Are You Going to Kiss Me Now? (9 page)

“So now what do we do?” Cisco shouted to be heard, looking directly at me. I’d opened the barf bag in the hopes of using it to collect some drinkable water. I knew it was important to stay hydrated. In seconds, the force of the rain ripped the bag apart.

“I don’t know,” I said, crumpling the barf bag and trying to hold back my tears of disappointment. “I guess we sit and wait here.” I leaned back and opened my mouth in an attempt to catch a little drink.

“It’s pouring!” Eve cried. “You want to squat here like a herd of stupid birds?” She started digging through Milan’s bag in search of a specimen collection cup.

“If we move, Jonah and Milan won’t be able to find us,” I explained, swallowing what little water I could get and using my hands to whisk away the rain like windshield wipers. “Let’s just stay put.”

It wasn’t long before Milan and Jonah reappeared in the rain. The sight of them was oddly reassuring. At first.

“The beach is about two miles off,” Jonah started to explain, shouting in order to be heard above the rain.

“What the hell are you doing?” Milan suddenly asked Eve, who she’d just noticed had taken advantage of her absence by emptying out a prescription pill bottle from her Balenciaga bag and using it as a little cup to collect rain. Everyone looked at Eve nervously.

“I’m sorry. We’ve been waiting for you guys forever, and I was so thirsty. I needed something to drink from. Besides, there was nothing in the bottles but ocean water.”

“Did I say you could go through my stuff?” Milan screeched as she snatched the bottle out of Eve’s hand and pushed a mat of wet hair off her face. Milan looked seriously pissed. She reached for one of the sticks I’d found and jumped Eve, holding the twig under her chin like a knife. I kid you not. “You listen to me you washed up, snotty tragedy. You touch my stuff again and I’ll kill you. I’ll
kill
you!”

I could understand why Milan was less than pleased at having Eve go through her things, but after all, this was an unusual set of circumstances, and Eve hadn’t taken her stupid pills. The rain suddenly stopped, and the pink sun reappeared like a painted on smile.

“Dear God! Help me!” Eve peeped as her eyes bulged out of her moon face. “Get this psychopath off me.” Eve definitely didn’t strike me as the sort of girl who had been in a lot of bar fights. In fact, she sort of seemed like she’d spent most of her life curled up inside a satin jewelry box.

Joe rolled his eyes as he peeled Milan off Eve and calmly motioned for me to see if Eve was OK. I reluctantly sat down next to her. She buried her head in my lap and started weeping and heaving. It was obviously making me super uncomfortable to have Eve Larkin sobbing hot tears of injustice in my crotch. You know how I feel about touching.

“That’s the one and only Academy Award–winning performance I’ve ever seen out of you,” Milan hissed as she finally broke free of Joe’s grasp and looked down at Eve crying.

“Bravo, bravoow!” she continued in a fake British accent. She clapped demonically as she stared down at Eve. Milan was a terrifying girl. So tough. Probably all those chick bar fights over Jared Leto. Or maybe it was growing up in the back of her mom’s station wagon, driving from audition to audition. Either way, Eve was definitely out of her league. Something told me the girls hadn’t gone quite this wild in England. Even the Americans.

“Give it a rest, Milan,” Joe ordered.

“Do you not get that I
need
my pills, you asswipe?”

“I didn’t take them!” Eve pleaded.

“I think pills might be the last thing you need,” Jonah said.

Milan’s head snapped around like the girl in
The Exorcist
before she pointedly told Jonah, “Go to hell!”

“Don’t say that, Milan. Please.” Jonah looked seriously wounded. His reaction was totally weird and disturbing. Nobody said anything for a minute or two.

“Oh no, are you gonna go all Ted Haggard on us?” Chaz asked Jonah, finally breaking the silence.

“Let’s just calm down, hold hands, and pray,” Jonah said, looking at our six disbelieving faces like we were his fallen disciples.

“Dude,” Cisco groaned, holding up both hands in mock protest.

“Please, are you serious?” Eve asked, wiping the tears from her eyes with my pants and leaving gigantic, unapologetic splotches of black mascara all over them. She didn’t look like the polished Spanish princess from the airport anymore. She looked like a billboard for one of those horror movies starring demonized children.
Chuckie-etta
.

“I don’t pray, you freaking freak,” Milan yelled.

Jonah looked all business now. “If you won’t pray with me, then plan with me. We need to collect some water and food. The sun is going to set fast. It’s going to get dark quickly now.”

Jonah glanced down at the remains of our SOS sign. “Nice work,” he laughed with a condescending lilt. “Would have worked better if you drove the sticks down.”

