Friday, December 8, 2017

I

ate nothing that day, and I didn't watch as George ate my Mediterranean style meal containing a large slice of cooked salmon, a salad with lemon, cherry tomatoes, romaine lettuce, crumbled feta cheese, medium cucumbers, with a dressing containing olive oil, red wine vinegar, garlic clove, a teaspoon of Italian seasoning, salt and pepper, topped off with a table spoon of spicy hummus and pita bread. I couldn't bear to see George's sick smile as he ate my food. I wanted to kill him, sick or not, for the blackmail.

But my rage waned after hours passed. I felt fatigued from not eating anything. The sound of the ocean was beginning to make me feel a tummy ache rather than to make me feel soothed.

I avoided Brett the rest of the day and planned to do so for a while so that George would get the idea that what he had walked in on was a one-time thing. It was not the big deal George made it out to be when he saw us together on the floor.

I did feel bad. I felt George was targeting me. The worst part of it all was that, even though it was a large house, it would be difficult to avoid George with only one kitchen. I tried however to assure George once today that my love for Jack was unmovable. I came behind Jack who was writing something in his lap on the fourth-floor balcony (which was still slightly at a tilt where ominous cracks designed chipped Mexican tile flooring). I planted a passionate kiss on him that still shot fireworks in my brain, and for a moment, like always, made me black out.

After George caught that kiss, I saw him grab for the second course of packaged salmon from the freezer (compliments of me), and I couldn't bear to watch as my own tummy grumbled. I was getting a pulsing headache in my right temple and I immediately ran to the opposite side of the fourth floor to the stairs leading up to the white rooftop. The door closed behind me when I reached the outside view of the surrounding sea, and there was Travis, like always, lying on the chaise lounge with his hands behind his head, one leg over the other, looking up at the grey clouds deep in thought.

"Hi, Travis," I said, managing to hide my sick frown with a thin smile.

Travis acknowledged me with a short, "What's up," and returned to his cloud gazing.

Feigning interest in his quiet activity, I looked up as well to see what he was looking at, and there up in the dull sky, I caught sight of what Travis was eyeing:

The clouds were moving faster and faster with each passing moment. Up there in the gray puffy dome, a small blue tile in the dark ceiling would appear, disappear, reappear and disappear as an expanding and retracting diamond of bright blue sky. The clouds continued to shift and more blue diamonds of sky would peep down now and again at our dark, sad world, and at the moment I had gotten bored, and felt a rumble in my tummy, I was about to leave Travis to his sky gazing and go downstairs to bed.

But before I could leave to sleep off my hunger, Travis snapped his fingers arrogantly at me and said, "Wait."

I turned and frowned at him. "What?" I said, holding my aching stomach.

He pointed up to the original blue diamond between the opening clouds, and as he cupped his non-pointing hand behind his ear, he said, "Listen. . . Do you hear that?"

I looked up, and frowned. The only thing I could hear was the rolling ocean waves as they crashed against the sides of the house and the single neighboring building that hadn't caught fire and collapsed the other night. Unable to hear anything else up in the sky, I cupped both my ears in the upward direction, waited and listened, but finally gave up, and shook my head.

"Just wait," Travis said.

And I sighed and looked back up, squinting my eyes. I was really hungry now. And my headache was surging. I would surely snatch two Tylenols from the cupboard before I took my nap.

I waited, and then, Travis smiled and snapped his fingers again. "You hear that?" Travis said.

"No," I said.

Travis pointed up again, "Listen hard, you'll hear it. . . and then you'll see it."

My heart began to thump underneath my breast when I started to feel a sonic thrust touch down upon my skin from somewhere up in the clouds. It might have been thunder. Was Travis waiting for me to catch a glimpse of lighting strike the Earth from high up in the sky? If that were the case I would jump and run the hell off this roof and down to the liquor cellar to hide.

But the rumble in the clouds was a softer kind, and it seemed to purr from afar and get closer overhead. It intensified, and the booming pass over quaked across the skin on my legs, arms, shoulders and neck until the hairs stood up in an electric static. I blinked three times as though finally waking up for the first time today.

That wasn't thunder. The clouds opened up to form sky holes the shape of blue diamonds.

"See it?" said Travis. He pointed to a pair of red-and-green lights dive through the blue perforations. A plane flew overhead!

In that instant my heart dropped to my pelvis, and I jumped up and down screaming. I yelled out and called to the plane, waving my arms as it slowly went directly over us. So slow was its passing, it felt like the people in the plane would surely spot us through their circular windows as they ate their chocolate éclairs and drank their little cups of cold Sprite.

But Travis merely sunk lower in his chaise lounge, put his hands back behind his head and laughed hysterically at me. "They can't see us, Zara. And they're certainly not looking for us, either."

I looked down at him with a red raging monster crawling out of my face. I shouted, "What do you mean they're not looking for us! Of course they're looking for us! Don't give me your pessimistic shit! If you think there's a problem then go fix it."

