I liked Anna. A lot. Without her, the island would have really sucked.

***

No one rescued us, so I missed my follow-up appointment with the oncologist at the end of August. Anna mentioned it at breakfast one morning.

“I’m worried about you not being able to go to the doctor,” she said, handing me a piece of cooked fish. “Careful, it’s hot.”

“I feel fine,” I told her, blowing on the fish to cool it before putting it in my mouth.

“Yes, but you were pretty sick, right?”

“Yeah.”

She handed me the water bottle. I took a drink and set it down.

“Tell me about it,” she said.

“My mom thought I had the flu. I had a fever, and I started sweating at night. I lost some weight. Then the doctor found a lump on my neck that turned out to be a swollen lymph node. They ran some tests after that: X-rays, biopsy, MRI, and a PET scan. Then they told me I had stage III Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”

“Did you start chemo right away?”

“Yeah. It didn’t work though. They also found a mass in my chest so I had to have radiation, too.”

“That sounds awful.”

She cut off a piece of breadfruit, and handed the rest to me.

“It wasn’t fun. I was in and out of the hospital a lot.”

“How long were you sick?”

“About a year-and-a-half, I guess. For a while, I wasn’t doing very well. The doctors didn’t know what to think.”

“That had to be really scary, T.J.”

“Well, they tried to keep me in the dark, which I hated. I only knew it was bad because suddenly no one would look me in the eye when I asked questions. Or they’d change the subject. That scared me.”

“I bet it did.”

“At first, my friends visited me all the time, but when I didn’t get better, some of them stopped coming around.” I took another drink of water and handed the bottle to Anna. “You know my friend, Ben?”

“Yes.”

“He came every single day. He spent hours watching T.V. with me, or just sitting in a chair by my hospital bed when I felt too sick to move or talk. My parents and the doctor would have these long conversations, out in the hall or whatever, and I’d ask Ben to try and listen. He’d tell me everything they said, no matter what. He knew I just wanted to hear it straight up, you know?”

“Of course,” she said. “He sounds like a great friend, T.J.”

“Yeah, he is. Do you have a best friend?”

“Yes, her name is Stefani. We’ve known each other since kindergarten.”

“That’s a long time.”

She nodded. “Friends are important. I understand why you wanted to spend your summer with them.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking about everyone back home in Chicago. They probably thought I was dead.

Anna stood up and walked to the woodpile. “Will you tell me if you notice any symptoms?” She grabbed some wood and threw it on the fire.

“Sure. Just don’t ask me if I feel okay all the time. My mom did, and it drove me nuts.”

“I won’t. But I’ll worry a little.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

Chapter 13 – Anna

The bright sunlight woke me, illuminating the interior of the life raft. T.J. was already gone, out gathering firewood or fishing. I yawned, stretched my arms and legs, and crawled out of bed. My suitcase was in the lean-to, and I reached in and grabbed a bikini, returning to the life raft to change. Dressed, I lifted the nylon flaps to let in some fresh air.

T.J. walked up with the fish he caught for breakfast. He smiled. “Hey.”

“Good morning.”

I checked the breadfruit and coconut trees, scooping up everything on the ground and bringing them back to the lean-to. T.J. cracked coconuts while I cleaned and cooked the fish.

After breakfast we brushed our teeth, rinsing with rainwater, and I marked off the date in my datebook. September already. Hard to believe.

“Want to go swimming?” T.J. asked.

“Sure.”

Last week, T.J. had spotted two fins, just outside the reef. We panicked and left the water, but as we watched they came all the way into the lagoon. Dolphins. We waded slowly into the water and they didn’t swim away, waiting patiently as we approached them.

“They almost act like they’re here to introduce themselves,” I said in amazement.

T.J. petted one and laughed when it blew water out its blowhole. I had never seen such social creatures. They swam with us for a while and then left abruptly, on some sort of marine schedule.

“Maybe the dolphins will come back today,” I said, as I followed T.J. down to the shore.

T.J. stripped off his shirt and waded into the lagoon. “That would be cool. I want to ride one.”

We entertained ourselves by using one of the collapsible plastic containers for a snorkel mask. There were schools of brightly colored fish – purple, blue, orange, and yellow and black striped. We spotted a sea turtle and an eel poking its head up from the ocean floor. I swam away fast when I saw that.

“No dolphins,” I said after T.J. and I had been swimming for at least an hour. “We must have missed them.”

“We can try again after our nap.” Suddenly, he pointed toward the shoreline. “Anna, look over there.”

A crab leg stuck out of the sand, the pincer opening, and closing. We ran out of the water.

“I’ll grab my sweatshirt,” he said.

“Hurry, it’s trying to bury itself.”

T.J. returned in record time, wrapped his sweatshirt around the crab, and pulled it out of the sand. We went back to the lean-to and T.J. shook it out onto the fire.

“Oh God,” I said, thinking for a second about the crab’s violent demise.

I got over it fast.

We cracked the legs with the pliers from the toolbox, gorging ourselves. The crabmeat – even without hot melted butter – tasted better than anything I’d eaten since we’d been on the island. Now that we knew where they buried themselves, T.J. and I would have to check the shoreline daily. I was so tired of fish, coconut, and breadfruit that I could hardly choke them down sometimes, and adding crabmeat would provide a little variety, something that was desperately lacking in our diet.

When the crab was nothing more than a pile of split shells, I took the blanket out of the life raft and spread it under the coconut tree. We stretched out next to each other. The shade from the tree helped keep us cool during the hottest part of the day, and it had become our favorite place to nap.

A big, creepy, hairy spider – its body the size of a quarter – crawled lazily across T.J.’s shoulder and I flicked it off him with my finger. “That one even freaked me out,” I said.

T.J shuddered. He hated spiders, always shaking our blanket out, checking for them before he put it back in the life raft. Personally, I hated snakes. I’d already stepped on one and the only thing that kept me from being completely traumatized was the fact that I was wearing my tennis shoes. I hated to think about stepping on one barefoot; whether or not they might be poisonous was too stressful to think about.

I thought T.J. had already fallen asleep, but then he said, “What do you think’s gonna happen to us, Anna?” His voice sounded drowsy.

“I don’t know. I think we just keep doing what we’re doing and try to hold on until someone finds us.”

“We’re not doing too bad,” T.J. said, rolling over onto his stomach. “I bet that would surprise a lot of people.”

“It surprises me.” My full stomach was making me drowsy, too. “It’s not like we had a choice, T.J. We either figured it out or we died.”

T.J. lifted his head off the blanket and looked at me with a contemplative expression. “Do you think they had funerals for us back home?”

“Yes.” The thought of our families holding memorials hurt so much that I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself to sleep, hoping to escape the images of a crowded church, an empty altar, and my parents’ tear-stained faces.