“I tried to tell them,” I started, in what came off as a lame attempt to both impress Jonah and blame everybody else. Chaz rolled his eyes. Jonah looked at me blankly.

“Oh man,” Milan cried, still digging through her bag for evidence of theft. “My metabolism pills were in there too. If I gain one pound, you loser, I…”

“Come, pray,” Jonah interrupted, holding out his long hands.

“Aren’t you enjoying yourself a little too much, Skipper?” Joe asked Jonah. “Are you planning on building a colony and converting us?”

“Look, as I see it, we can sit on the dirt complaining or go get some supplies to make the night pass as smoothly as possible. And we need to build a signal fire. It will be easier to keep it going on the beach.”

Everybody paused to absorb Jonah’s words, and much as I hated to admit it, he was making sense. And then he ruined it by saying:

“It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark, you know.”

“Do you always talk in bumper stickers?” I asked him.

“Extreme times demand extreme faith.”

I took that as a yes. He was so self-righteous. That’s when I remembered Joe’s pilot speech back in New York and decided these two had more in common than they realized. They were both know-it-alls. I hate know-it-alls. Especially know-it-alls who obviously know nothing. Like Captain Water Landing and his baby Jesus.

“If you think God’s gonna get me through the next two hours without a Klonopin,” Milan said, “you’re not just a Jesus freak, you’re also an ignoranus.”

“Ignoranus,” Chaz laughed. “That’s rich!”

I held back a laugh. Those two were like fifth graders.

“You are the reason I hate religion!” Milan continued, ignoring Chaz and pointing a finger at Jonah. “And it’s just such a waste because you could be pretty hot if you were normal.” She paused as she eyeballed his black skinny jeans with a look of outright disdain. “And hired a stylist.”

“You don’t hate religion, Milan, you’re just afraid because you’ve strayed,” Jonah said calmly.

“Shut up, you poser douche!” she snapped. The inability to pop a pill was clearly rattling her nerves.

“Stop it, Jonah! That’s enough already,” Joe shouted. Jonah looked at his father and delivered a withering smile.

“Look, can we all just work together until they find us? Maybe we can catch some crabs for dinner.”

“I do love a crab cake,” Chaz cooed, smiling at Jonah lustily.

“I don’t eat shellfish,” Cisco said.

“Neither do I,” Joe agreed. “And besides, maybe we should stay put for the night. Since this is where we landed, it makes sense to stay here in the event that they catch a signal from the black box.”

“Why don’t
you
stay here?” Jonah suggested antagonistically.

“Alone?”

“If you’re right, then it wouldn’t hurt to have a fire going here too. All you have to do is keep it flaming so the rescue plane sees it. We can use the extra wood Francesca gathered to make it. Can you handle that? You can rest up your leg. It’s a good two-mile walk to the beach. It might take an hour in the dark.”

Joe’s mouth formed into an angry, tight line before he managed a slight nod. He looked furious, and I didn’t blame him. But he had gotten us into this mess, so whatever. Frankly, I wasn’t sure he’d have enough wood to keep the fire going that long, but I was so psyched Jonah Baron knew my name I didn’t really care.

In retrospect, Joe was right about us all waiting at the landing site, but for whatever reason we followed Jonah’s instruction. It wasn’t so much that we thought Jonah actually knew what he was doing, but his passion was mildly contagious and, like I said, this was a group of people in need of a director. Joe might have been right, but Jonah’s “vision” was more convincing.

“Okeydokey,” Chaz said as he pushed himself off the ground and sidled up next to Jonah to gather dry kindling for the fire. “What other snacks will Jesus be offering? I’m famished, and I hope the Lord is in a ‘givethy’ mood.” He paused. “Mmmm, I’d love some Chicken McNuggets with sweet and sour sauce. Does our savior like white meat or dark?” he asked, looking Jonah up and down. “I like white meat myself. Tall, hairless white meat.”

After the signal fire was going, Jonah used it to light one of the larger wood sticks to act as a guiding torch. It didn’t work the way it does on TV. Ours blew out in about fifteen minutes. I happened to know that it needed to have a wick—courtesy of Mr. Krauss’s eighth grade science class—but I was pretty sure nobody had any paraffin, and I didn’t want to insult Jonah’s masculinity. So, as I privately predicted, we were now walking by nothing but moonlight. It was amazing how quickly it got dark. I was behind Eve and kept getting whacked in the face with the tree branches that Cisco held for her but which she didn’t feel necessary to hold for me. Nice. My left foot was red and blistered. I think we’d been walking for about thirty minutes when we heard a welcome sound.

