was a dream. But it seemed so real. I was back in that canoe on the night MJ got eaten. The shark came along and tried to take a big bite out of it, but the canoe turned into a killer whale, one of those Orcas like we'd seen near Port Townsend when had just left Seattle. The Orca totally terrified the shark, which just took off, and the Orca swam after it. I floated up into the air on my own wings and was looking down on what was happening. The Orca caught up to the great white, and they both slowed down and just floated there alongside each other for a long time, like they were talking.

The setting sun was a deep red as I fluttered over them. At first, I thought I had angel's wings, but I noticed they were black, more like a raven's wings. I'd never seen black angel wings. Are there black angels? Must be. I floated up above the two giant creatures and it seemed they were both looking at the sun. All of us were just watching it go down.

All of a sudden, they started swimming all over the place eating all the plastic in the ocean. They called their friends and all the other fish and creatures in the sea. Soon, every fish in the ocean was eating all the plastic they could until their bellies were swollen. I screamed at them to stop it, but they wouldn't listen. They all started dying and the sea began to stink. My wings got heavy and I fell back into the rotten ocean.

It was one of those falling dreams where you wake up and it feels like you just fell into your bed. I felt like I had hit the bottom of the life raft, and I bounced awake. Dishongs, my head was burning, and I was still feeling crappy, but I heard someone next to me groaning. A man was lying right beside me. I forced my eyes open for a second and saw that it was Estevan. His hands were tied, and his mouth had a strip of duct tape on it.

That was the weirdest thing ever, even stranger than the dream I just had. I was sure I must still be dreaming. I couldn't imagine why he was there all tied up like that. Suddenly, I started thinking that Jenna was behind all of this. I could see her throwing me overboard and burning down the yacht and kicking her cat off. "No." I thought. "Impossible. She could never have done that. LOL."

In hindsight, I guess I can understand why I had that dream about the canoe turning into an Orca. On the yacht, Estevan had talked about that canoe a lot when we were traveling down the West coast. He said it was an expensive treasure. It had been built by the Makah Indians in the 1980s, a smaller replica of boats they used to make back in the day. Before they started work on a boat like this, the natives would fast and pray and go to the sweat lodge and do whatever they do in those things. It was a spiritual thing for them. The boat and the tree were spiritual things. They thanked the tree for its life before they cut it down. They let the log sit there over the winter so that it wouldn't crack once they started carving. Sometimes it took up to two years to finish one canoe.

It was called a dugout canoe because it was made of one single tree with the middle dug out. They used fire to make it easier to shape the middle of the log with an adze. Then, they used hot rocks and water to shape the stern and bow upwards.

Anyway, that's about all I remember from the seventh day stranded at sea. I tried to ask Jenna why Estevan was there, but I just couldn't do it. let my eyes close and faded back to sleep. I had a million other crazy dreams that I can't remember.

Day Eight

When my eyes first started opening, the world was orange. I imagined it must be around sunset. But I soon realized it was just the light filtering through the tent and it was still early morning. The peanut butter hadn't killed me, but it sure came close. I guess maybe I wasn't as allergic to it as I was when I was a kid. But the combination of exhaustion, dehydration and peanut butter nearly killed me.

My head was not hurting as bad as it had been. It was still spinning a little, but I was able to sit up. Jenna noticed that I was trying to get up, and she helped me prop my back against the side of the lifeboat.

"Thank you," I said hoping that she knew I was thanking her for saving me life. "Did you see my dad?" I saw a look of disappointment on her face and realized it was probably rude of me to not ask about her first. But I had hoped maybe they got out together.

Jenna looked at me and shook her head. "I hoped he was with you," she said.

I felt something run down my cheek and realized I was crying. Hao nan guo!

Jenna made me an electrolyte drink that tasted sort of like Gatorade. I wiped my eyes and watched her open the package and empty the powder into a fresh bottle of water and then hand it to me. Dishongs, you don't know what that felt like. And I can't explain it. All I can say is that it was like somebody was handing me a cup full of life.

I couldn't make sense of anything, and I must have had a really confused look on my face as I took it from her hands because Jenna said, "I'll tell you everything I know when you're ready." After the first sip, I chugged down the rest of it without thinking or stopping. It was so good. I handed Jenna the empty bottle while my cheeks were still bloated with the last mouthful. I got a good look around the lifeboat and noticed a clean bandage covering my cut-up hand. I rubbed it lightly. It wasn't nearly as sore as it had been. It felt so good to be healing and to have hope. I started to realize that the filth and caked-on salt I had gotten used to the past few days were gone. Jenna had somehow given me a bath and put aloe-vera lotion on my skin. My face grew a reddish orange when I noticed my pants were hanging up and drying and that I was in my underwear.

"Here, let me look at your hand," she said. She must have seen me rub it.

I held out my hand and watched her as she carefully removed my bandage. I didn't even look at my wound. I just looked at this beautiful girl sitting there in front of me taking care of my wounds. "My angel." I'm not sure if I said that or not dishongs. Really. I'm not sure. I hope I said it. I know for sure that I asked, "Have you seen my phone?" She glanced sideways as if to let me know she was looking at it. It was right there next to me.

Her brunette hair fell into her face, and she pushed it back behind her ear. I don't know why, but it was like I didn't know what to say after that. I felt the same as the first time I saw her at Tacoma Mall. I was leaving with a friend of mine, just minding my own business and walking out of the mall on our way to the car. I don't know where we were going. Home, probably, to play Fortnite or something, knowing how lame my life was. Anyway, she was standing there by the sliding doors looking out, like she was waiting for someone. Something inside me said I had to go up and talk to her. But I kept walking. I walked through the doors and we got halfway to the car and I looked back. She was still standing there, and I think she was looking at me. I walked a little farther and told my friend, "Wait here. I'll be right back. I gotta talk to this girl."

So, I went back and said something totally lame. I don't even remember what I said, dishongs. I never knew how to talk to girls, but I just went up and opened my mouth.

She had just gotten off work and was waiting for a ride from her mom. I asked her for her phone number, but she gave me her Kik account instead. We didn't talk a lot that time, but I sent her a message the next day and the rest is history. Or herstory I guess. The rest is her story.

When she'd finished putting a new bandage on my hand, I couldn't contain myself any longer. I grabbed her and hugged her and realized she had lost weight. I kissed her cheek. "How did you get here? What happened?"

"I could ask you the same thing," Jenna said.

"I know my story," I said. "I want to hear yours."

"Okay, I guess it's been about eight days now," Jenna began. "Do you remember much about that night before it happened? What we were doing? I can't. I remember we had dinner and while we watched the sunset, I suddenly felt exhausted. I could barely move."

"Yeah," I said, helping her remember. "I thought you were getting seasick again, so I helped you down to your berth. You fell asleep really quick, and I went back up to the deck to chill. I sat there and read some of my book. Dad and Estevan were talking." I thought about it a moment and didn't really want to admit that I knew dad had been drinking again. I remember him hitting the bottle pretty hard during dinner. It wasn't worth mentioning.

"I went on deck to look at the stars. I strapped my tether on and lay down. I guess I fell asleep. Next thing I know, I'm being pushed over the side and you guys are driving away," I'm starting to tear up again here dishongs because I realized how betrayed I felt. "Then, I watched the yacht burn down. And I found the old canoe with MJ clinging on to it. And I was able to survive that way."

"I knew you were still alive," Jenna said. "Or at least I hoped it was you and MJ."

"Because of the tracker in his collar?" I said.

"Yes." She said. I could tell she was hesitant to ask me what had happened to MJ.

"Look, I'm sorry." I said. "I tried to save him. I fed him what I could. We found a dead sea turtle, and he loved that. I gave him water when we had it. We were doing fine until one night a stupid shark attacked our canoe. It started to sink and MJ was swimming in the wrong direction. I yelled at him, but he kept swimming the wrong way." I hesitated but knew I had to tell her. "The shark got him."

Jenna wiped the tears from her eyes but didn't break down the way I expected her to. I guess she'd had time to prepare for that news for several days. I knew how much she loved that cat. She got MJ when she was like two or three. It was a gift from her dad after her parents got divorced and was named after the man who helped deliver her. When her mom was pregnant with Jenna, she went into labor really fast and they weren't able to make it to a hospital. Her dad pulled over at a gas station and a man there jumped in and helped deliver her. His name was Gerald Jackson. His legacy lived on in that cat until just two days ago.

"I had taken the collar off of him not long before that and put it in my pocket," I continued.

"I see," she said wiping her eyes and fumbling with MJ's collar. She tried putting it on her neck but it was too short so she wrapped it around her ankle a couple of times and wore it there for the rest of the trip.

"I'm sorry."

