We Give a Squid a Wedgie (19 page)

“THEY’VE BEEN PICKED
up by some ­fishermen at sea,” Janice said as she watched the twins board the small fishing canoe through her binoculars.­

“What should we do?” Ernest wondered. “Follow them or the cruise ship with their father on it?”

“We’ll keep following them. The fishermen might take them to the island,” Janice said.

“And when we get there, I’ll get my revenge,” said a wet and weary-looking Bonnie. “Big Bart wants that island and he’ll have to go through me to get it.”

“That island doesn’t belong to you,” Janice snapped at her. “We rescued you from the sea. We can toss you back in again.”

“I’d like to see you try it,” said Bonnie.

“Make me,” said Janice, who was quickly ­
discovering that pirates did not make good guests aboard a small boat.

“Ladies,” Ernest interrupted. He was quickly discovering that it wasn’t easy sailing with a grave robber and a pirate. “Should we call Sir Edmund and let him know what’s happening?”

“Not yet,” said Janice. “We’ll let the twins lead us to the island first. Once we know where it is, we’ll call Edmund and get our reward.”

“And then I’ll get my revenge,” said Bonnie. “With Sir Edmund’s reward money, I can buy off Big Bart’s whole crew and send him to the bottom of the Pacific, just like he tried to do to me.”

“You aren’t a very forgiving person,” said ­Janice. “I like that.”

She trimmed the sails and they continued following the small boat.

JABIR’S BOAT HAD
two small sails at the front and back and moved low in the water. It wouldn’t be much use in a storm and wasn’t really made for traveling in the open ocean.

“We don’t usually go this far from land,” said Jabir. “But I thought you guys might be in some trouble when I saw you sailing in circles.”

“Your mother seemed angry when I left,” said Celia.

“She wasn’t happy that I made up all that initiation stuff,” he said. “She still doesn’t know that I gave you that compass. I think I will probably get in big trouble. But it is worth it to help you.”

“You’re doing all this for
her
?” Oliver scoffed. “Really?”

“For all of you,” said Jabir, not making eye contact with anyone.

“Ha!” Oliver exclaimed. “You’re going all googly for my sister!”

“I am not,” said Jabir.

“You are!”

“I am not,” he repeated.

“You are!”

“He is not!” Celia interrupted.

“Thanks for coming to the rescue, Jabir,” Corey said, cutting the argument off. “I don’t know what we would have done without you.”

“I am your number one fan!” Jabir smiled.

“Oh great, now he’s googly for Corey,” Oliver groaned. All three of them gave Oliver a long stare. He burst out laughing and shook his head. “I was kidding … sheesh.”

They sailed all day and all night. They took turns sleeping and steering and watching out for giant killer squid as they got closer to the island. Oliver and Celia couldn’t really sleep. Every shadow beneath the waves made their blood run cold; every strange noise made them shudder with fear. Their imaginations conjured all sorts of sea monsters
from the depths, but the night passed without seeing one.

The next morning, land appeared in the distance, a green volcanic island ringed with a white sand beach. They couldn’t believe the boy had found his way there on the open ocean with just the broken needle of an old compass to guide him.

“I read the waves and the birds and the clouds.” He shrugged. “They tell me where to go better than some little piece of brass.”

He dropped the sails and rowed them to the shore.

“I will have to go back to my mother,” he said. “She will worry if I do not come home soon. I have to bring her some fish or she won’t eat today. You understand?”

“Family,” Oliver said. “We get it.”

“Thank you, Jabir.” Celia took his hand and held it for a moment.

After a long silence, Jabir climbed back into his boat, raised the sails, and sailed away.

“Totally googly for you,” Oliver told his sister. She didn’t argue. “So what are we supposed to do now?” he asked.

“Bwak,” Dennis said, running free up and down the beach, happy to be where chickens were meant to be: dry land.

They watched Jabir’s boat vanish over the horizon.­

“So this is the mysterious island,” observed Corey. “We didn’t see any giant squid on the way here.”

“I told you the kraken isn’t real.
Beast Busters
is never wrong,” said Oliver. “So, you think Mom’s here?”

“I dunno,” said Celia. “But I guess we better start looking.”

THE TWINS SLUMPED
down on the sand. They had spent an hour walking up and down the beach calling their mother’s name. They received no reply. They needed a rest. They looked up at the sky.

“It looks like a yak,” said Oliver.

“No it doesn’t,” said Celia, shading her eyes with her hands.

“Well, it changed.” Oliver squinted up at the sky. “It used to look like a yak.”

“No,” his sister said. “It didn’t.”

Being three minutes and forty-two seconds older than Oliver meant that Celia was closer to being a teenager than he was, which meant the she was the expert on exactly what shapes the clouds were, and it was very irritating that Oliver would disagree.

“It looks like a herd of something,” she told him.

“Yaks!” Oliver dug his toes underneath the mushy wet sand and kicked blobs of it into the surf. “A herd of yaks!”

“Chickens,” said Celia definitively. “It looks like a herd of chickens.”

“Chickens don’t go in herds. They go in flocks.”

“Well, it’s gone now.” She tossed a clump of seaweed into the breaking surf. On the beach behind them Dennis hopped by, pecking uselessly at the sand. The sun burned white-hot above them. The last puffs of cloud disappeared beyond the horizon, ruining Oliver and Celia’s argument. There was nothing left to watch, just blue in all directions.

The water was blue.

The sky was blue.

They were feeling pretty blue.

“So we’re marooned, huh?” said Oliver. He rested his cheeks on his knees and locked his hands under his legs. He exhaled slowly.

