Page 22 of Resisting Mr. Fancy Pants

“Anything?” I asked.

He shook his head. “The land is very uneven and rocky in places. I didn’t go too far, as I came across some downed limbs that aren’t damp from the storm.”

I didn’t give in to the grimness of our situation. Agan seemed sure his father would find us. I held on to that hope, as it was my lifeline to getting back to my daughter. Then, embarrassingly, my stomach let out a growl that broke the stillness that surrounded us.

“You’re hungry,” he said, stating the obvious.

“It’s fine. I can wait.”

He set down the wood in a pile near the black bag and raft, farther up from where I sat. He opened the bag and pulled out a couple of things. He returned to me, sitting down.

“Here.” He handed me a bar.

“You said we should be careful about how we use things.” I checked the bag myself and found less than a dozen bars. I hadn’t counted them.

“Yes. But we can ease into it. You’re hungry. Eat.” He also handed me a bottle of water. There had been fewer of those.

I was hungry and didn’t argue further. I trusted he knew what he was doing. I tore open the bar without looking at the flavor. I was pretty easygoing about food. There never seemed to be enough of that growing up and I’d learned to eat whatever was around, like it or not.

It was chewy, which I was grateful for. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was until I bit down. If it had been dry, I didn’t think I would have been able to swallow it. I opened the bottle and drank deeply. When I felt half-human, I said to him, “You’re not going to eat anything.”

He shook his head. “I’m not hungry yet. I should get a fire going. Smoke is a good natural beacon. I should have started one a while back.”

What he didn’t say was that he’d been worried about me and hadn’t wanted to leave me alone for a long period of time. Feeling guilty, I lost most of my appetite but forced myself to finish. I wouldn’t be his burden. Not wanting to pollute, I walked over with my empty wrapper and empty bottle. I put both in the bag. They could be useful somehow before we were rescued.

“How can I help?” I offered.

“Can you set up the tent?”

“Sure,” I said, though I’d never set one up in my life.

He handed me a long, slender bag with two handles. Then he arranged the wood into a tepee structure. He got out what I thought was a knife, and it was. However, he used the knife against something that came off the top of the knife. He struck the end of the knife against the skinny metal from the top. That created a spark. The paper beneath that I hadn’t noticed now flared to life. He added the paper to the wood structure and it lit. “I’m going to gather more wood.”

I nodded confidently and set the tent bag on the ground. How hard could this be? I unzipped it and pulled out what looked like a giant umbrella. I set the base on the bottom and tried numerous ways to open it up. I’d never been camping before. The closest was a fort I’d created with a sheet over our table in the trailer I’d grown up in. Mom wasn’t into camping. And Avery’s dad, who was the closest person to a dad I’d ever had, was a fishing guy, and those were day trips.

When Agan returned, I was still at it.

“Need some help?” he asked while laughing.

“Okay. Let me see you do it,” I said, sure he’d be foiled by the tent as much as I had been.

It took him all of sixty seconds, if that. He flipped the umbrella-looking thing over and it sort of took shape. He moved some rods that held the structure together, but in seconds, it was done.

A burst of giggles left my chest at the ridiculousness of all of it. “I’m so dumb.”

“It happens to the best of us.” He reached into the main black bag and took out some bungee cords.

“What are you doing now?” I didn’t want to be a hindrance and was eager to learn in case I had to do whatever he was doing in the near future.

“I’m going to anchor the tent to the raft and then both to a tree. Since we don’t know how far the tide will come in, hopefully we won’t wake up drifting in the ocean.”

His ingenuity only made me feel more secure we would survive this. I said nothing more and watched him work. I made sure to memorize what he was doing.

Soon, our shelter was at the top of the sandy dune on the flattest surface available. Then we made several trips out into the middle of the island for more wood. What was interesting was the only sounds were ours. Even with the trees that grew high above us, unmarred by the storm or tide that had devastated the trees near the shore, there were no sounds of birds one would expect to find.

“It’s quiet,” I said.

“It is. That made me sure we were on a small island and not something else. I don’t think we have to fear any animals at all, good or bad.”

---