Vitro by Jessica Khoury Read Free Book Online Page B

him. As far as she was concerned, the day he dragged her across the ocean and forced her to restart her life, he lost all his right to interfere in her relationship with her mom. We could have stayed on Guam at least. Or I could have had a choice. Who knows? If she’d gone with her mom instead back when she was seven, she might have grown up with this Nicholas, maybe stayed friends with Jim. This Skin Island wouldn’t be a strange, menacing place that filled her with anxiety—it would be home.
Despite the secrets it kept from her, from the moment she’d set foot on Skin Island, Sophie had been haunted with an inexplicable sense of familiarity, a kind of kinship with the palms and the sand and the sea. It had been calling to her for years and at last, she’d answered. “Take me to her,” said Sophie.
Nicholas smiled.

SIX
JIM
Jim stood and stared perplexedly from the plane to the runway to the beach. If I could just get it to the edge of the concrete, it should slide down the beach . . .
    He pushed. He pulled. He cursed. He slapped the mosquitoes that hovered above his bare skin and snuck in a bite whenever he stood still. The plane, which had always felt light as a whisper in his hands when he was lost in the clouds, now felt as if it were weighted with a dozen tons of cement. He took the wheels off to see if there were some way to make use of them, but they couldn’t have been in worse shape if he’d shot them with a machine gun. In frustration, he chucked bolts and the rubber wheels as hard as he could into the ocean. Then he realized the material of the wheels might be useful for patches if he ran out of duct tape, and he had to strip down and dive into the water to find them again. When he emerged, dripping and still minus one wheel, he was ready to give up. He halfheartedly pulled on his jeans, then collapsed into the sand with one arm flung over his face to block out the sun.
    “Damn, damn, damn.” He propped himself on his elbows and stared across the channel to Skin Island. It had been over an hour, and he’d seen no sign of Sophie—or anyone else, for that matter.
    I shouldn’t have come here. But it seemed to be an alltoo familiar pattern for Jim: plunging into situations before he considered the consequences. There was the time he lost every penny of his once-substantial savings when he bet on his friend Manny to win the island’s annual dragon boat race, and Manny showed up so drunk he fell off the boat and almost drowned before the race even started. Then the time he and his friend Kong thought it would be a great idea to go cliff diving in the middle of the night, and Kong busted his arm and collarbone on the rocks and Jim had to jump in after him— which only left him with a broken arm and several bruised ribs. When he decided to go surfing just as a typhoon was sweeping in, and nearly drowned before his dad rescued him in their neighbor’s canoe. The time he’d asked out Lonnie Hall because he hadn’t realized that she’d just started dating the captain of the wrestling team, who then beat Jim to a pulp with half the school looking on. And cheering. In fact, now that he looked back, he realized his life was a study in “it seemed like a great idea at the time,” going all the way back to the misadventures he dragged Sophie into when they were barely old enough to spell their names. Flying to Skin Island, however, could well be the worst of his great ideas yet.
    But there wasn’t any point in lying around feeling sorry for himself. He rolled onto his feet and trudged up the beach, carrying the wheel he’d managed to recover. Then he stood on the runway and stared for a long time at his plane, thinking.
    He finally concocted a plan that he was fairly certain wouldn’t work, but he knew he had to try. He dragged as many fallen palm trunks as he could onto the pavement, which amounted to three, since the last two he found were too heavy for him to carry. He laid them in front of the plane