“Do you hear that?” Eve suddenly asked, unleashing a particularly vicious branch right in my face.

“The plane! The plane!” Chaz shouted, jumping up and down.

We all looked into the air and saw two white lights and a small red one. Without a word we instinctively turned around and started running back to the spot where we’d left Joe with the signal fire. The “path” was a blur of trees and moonshine. I’d never run so fast in my life.

It quickly became obvious that we weren’t going in any particular direction. It was too dark, and for some reason we couldn’t see the signal fire. All we could do was hope that the plane had seen it.

“I think we’re walking in circles,” Chaz moaned.

“No we’re not,” Jonah pronounced. “I’m following Polaris. We’re heading north.”

“What’s a Polaris?” Milan asked.

“It’s a star,” he said, pointing to the sky. “Just above the Big Dipper. See it? That means we’re definitely heading north.”

“But we’re not in the Northern Hemisphere,” I corrected him. “That can’t be Polaris.”

“For real?” Jonah asked in a tone that belied all sense of authority and leadership.

“I mean, I’m not 100 percent, but I think so. And I’m pretty sure that’s not the Big Dipper.”

Silence.

“So your whole rock and stick routine was crap too?” Chaz asked Jonah.

“I must be really tired,” he said, rubbing his eyes, as if that were some kind of an excuse.

“Look,” I suggested, trying to ease Jonah’s embarrassment, “none of us know exactly where we are. I’m just assuming we’re in the Southern Hemisphere based on our having flown out of Johannesburg. I could be wrong,” I offered, knowing that I wasn’t.

“Well, this is just great,” Chaz spat. “Astronomy lessons from Beavis and Butthead.”

“Who cares?” Cisco said. “We’re out of here anyway.”

When we finally found Joe, about an hour and a half later, he was asleep.

“Well look at that,” Jonah seethed, staring at the orange ashes and sticking his heel in Joe’s back to rouse him. “He’s sleeping.”

“Not. Not asleep,” Joe mumbled, waking up and scrambling unsteadily to his feet.

“What’s going on? Dear God, what happened to you?” he asked, looking at my scratched-up, bleeding face.

“You let the fire go out?” I asked. “Does that mean the plane didn’t see it? That they don’t know we’re here?” It was all I could do not to burst out into tears.

“What plane? What are you talking about?” he asked, rubbing the sleep from his red, puffy eyes and massaging his head.

“Why don’t you just shoot us all?” Milan shrieked, yanking out an extension with her left hand. “What the hell is the matter with you? Do you like it here or something?” She threw the hairpiece on the smoky embers. They sparked enthusiastically. “A plane came looking for me, and now it’s gone because you needed a goddamn nap!”

“Not you, Milan,
us
, a plane came looking for
us
,” Cisco corrected.

Joe’s face suddenly took on an expression of profound sadness. It was as if this second mistake had deepened his uncertainty. And there was no publicist or manager to protect him from the indignity of his failure.

“Whatever. Now we’re stuck here all night because this antique necrophiliac can’t keep his eyes open,” Milan said.

Chaz let out a depressed snort.

“Narcoleptic,” Eve corrected.

“Oh shut up, you cow!”

“I’m so sorry. I must have nodded off,” Joe apologized.

“Nodded off? You nodded off?” Milan shouted, her face about two inches away from Joe.

“Oh get away from me,” he pleaded, giving her a gentle push back on the shoulder. “You exhaust me.”

“Well, get used to my face, you dumb ass, since you just blew our ride out of here.”

We all made it to the beach in a bleak forty-five minutes. At the risk of offending Jonah’s survival skills, I nonetheless suggested tying cotton to a bunch of branches so that we could easily keep a guide light going. Jonah reluctantly agreed to give it a try, and Milan enthusiastically offered her shirt for material. Who needed a shirt with those hooters, right?

In any event, it looked like we were definitely spending the night. Joe trailed behind us like a chastised dog. Pissed off as we all were, we were still confident that it was just a matter of time until the next plane showed up. The key was to get to the beach, build a big fire, and just wait.

After thirty minutes or so, the beach made its abrupt appearance from the knotty jungle.

“Oh,” Eve cried, taken by the swift change of scenery. I imagined it was how a bug must feel after being released from a glass jar. It was like taking a deep breath after holding your breath in an overcrowded elevator. The moonlit beach itself was a boomerang-shaped disc of white sand, punctuated with building-sized boulders. The openness was like nothing I’d ever seen. The suddenness of such beauty would have been mesmerizing had we not been so tired and hungry.

After Jonah got a fire going, we banked up against one of the huge rocks for warmth. I started “texting” Jordan in an attempt to not think about food.