But Travis only shook his head at what he considered to be my overemotional response to his realism. "I can't fix this," he said. "Not if they're not looking for us."

I was so mad I ran over to him and slapped him straight on the face. He hardly shook in his chair as I retracted with heavy breathing. "Why--" I huffed, catching my breath, "--wouldn't they be looking for us?"

He simply touched his face, and looked at his thumbs. He shook his head at me, took a deep breath and let the moment pass. He said in a calm, refined (yet softly condescending) tone, "Because. . ." Travis took a deep sigh and said, "We're not in California anymore."

I stared at him blankly, and batted my eyes as confusion washed over me. "What do you mean?"

Travis bit his tongue like I was annoying him, and that made me even madder. "Like I said," he said, "we're not in our little rich town anymore. We're not in our county anymore. We're not even in southern California anymore."

I thought Travis's pessimism had finally made him lose his mind. "What are you talking about? What do you mean we're not in California anymore?"

Travis sat up finally and leaned forward, raising his eyebrows and making three long wrinkled lines appear perfectly parallel across his forehead. "What I'm talking about," he said, in his patronizing tone, "is that the night we fell asleep on your party boat, everybody, even I, was too drunk to drop anchor. I noticed this the next morning when the ship had come close to shore and the tsunami was able to pull all the current out from underneath the yacht."

I interjected too quickly, "But what's that got to do with us not being in California anymore? We still reached the shore--"

But Travis cut me off. "But our boat drifted," he said. "Overnight the yacht must have moved along the ocean current south to the Mexican border and pushed us toward the shore somewhere along the western Mexican strip, close below to southern San Diego."

But I shook my head and said, "But wouldn't border patrol stop us before we crossed?"

Travis shrugged. "If that were a concern, a tsunami warning would have initiated other concerns to distract attention from our vessel."

I frowned, putting my hands on my hips. "But how do you know we're in Mexico?" I looked around. All I could see was gray ocean for miles. And this house seemed like any American house to me. . . except maybe the Mexican tile flooring on the fourth-floor balcony.

Also, all the homeowners' documents in the office are in English, not Spanish.

Plus, we were running so fast from the shore to this house, that we had no time to gaze at the people as we ran through the few blocks of houses. We only really saw backyards and a couple of streets, the backs of people running and speeding cars. Sure, there were Mexican folk running but also white and black and Asian and your usual diverse flavorings California normally offer. If Travis saw any street signs or license plates saying Tijuana, then that would certainly mean we were in Mexico. But if he simply spotted species of cacti floating in the water or a foreign flock of seagulls, then his argument that we were in Mexico would be unsound. What makes Travis believe we are in Mexico?

"Because. . ." Travis said, lying back down in a relaxed and futile position on the chaise lounge chair bench, "it's been days, and no one, and I mean no one, has come looking for us. If we were back home, we would have been rescued day one and you would have been helicoptered into the best hospital in the nation instead of received a home operation from your school friends. If we had drifted into a less affluent area in California, maybe we would have been rescued a day later. If we had drifted to an even less affluent area, maybe a couple days. . .

"But look around you," continued Travis, with a sad, defeatist smirk. He jumped to his feet and spread his arms to the empty ocean to prove me wrong. "There's nobody here. Nobody cares about this place, so no one's going to find us because no one will look here. We may be in a nice four-story house, but this is in no way a rich four-story neighborhood. This block is a strip of outliers. And I bet all the owners were smart enough to leave ahead of time. No one is coming for us. We're lost, and we will die in this house. Period."

I was in hot tears. I did look around me, and instantly I felt more scared than I had ever been in my life. I was hungry, and I knew I would get even hungrier. I was dehydrated from the lack of clean drinking water and I was drunk from the alternative of drinking alcohol. My stress was starting to cause tension and I was already afraid of my disloyal actions with the other boys in this house besides Jack. I also felt claustrophobic, I couldn't run away from here even if I tried. I was trapped. I wiped at my eyes but the tears kept coming.

"But--" I said, shaking, "but we can help rescuers find us!"

"I wish there was a way," Travis said. And to my total surprise, Travis wrapped his arms around me in an awkward hug and patted me twice on the back.

When he moved away, my tears were on his shirt, and when I looked up in the sky, a light bulb lit up over my head. "Wait," I said. "What if there's a flare gun in the house."

Travis gave a quiet laugh and shook his head. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, "There's no flare gun in this house."

I gulped the knot in my throat and shot him a hard look of determination. "But we should try to make one," I said.

It might have been my determination, or his engineerial passion that made his face suddenly glow, but his eyes lit up, and a smile stretched across his lips as he jumped to his tallest posture. "Now that idea--" he said, wagging his finger at me (you smart little darlin' you, Zara, girl) "--that idea just might work."

In an instant he grabbed my hand and pulled me to come help him find supplies downstairs. "We're gonna make something to light up the entire sky if it's the last thing we do!"

With Travis intrigued, I already knew I had accomplished something amazing.

Little did we know that this attempt to light up the sky would almost set our house on fire.