Jenna just shook her head, wiped her face dry, and continued her story. This time, I thought I could hear a little anger in her voice.

"Well, I woke up on this stupid life raft the next day. Estevan had my hands tied behind my back. He was passed out and I got a good look around and..."

"Did he get mangly dangly?" I interrupted. What a stupid thing to say. I cringed as soon as the words came out of my mouth. Who talks that way? Stupid, lame Alexzander Hua! That's who.

"Mangly dangly?" Jenna said. "You're so weird."

"You know what I mean," I said trying to act like I wasn't embarrassed.

"No. I don't think he touched me. Maybe he tried something when I was asleep. But, just listen. He was sleeping and I started looking around for something to untie my hands with. I found a knife in the box there. I started trying to cut the rope, but Estevan woke up. I lay back down and covered the knife and pretended to be asleep. I could hear him moving around and groaning and cussing to himself. After a few minutes he got on the satellite phone and called somebody. He was speaking Spanish. Can you imagine? He told us he was from Brazil, but I think he's actually Columbian. Good thing I never mentioned that my dad's family is from Mexico and I speak a little Spanish. It sounded like he was talking to a friend or maybe his brother. He was getting angry. Best I could tell was they had arranged to meet up, but the boat was late. I think they got held up in a storm. Then I heard Estevan tell them he had a girl with him. The person on the other line must have been really pissed. I could hear him yelling. Estevan said 'venderla a los something.'"

"What's that mean?"

"Sell her to something. He was going to sell me. Can you believe that? I've heard of human trafficking, but I never thought something like this could happen to me. Why would he want to do something like that?"

I just shook my head and wondered what I could do to console her. I felt so bad, dishongs. This was all my fault.

"I'm so sorry," I said wiping the hair back that kept falling into her eyes. She looked at me a moment with a mix of tenderness and dislike. Then, she kind of moved back away from me and stared off into the distance to continue her story.

"So, he kept yelling at this guy to hurry up and find us because he didn't have long. His doctor said something about his blood. I assumed he needed to get to land to see a doctor. There was a pause in his conversation, and I could hear water running. I realized he was standing up and peeing over the side of the boat. I didn't hesitate. I jumped up and tried to kick him in the back hoping he would fall over into the water. Well, he didn't. He dropped the satellite phone in the water and collapsed into the life boat. I kicked him too low in the kidney. While he was down, I stomped on him several more times in the back. Remember how he kept telling us he was sick, but we never could quite figure out what was wrong with him?"

I nodded.

"Kidney failure," She laughed. "I kicked him right where it counted the most, and I didn't even know that. He had surgery a while ago and still needs dialysis. That's why he was in a hurry to get rescued. He was going to sell me off and then go have dialysis and live a nice life."

"That bastard," I said. Dishongs, I was getting pissed. I couldn't stand to look at him lying there with his eyes closed pretending he couldn't hear us. "I ought to throw him overboard right now," I said as I kicked at him with my right foot. He didn't move.

"It's okay, Zander. Stop. He doesn't have long to live. We've been out here for eight days now. Most people who need dialysis die within something like ten days if they don't get their treatment."

"How do you know all that?" I asked.

"He's been whining about it the whole time."

"What was he thinking? What an idiot," I said.

"He thought his friends would come and rescue him, but when he dropped the phone over the side, we lost contact with them and the rest of the world. My hands were still tied, literally, and he was in so much pain that he couldn't move. It started raining not long after that and the winds picked up. That phone was the last thing on my mind. If I was thinking clearer, I would have jumped in to get it, even with my hands tied. The things are made to float. But I just didn't realize how much I would need it. We couldn't communicate with anyone, so we just drifted. I eventually cut my hands free. He had that motor, but we ran out of gas quickly. He had a spare gallon gas tank that I poured into the tank and the tossed overboard. Do you remember all those gas tanks we discovered he had on the yacht?"

"Yeah."

"I think he used those to burn it down."

"Shit," I said.

I wondered if that's where the one I found came from.

"So, you've been on this raft all this time with this asshole. Why didn't you kick him off?"

"I tried, but you wouldn't believe how heavy he is. And he can still fight when I'm trying to get him out. I finally gave up and decided to just kept him tied down."

"It must have been so stressful," I said.

"Yeah, but I've been working and learning. I gathered lots of rain water. Oh, and he brought plenty of food. He hasn't gotten much of it, though," she said with a wicked smile that showed me a side of Jenna I hadn't seen before. Turns out she was pretty bad-ass. She opened a box and showed me about twenty cans of tuna and fifty or so dehydrated meals. All you had to do was add hot water, which she could make easily with a Kelly Kettle. I felt like I was in some five-star hotel. And there was a professionally made solar still, like the ones I'd made out of plastic bottles.

"Want some dinner?" Jenna asked. I loved that girl. She was so cool, way cooler than anybody I'd ever known.

I looked at the selection and chose turkey and dressing. She boiled the water and poured it in this container and let it sit a few minutes to rehydrate.

"Maybe that's kind of like me," I said as we watched and waited for the food to be ready. "All I needed was to rehydrate, I think. I'm feeling a lot better. Thank you for finding me. I would have been dead for sure."

I really was feeling better. My head was not spinning anymore, except for the usual sea motion but that wasn't even hardly noticeable. I got a whiff of the turkey and realized I was starving and ready to eat. I scarfed the thing down in no time and handed her my empty bowl.

"Can I have another?" I asked.

"Maybe you should take it easy. You haven't had anything to eat in a long time. Better just ease into it."

She was right. I started to feel a bit queasy. I nodded and leaned back against the boat.

"So, tell me, did you really find me because of that cat collar, or was this like an accident?"

"Oh, she said. I was tracking you all this time. Actually, I thought I was tracking MJ. I didn't know you had his collar. I figured he had climbed on some piece of wood or something and was just floating. But, I also hoped that maybe the two of you were together with your dad. I didn't know what I was tracking, actually. For all I knew, I was just chasing after a dead cat floating around with the collar. Since we didn't have any gas for the motor, I had to paddle. That was nearly impossible for one person in such a big raft and with such a fat guy lying in it. I got close to your dot on the tracker a few times, but never close enough. When it looked like I was within a couple of miles I would send up a flare."

"That was you?" I said.

"You saw it?"

"Yes! It was awesome. Did you see my fire?"

"I think I did. I saw a little flicker off in the distance. That's when I shot off the flare and started paddling towards you. I almost hated to send off the flares, though," Jenna said.

"Why?"

"I was afraid it would attract Estevan's friends. They are out there looking for us right now."

I thought about that for a second. At first I thought "Yay! Somebody's looking for us." Then I thought maybe they would kill us if they found us.

I don't know why I thought of this at that time. Dishongs, sometimes I say the stupidest things.

"You know," I said. "In the early 90s Nike lost a whole shipping container out here somewhere. The thing broke open and something like 60,000 pairs of shoes went floating around. Some of them ended up all along the Washington and Oregon coast and even California." I was remembering my project on the GPGP. "They used those shoes to figure out how ocean currents work because Nike stamps a specific number on each shoe. Looks like you and I would have floated apart so far that we would have never seen each other."

"We probably would have, but I kept looking for you."

"Thank you. You're awesome," I said. Jenna smiled slightly but she didn't return the compliment. I grabbed her hand, but she pulled it away and made herself a meal. She seemed to be growing kind of distant from me, not like before all of this happened.

Estevan moved a little and groaned. It was the first sign of life I had seen from him that day. I gotta admit, dishongs, I was ready to throw him overboard to feed the fish like he did me.

"So, you think he's going to die?" I asked.

Jenna smiled that sort of wicked smile again.

"Depends," she said grinning as if she had some evil secret.

"Depends? On what?" I said.

She looked at me for a minute and then decided to show me something.

She reached inside another box and pulled out this really weird looking contraption, a black belt with a bunch of clear plastic tubes, a battery and a bunch of filter-looking things attached to it.

"What is it?" I asked.

"It's his portable dialysis machine."

"What does it do?"

"It filters his blood, you dope. Without it, he dies."

"Wait, you've had this the whole time?"

She smiled and nodded like I should be proud. But really, I didn't know what to think. That's pretty tough, wouldn't you say? I probably would have broken down and given the guy his dialysis on the second day or so. But she kept it from him this whole time.

"So we can filter his blood and save his life?" I asked.

Estevan turned his head toward me, and I could see his eyes were now open and pleading with me.

At that moment, reality sank in, and I shuttered to think that this man's life was now in our hands.

"Wow," I said. "You didn't use it yet?"

"No. The last thing I needed was for him to be healthy. Can you imagine, just me and him out here all alone? He's a monster. When I tried to throw him overboard in the beginning, he put up a terrible fight. So, I just kept him tied up with the ropes he used on me. I give him some water every now and then and I've fed him a couple times."

