"I'VE BEEN THINKING," JJ INFORMED BREE AS THEY SAT IN THE CONTAINER. He was leaning against some net thing while she sat on a crate perpendicular to him.

She smiled at that and did not miss the chance to crack a joke. "Oh, good for you."

"Shut up," he laughed out, shaking his head before staring in front of him as if he was picturing something in his mind. "When all this is over, and we're just rolling in the dough, I'm gonna get a new board. I'm gonna deck it out, and I'm gonna go on a surf trip. I don't know where, but, like, the world's calling. I don't know. Name a place."

"Argentina," the Callaway girl suggested after a moment of thinking. Her mother used to tell her stories about her childhood in Argentina. She had lived just outside Buenos Aires, and the girl had always dreamed of visiting the country.

He nodded at her with an excited grin, happy that she was going along with his antics, before continuing, "Then after Argentina, South America or South Africa."

"You'll go to South Africa?" she questioned.

"One of the South places," he answered, and the brunette girl couldn't help but giggle when she noticed the way that his face lit up when he spoke. "Then Micronesia maybe, and then... and just ride. Wherever the wave takes you, you know?"

She raised her eyebrows at him. "So that's the plan if we were to get a ton of cash? That's the dream? Surf trip?"

"Ripping jungle break all day long. Bamboo hut, cooking a fish on a fire, and after that, you go back out and just hit the waves again. That's the dream," he confirmed, making hand gestures as he spoke.

"Sounds perfect," she responded before looking at him with a questioning look. She asked, "Got room for one more?"

He quizzed, "You got your passport?"

"You don't have a passport," she told him almost immediately because there was no way that the Maybank boy owned a passport, at least not one that had been updated in a while. She had not updated her passport in a while, and she was pretty sure that it had expired. When had they ever played by the rules, though?

"Hell no, I don't got a passport," he exclaimed, shaking his head, causing her to laugh so hard that she bent over. He added, "Kookiest thing ever."

They fell into a comfortable silence for a moment, but when Bree remembered something that had happened the day before, the silence was starting to turn awkward. When she glanced at him and he made eye contact with her, he just looked away quickly, letting her know that he had remembered it as well. She was the first one to speak up about it. "You think we should talk about...?"

"Yeah, probably," he responded swiftly.

"Okay," the Callaway girl muttered, and a quiet fell over them for a moment, daring each other to say something else. Finally, she gestured for him to start talking. "Um, you start."

He nodded, but he did not seem too excited by the prospect of being the first to say what he was feeling. He did it, though. "Okay, so we kissed...twice. And it was great. It was really great."

Her heart and stomach dropped. That was anything but good. When someone started out a talk like that, it was not going to end well. She knew deep down that it was going to end something like this, but a part of her had hoped that he would forget the fact that it would be weird if they ever broke up. A part of her wanted him to not care about the future or what it might lead to and just live in the moment.

"...But?" she questioned, and she winced as she said it, not really wanting to know the answer. Maybe if she didn't ask, he would not say anything.

He sighed, "But the rule."

"The rule," she muttered as if it were obvious, but her heart was breaking. He didn't want to be with her because of the stupid no pogue-on-pogue macking rule that every single person in their group had broken at least once.

He tried to explain to her and act like her obviously fake smile didn't break his heart. He wished so much that he could just kiss her right then and there and make everything better, but he just couldn't. He knew he would never be able to explain it to her. "I just don't wanna mess up the dynamic of the group."

"Yeah, no, I get it," she told him, nodding along to his words even though she did not agree at all with anything that he was saying.

He raised up his fist, and that made everything worse. Not only was he rejecting her, but he was also friendzoning her with a freaking fist bump. "We good?"

"We're good," she assured him before bumping her fist with his and leaning back on her barrel. She heard voices coming from outside, and recognized them as her friends'. "Uh, that's them, so..."

He looked at her one last time as she got to her feet and started unscrewing the grate so that they could get in. The trio squeezed through the grate and hopped back into the container. The Maybank boy informed them, "I thought Rafe got you guys for sure."

"All right. Okay, let's put the grate back on," the brunette girl said, reaching out to put it back on when Pope grabbed her arm to stop her.

