Lost Girls (23 page)

“Why not wait awhile, Bonz?”

“No, we need to get help now.” I give her the waterproof holder with my tattered journal. “Jas, you promise not to read my journal?”

“Sure, I promise. What do you think I am?”

“If anything happens to me, you can.”

“Bonnie, you’ll be fine. I’ll look after it.” She plants a kiss on my head.

“Hide it from the others.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

We have spent half a day fixing up the raft. We’ve rigged a simple sort of sail using the canvas from the boatman’s wreck. For a rudder we use the juniors’ seesaw: a long plank of barnacle-covered wood. It’s very basic, but it’s all we have. I’ve shaved it with the wood saw of my Swiss Army knife so it is paddle shaped, more or less, and I’ve mounted it at one end of the raft. It won’t stand much violent shifting, but if we are lucky and careful… And we have a couple of punting poles made from thick
branches of an unidentified tree that was pushed over by the storm. We also have the shovel to use as an oar.

“Where will you go?” Jody asks me.

If we can get to the next island, which is about a mile away, I guess, we’ll be more visible to passing boats or planes. We have to try something—Koh Chang, the inhabited island, is too far away.

At high tide, Hope, Jas, and the juniors push us off. I am on the raft, in charge of the rudder.

“See you later, alligator,” I call out.

“In a while, crocodile,” they all shout from the shore. Hope wades after me and climbs on board when we are beyond the breaking surf. We have several false starts. The raft rises, plunges, and turns back on itself the first couple of times, so we have to repeat the process, our muscles becoming more and more weary with the huge physical effort involved. Once again, Jas and the juniors push us out, then wave and cheer and jump up and down in the shallows, and we eventually sweep out over the big waves and actually set off toward the reef.

At first we use the poles, as the water isn’t very deep. Hope is in charge of the sail, and I look after the rudder for now, but we’ve agreed to switch when we need to.

“Wow.” Hope grins at me. “We are actually moving in more or less the right direction.” On the beach, waving and getting smaller and smaller, are Jas, Jody, and Carly.

“I hope they’ll be okay,” Hope says as she waves back with one hand and grips our sail with the other. I want to reassure her, but I can’t, so I smile and point toward an island in the distance.

“Thataway, Cap’n. We have a long way to go.”

We are nearing the reef and the water is becoming more turbulent as we head for the open sea. We have to somehow maneuver the unwieldy raft through the gap in the reef. I thought the high tide would cover the rocks, but it hasn’t.

Suddenly I realize we aren’t going to make it, and a massive blow on the rudder knocks me over.

“Help… Hope!” I scream. “The rudder! Can’t hold it. Help! Now!”

Too late, I feel the rudder snap, and what remains is swept from my hands as if it’s alive.

“Poles, the poles…” Hope is pushing with all her might, balancing herself on her knees. Yes, it’s working. We use the poles to keep the raft from hitting the reef, but we’re going around in circles. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Hope paddles furiously with the shovel but the raft is completely out of our control, swept in a downward spiral….

“Abandon ship! Jump!” My words are whisked away in the noise of the pounding surf as I jump away from the reef and into the tossing sea. Hope follows.

I strike out for the beach, swimming strongly to escape the turbulence and pull of the water rushing through the exposed coral. I’m a good swimmer—I can reach the shore. Hope is fine; her crawl’s almost as strong as mine. It could be even stronger. Looking over my shoulder I see the raft rise from the swell, then lifted, dropped, and smashed as if a clenched fist has broken a bundle of twigs and thrown them into the air.

I lose sight of the beach as I’m plunged into the valleys of the waves. This is nothing like swimming in a pool. I swallow water and choke. Is Hope still there? I see her, but she has drifted away from me and is swimming parallel to the beach instead of toward it. For a moment I think she knows what she’s doing, but then I realize—of course, her eyes! She can’t see where she’s headed.

“Hope, Hope! This way… Hope!” The scream of the sea and wind drowns my calls, and I can’t catch my breath to force more noise from my lungs. I try to swim toward her but I can’t see beyond the hills and troughs of waves.

My mind is full of sharks. I have a brief image of Dad, laughing at me. “You and your imagination, Bonnie.” But the fear is terribly real. At that very instant I think I see a black fin away in Hope’s direction. I tread water, trying to see Hope, trying to see the fin. Nothing. I imagined it. Then I see an arm lifted from the water—in
greeting or in desperation? A thin, high scream reaches me. A seabird? Is it Hope? Maybe
I
screamed?

I strike out again, swimming for my life now, toward the beach, moving faster than I ever move in swimming tournaments. I don’t look left or right; I simply keep my eye on the beach ahead. Head for the beach, for safety.

As I near the surf breaking on the shore I hear the other girls calling, see them leaping up and down on the beach, waving at me, encouraging me. It’s like the finish of a race, my family and friends cheering me on. I’m the winner. Jas wades out and half drags, half hinders me as I get there, falling into the waves with me. She’s sobbing.

“Oh, Bonnie. We saw it. We saw the raft wrecked.” I cough and splutter. “Hope?”

“No!”

We stare out at the tumbling white water, and at the ranks of mountainous waves in the lagoon. We don’t see her.

“What’s that?” Jas points at a black object in the distance over toward the gap in the reef, where we lost our raft. It is the unmistakable, dreaded shape, the black triangle.

We never see Hope again.

We’re holding one another,
Jody, Carly, Jas, and me, holding one another tight and crying. Mrs. Campbell, May, and Arlene come staggering toward us from the direction of Black Cave. They are thin and haggard, with dark bags under their eyes, their hair wild and tangled, greasy and flattened. Mrs. Campbell is practically unrecognizable.