"How does he, you know?" I hesitated.

"I just keep these towels down there and change them every now and then. He's getting some pretty bad blisters. Of course, when he does number two, I have to change it. Stinks too bad. It's so gross."

Jenna said all of this like she had been a nurse for twenty years or something. She talked about this and everything else just as calm as a clam. I didn't know if I should admire her or fear her. I guess I kind of did both.

We heard a weak and muffled moan coming from Estevan. It sounded like he was saying "Please."

He was looking at me, but I couldn't bear to look back. He had such a weird yellow color to his face. It was obvious even in the orange pale that was being cast by the raft's tent.

We sat there in silence a while, and I started to feel the weight of this dying man's life on us. It was a heavy burden that somehow threatened to pull me down to the bottom of the ocean. It shouldn't have been, though. I mean, he did try to kill me. He did probably kill my dad. He did try to sell Jenna into slavery. There is absolutely no reason I should have felt any responsibility for him at all. But dishongs, I did. I tell you. I looked at his pleading sorry eyes and felt sorry for him, and I don't know why. I still wanted him dead, but I didn't want to be the one to kill him.

"We can't just let him die," I said after a long pause.

"If he's healthy, he will be hard to handle. You're still weak and I know how strong the guy is. I don't think we know enough about tying people up to keep a man like that subdued."

Estevan let out a loud moan. He was in pain.

I looked at Jenna with pleading eyes.

"He does this all the time. Don't worry. He'll stop soon."

"Maybe forever," I said under my breath.

"So, what do you suggest we do?" Jenna was getting miffed.

I thought about it for a while and said, "My island." Jenna had tied my floating island to the raft so we still had it.

"What?"

"We can put him on my floating island. Make it a little bigger. We'll put him on it, and we'll give him a little food and water. Then we'll give him his machine thingy to filter his blood, turn it on and let him go. That way we don't know if he lives or dies, we don't have to deal with him, and we don't have to feel guilty about killing him."

Jenna thought about it for a minute. "You're soft," she said finally. But after a few moments she said, "I guess that would be okay. I can't wait to get rid of him."

My stomach started grumbling and I realized I was going to need to relieve myself. That turkey and dressing meal was the first real food I'd had in seven days.

"Where's the head?" I asked Jenna jokingly.

She pointed to the side of the boat. "I've been using that side."

"Starboard?" I said, playfully testing her knowledge of boat terminology. I was feeling lighter now that we had a plan for something to do with Estevan. I had tried teaching her boat lingo during the first few days of the trip, but she never seemed interested.

"I guess. That one," she said pointing again but not looking.

"Soon as I feel strong, I'll start getting the island ready," I said. "Could you turn around?" She did, and I did my business. That's really embarrassing, dishongs. Really embarrassing. But she had to do the same thing, or get into the water, so it all worked out.

Day 8 - Afternoon

Jenna jumped into the water before I did. She was eager to get the floating island ready, and she thought she saw something floating about twenty feet away. The water was completely still, and the sun was directly overhead, beating down and heating up the tent. It might have been 100 degrees inside for all I knew.

Estevan was sweating and groaning. I removed the tape from his mouth and gave him a sip of water.

"Medicine," he said weakly.

"What medicine? Where?"

He pointed to a box. I opened it, and it was full of prescription medication.

"Which one?" I said.

He moved his head to indicate that I should just let him see.

"This one?"

"Yes."

I opened the bottle. "How many?"

"Two," he said.

I took out two small white pills and dropped them in his mouth, then gave him some water to wash them down.

He swallowed and looked at me like I had not done him a favor or anything. He just looked like I had owed him that service. He didn't seem to know or remember what he had done to me. I read about people like that one time. They're called psychopaths. They don't have any sort of guilt or anything. I guess some part of their brain doesn't work right. Personally, I think the part that doesn't work right is probably the most important part. The part of the brain that says dishongs. Or tze mei. The part that has empathy. If you don't have that, then what have you got? Hell if I know.

I got pissed off at the ungrateful turd. "You're welcome" I said and threw the bottle back in the box, not caring if it fell open spilling out all his precious life-saving medicine. "Can't wait to get rid of your ass."

Jenna came swimming back, and I put the tape back on his mouth and gave him the finger. He laughed.

Jenna had found a pretty good score. It was a laundry basket that had bicycle inner tubes tangled up in it.

"Nice catch," I said.

Jenna tossed it onto the island and took a minute to catch her breath before climbing back in the raft from the rope ladder in the rear of the boat. She climbed up and I reached out my hand, but she didn't take it.

"You should wear a life vest when you go out," I said. She didn't say anything.

I scanned the area but didn't see anything floating nearby. Jenna saw me looking and handed me a pair of binoculars.

"Dang," I said. "You got everything!"

I did a 360 looking for boats, but everywhere I looked it was the same, placid water. I could hardly even tell where the sea ended and the sky began. There was hardly a ripple. It was like the ocean had just decided to rest a while.

I gave up looking for ships and turned my attention to getting more trash for the island so that we could get rid of Estevan as soon as possible. But through the binoculars, I couldn't see any of that either.

"Maybe I'll just go for a swim and see what I can find," I said, half talking to myself.

Jenna was sitting inside drinking an electrolyte drink. She gave me the thumbs up. She was being very quiet. I didn't know why, but I guessed it was because this was all my fault. She wouldn't have been out there if it wasn't for me. And she probably wanted me to just throw the guy overboard, but I couldn't do it. I felt my heart sink. I wanted to get us out of there. I wanted more than anything to get her home safely. I put on a life vest and jumped in feet first.

The water brought back some really bad memories. I got a panic attack remembering eight days ago when I had been thrown into the water without warning. I had to grab on to the life boat. I just held on for my life, dishongs. I was scared. I felt like it would leave me, and I would never see Jenna again. Swear to God, I even heard a motor start up. I had to climb back in for a while. I just couldn't do it.

"Bu shing. I can't," was all I said when I crawled back into the lifeboat.

Jenna just nodded. She didn't seem disappointed or anything. It was like that's what she expected of me. Another failure.

"Well," she said. "You survived on the island the way it is. Why can't he?"

I thought about it a minute and shrugged my shoulders.

"I guess that's true."

"You want to just do it now?" Jenna asked.

Estevan squirmed a little.

I remembered his ingratitude when I gave him the medicine. "Sure. Why not?"

Jenna started packing up his medications and stuff.

"Let's give him two days' supply of food and water. That's a hell of a lot more than he gave me," I said.

Jenna nodded. "If you ask me, we shouldn't give him anything, but it's your call."

I just couldn't bring myself to do that to another human being, dishongs, because I now knew what it was like to be that hungry and thirsty, and it's a fate I don't wish on anyone, not even my worst enemy. But I should have. Knowing now what happened and all, I should have given him nothing. But I didn't. I was too nice. "Soft" was the right word. Jenna was right. Tai ran de.

I pulled the island closer. It was much smaller than I remembered. "I survived on that?" I thought. I remembered MJ, the shark head, sitting there looking over me. I remembered the big bite that the shark I called Moby took out of the island. "It still floats," I said to myself in wonder.

I went ahead and added the new clothes basket and the inner tubes to the island. I cut the tubes in half and blew as much air into the them as I could, then tied them tightly so that they would float better. I put the basket upside down and then put the tubes under it then tied it to the island. It might give him a place to put his feet, I thought. Mine had been hanging over the side the whole time.

I stepped out onto the island and made some adjustments so that it would be more stable. The buoy was still secure in the middle, and everything else sort of just fit. I uncovered that old skateboard wheel I found the first day and threw it onto the life raft. "Keeping that," I said. Then I came across my holy Jenn-air logo.

"Jenna, you've got to see this. I almost forgot!"

She stuck her head outside the tent, and I told her that whole story about the Mahi Mahi and how I found that logo right about then.

"That's weird," was all she said before tucking her head back into the tent. Weird? I thought. That's all? Weird? Maybe I didn't tell her that story right. Or maybe she's just not a very spiritual person, I thought.

I made an a-frame out of boards so that I could wrap the tarp over it to give him some shade from the sun. Jenna watched me work and every now and then asked if it was ready yet. She was getting impatient and the day was getting on. Finally, about three or four I said it was ready.

Jenna handed me the food and water that she decided Estevan should have. I put the box on the island and tied it down tight. Everything seemed pretty secure. There would be room enough for him to lay down, and I tried to make it so that there was one spot he could lay down without having crap poke him in the back. I used half of the tarp for the a-frame for shade and the other half for him to lay on.

"I guess that's it," I said. "Let's get him on it."

