it arched out of the sea like a turtle, and I gripped its little spine and held myself there.
Ten feet away, in the gray foam of the breakers, Frank floated facedown. His black hair shone, flat and smooth. His jacket puffed out around his back, swollen with air and holding his arms splayed across the water. I could hold on to the boat and ride it to shore, or I could let go of my last hope and try to save Frank. But I barely thought about it. I pushed away from the boat and grabbed Frank. I held on to his jacket, on to his collar, on to his arms while a tumbling wave tried to tear us apart.
He snapped awake.
His head shook like a dog’s, flinging water from his hair. His eyes grew impossibly big. And then, with both hands, he clutched onto me, pinning my arms to my sides.
I couldn’t swim; I couldn’t even keep us afloat. But the more I struggled to get away, the more Frank fought to hold me. We both sank underwater, and the next wave drove us deeper. It rolled us over and over in a frozen darkness. It scraped us across the rocks on the bottom, then spun us up to the surface. I gasped as the surf thundered around us, and I kept my arm around Frank, lifting his head out of the water.
We were just tiny things in that surf, pushed here and there, pummeled and punched. The waves whirled us along, but every one swept us closer to land, and the seventh—or the eighth or the ninth—slammed us down on a stony beach. With a rumble and clatter it drained away and left us stranded.
I heard the boom of the next wave smashing. It pushed us higher up the beach, then tried to pull us back as it drained away in a gurgling rush through the stones. I grabbed a rock and held on.
Wave after wave reached up to get us. They pulled away my boots, one after the other. They pulled Frank out of my arms and dragged him down the beach. On his back he slithered, spread-eagled, over the moonlit stones, screaming at me to save him. I grabbed his leg and crawled up the beach like a crab, scuttling a few feet at a time.
My hands were bleeding. My knee throbbed. But I kept moving up from the sea, and Frank crawled along behind me like some terrible creature slithering from the depths. At the top of the beach we found a cliff, and we sat with our backs against it.
I couldn’t believe how I’d tumbled so quickly from an ordinary life into my very worst nightmare. I was stranded in the wilderness with a kid who seemed barely alive, and I had no idea who he was.
At dawn I looked out on a dreadful world. Waves thundered into the cove and hurled themselves at the stones below us.
A line of kelp and seaweed lay bundled like rope along the base of the cliff. But there was not a stick of driftwood, and that puzzled me for a moment. Then I realized what it meant. At high tide, the beach would disappear. The cove would fill like a huge bucket, and we would drown like mice inside it.
I shoved Frank’s shoulder. “Get up,” I told him.
He groaned. He pushed my hand away. But he lifted his head and looked around, then dragged himself to the cliff. He pressed a hand against the rock where a trickle of water made it black and shiny.
In a very little while, his palm began to fill. He slurped up the water and filled it again, and beside him I did the same thing. Together, we drank water from the stone. When he’d had enough, Frank turned to the seaweed and pulled out a handful of leaves. They looked like lettuce gone bad in a crisper, but Frank shook off the pebbles and twigs, the tiny shells, and stuffed the seaweed into his mouth. The sound of his chewing made my stomach gurgle. I had eaten nothing since my night at the dock in
Puff.
“How do you know that’s safe?” I asked.
He looked at me as though I was stupid. “It’s all safe, moron.”
“Says who?”
He didn’t answer. He kept chewing, stuffing more seaweed into his mouth.
“How do you
know
it’s safe?” I asked him again. But he still didn’t tell me. I was so hungry that I