Day 2

I woke up as soon as it got light. Jennie was already awake, sitting on the sand beside me looking up at the sky. My stomach growled, and I didn’t have any spit.

I sat up. “Hey. How’s your head?”

“Still pretty sore,” she said.

Her face was kind of a mess, too. Purple bruises covered her swollen cheeks and there was crusty, dried blood near her hairline.

We walked to the breadfruit tree and Jennie climbed on my shoulders and knocked down two. I felt weak, unsteady, and it was hard to hold her. She got off and while we were standing there, a breadfruit fell off a branch and landed at our feet. We looked at each other.

“That will make things easier,” she said.

We cleared away the rotten breadfruit under the tree so if we came back and found any on the ground, we’d know we could eat them. I picked up the one that fell and peeled it. The juice tasted sweeter and the fruit wasn’t so hard to chew.

We desperately needed something to collect water in, and we walked along the shoreline looking for empty cans, bottles, containers – anything that was watertight and would hold the rain. We spotted debris, which I thought might be wreckage from the plane, but nothing else. The lack of any human garbage made me wonder just where the hell we were.

We went inland. The trees blocked the light from the sun and mosquitoes swarmed us. I slapped at them and wiped the sweat off my forehead with my arm. We saw the pond when we came to a small clearing. More like a large puddle, it was full of murky water, and my thirst kicked into overdrive.

“Can we drink that?” I asked.
 
Jennie knelt down and stuck her hand in. She swirled the water around and wrinkled her nose at the smell. “No, it’s stagnant. It’s probably not safe to drink.”

We kept walking but we couldn’t find anything that would hold water so we went back to the coconut tree. I picked up one of the coconuts from the ground and smashed it against the trunk of the tree, then threw it when I couldn’t get it to crack. I kicked the tree, which hurt my foot. 

“Goddamn it!”
 

If I could get one coconut open, we could drink the coconut water, eat the meat, and collect rain in the empty shell.

Jennie didn’t seem to notice my tantrum. She shook her head back and forth and said, “I just don’t understand why we haven’t seen a plane yet. Where are they?”

I sat down next to her, breathing hard and sweating. “I don’t know.” We didn’t say anything for a while, lost in our own thoughts. Finally, I said, “Do you think we should build a fire?”

“Do you know how?” she asked.

“No.”