"Finally," Jenna said. I could tell now that she was really mad at me. Maybe she thought I was being a wimp or something. Maybe I was. Dishongs, I don't know. I've thought about this a lot. I know I did the right thing. But I feel like I never made a bigger mistake in my life.

I climbed back onto the boat and saw that there was a marker in one of the supply boxes and a piece of paper. "One more thing," I said. And just for fun, I made a sign that said "Zander's Island: One man's trash is another man's salvation" and I put it on the post where MJ used to be.

"Okay, so here's how we're going to handle this," Jenna said quietly as we huddled together to plan the move of Estevan to the island. "His legs are dangerous. He's like a crazed kangaroo. He'll kick for sure. That's why I've had his legs and arms attached to the boat all the time. You untie his arms and get under his shoulders. When you're ready, I'll untie his feet and then you can pull him out onto the raft."

"Island," I said. For some reason, I thought of it as an island instead of a raft.

"Island, whatever. If he gives us a hard time, I'll have to stick the knife in him."

I untied the rope that was securing his upper body to the raft and made sure that his hands were still tied together. I grabbed his shoulders and nodded to Jenna that I was ready. She untied the rope that held his feet, and we soon found out he wasn't going out there without a fight. He kept bending his knees and rolling up into a ball, then kicking at Jenna. Even though his legs were tied, he was still able to kick, like she said.

Jenna grabbed the knife out of the box and pushed the blade into his fat belly. He didn't like the pain, and he pushed away from it sending me backwards because I still had ahold of his shoulders and was pulling on him. I kept pulling and Jenna kept poking him with the knife and we ended up with him sitting on the side of the life raft with his hands and feet still tied. He was breathing heavily.

"Get on the God damned island!" Jenna shouted holding the knife to his belly.

He groaned and yelled through the duct tape.

"Get off my boat!" Jenna yelled. Estevan looked back and saw that the island was right below him. Jenna pushed the knife harder into his belly and he fell backwards onto the island, nearly falling into the water. I helped hold on to him while he adjusted his weight more towards the center of the island.

Once we got him situated, Jenna handed me his dialysis machine.

"You know how to do this?" I asked him.

He nodded. He was more awake than he had been this whole time. In the late afternoon sun, his skin was as yellow as a sunflower. I helped him put the dialysis machine on. Then, I untied his hands and said.

"Hook it up."

I climbed back into the life raft and we gave him a minute or two to get the machine turned on. I undid the rope that was holding Zander's Island to our raft and then jumped into the water. I was facing my fears better and was able to get in the water. This time, I started swimming, towing him away from our life raft. The water was still incredibly calm, like a swimming pool at the YMCA after closing time.

I swam a good distance and then decided it was far enough. I swam back to the raft and shouted, "Good luck asshole."

You won't believe what I heard him say. "You'll need it more than me."

It shook me, dishongs. It made me feel all weird, like he had something planned.

I should have just dumped him over the side and sank the island and let him drown right then and there. I don't know why I didn't. Sometimes when they're bad, that's the only thing you can do with them.

But I didn't. I just stayed in the raft with Jenna. We both grabbed our paddles and paddled as far away from him as possible. We paddled until we couldn't see him anymore and then paddled until we couldn't paddle anymore.

As the sun went down, we both said good riddance to that jerk. We rehydrated a couple of meals with hot water and watched in silence as the sun faded away.

Jenna said she was really tired. I was exhausted, too. So, we both went to bed early. I closed my eyes but had trouble falling asleep for fear Estevan would jump into the boat at any time.

"Should have let him die," I kept saying to myself. "Should have let him die."
Day Nine

I woke up the next morning very early while Jenna was still sleeping. Physically, I felt better than I had in a long time. I watched my angel sleep for a few minutes and started to touch her hair, but I remembered how mad she was at me. And she had every right. If not for me, she would be at home sleeping in her own bed safe and sound. Mister Jackson would be curled up at the foot of her bed where he always slept. Since it was summer, on her to-do list would be to go to work at the pretzel factory in Tacoma Mall. I wished that the only danger she was in was the chance of burning her hand on a waffle iron. But instead, she was lost in the Pacific out here with me. Lame.

I let her sleep and guiltily made myself a packet of the electrolyte drink. I found a little trail mix for breakfast and ate that, figuring I would wait for Jenna to wake up before rehydrating another meal. The sun was coming up, and I looked out of the tent to see that the water was still smooth as glass. "Wow. We really must be in the dead middle of the Pacific High, now," I thought. It was all too eerie. Too quiet.

I closed the flap on the tent and saw that our raft had a solar battery charger. Can't believe I hadn't seen it before. I pulled out my phone and plugged it in. I actually felt my heart racing because I was charging a stupid phone. What's up with that, dishongs? I really hoped it would hold a charge after using it to light the fire. The charging indicator lit up, and I started getting more excited. As I put my phone down, Jenna's phone caught my eye. It was sitting there next to the charger. I picked it up and it opened by itself. It wasn't locked. I hesitated a minute, knowing what a private thing phones are.

But I was curious to see the app she used to track MJ's GPS signal. It showed that the emitter was right where we were. Pretty accurate. You didn't need wifi or cellular for that tracker to work. Then, I realized that it gave me coordinates. I remembered the text I sent the first day when I included coordinates, so I turned on my phone while it was charging and compared them with where we were when the boat went down. I figured we had floated about 230 miles northeast. That didn't help me a lot, other than to help confirm my suspicion that we really were in the High. It also gave me a good estimate about how far from California we might be.

I began to formulate a plan and actually started to feel kind of hopeful. I once saw a documentary about four women who rowed a boat across the Pacific, all the way from San Francisco to Hawaii, then to Samoa, and then to Australia. 8,000 freaking miles! It took them something like 9 months, but they did it. I did my best dead reckoning in my head and figured we were probably directly west of San Francisco anywhere from 900 to 1,500 miles. Not very precise, I know my dishongs, but me and numbers were not good friends.

"At least we have some idea where we are now," I thought. I was about to turn off Jenna's phone when I saw an daily journal app and realized she had been writing about everything. I wanted to read it, but I decided I'd better not. Just as I was putting Jenna's phone down, I realized she was awake and looking at me.

"Were you looking at my phone?" she asked, obviously pissed.

"No! I was just,"

"Leave my stuff alone, Zander. That's none of your business."

"I was just looking at the tracker app. I think I know where we are now and how far we floated."

"I know. We're in the stupid Pacific High," Jenna said grabbing her phone.

"Right," I said. "And we've floated a little over two hundred miles northeast from where we were. That means if we paddle straight east, we might end up in San Francisco. I think we should use all our free time paddling East. At least we'll get out of the High at some point and we will have a better chance of someone finding us."

Jenna wasn't listening to me. She was looking at something on her phone.

"What do you think?" I asked.

"Sure. Fine," she said. I let the silence fill the air for a while.

After a few minutes, I asked, "You hungry?"

Jenna switched off her phone and looked out into the ocean. I could tell she was about to cry, but I didn't know what to say or do. I took out the Kelly Kettle and started boiling some water. It looked like we only had about three or four gallons of water left.

"We're running low on water. Maybe I should get that solar still working. Hope it rains." I said trying to keep the conversation light. When you don't know what else to say, talk about the weather. But she didn't respond.

After a few moments of heavy silence, I broke down. "Sorry for all of this," I said getting all emotional. "I wish I never invited you, or your mom had said no. I wish you were back at home in Tacoma, safe and sound."

I saw the tears roll down her cheeks, but she kept looking over the ocean.

"I wish you never met me," I said getting a little dramatic and feeling sorry for myself. I only wanted her to say something nice, but I wasn't prepared for what I heard.

"Me too," she said.

That hurt, dishongs. It felt like my soul had been cut in two and I could see its center and it was made of cheap plastic. I felt like nothing more than one of the billions of castaway pieces of garbage floating around out there. When I think about the cut on my hand that got infected, the sunburns, the seasickness, the cat scratches, the seven days of being wet, of being hot in the day and cold at night, of hunger pains, of a dirt-dry throat, of my sprained wrist, of the stench of a rotting sea turtle, I'd take them all again over hearing those two words.

"Me too," she said again softly but loudly enough for me to hear.

I was on autopilot after that. I kind of shut down. I was hurt and angry. But I couldn't even blame her. I didn't do anything to deserve this, yet everything was my fault. That sucks, dishongs, but sometimes that's the way it is. You never mean to screw things up, but you do.

The water was boiling, and I turned off the kettle. Through my dry mouth I asked, "Chicken or beef?"

Jenna wiped her eyes and stopped crying, like she had a new resolve.

"Beef."

I guess it was out there. She had said her peace. I understood somehow that our relationship was over. There was no coming back from putting her in danger like this, even though everything was an accident. And I felt so bad about everything, I just decided to let it go.