She furrowed her eyebrows at him, but she questions were answered when another voice came through the vent, and some random girl with an accent climbed in with them. "Jesus Christ! I kill you, John B!"

"Who is she? What's going on?" Bree asked with furrowed eyebrows because she had never seen the girl before, and she was not sure how much she trusted some random person they found on a boat.

"Hey, hey. Bree, relax. Relax. Remember I told you about the girl we met in the Bahamas that saved us?" he quizzed, and the girl finally put two and two together just as he introduced the girl that was now inside. "Cleo. She's gonna help us, all right?"

The new girl muttered to him, "Next time, ask me."

"You seriously didn't grab nothing, not one single gun?" the Maybank boy questioned once they were all done telling the two what went down when they were stuck inside the container.

The Routledge boy sighed and defended himself, "We tr...we tried, okay? I got attacked."

"Let me get this straight," Cleo murmured, pointing to all of them with her knife. "You four, with no weapons, decided you were gonna hijack this tramp steamer on your own? Do you have any idea who these people are? Eberhimi, if he catch you, he's gonna kill you. Dead. Cut off your fingers."

"Okay. What about waiting until we get to port? At least then, if something goes wrong, we have a place to run," the Carrera girl offered, glancing at everyone for their reactions.

Pope shook his head almost immediately. "No. No, we can't do that because I've run the scenario over 1,000 times in my head, and our best chances are on this ship. There's 15 crew members and five of us. Three-to-one odds. Best it'll get. We wait till we get there, they'll trap us."

"We have no chance," the raven-haired girl breathed out.

"No, Kie, there's something else. Ward's alive. He's alive, and he's on this boat," John B announced, causing them all to whip toward him and exclaim in surprise. Once he saw their confused expressions, he explained, "It was all a setup, blowing up the boat, the confession to Shoupe. Think about it. That was to clear Rafe's name. And he does what? Goes to the Druthers. And what's on the Druthers?"

Bree's eyes widened when she realized what he was referring to and how Ward escaped the boat that blew up in front of their eyes. "Scuba."

"So, Ward's alive, huh? And he has the gold and the cross and Sarah. So he's just gonna get away with everything again, huh? Not happening. We're not watching this movie again, right, Pope? You said we need the win. And with her, we're going to the bridge, and we're gonna take it right now. You with me?" JJ questioned, and everyone glared at him for rubbing in the fact that they did not have Sarah or the cross or the gold.

Pope nodded in response, growing more confident as more hatred pumped through his lungs. "I'm with you, and I wanna be the one to take that bridge."

"That's what I'm talking about," the blonde boy celebrated.

"He's gonna take the bridge?" Cleo scoffed with a chuckle, pointing at the Heyward boy with her knife. "He couldn't even take me."

He just shook his head as all of his friends raised their eyebrows at him because of what she just said. "First of all, I was going easy on you."

"I was going easy on you," the girl corrected, and it sounded kind of threatening. Bree would have laughed if it were not for the situation that they were being faced with. She still could not believe that Ward was alive.

"If you're really with us, if we use that knife, we can go up into the bridge, hold it up against the captain's neck, then we go on the intercom and make him tell the rest of the crew to meet up in the forward hull," the Maybank boy told the new girl. "Once they're in the same place, bam, we lock them in there, and we take back what's ours. Are you with us, then?"

Cleo shook her head in response, knowing that it was an awful idea and that it was not going to end well for anyone. "No. This is stupid."

"All right, let's open these things up!" called a man from outside, and they all tensed up when they realized what was happening and that they needed to move or do something quickly before they were found out.

"They're checking the containers," Kie murmured to them, and the new girl wasted no time in jumping out of the container. "Cleo, what are you doing?" They all thought that she was either getting herself out of it or turning them in, but she shocked them when she started telling the guards that she had already checked the container and that it was all clear.

John B smiled when she made them go away. "See? She's on our side. Let's go."

AUTHOR'S NOTE

guys, i'm so sorry. i skipped a chapter. sometimes, when i copy and paste from google docs, i skip things. this is the actual chapter twenty-eight.