Fish Talk

As soon as we were out of earshot of everyone else, Fish got right to it.

“Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Do you have a crush on that girl?”

I don’t know what I was expecting him to ask, but that wasn’t it. And since I didn’t have a good answer, I tried stalling him a little.

“What girl?” I said.

“Cockroach…” Fish said, which sounded a lot like We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way. I knew who Fish was talking about, and he knew I knew it.

“Oh? Carmen? No, sir,” I said, with my best innocent face. “No crush there.”

“Then why are you picking up the slack for her all the time?” Fish said.

“Huh?” I said. This whole thing kept changing faster than I could keep up. “Hang on. You know about all that?”

“It’s kind of hard to miss,” Fish said.

“So then why are you letting her get away with it?” I asked him.

Fish reached over and toink-toinked me on the forehead again. “You don’t get it, do you?” he said. “This isn’t middle school, kid, and I’m not your homeroom teacher. Out here, you live with your own choices. You want to walk around with someone else’s footprints on your back? That’s up to you.”

Uh…

This is the part where I reach into my pocket and pull out one of my Official Free Passes. It’s like a Get Out of Jail Free card. I hand it over to Fish, he lets me walk away, and we both forget this conversation ever happened. Yeah, in my dreams!

And since that wasn’t an option, I tried one of the oldest tricks in the book. Changing the subject.

It doesn’t always work, but it’s always worth a shot.

“Shouldn’t we be getting back?” I said, trying to be as smooth as possible. “I’ll bet they have those rafts on the river by now.”

And guess what? It worked! Fish actually cracked a real smile and everything.

“You think that dinky little stream back there is the mighty Arkansas River?” he said.

“It’s not?” I said.

“Come here,” Fish told me.

Instead of heading toward camp, we started going deeper into the woods. After a minute, Fish ducked us under a bunch of pine branches, and we came out onto this big open piece of rock.

“Now that’s what you call a river,” Fish said.

And all I could say was…