I made her that beef meal for breakfast, and then took off my shirt and changed into a swimsuit that had belonged to Estevan and went to jump in the water.

"Aren't you going to eat?" Jenna asked.

"Not hungry," I said.

The water was cool. It felt good on my face. I knew it would hide my tears. Never let them see you cry, dishongs, or some other bullshit. I swam away from the life raft about twenty feet or so and hoped that if I did start bawling, I'd be far enough away that she couldn't hear me.

I slapped the water a hundred times and hoped she wasn't watching. I let myself go under and while down there I screamed at the top of my voice. I almost inhaled before I came back up to the top, but I didn't. I didn't drown, regrettably. When I surfaced, I just floated on my back, letting the water run into my ears. That was fine with me. I didn't want to hear anything anymore. As long as I held my breath, I would float. It felt like I was on a waterbed. It felt like the Dead Sea. My uncle had gone on a trip to the Holy Land one time and he told me about how the Dead Sea has so much salt in it that you can hardly sink. You just float on top. I thought about the Dead Sea and my dead reckoning and my dead hopes and my dead dreams. I turned over so that my face was in the water and opened my eyes. Right below me, I swear dishongs, swam a school of Mahi Mahi. They must have been going 50 knots. They were gone in a couple of seconds. It was like my dad reminding me of my responsibility to Jenna. Even if she didn't love me anymore, I still loved her. And I owed it to her to get her back alive.

I rolled back over and looked up at the sky and pointed. This time, instead of a prayer, I made a promise. "I'll get her back alive. I'll make sure she's safe."

I swam back to the boat and climbed onboard but didn't go in. I sat on the side waiting to dry off a bit. I banged my head sideways to clear the water from my ear canals and as I did, I heard something. At first, I thought it was a seal or a whale, but I didn't hear it again for another minute. I sat there staring off into the distance thinking about how we could get back home. We really had a lot going for us. We were two people, we had food and water, we had shelter, we had paddles and a heading. I decided to focus on that. But soon I found my eyes were focusing on something white off in the distance. It looked like a big floating piece of flotsam.

"Jenna, give me the binoculars."

She came out of the tent and handed them to me.

"What do you see?"

"Probably nothing," I said.

But after I focused in on the object, I knew it wasn't nothing. I froze and regretted asking for the binoculars. It let Jenna know that I had seen something out there. I thought about just not telling her, but she was persistent, and I hate to lie, dishongs. I'm really no good at it. I can do it for a minute or two, but if somebody pushes me, I end up telling the truth.

"What?" Jenna said again. She could tell from my body language that something was wrong.

"Let me see."

As I handed her the binoculars, I spilled the beans.

"Estevan."

"Shit, are you serious?" she said ripping the binoculars out of my hands. "Oh my God," she said. "What is he doing?"

"I think he's paddling this way," I said, feeling like a real idiot. He must have found a board floating around out there that he could use to paddle with. "Should have let him die," I repeated under my breath. "Should have let him die."

"He's insane," Jenna said. "We've got to get out of here."

As we were getting the paddles ready, the wind picked up a little from the south where Estevan was. It carried his voice. We both heard it clearly.

He wasn't using that stupid fake-ass Brazilian accent anymore, "Jenna? Oh, Jenna baby? Don't you miss me? You didn't treat me nice. No, you weren't nice to me at all."

We both grabbed a paddle and started rowing as hard as we could, Jenna on starboard, me on port. We both paddled non-stop for a good two hours. I navigated by the sun trying to keep us headed in an easterly direction towards California. I was getting tired, but Jenna was still going strong, and I didn't want to be the first one to call for a break. Man, that girl was tough. I was dead tired, but she kept on going. She was like the freaking Energizer Bunny. Finally, after what seemed like another two hours, she stopped rowing.

I dropped my paddle and tried to catch my breath. We both tried to listen for Estevan's voice, but we couldn't hear it anymore. Jenna looked everywhere through the binoculars for probably twenty minutes before she finally put them down and decided we'd lost him.

She went into the tent, grabbed some water, and lay down to rest. I could hear her muffled sobbing and I felt bad, dishongs. I felt bad.

My stomach started complaining that I'd skipped breakfast and it was probably past lunch time. I hated to go into the tent with her there because I felt like she hated me. But it was a small tent. A great big freaking ocean, but a really tiny eight-person tent. I got to thinking about that. The Pacific Ocean is 60 million square miles and covers over 30 percent of the Earth. Yet we ran into Estevan. What are the odds? "Is he tracking us?" I said. I searched for any tracking device on our boat, but I didn't find one other than MJ's collar. I made myself a chicken meal and ate it in silence, trying not to upset Jenna any more.

The raft started rocking a little bit. I looked out and saw that the water had ripples, comparable to the water in the Puget Sound or on a big freshwater lake. A wind was starting to pick up, and it felt good to have some air blowing through the tent.

I swallowed the last of my lunch. Jenna had stopped crying when I came in and was typing something on her phone. I guess she was writing in her journal. That's actually a good survival technique. You should keep your mind busy. She was actually kind of a natural at this survival stuff.

I felt pretty well-rested and wanted something to do besides sit in the boat and feel guilty. "Guess I'll keep rowing for a while," I said.

"Okay," Jenna said without looking up.

I sat on the helm, grabbed my paddle and started rowing gently and half-heartedly. I wasn't really paddling with any determination. I was just there to kill time and give Jenna some space. We were getting into one-foot waves and the wind was picking up some and I could see clouds off in the distance to the south of us, where I figured Estevan was.

"Hope a storm gets you," I said to him under my breath.

Jenna came back out and sat down next to me, grabbed her paddle and without saying anything started rowing. I felt the pressure to keep up with her. Every now and then I would have to tell her to slow down because the boat was headed in the wrong direction. It's nearly impossible when you're out on the ocean to know if your paddling is doing any good. We were headed into a wind that was trying to blow us south and west, back out to the ocean. It was the opposite of what we wanted. I asked Jenna to stop rowing for a few minutes while I gauged the current and the wind. It seemed to me we were not going to make any progress that way.

"We're just being blown back the way we came," I said.

"Keep going," Jenna said.

"It's no use. We're being blown backwards."

"You just don't want to help," Jenna said.

That wasn't fair, dishongs. I understood that she was mad, but now she was just being mean.

"That's not it. I just know we're wasting our time and energy. We need to drop the sea anchor and hang out for a while." As if on cue, a strong gust of wind rocked our orange spaceship-like raft. Jenna stopped rowing and dropped her paddle inside the boat. She sat there a few minutes looking distraught. For the first time, I noticed how much older she had gotten on this trip. Her hair was all out of place, something that would have never happened if she were back in Tacoma. She loved to wear makeup and always made sure her hair was perfect. But now, her hair was disheveled and her eyes were starting to sink in and glaze over. In the afternoon sunlight I would have sworn her hair was gray. She was only sixteen and a half.

"You go rest," I said. "Just take it easy a while. I'll drop anchor and stay out here watching for ships and any sign of Estevan I'll wake you up. Maybe I'll catch a fish so that we don't have to use all our provisions." She scoffed and I could see her doing math in her mind. Her face told me exactly what she was thinking:

How long do you plan on being out here? We've got 40 more meals left. If you think I'm going to be out here longer than that with you, you're crazy. And she probably said mister after that, too.

"Just rest," I said. "Lay down. Let me take care of you for a while. You've been working so hard and so long. You saved my life. I owe you. It's my turn to help you. Just rest. Don't worry about him. He's being blown back in the same direction and fighting the same wind and current we are, and he's only one person and doesn't have a real paddle. We'll beat him. We'll be fine. Plus, he's weak."

I swear I heard her say under her breath, "Like you." Then she let herself collapse back into the boat. I swallowed my pride and gave her a pillow and tried to make sure she was as comfortable as possible. Then, I grabbed the sea anchor and tossed it out to hold our bow into the wind and to slow us from being blown back in Estevan's direction too quickly.

Jenna fell asleep, and I was really glad. Her words had cut me worse than any aluminum can knife ever could. But I tried to get over it. The whole trip was too traumatic. I have no idea how she held up as long as she did. Can you imagine being in the same little raft with somebody who kidnapped you for seven days? Like I said, she was tough, dishongs. She was beautiful and tough. And she was right. I was weak. I was soft.

I dug through the hamper quietly and found the fishing gear that came with the life raft. They thought of everything when they made this crazy contraption. It had heat-reflective insulating material so that when you lay down your body heat helped warm up the place. It had reflective strips on the outside so that it would be more visible and was of course bright orange to make it easier to locate. It had water pockets on the underside of the boat to help keep it stable. This one was made for eight people, so it was pretty roomy for just two, although it sure can feel small when the one person you're sharing it with is pissed off at you. They included a can of orange smoke, a signaling mirror, some flares, a noise maker, a reusable rocket. I read the instructions on everything so that if I ever needed to use it, and I sure hoped we did, I would be ready.

