Jack looked around. All he saw was a wooden house with a sign that read, Apartment for Rent.
Soft laughter came from above. “Child, I’m up here.”
The top half of an older woman leaned on the rail of a second-story porch.
“Oh, hello,” he said. “Can you tell me where I can find the internet?”
The old woman shook her head. “You better come up.”
Jack hesitated. Aunt Julia had warned him about strangers, although she had mentioned that middle-aged men in vans were the ones to watch out for. She had specifically warned him to run if anybody said they had lost a puppy. She had not said anything about old women on porches.
“I don’t bite, child.”
He had to e-mail Zack.
Jack climbed the stairs tucked under the house.
The woman sat on a wooden stool. She pointed to another stool and said, “Rest your bones, baby; it’s a hot day. I’ll get you a flavored ice.”
“Oh. No thank you,” Jack said. “I’m not supposed to eat anything from strangers. It might be drugged.”
The woman considered this, then said, “I worked my whole life in New York City. I believe that is an excellent policy for the Big Apple. But, baby, this is Lee Beach, and I’m Seldie Moore. I know everybody, and everybody knows me.”
Jack didn’t think that was true. He didn’t know her. So that right there was one fact that blew her story full of holes.
She called down to a young man on the road. “Karl, tell this boy who I am.”
Karl looked up and smiled. “Mornin’ Miss Seldie.”
Seldie turned to Jack. “See, baby? Now, he don’t call me just Seldie, he puts a miss on it. Because he’s a boy, you see, and that’s respectful.”
Jack sat there, not sure what he should do. Should he be rude and refuse the flavored ice or respectful and die eating it?
Seldie laughed. “Never mind, child. Maybe next time. What you came for was the internet. Now, I’m still workin’ on figuring out the remote to my television. But I do believe they got to have internet in Manda. Now, if I said I knew for sure, I’d be a liar, and I don’t like liars. But I say I believe because if it is anywhere on this island, that is where it is. I’m forever on a journey to that dusty place for one thing or the other. Just when you think you have everything you need, you go noticin’ you need more blood pressure pills. So off I go again and don’t dare have a glass of water before I set out or I’ll have to go before I even get there. So, baby, that’s why it never was a yes-or-no answer. It’s a definite maybe.”
Jack had tried to follow what Ms. Seldie said as closely as he could, but he got all turned around when she talked about her blood pressure and not being able to drink water. All he could gather at the end of it was that the internet was probably in the town of Manda.
Jack had seen Manda when he and his parents left the airport. It had looked as though a landslide could strike at any moment. And anyway, Jack couldn’t go there without his parents.
Or could he?
His mom had left a note telling him to explore. If Jack bought a candy bar on the way, he would be following her instructions exactly.
He could hear Aunt Julia’s voice in his head. “Go off to another town? By yourself? In a foreign country?”
Aunt Julia was right. It was too dangerous.
His shoulders slumped.
“What’s harrassin’ you, baby?” Seldie asked.
“I have to get to the internet to e-mail my friend,” he said.
“My advice is, ask the bus driver. If there’s internet in that town, he’ll know where it is. Do not pay him more than seven bacs, no matter what he tells you. That’s the goin’ rate.”
“Well,” Jack said, hesitating, “I don’t think I should go on my own. I might get lost. Or kidnapped, even.”
Seldie let out a hoot of laughter. “You ain’t no infant. When I was your age, there was no road here or taxis and buses neither. I’d saddle up my daddy’s horse and ride him all the way into Manda. I loved to ride that horse …”
Jack wasn’t sure what riding horses had to do with him going to Manda. But Seldie was an adult and she lived on the island. If she thought it was okay … And anyway, should he really bother to ask his parents? They would probably let him go to Australia by himself if he wanted to.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “Where’s the bus station?”
“Now there’s the conwenience of it. Just stand on the road wherever you happen to be and wait for a bus to come along.”
Jack thanked Seldie and went down the stairs and to the road. He stood there with a knot in his stomach. The decision to go off by himself seemed totally wrong, but he was going anyway. The only person in the whole world that would know where he went was an old woman he had just met.
“Wave your arm, baby,” Seldie cried from the porch. “Flag them down.”
A white van barreled down the road. Not a bus. Jack waved his arm anyway.
The van slowed to a stop, and a boy opened the door.
Jack got in and Seldie called, “Take that boy to the internet. Only seven bacs, mind.”
Jack huddled in a seat next to the window. The van wound up and down hills and around curves, taking the same road the taxi had traveled the night before. It occurred to Jack that he was in a van driven by a middle-aged man, exactly what Aunt Julia had told him not to do. At least there were other people in the vehicle. A young man with blond dreadlocks chatted to a tangle-haired woman who looked as though she might have dreadlocks soon.
The woman said, “I’m a bit nervous about learning to scuba dive, but wouldn’t it be brilliant if we saw a whale shark?”
“We might, actually,” the man said. “My guidebook says this is the right time of year.”
Whale sharks? Sharks as big as whales? Everybody was so scared of great white sharks. How had whale sharks escaped their notice? How many people were swallowed whole every year?
The bus screeched to a stop. The boy tapped Jack’s arm. “That’s you,” he said.
There it was. Right outside the window. A two-story stone building with a big sign: Internet Café. He had done it.
Jack paid the boy and ran up the steps. The café was a small room, the walls lined with clunky-looking computers. The girl at the counter told Jack he could log on and pay when he was finished.
The dial-up seemed to take forever. Finally, he got on his Gmail account and wrote to Zack.
