Two blurry images of Jiho hovered above me, and I blinked until they merged into one. He had cuts on his face and his left eye was swollen shut.

“Where are we?” I asked. My voice sounded scratchy and my mouth tasted like salt.

“I don’t know. Some island.”

“What about Graham?” I asked.

Jiho shook his head. “What was left of the plane sank fast.”

“I can’t remember anything.”

“You passed out in the water, and when I couldn’t wake you up I thought you were dead.”

My head throbbed. I touched my forehead and winced when my fingers grazed a large bump. Something sticky coated the side of my face. “Am I bleeding?”

Jiho leaned toward me and combed through my hair with his fingers, looking for the source of the blood. I cried out when he found it.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s a deep cut. It’s not bleeding as much now. It bled a lot more when we were in the water.”

Fear gripped me, traveling through my body like a wave. “Were there sharks?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see any, but I was worried about it.”

I took a deep breath and sat up. The beach spun. Placing my hands flat on the sand, I braced myself until the worst of the dizziness passed. “How did we get here?” I asked.

“I looped my arms through the straps of your life jacket, and we drifted with the current until I saw the shore. Then I dragged you up on the sand.”

The realization of what he’d done sank in. I looked out at the water and didn’t say anything for a minute. I thought about what might have happened if he’d let go of me or if the sharks had come or if there hadn’t been an island.

“Thank you, Jiho.”

“Sure,” he said, only meeting my gaze for a few seconds before looking away.
 

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“I’m okay. I think I hit my face on the seat in front of me.”
 

I tried to stand and failed, overcome by dizziness. Jiho helped me back up and this time I stayed on my feet. I unbuckled my life jacket and let it drop on the sand.

I turned away from the shore and looked inland. The island looked just like the pictures I’d seen on the Internet except it didn’t have a luxury hotel or any vacation homes sitting on it. Barefoot, the pristine white sand felt like sugar under my feet; I had no idea what had happened to my shoes. The beach gave way to flowering shrubs and tropical vegetation and then finally a forested area where trees grew close together, their leaves forming a green canopy. The sun, high in the sky, burned with an intense heat. The ocean breeze failed to lower my rising body temperature, and sweat trickled down my face. My clothes clung to my damp skin.

“I have to sit back down.” My stomach churned, and I thought I might throw up. Jiho sat down next to me and when the nausea finally passed I said, “Don’t worry. They have to know we crashed and they’ll send a search plane.”

“Do you have any idea where we are?” he asked.

“Not really.”

I used my finger to draw in the sand. “The islands are grouped in a chain of twenty-six atolls running north to south. This is where we were headed.” I pointed to one of the marks I made. I dragged my finger through the sand and pointed at another. “This is Malé, where we started. We’re somewhere in between, I guess, unless the current took us east or west. I don’t know if Graham stayed on course, and I don’t know if seaplanes file a flight plan or if they’re tracked on radar.”

“My mom and dad have got to be freaking out.”

“Yes.” Jiho’s parents had undoubtedly tried to call my cell phone, but it was probably at the bottom of the ocean by now.

Should we build a signal fire? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when you’re lost? Build a fire so they know where you are?

I had no idea how to build one. My survival skills were limited to what I had seen on TV or read in books. Neither of us wore glasses, otherwise we could have angled a lens toward the sun. We didn’t have any flint or steel either. That left friction, but did rubbing sticks together actually work? Maybe we didn’t need to worry about a fire, at least not yet. They’d see us if they were flying low and we stayed near the beach.

We tried to spell out SOS. First we used our feet to flatten the sand, but we didn’t think it would be visible from the air. Next, we tried to use leaves but the breeze scattered them before we could form letters. There weren’t any large rocks to hold the leaves down, only pebbles and fragments of what I thought were coral.

Moving around made us hotter and the pain in my head worse. We gave up and sat down.
 

My face burned in the sun and Jiho’s arms and legs turned red. Soon we had no choice but to move away from the shore and take shelter under a coconut tree. Coconuts covered the ground, and I knew they contained water. We banged them against the trunk of the tree, but we couldn’t get them open.
 

Sweat ran down my face. I gathered my hair into a pile and held it on top of my head. My swollen tongue and dry mouth made it hard to swallow.
 

“I’m gonna take a look around,” Jiho said.