The only thing that wasn't so great was the fishing gear was just a bunch of line with a lure, no rod or anything. It just had kind of a kite handle that you could use to hold on to it and wrap it back up if you ever caught anything with it. I dropped the lure into the water and let the line unravel and the lure sink about 15 or 20 feet. Then I sat there looking out across the horizon, hoping to see a boat. You would think that there would be some traffic somewhere because there's nearly 8 billion people on the planet. Surely a few of them would be out on the water. But I started thinking about it. I figured that the ocean would hold about four or five countries the size of the United States, and at any given time, say there's about 100,000 people in boats out there. I didn't have a calculator, but I figured that there was probably one person for every 600 square miles. And that didn't even matter. What mattered was that we weren't in any shipping lanes. If we were in shipping lanes, all we'd have to do is just wait. Kind of like sitting on the side of the road with a flat tire, waiting for someone to come along and help.

I tried not to be discouraged, but I really started feeling hopeless again. "Do it for Jenna," I said. "You've got to stay strong for Jenna. Remember your promise."

Nothing was biting. I sat there for hours in the waning sun and in the wind and caught nothing and saw no boats, not even a single piece of trash floating around. I kind of missed the trash. Like I said, it reminded me of civilization, that somewhere people were living their lives like usual. Eventually, I tied the line to the post that was holding up the tent and checked my cell phone. Fully charged! I was excited. I remembered when I was down to five percent and I figured had even less chance than that.

I turned it on. Still no signal of course, but on the bright side, I figured I could play a few games. Dishongs, I hadn't played a video game in nine days, maybe ten. I can't remember if I played the last day I was on the ship. That's probably the longest I've ever gone in my entire life without a video game. I really wanted to play Clash Royale, but there wasn't a single player mode, so I went to one of the only ones I had downloaded, an old trusty that I was obsessed with when I was younger, _Angry Birds_. It was sure nice to get my mind off just surviving. After an hour or so, the sun was starting to set, and I switched to Candy Crush. The sun went down, and I heard Jenna breathing heavily. She must have been lost in a deep sleep. My battery was getting low pretty fast, so I figure I messed my battery up when I used it to light a fire. I plugged my phone in and reeled the line in. Nothing. I decided I'd save some of my meal tomorrow to use as bait. I took one last look around outside and didn't see any lights or ships, so I lay down on the floor and got lost in Candy Crush again until I fell asleep.

Dishongs, try to live your life like every moment could be the last, like you might not see the person you're with ever again. Try to know them and love them. I wish I would have spent that last night with Jenna just looking at her. I wish I would have memorized her face. I wish I would have recorded in my mind the sound of her breathing. But I didn't. I fell asleep having activated the Moon Struck power, whatever the hell that means. I haven't touched the game since.

Day Ten

I woke up the next morning and checked my phone. It was 9 am, and Jenna was still not awake. She must have been totally exhausted after all that time with Estevan. I bet she didn't sleep much the whole time he was there. She would have been too scared.

I wasted no time opening a can of tuna and scarfing down most of it, but I saved a little to bait my hook with. After I dropped the hook in the water, I stood up to take a leak over the side of the raft, but before I got very far my eyes fell on a ship, about a mile or two away. I could see it clearly, a large cargo ship loaded down with hundreds of containers.

"Ship!" I yelled to Jenna. "There's a ship! Wake up! Jenna! Get me the signaling mirror."

Immediately, I heard Jenna digging through the hamper and throwing things around. Within seconds she was next to me. I wanted her to give me the mirror, but when I reached for it, she wouldn't let go of it.

"Where? Where?" She said.

"Straight ahead. Signal. Hurry up shine it on them!" I was getting impatient. It was all I could do to not rip the mirror from her hands. But she had it figured out pretty quickly, and I was sure she was sending the light in the right direction towards the ship.

While she was doing that, I went back in and dug through the hamper and found the can of orange smoke. I pulled the cord and let it float on the water. A great big cloud of orange started shooting up out of it and reaching into the sky. We yelled as loud as we could, and I pulled out the signal horn and started letting it rip. I even shot off a stupid rocket that probably would have been more visible at night than in the day. But I wanted to give it everything we could. We yelled until we were hoarse, but the ship just kept getting smaller and smaller. I knew it had to be within three miles of us because that's as far as the human eye can see when you're standing about five feet tall. The curvature of the earth makes it impossible to see farther unless you're up high.

"They must have seen us. We weren't that far away." I tried to console Jenna as the ship finally shrank to nothing and was swallowed by the sea.

"They've probably radioed someone to come help us. They'll send someone. Those ships are too big, and they have deadlines. They can't just turn around that easily, but they'll send someone. I know it. Don't worry. You'll see," I said trying to sound as convincing as I could, even though I had a hard time believing it myself. How could they not have seen us? My heart really sank but I didn't want Jenna to know it.

She didn't seem to believe me anyway. She watched the horizon like a dog waiting for its owner to come back home. But nothing showed up.

I made her breakfast and tried to feed her, but she refused. She just kept looking to the horizon for that boat to come back. That's when I noticed my line was being tugged on. I reeled it in and there was what looked like a young Pacific cod on the line. It probably weighed a couple pounds. Normally, I would have been excited, but watching that boat sail away from us made anything like catching a fish seem small.

"Big deal," I said to myself as the fish flopped around. I grabbed the net that was included in our five-star raft.

"Do you see the knife?" I asked Jenna. But she was lost in her own world. It was like her mind had disappeared into the ocean along with that container ship.

I found the knife myself and beat the fish over the head with it. The thing had swallowed the hook, so I had to cut it out of him. I chopped off the head and had the fish cleaned in no time. My dad had taught me how to clean fish. I remember the pier down on the Ruston Way waterfront in Tacoma had this sink where you could clean your fish and let the unwanted parts drop back into the water for other fish to eat.

I thought how nice it would have been to have a knife like the one I was using when I was all alone and making my island. I threw the guts and scales and head overboard as far from the raft as possible. Then I put the Kelly Kettle on and boiled the fish.

It cooked pretty quickly, and I shared it with Jenna. She only took one bite, though, and she took it without even acknowledging that I was there. She stared off into space, chewed and swallowed and then wouldn't take any more.

I actually kind of enjoyed it. It would have been pretty tasty if I'd had a little salt and pepper. Maybe a bit of butter. I started dreaming of home cooked meals and everything I would be eating if I made it back. I ate my fill and saved the rest for Jenna.

The smoke had all burned off after only four minutes. We were no longer all that easy to spot, except for our reflective strips and our bright orange color. I sat at the helm scanning the horizon, hoping the container ship had seen us and called for help. I figured I would just sit around and watch for the boats that would soon be coming.

I kept watch for I'd say about an hour or so before I saw a small dot on the horizon coming up from the south. The cargo ship had been north of us. So, it didn't come directly from the ship. I assumed they probably called someone.

"Jenna! It's a boat. I think they're coming for us!"

Jenna kind of looked at me vacantly. I looked again and the boat was getting bigger. It was definitely headed our way. I took the mirror and started signaling it.

"Jenna, seriously, it's coming this way!"

I got a bit worried when the boat started to head a bit west of us, but they must have seen us because I saw a signal from the boat and they started heading back in our direction.

"They see us, Jenna!" I shouted. "They're coming for us! Jenna, take a look."

Slowly she emerged from the raft and when she saw the boat coming towards us, she covered her mouth and started screaming and crying. Great big blobs of tears were running down her face.

We heard the horn blow and I could tell it was a nice yacht.

I can't explain how good that felt to know that someone had found us. Remember that feeling I had when Jenna handed me that cup of Gatorade, like she had handed me a cup full of life? And the first time and that feeling I got when I found the Jenn-air logo? Put them together and then multiply by two. I started dancing. I grabbed Jenna and hugged her, and she just kept her mouth covered and was mumbling something unintelligible.

As the yacht pulled closer, I gasped at the enormity of it. It was this crazy beautiful long blue and white boat. I had seen something like it at the Seattle boat show the year before and figured this one had to be a 30-million-dollar vessel, at least. This was the nicest private yacht I'd ever seen. It was even nicer than Estevan's. The yacht pulled up on our starboard side and Jenna stood there trembling with excitement.

I could see two men aboard. One looked to be white and the other, I guessed to be Hispanic, but he was further inside and not standing in the sun.

"Need some help?" asked the man who had been steering the vessel.

"Oh, my God! Do we? We've been out here ten days," I said.

