Escaping the Lost Island (working title)

Chapter 20

Next thing I knew, I was squinting into to the blinding light of day.

Shielding my eyes, I sat up. Jessie was steering through relatively placid waters. The others were in varying states of bleariness, except for Toby who was fast asleep.

My stomach growled uproariously and it occurred to me that it had been nearly a day since I had last eaten. I crawled carefully over to the store of bananas and grabbed two of them.

"We should fish today," Rita said, peering under the flap that covered the food.

I nodded. "Closer to night though."

"Good idea."

Isaac shifted his position. "God I'm sore."

I looked at him. It was unlike Isaac to complain, even a little bit. His freckles seemed to be standing out more prominently on his pale face.

He must have felt me looking at him because he turned towards me and straightened. "It's no big deal," he said quickly. He bent down to grab a handful of walnuts and began popping them into his mouth. "So what do you guys want to do?"

My eyebrows raised. "What do you mean?"

Isaac shrugged. "Well we could just sit here all day and do nothing again or we could think of some form of entertainment, a game or something."

A small smile curled my lips. Coming up with games to pass the time between eating and fitful nightmares; that was more like the Isaac I knew. "Okay," I said. "Like what?"

He took out his pocket knife. "Tic tac toe?" Without waiting for an answer, he began to carve two vertical lines onto the deck.

I knelt beside him and watched as he made two horizontal lines across the vertical ones.

"You first," he invited.

I took the knife from his outstretched hand and sliced an X into the middle spot.

"What are you guys doing with that knife?" Jessie's voice had a hint of alarm.

"We're just playing tic tac toe," Isaac replied.

Jessie laughed, a welcome sound to my ears. "Oh okay," she said. "I'll play winner."

Isaac's blue eyes lit up. "Yeah! Let's make it a tournament!"

Rita's eyebrows had knit together in confusion as she watched us. "What is this game?" she finally asked.

"It's called tic tac toe," I explained. "You have to try and get three of your shape in a row like this." It was my turned and I cut an X into the top left corner, making a vertical line of three.

"Yeah," Isaac said, starting on a new board. "Except I let you win for educational purposes."

I rolled my eyes. "Whatever you say." I turned back to Rita and offered her the knife in my hand. "Want to try?"

She smiled. "Why not?"

"You can play for me against Jessie." I stood up and went to the front of the raft. "Your turn," I told Jessie. "We're teaching Rita to play so she's in for me this round."

Jessie nodded and I took the rod from her.

Rita caught on quickly. After just three rounds, she had developed a strategy that beat Jessie, Isaac, and I one after the other. About an hour after we had begun, Toby woke up and wanted in. After a while, our game evolved from a nine square board to a sixteen square board and then continued to grow from there. Soon, almost the entire deck was covered with boards and brackets. It was clear that we had all been desperate for something to take our minds off of the horrors of the previous days because we became completely absorbed in our tic tac toe tournament.