Adrift: Chapters 19–29

Our water supply was starting to look scary, and what little we dared to drink we sweated right out.

Now that Stef and the flies were gone, the sense of urgency had left the boat.

The real drag about being stuck on the water is the monotony.

We tied the mast to the railings that ran along the front of the boat with a complicated web of towrope.

The sail held the wind and stayed up and almost flipped the boat. We lowered the sail, the flag of our incompetence.

Being together with nowhere to run, we were forced to absorb one another’s moods.

Only John was immune to our fears and hopes.

John was making a harpoon from the Windsurfer’s handrail.

We’d made a smaller tent toward the back of the boat with the Windsurfer sail. It was big enough for two people, but we designated that one for Dri whenever she wasn’t on watch.

And—I’m not lying—it was always Stef who got us involved in the mischief in the first place.

I know, he’s rich, so the world should be rosy every which way he looks, right? But all the stuff he does with the foundation? He sees things. He tries to fix one of them, then he takes on two more disasters.

You drop the forestry thing and major in something sensible and incredibly lucrative like film criticism, something that will keep you from running away to the canyons, where they don’t have any movie theaters, just so you know.

Police won’t comment while the investigation is ongoing, but rumors are circulating that authorities aren’t ruling out the possibility of a kidnapping.

“You’re tearing off your skin. Your nails are filthy. You’re infecting yourself.”

Her head rolled with the waves, leaving her neck exposed. I kept thinking, Vulnerable. She’s so vulnerable.

A bad feeling had come into the boat. It wasn’t exactly anger. A menace, maybe.

I lifted the water jug from the sea. We kept it there with a towrope to cool it and slow the bacteria from turning it bad.

We’d cut the rations to stretch the supply, but that rainstorm was five long days in the past, and now we were down to a third of a jug.

Now we’ve gone from bait to food.

I know where we are, what our prospects are.

No food and the drive to survive can make a person do things he never thought he’d be able to do, especially when he’s losing his mind.

He’s there under the tracks, right where it all went down, lingering in the trestle shadows.

I read that one in twenty-five people is a sociopath.

“It was reactive,” I said. “It wasn’t thought out. I gave in to my anger.”

You were giving in to your sense of compassion for the man who was being spit on. Somebody had to stand up to those idiots, and you and John did.

Both Halloway and Costello were set up with counseling at their middle school after Costello’s father was killed.

Subject: REQUEST TO SHIFT SEARCH FOCUS FROM LAND TO SEA, ASAP
Date: Thursday, August 26, 11:51 AM
The local police department’s call database for August 17 lists an unfounded complaint about a Windsurfer in the vicinity.

The land seemed to fade each time we went over a wave. “Is it a mirage?”

This patch was much smaller, and most of the bottles were intact and floated on the surface.

I’d been feeling queasy since we left land the week before, but now it was kicking in, that survival instinct John was talking about, the one that could make you do things you didn’t think you were capable of, like eating a fish that looked rotten.

There was this internal scream happening, a pull in every one of the tens of trillions of cells that had woven together to make me.

This is insanity. How can it be that I am the first one to fall apart here?

He washed them with seawater and trimmed out the salvageable meat.

Hope is so very draining.

They said it was the result of a chemical imbalance in my brain. That the way I was feeling wasn’t the real me.

Well, with any luck, you will be allowed to die together. I guess that’s something. We must be grateful for minor blessings.

Tropical storm Carlotta has been upgraded to a Beaufort rating of 10 with sustained winds of 50 knots.

What do you call it when you lie not by what you say but by what you don’t, by leaving something out of the story, like the most crucial part?

I tried to stop you from getting yourself into a mess. If that makes me bad or a coward, I don’t care. The label means nothing to me. I was right to do what I did that night, to try to hold you back, to save myself when I got the chance, and I would do it again, just the same way.

“We should get it over with. We should die with what little dignity we have left. We should kill ourselves.”