"No kidding? Is everyone okay in there?" He asked.

"We're okay, just really shaken up," I said.

"How many are you?" He asked.

"Just the two of us," I said.

"Hold on. Let's get you aboard." The guy dropped a rope ladder down to where I could grab it. I held it firm and told Jenna, "You first."

I'll never forget the look of disbelief that she gave me. I assumed she couldn't believe that we were being rescued. But in hindsight, I think she couldn't believe what an idiot I was. She grabbed onto the ladder and as she started climbing, she was mumbling something in Spanish. I should have paid attention in some of my freaking classes when I was in school. I had Spanish before, but I didn't know what she was saying. Sounded something like "un bot azle." She climbed up quickly with her entire body shaking while I held the rope ladder steady down below. The man extended his hand and pulled her on board. I heard her whimper a little bit.

"You poor thing," I heard him say. "Please, go inside and get something to eat and drink. We'll get you taken care of."

Jenna walked into the cabin without waiting for me. My gut instinct told me something was wrong. I told the guy, "Wait a minute. I need to get my phone." I really was going to get my phone, but I also wanted to get that knife. Something was off. I went back into the tent and saw both our phones sitting together. I slipped the phones into my pocket and grabbed the knife, but when I popped back out of the tent, the rope ladder had been pulled back up, and the boat had floated away from me about 10 or 15 feet. The guy was still standing there, and I saw he had a weird tattoo that I'd seen before. I stuck the knife in the back of my pants, not in my pocket but where the waste was tight enough to hold it in place. I realized where I'd seen that tattoo. It was the same demon that lurked behind Estevan's sock!

"Okay, I'm ready," I yelled. But there was no answer. I was really getting nervous now, dishongs. "Hey, what's going on? Don't forget me!" I yelled.

Then, from the bow of the boat I saw an unmistakable figure walking inside the railing toward me. He had a bulge in the center of his belly, which I recognized immediately as a portable dialysis machine.

"Zander! My old friend." It was Estevan. His voice was weak, but he was still alive thanks to me. "Thank you so much for what you did for me. I never said thanks, but I really want you to know, I do appreciate it."

"You son of a bitch!" I said. "Give her back, Estevan. Jenna!" I yelled.

"Oh, don't worry. She's fine. She's inside getting ready for her first shower in, what, ten days? She doesn't know I'm here yet. Don't tell her. It'll be a wonderful surprise, don't you think? Mangly dangly!"

The boat kept drifting farther away from my raft. "Jenna!" I kept yelling as loud as I could. "Estevan! Don't do this. We saved your life. We could have killed you. Jenna could have let you die so many times. You know that. I could have killed you."

"No, my friend," he said. "SHOULD have killed me. Should have. There's a big difference." There was that lame fake-ass accent again. It was almost like he thought he was some freaking guru. I hate freaking psychopaths, dishongs. I hate them.

"Hey, your smoke signal helped a lot. We were having a hard time finding you. The GPS tracker I left on the raft went silent a while ago," he said. "Anyway, when we heard the radio chatter, we started heading this way and the smoke was very helpful."

"How did your friends find you?" I asked.

"Funny thing," Estevan said. "This little dialysis machine also sends my readings and my location to my doctor, who you just met. Jenna had kept it turned off, but you, my good friend, gave it back to me. Thank you, my little friend."

I was enraged and wanted to kick myself as hard as I wanted to kick him. I pulled out the knife from behind my back and threw it at him as hard as I could. You wouldn't believe it dishongs, but it actually hit him in the dialysis machine. I think it might have broken it or something cause a piece fell off. I hope so. I hope he died because he couldn't get his filthy blood cleaned. I wish it would have stuck in his fat belly. But it just made him mad. He took out a gun and shot my raft twice. Two of the sides started deflating and I yelled, "Stop it! Okay. Okay. Stop."

"Just having a little fun, Zander." Then he walked to the helm and on the giant party deck was my island. "I wanted to make sure to return this to you. As you can see," he said motioning at his fancy plush yacht like a stuck-up rich person, "I don't need it anymore." Then he shoved it into the water with his feet. "Don't say I never gave you anything. This is the second time I've given you something to keep you alive."

"What did you ever give me?" I asked.

"You found the canoe, didn't you? Where would you be without that? Good luck, Zander," he said. "I have to admit. I never thought you'd make it this far. Maybe you'll make it yet."

"What happened to my father!" I shouted.

He ignored me. "Estevan!" I shouted. "What happened to my dad?" He didn't answer. He just walked back into the cabin, and the yacht's propellers started spinning and kicking up water into my face. I grabbed the sea anchor on the raft as fast as I could and tossed it at the helm. It caught on a piece of railing and as soon as the yacht took off, I knew I had made another mistake.

My raft now only had two good sides and when the yacht accelerated, the thing flipped over sending me flying out into the water. The sea anchor came undone, and Estevan sailed off with Jenna. Once again, he had taken everything from me. My food, my water, my knife, my flares, the Kelly Kettle, my phone...EVERYTHING was gone, including my angel.

I climbed on to the capsized raft and yelled at the yacht. But they never turned around. They never even slowed down.

Dishongs, I wasn't sure I would ever see Jenna again. I sat on that upside-down raft completely emotionless. It was like I was dreaming. I had no emotions at all. I started thinking of Starbucks again and swear a mermaid popped her head out of the ocean about twenty yards away. I denied any of this had happened. I convinced myself that I would wake up in my own bed the next morning and mom would be yelling at me to get ready because she was going to be late for work. And my dad would be on his boat at the marina. And I would catch the number 12 bus to Pt. Defiance and school would be in session. Ms. S would be there to tell us about another stupid novel that when all is said and done doesn't matter.

But in reality, it was all gone. All I had was the upside-down raft that was still leaking air. I tapped my pocket. I still had my and Jenna's phones. I lay down on that disappearing orange life boat, resigned to my fate. As the raft slowly sank, I decided I would just go down with it. But when the water started coming over the sides and I started to float all by myself, I remembered that Estevan had kicked my island back in the water. It was floating about the length of a football field away.

"Oh hell," I thought. I kicked away from the deflated boat and did the backstroke in the direction of my island, hardly caring if I actually found the dumb thing or not. As I crawled up on it, I looked back for signs of the raft, but I couldn't see it. I knew it was probably still floating there right under the surface, and that I could use it as part of my island, but I didn't want to even try. It would just become another piece of trash floating around in the ocean.

I lay on the raft and noticed that Estevan had remade my Zander's Island sign on a printer and even laminated it. Can you imagine that? He had a laminator on a freaking yacht. What a putz! The sign now read, "Zander's Island and Floating Hospice." He had drawn a likeness of me, too. It was actually a pretty good likeness, I had to admit. It had my long wavy hair and my big nose. But he made me look fat on purpose.

At the bottom of the sign, he added a slogan, "Where the cheek is turned, the dope gets burned."

I punched at the sign and tried to rip it off and tried ripping it in half, but it was hanging on by those strong plastic zip ties, and I was in too much shock to care about a stupid sign all that much. I think I stood up and took a leak on it but gave up trying to tear it off.

Nobody came along that day looking for me. I was all alone once again back on my island, this time with nothing whatsoever. Back to square one, as they say. But this felt more like square negative one. I tried to console myself that at least Jenna would be alive. I didn't dare think of what they might do to her, but at least she would probably be alive. I tried to tell myself that she was in better shape than I was, but I just couldn't really believe that.

That night I lay looking up at the stars. Some of them were moving. What a beautiful sight were the wayward stars. If only I could be on one of them, I thought. I wondered where they were going and who was on them. I figured they were either coming from or going to Asia. Maybe Hawaii. Lucky bastards, I thought. Tomorrow, I'll drown myself. This time, for sure.
Day Eleven

I woke up as the sun was just starting to color the sky. "Are you alive?" I heard someone say. At first, I thought it was a dream, but after I rubbed my eyes and looked up, right next to me was a longliner fishing vessel like the one my dad used to work on when he was deep-sea fishing. Someone on board had one of those loud speaker megaphone things and was looking down on me yelling. "Hello, there. Are you okay? Can you move?"

I looked up at him in disbelief. I didn't feel my hopes rise and to be honest, I didn't want them to. Actually, I don't think it's possible for me anymore to get my hopes up. They seem to have leaked into the ocean with my tears. They are all still out there floating somewhere in the Pacific, stuck in a gyre with all that plastic.

I slowly sat up and nodded and could hear a bunch of commotion on board. Pretty soon, the whole crew was looking over the side of the boat to see what they'd caught. I bet that's the first time they ever hauled in a kid on an island of trash. They threw down a rope ladder and somebody climbed down to help. "Can you climb up the ladder? Do you have the strength?"

