On the Island by Tracey Garvis Graves Read Free Book Online Page A

like Anna, pretty much guaranteed I’d wake up with a boner.
    She lay on her side facing me, still asleep. The cuts on her face were healing and lucky for her, none of them looked deep enough to leave a scar. She’d kicked off her blanket sometime during the night, and I checked out her legs, which was the wrong thing to do considering what was going on in my shorts. If she opened her eyes she’d catch me staring, so I crawled out of the life raft and thought about geometry until my hard-on went away.
    Anna woke up ten minutes later. We ate coconut and breadfruit for breakfast, and I brushed my teeth afterward, rinsing with rainwater.
    “Here,” I said, handing the toothbrush and toothpaste to her.
    “Thanks.” She squeezed some toothpaste on it and brushed her teeth.
    “Maybe there will be another plane today,” I said.
    “Maybe,” Anna said. But she didn’t look at me when she said it.
    “I want to look around some more. See what else is on this island.”
    “We’ll have to be careful,” she said. “We don’t have shoes.”
    I gave her a pair of my socks so her feet wouldn’t be completely bare. I ducked behind the lean-to and changed into my jeans, to protect my legs from the mosquitoes, and we walked into the woods.
    The humid air settled on my skin. I passed through a swarm of gnats, keeping my mouth closed and swatting them away with my hands. We walked farther inland and the smell of rotting plants grew stronger. The leaves overhead blocked almost all the sunlight and the only sound was the snapping of branches and our breathing as we inhaled the heavy air. Sweat drenched my clothes. We continued in silence, and I wondered how long it would take us to clear the trees and come out on the other side.
    We came upon it fifteen minutes later. Anna trailed slightly behind me, so I spotted it first. Stopping short, I turned around and motioned for her to hurry up.
    She caught up to me and whispered, “What is that?”
    “I don’t know.”
    A wooden shack, roughly the size of a single-wide mobile home, stood fifty feet ahead. Maybe someone else lived on the island. Someone who hadn’t bothered with an introduction. We walked toward it cautiously. The front door hung open on rusty hinges, and we peered inside.
    “Hello?” Anna said.
    No one answered, so we stepped over the threshold onto the wooden floor. There was another door on the far side of the windowless room, but it was closed. There wasn’t any furniture. I nudged a pile of blankets in the corner, and we jumped back when the bugs scattered.
    When my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I noticed a large metal toolbox on the floor. I bent down and opened it. It held a hammer, several packages of nails and screws, a tape measure, pliers, and a handsaw. Anna found some clothes. She picked up a shirt and the sleeve fell off.
    “I thought maybe we could use that, but never mind,” she said, making a face.
    I opened the door to a second room, and we crept in slowly. Empty potato chip bags and candy bar wrappers littered the floor. There was a wide-mouthed plastic container lying next to them. I picked it up and peered inside. Empty. Whoever lived here probably used it to collect water. Maybe if we’d explored the island a little more, walked farther and found the shack earlier, we wouldn’t have been forced to drink the pond water. Maybe we would have been on the beach when the plane flew overhead.
    Anna looked at the container in my hand. She must have made the same connection because she said, “What’s done is done, T.J. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”
    A moldy sleeping bag lay crumpled on the floor. In the corner, propped up against the wall, stood a black case. I flipped open the clasps and lifted the lid. Inside was an acoustic guitar in good condition.
    “That’s random,” Anna said.
    “Do you think someone lived here?”
    “It sort of looks that way.”
    “What were they doing?”
    “Besides channeling Jimmy Buffett?”