“We saw,” says Mrs. Campbell. “It was terrible. We saw the raft go down.” Her mouth twitches and she puts a hand to her wrecked hair.

“Did you see what happened to Hope?”

“No, I lost sight of her.”

“She just sank,” says Arlene.

“She was heading in totally the wrong direction,” May says with a smirk.

“She couldn’t see!” I scream. “She couldn’t see where she was going!”

“I’m sorry,” says Mrs. Campbell.

What is she sorry about? That she has been worse than useless, a total waste of time? That she takes mind-bending drugs? That she gave May and Arlene drugs? That she was responsible for Natalie’s death? Or that Hope has died? I turn from her and walk away from everybody, along the thin strand of sand, wanting only to be alone. My nose streams with salt water. I cough and spit up phlegm and find I am vomiting. I fall to my knees and then to my belly, holding on to the sand as if it were solid ground. Jas runs to me and holds my shaking shoulders, but I push her away.

“Leave me, leave me. Go away!”

She shoves the sand with one foot but says nothing.

The dizziness goes eventually, and the nausea, but I am left weak and shivering. Not only have we lost Hope, we’ve lost all means of making fire—Hope’s broken glasses.

The wind has dropped. My mind crackles with furious thoughts.
If only we had waited, we could have steered through the reef. If only… if only…

Thunder cracks loudly overhead, followed by a blinding
flash, and a torrent of rain falls from the low sky. It hurts. The huge drops are like small opaque white cannonballs and they leave craters in the sand, like in those photographs of the surface of the moon. I turn and run with the others to the meager shelter of our enclosure. Our roof is useless; we are as wet as if there were no thatch. I can almost hear the rain spirits—
pee pah—
laughing at us, glad we are marooned on this island.

Later, much later, I retrieve my journal from Jas and start writing:

The boatman was right: We should never have set foot here. It is a terrible place; it will kill us all. We are like the people at the party in a foreign movie I saw with Mom. We cannot leave, must stay here forever and live like animals, or go mad, and die.

It’s my fault. I should have listened to Hope. I am responsible for her death.

High in the sky
several large birds circle. We hear them cry, a deep mew like a trapped cat, a sound that makes my heart stop.

“They’re vultures, aren’t they? Vultures waiting for us to die?” Arlene says tearfully. May has nothing to say, for once.

“Kites, I think, not vultures,” says Jas. “Maybe Brahminy Kites. Red on the back, white underneath.”

I sit saying nothing. I have said nothing since I returned to the shelter, and the others say nothing to me. It’s as if I’m a stranger. Briefly, I wonder how Jas can bring herself to teach us anything new…. But as always I listen to what she says. And after a moment’s silence, I break mine.

“Kites! A kite!” I shout, surprising even myself. “That’s the answer—a kite.” I twist off of my bottom and onto my knees, turning to face them all. “If we can’t get smoke, we can have a kite.” My words tumble out of my mouth. “Wind we certainly do have. It’s what we have most of, apart from seawater and rain. If we could make a high-flying kite, someone would see it and know there is someone on this island. They would know where to find us. I’ve seen Lan Kua make kites for his little brothers and sisters…. And we’ve flown them often enough….” I stop, suddenly breathless.

I have to think carefully. If I can only remember how to do it…

I draw a simple kite shape in my journal, mark the components like Phaedrus did with his motorcycle, and show the others.

We gather our lightweight clothes together, whatever we can find: the two red neckerchiefs, the orange rag from the monk. Using two thin bamboos I make an A-frame, tied in the middle with the fishing line, very basic but workable. I make notches at the ends of each stick and cut a piece of string long enough to stretch all the way around the kite frame. I make a loop in the top notch and fasten it by wrapping the string around the bamboo stick. Then I stretch the string through the notch at one end of the crosspiece, and then make another loop at the bottom.
Next I stretch the string through the notch at the other end of the crosspiece. I finish by wrapping the string around the top of the stick a few times, and then cut off the excess string. It looks great; taut and square, and the bamboo sticks are not bent, not under stress.

Now I position one of the neckerchiefs to fit the frame with a bit left over, a margin. It’s difficult cutting through fine cotton with a knife. Then I remember there’s a tiny pair of scissors in my knife. I get Jody and Jas to stretch the fabric between them so it’s taut before I begin to cut it.

“We haven’t got any glue. How are you going to stick the material to the frame?” Jas asks.

We “sew” the material using a sharp rattan palm thorn to pierce holes in the cloth, then get Carly and Jody, who have the smallest fingers, to push and pull the thread through the holes and wrap it around the bamboo sticks, the way an old-fashioned boat has its mainsail attached to the boom. It’s looking good—primitive but serviceable.

“Well done, girls! Great job,” Jas says, and the juniors flush with pride.

“What shall we use for a tail?” Jody asks.

“I know, I know!” May shouts. “Bonnie’s journal. Tear out the pages and twist them into bows and tie them on the string.”

“No way, May!”

But none of our other materials are light enough. Paper
it will have to be, but certainly not from my journal. I pull Mom’s book out of my backpack.

I begin at the title page—
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, An Inquiry into Values
. I tear it out and twist it in the middle and tie it onto a long length of fishing line. Then I tear out the page that gives the name of the publisher. Then the page where Pirsig dedicates the book—
FOR MY FAMILY
. Next goes the author’s note, and then the next page, which has only these words: “And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good—Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?” I tear out a dozen pages in all, worrying all the time about what Mom’ll say when she sees her precious book ruined. As if it matters.