I was light-headed but said, "Yeah. I think so."

I climbed up and he stayed below me in case I fell back. A couple of guys grabbed my hands when I got to the last rung. As they pulled me on board, I got a flashback of my dad. When I was five or six, he had taken me onboard a ship just like this to show me how things worked. I half expected Dad to be on deck and give me a big hug, but that didn't happen. He wasn't there.

A couple of deckhands started asking me how I got there, and another guy came out and checked me over to see I needed any first aid. But all I wanted was some water and to tell them what had happened to Jenna. They gave me a bottle of cold water and told me to sit down and wait for the captain to come out. So, we went inside the galley and the captain came in and shook my hand. "Thanks for finding me," I said trying to sound relieved that I was saved. He said that a cargo ship had spotted a distressed life raft yesterday and radioed the coordinates. They had been heading back to port but changed course about fifty nautical miles out of the way to search for me. They had been looking for an orange life boat but never expected to see a guy floating on top of an island of trash.

I described the yacht that Estevan and the guy with the tattoo were on. The captain radioed the Coast Guard which sent out an APB or whatever the Coast Guard calls them. Everybody started looking for that stupid yacht. I gave them the best description I could, but I am embarrassed to say that I couldn't even recall the name of the boat. I know it had something written in gold letters on the side, but once Estevan came out and started talking to me, my mind just went all haywire and I didn't think straight. I just didn't think about reading the yacht's name at that time.

The Chief Steward had been listening to my story while at the same time preparing a nice burger for me. He put it in front of me, but I couldn't eat it. I just wanted to find Jenna. I pleaded with them to chase after Estevan. But they said they had to get back to port. They only had a few days of fuel left, and their freezers were nearly full of skipjack. Estevan had at least a 12-hour head start. I wasn't entirely sure about the time, but it was at least 12 hours, probably more. It didn't make sense for them to head back west into open ocean. They would take me back, and I could work with the authorities to help find Estevan and Jenna.

As we began to pull away, I asked the captain if they would help me keep my island. I don't know why I wanted it. It had some bad memories, dishongs, but I just needed to take something back with me from this whole experience. The captain agreed, so the deckhands used the mast as a crane and pulled it up onto the deck. The guys looked at it, amazed that I had survived on that contraption for several days. "I would have died if Jenna didn't find me," I said trying not to cry.

One of them, who was named Marty, found that stupid sign Estevan made.

"Zander's Island and Floating Hospice," he read aloud and took in the picture. "Quite a story, bro." He patted me on the back and continued reading. "When the cheek is turned, the dope gets burned." I was humiliated.

"What a load of crap that is, eh mate?" said the other guy named Derek who was from Australia. I didn't want to say anything, but at that moment I figured Estevan was right. I turned the other cheek and got walloped for it. My whole body hurt, right down to my plastic soul.

I took a shower and the guys gave me some clean clothes. The whole experience would have felt awesome if Jenna had been with me. But she was gone and part of me would never be the same. There would always be a hole there. I didn't figure I could ever enjoy anything fully again.

We started back towards San Francisco, and I sat in the galley talking to the captain and chief steward. When I told them my dad used to work on a longliner, they asked what his name was. The captain thought name sounded familiar and after a while realized that he had worked with dad about 12 years earlier. "Yeah. Mike, Chinese guy, right?"

"Taiwanese," I corrected. Dad always hated to be mistaken for mainland Chinese. He hated the communist government in China. He was a Taiwanese patriot who loved America and freedom, even though America betrayed Taiwan in the 1970s.

"Yeah. Taiwanese. I remember. He was a really good seaman," he said. "Great guy, too. I think he used to talk about you a lot if I remember right. Your mom, she's a lawyer or something?"

"That's right," I said.

"Fights for the planet and animal rights, that sort of stuff?"

I started to blush a little because that's not the kind of thing you want to reveal on a boat full of fishermen. I just sort of nodded and rolled my eyes, letting them know I was on their side. But really, I didn't know what side I was on. I wanted the planet to be healthy, but I also wanted people to do the jobs they loved. Sure, the trash in the ocean was killing animals, but if we didn't have plastic, where would we be? Where would I be? I, for one, would be dead along with millions of other people who couldn't get their meds or food or whatever because of all that plastic we use.

"Yeah. Mike Hua. Good guy. Really good guy," the Captain said.

I looked out the window as we cut swiftly through the waves and thought about the Mahi Mahi school that had swum past me at speeds like this. Pretty good dad, too, I thought. Then, at that moment, I remembered Jenna climbing up that ladder onto the yacht. She was still wearing that cat collar on her ankle. I reached in my pocket and saw that I still had her phone with the tracker app on it!

"I can track her!" I shouted.

The guys gathered around me and I explained the GPS tracker in the cat collar. But I couldn't unlock Jenna's phone. I guess she didn't want me snooping around again. I tried every password I could imagine she might use, but it was no use.

I spent the rest of the ride talking to my mom and the police and the FBI and the CIA and everyone else on the satellite phone. When we got into range of a cell phone tower, the texts I had been writing sent automatically, and I started getting messages from people asking if all that was just a joke.

I sent a group text. "I'm okay. Will explain everything later."

We pulled into the port of San Francisco and police and first responders and newspaper reporters were there asking me a bunch of questions. I gave Jenna's phone to some cop, and they put me up in a hotel until my mom could fly down.
Days Since

Over the next week or so, the authorities started to piece together what had happened. Turns out, Estevan had already sold his house the year before, and his bank accounts were empty. About two years ago, he had kidney surgery, and the doctor told him he would need a transplant but until then he could use a new portable dialysis machine that would regularly send reports to the doctor about his health. The doctor prescribed pain medication. Detectives suggested that he probably got addicted to Vicodin at that time and then progressed on to cocaine and other drugs. They had arrested a local drug dealer who agreed to cooperate with the police in exchange for a reduced sentence. He identified Estevan as a customer and had a pretty good deal of other info on him.

Soon, the detectives learned that Estevan had gotten tired of buying drugs on the street. He always had to be in charge, and he wanted his own steady supply. So, he started flying down to Columbia. After a while, his greed got the better of him and he cheated some cartel down there out of several million dollars. Estevan didn't need the money. He was already a millionaire many times over. He just loved the thrill, I guess.

Anyway, the cartel started coming after him, and he had to figure out a way to disappear. So, he came up with the idea of hiring someone to sail his yacht to Hawaii. He would sink it in the middle of the Pacific and the reports would say he was missing at sea. Then, his friends would pick him up and they would disappear. The question now is where they disappeared to.

As to Jenna, I don't think she was part of the original plan. She was just icing on the cake. Detectives were able to hack into her phone with the help of her mom, who was actually the owner of the phone. They tracked the collar to a small fishing boat in Hawaii. The owner of the boat has no idea how it got there, but they're scouring Hawaii right now. One detective told me they think Estevan either sold her into the sex trade or is keeping her for himself. But I prefer to think she's hanging out on a beach in Waikiki sipping a virgin daiquiri. Dishongs, I just can't believe she could be a slave. In this day and age, how is that possible? When I started looking into the whole human trafficking thing, I just couldn't believe it. How is it possible that there are 20 to 30 million slaves in the world today? How is that possible? Almost five million of them, mostly girls, are sex slaves.

Someone told me I should write my story down and maybe it could help make the world a better place. Sometimes, I've been invited to take my island with me to schools and speak about all the plastic in the ocean and the horrors of human trafficking to people like you, my dishongs. If you take only one thing away from this story, dishongs, it's don't get all mangly dangly with the girls. When I think about it, I get confused how we let all this crap happen.

I'll graduate high school this summer. I've already applied to work as a deckhand on a fishing boat, a longliner like Dad used to work on. Mom is not too happy about it, but who cares. I need to be out there. I will keep up the search for Jenna and live up to my name, "protector of people." I'll never give up. I'll remember the promise I made to her. Besides, it's my fault she's out there.

Sometimes, I lay outside and I look up at the stars and say to Estevan, imitating his fake-ass accent, "SHOULD have killed me." When I find him, I'll say, "You should have killed me." And then, I'll tie a giant rock around his neck and watch him sink to the bottom of a cold, deep, dark ocean. And he'll be the only piece of trash that belongs there.

The End
About the Author

RL Martin is a writer and teacher in Tacoma, Washington. He has an MA in English Composition and has taught for over twenty years. He has had a lifelong concern for the environment and hopes his writing will do some good for people and the planet. His third novel, Zander's Island, tells a story about two brave teenagers dealing with the ramifications of our throw-away society. His writings can be found at http://www.rlmartinwrites.com.

Other books by this author

Oh Resistance!  
Refreshing Jutta  
A Great Deal of Other Emtynesses

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