You have to get me out of here. This is what’s happened so far:
• Landed safely. (Barely, the plane wasn’t much bigger than the one hanging from your bedroom ceiling.)
• Parents lied to both immigration and customs. (Yes, they have now involved me in two crimes, so I may be wanted by the authorities.)
• I had a banana soda. (It tastes like bubble gum.)
• There is a cockroach the size of a hamster stalking me in my room. (My dad named him Fred.)
• I was nearly killed by a parrot. (They are more dangerous than they look!)
• I have just found out that there are sharks as big as whales circling the island. (I know. They make great whites sound like goldfish.)
• Also, while D. fantasticus lives in northern Peru, this island’s habitat is similar. (I am convinced they are here.)
The next time you are standing anywhere near Diana, loudly discuss how I am living worse than the Swiss Family Robinson but am surviving. You could also mention I am using a speargun to catch my own fish. I’m not, but for all I know it may come to that. I am officially a dropout—my parents have not made any plans to enroll me in school. I feel illiterate already. They have actually talked about homeschooling! (My mom calls it ‘the home-schooling thingy.’) If I am homeschooled by them, I will only learn about the cost of a cup of coffee in Budapest and the train schedules in Greece. This will not get me into college. Tell your parents that I am available for adoption, am in grave danger, and would be a loving son. I hope you are not sitting next to Diana on the bus. If you are, cut it out!
Jack surfed around the internet to see if there had been any plane crashes, capsized ferries, earthquakes, or gruesome animal attacks since he’d left Pennsylvania. He read about a woman in California who was stalked by a mountain lion while riding her bike and a toddler in Ohio who got stuck in a pipe in his own backyard. Both survived. The parents of the toddler said he had done that two times already and they were sick of it. Jack logged off and went to the counter.
The girl checked his time. “Seventy bacs.”
“Seventy?” Jack asked. That couldn’t be right. His parents had only paid 150 for a whole hotel room. “You mean seven?”
The girl looked bored as she pointed to a handwritten sign on the wall: “Five bacsiras a minute.”
Why hadn’t Jack kept track of how much money he was spending? If he could do it over again, he probably would not have used so many minutes reading about the kid stuck in the pipe. How would he pay her? Jack only had seventy-three bacsiras, and he needed seven to get back to Lee Beach.
He said, “Could I pay you sixty-six now and come back tomorrow with the rest?”
“No,” the girl said. “I’ll get fired.”
“Could I talk to your boss?”
“She ain’t here.”
“But I don’t have that much money.”
The girl crossed her arms. “She say gringos are rich. They just pretend to be poor. She say anybody that don’t pay the bill can get arrested by the policía.”
The policía. The police. The girl glared at him as if he were a criminal. Did she know his parents?
Jack dug his money out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Here,” he said. His parents might not mind being thrown in jail in foreign countries—they were used to it—but he doubted he would survive even one night locked up with bank robbers and criminal masterminds.
The girl slowly counted out the money, gave him three bacsiras back, then said, “Thank you for your business. Come again soon.”
Jack stood on the balcony of the internet café, clutching the railing. It was late in the afternoon already.
Would his parents panic when he didn’t show up for dinner? Probably not. They might have already forgotten they’d brought him along. Jack could picture a week going by before his mom would say to his dad, “This shirt looks too small for you.” His dad would say, “That’s not my shirt.” Then they’d look at each other, slap their foreheads, and say, “Jake! … No, that’s not right. Jack!”
A phone. He could call the Deep Water Inn and tell them what happened. They could send someone to pick him up.
Jack went back into the café. “Could I use the telephone?” he asked.
The girl peeled off a long strip of white nail polish and flicked it into the air. It landed on the counter between them.
“It costs ten bacs.”
Jack staggered out of the café.
He stood at the side of the road for what seemed like hours. A few cars passed by as he waited. The sun began to sink. Just as it had done the day before, it barreled down the horizon at warp speed.
Jack’s mouth felt sticky and dry.
Finally, a white van rounded the corner. It was a different driver, and a different boy slid the door open.
Jack said, “Um, I need to go to Lee Beach, but I only have three bacsiras. Could I pay you the rest when we get there?”
The boy looked at the driver. The driver threw up his hands and yelled something in Spanish that ended with “Gringos!” The door slammed shut.
Jack guessed that was a “no.” He’d just have to put one foot in front of the other and start walking.
The sky turned a shade darker with each step he took. Overhead streetlamps blinked on, bracketing long stretches of gloomy twilight. A dog barked as Jack passed a compact stone house. It sounded like it had been infected with rabies. Jack fingered the Saint Anthony medal in his pocket. He had asked the saint to find stuff before but never the way back to a hotel.
The occasional car or pickup truck sped by. Jack considered hitchhiking but decided he’d made enough bad choices for one day. He had seen a horror movie once with hitchhikers in it. A number of young lives had met sudden and gruesome ends.
A flapping noise erupted overhead, and the sky filled with rushing black wings. Jack ducked to the ground. A hoard of bats flapped over the trees. Vampire bats, probably.
Three steps later, Jack heard a loud crunch. He lifted up his sneaker and looked down. A flattened tarantula lay twitching on the tarmac.
Rabid dogs. Vampire bats. Spiders as big as the palm of his hand. What else lurked in the darkness? Snakes. Of course there would be snakes. One deadly strike and the venom would course through Jack’s body. He didn’t even have a pen and paper for a last will and testament. He would have to use his last breaths to crawl to the side of the road and scratch out in the dust, Thanks, mom & dad.
Hitchhiking was starting to seem like a good idea.