“Yeah,” said Celia, scanning the horizon for any sign of Jabir’s boat coming back or the pirate ship or the small sailboat that had been following them. “We’re marooned.”

“This stinks,” Oliver said. He pulled the untied
bow tie out of his collar and threw it onto the beach next to him. His tuxedo shirt was filthy; his tuxedo pants were ripped at the knees. His shiny black shoes were long gone, and his tuxedo jacket was stretched out on a rock to dry. Oliver was learning what many an explorer before him had discovered: a tuxedo is a terrible outfit in which to be marooned on a desert island.

“It’s not so bad.” Celia had ripped the frilly, lacy part of her ball gown off so she was just wearing a long skirt and a T-shirt. She looked almost comfortable. She glanced back toward the low bushes and palm trees at the edge of the beach, where Corey was setting up a small shelter out of washed-up garbage and palm tree leaves.

“It’s not so bad?” Oliver stood. “It’s not so bad? How can you say that? We should be at home right now! We should be sitting on the couch watching
Sharkapalooza
, or
The
Squid Whisperer
, or
Beast Busters
! But instead, I’m dressed in fancy clothes, stranded on a desert island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean because some Orange Lord was making googly eyes at my sister! And all my sister can do is make googly eyes at Corey Brandt!”

“I do not make googly eyes at Corey Brandt!”

“You do too!”

“I do not!”

“Do too!”

“Do not!”

“Do too!”

“Do n—”

“Please Remember What’s First!” Corey called out, interrupting them. “It’s a helpful mnemonic!”

The twins stared blankly at him.

“A mnemonic … a trick to remember something.
Please
for
Protection
,
Remember
for ­
Rescue
,
What’s
for
Water
,
First
for
Food
. If you remember
Please Remember What’s First
, you’ll remember what to do when you’re marooned on a desert island. I’m building us some protection!”

“Did you come up with that yourself?” Oliver asked.

“I am the Celebrity Adventurist,” said Corey, which didn’t really answer Oliver’s question. Corey went back to building. He had his tuxedo shirt tied around his head like a bandanna with the bow tie to hold it in place. Somehow, the little wisp of hair that came out under it was still perfect.

Celia sighed. Oliver rolled his eyes.

“See. Googly,” he said.

Just then, they heard a deep rumble in the distance. Both children looked toward the center of the island. Corey Brandt froze, broken plastic bucket and palm leaf in hand. Dennis stopped pecking at the sand.

In the hazy sky beyond the palm trees, the jagged black rock of a volcano jutted into the sky. Its flat top was tilted just a little and one spike of rock poked out from the rest, like a bad haircut. Oliver named it Mount Haircut. It rumbled again and belched a cloud of black smoke, then fell silent.

“Not good,” said Oliver.

“Hey, guys.” Corey trotted over to the twins. “So I, like, think we’re okay for now.”

“You do?” asked Oliver.

“When I was filming
Agent Zero
in Iceland, we had this, like, crazy volcano erupt. No one could pronounce the name of it, so when you tried to find out what was going on, people just acted like nothing was happening so they didn’t have to talk about it. Everyone ignored all the black smoke and ash and just, you know, did their thing. Like shopping or whatever.”

“That must have been so scary,” said Celia. She could feel Oliver’s eyes boring into the side of her head.

“It wasn’t so bad … I was just stuck in my hotel room for a few days eating pickled shark meat.”

Celia couldn’t stop her face from wrinkling. She was relieved when Corey laughed.

“It was, like, delicious. Sort of salty and wet with a hint of—”

“Um.” Oliver stopped him. “What about the volcano?”

“Right,” said Corey. “So there were all these earthquakes, like, for days before the volcano erupted. I think we’re okay here because there haven’t been any earthquakes yet.”

“Yet,” repeated Oliver.

“Don’t worry, bro.” Corey patted him on the back. “Everything’s gonna be C-O-O-L, cool.”

“Yeah,” agreed Celia, squeezing Oliver’s shoulder to show how reassuring and big sisterly she could be. “See? We’re gonna be fine.” She smiled.

“Whatever,” snapped Oliver. He stomped off down the beach. He hated when Celia acted like she was older than he was. Three minutes and forty-two seconds didn’t count, not really.

“Don’t go too far!” she called out as Oliver headed for the trees.

“I’m just going to look for some coconuts,” he yelled back. “So you two can have your privacy!”

Celia blushed bright red. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

Corey Brandt just shrugged. He was a teen superstar, so he was used to kids acting weird around him. Adults too. Pretty much everybody acted weird around him. The Navels were actually the most normal kids he knew.

“Eyjafjallajökull!” he yelled after Oliver.

“What?” Oliver turned.

“Eyjafjallajökull,” he said. “That was the name of the volcano in Iceland.” Oliver shook his head and kept walking, so Corey turned to Celia and flashed his smile. “I took lessons so I could pronounce it. Anyway, want to help me build this thing?” He pointed to the pile of garbage. Celia wasn’t sure how that pile of garbage would become a shelter, but she figured it was better than walking up the beach calling her mother’s name, so she started to help.

As Oliver wandered into the shady trees beyond the beach, he glanced back at Corey and his sister
setting to work on a little hut. He felt kind of left out and wished he hadn’t stomped off so dramatically. But he didn’t want to be a castaway on a desert island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, looking for his mother with his sister and Corey Brandt. He wanted to be at home watching Corey Brandt on TV and eating cheese puffs and snack cakes and waiting for their mother to return like she had promised she would.