The bright sunlight woke me, illuminating the interior of the life raft. Jiho was already gone, out gathering firewood or fishing. I yawned, stretched my arms and legs, and crawled out of bed. My suitcase was in the lean-to, and I reached in and grabbed a bikini, returning to the life raft to change. Dressed, I lifted the nylon flaps to let in some fresh air.

Jiho walked up with the fish he caught for breakfast. He smiled. “Hey.” 

“Good morning.”

I checked the breadfruit and coconut trees, scooping up everything on the ground and bringing them back to the lean-to. Jiho cracked coconuts while I cleaned and cooked the fish.
After breakfast we brushed our teeth, rinsing with rainwater, and I marked off the date in my datebook. September already. Hard to believe.
 

“Want to go swimming?” Jiho asked. 

“Sure.”
 

Last week, Jiho had spotted two fins, just outside the reef. We panicked and left the water, but as we watched they came all the way into the lagoon. Dolphins. We waded slowly into the water and they didn’t swim away, waiting patiently as we approached them.

“They almost act like they’re here to introduce themselves,” I said in amazement.

Jiho petted one and laughed when it blew water out its blowhole. I had never seen such social creatures. They swam with us for a while and then left abruptly, on some sort of marine schedule.

“Maybe the dolphins will come back today,” I said, as I followed Jiho down to the shore. Jiho stripped off his shirt and waded into the lagoon. “That would be cool. I want to ride one.”
 
We entertained ourselves by using one of the collapsible plastic containers for a snorkel mask. There were schools of brightly colored fish – purple, blue, orange, and yellow and black striped. We spotted a sea turtle and an eel poking its head up from the ocean floor. I swam away fast when I saw that.

“No dolphins,” I said after Jiho and I had been swimming for at least an hour. “We must have missed them.”

“We can try again after our nap.” Suddenly, he pointed toward the shoreline. “Jennie, look over there.”

A crab leg stuck out of the sand, the pincer opening, and closing. We ran out of the water.
 

“I’ll grab my sweatshirt,” he said.
 

“Hurry, it’s trying to bury itself.”

Jiho returned in record time, wrapped his sweatshirt around the crab, and pulled it out of the sand. We went back to the lean-to and JIHO shook it out onto the fire.

“Oh God,” I said, thinking for a second about the crab’s violent demise.

I got over it fast.

We cracked the legs with the pliers from the toolbox, gorging ourselves. The crabmeat – even without hot melted butter – tasted better than anything I’d eaten since we’d been on the island. Now that we knew where they buried themselves, Jiho and I would have to check the shoreline daily. I was so tired of fish, coconut, and breadfruit that I could hardly choke them down sometimes, and adding crabmeat would provide a little variety, something that was desperately lacking in our diet.

When the crab was nothing more than a pile of split shells, I took the blanket out of the life raft and spread it under the coconut tree. We stretched out next to each other. The shade from the tree helped keep us cool during the hottest part of the day, and it had become our favorite place to nap.

A big, creepy, hairy spider – its body the size of a quarter – crawled lazily across Jiho’s shoulder and I flicked it off him with my finger. 

“That one even freaked me out,” I said.

Jiho shuddered. He hated spiders, always shaking our blanket out, checking for them before he put it back in the life raft. Personally, I hated snakes. I’d already stepped on one and the only thing that kept me from being completely traumatized was the fact that I was wearing my tennis shoes. I hated to think about stepping on one barefoot; whether or not they might be poisonous was too stressful to think about.

I thought Jiho had already fallen asleep, but then he said, “What do you think’s gonna happen to us, Jennie?” His voice sounded drowsy.
 

“I don’t know. I think we just keep doing what we’re doing and try to hold on until someone finds us.”

“We’re not doing too bad,” Jiho said, rolling over onto his stomach. “I bet that would surprise a lot of people.”

“It surprises me.” My full stomach was making me drowsy, too. “It’s not like we had a choice, Jiho. We either figured it out or we died.”

Jiho lifted his head off the blank