Alabaster Island

Chapter 2

The next day I woke up with a melody stuck in my head. A peculiar series of lilting notes that held a strange melancholy longing at their core. It wasn't an unfamiliar melody, but it was one I'd chosen to forget. Whether right or wrong, I associated it with Daniel's death.

My face lay pressed into the wool rug on the floor and my eyes were puffy from leftover tears. For a moment I felt disoriented. Then I remembered: today I had to put in a name. The boy I wanted to spend the rest of my days with.

Light streamed in through the five windows. Giant and wood framed, the windows looked out over our tiny island in every direction. To my left, past the runway, was the area where most of our community lived. Rows of twenty-eight gray, concrete buildings arranged around what used to be a military training complex in the 1970s. Now it was our town square. Tall palm trees shaded the area and provided us with as much coconut milk as we could drink. A gentle grade and a crumbling sidewalk led to our old dock.

I looked at the telescope and saw that I'd forgotten to move it back to its original position. Now I couldn't help but peek at what was going on this morning.

Marlow, our mayor, stood on the dock waving his hands at Kassandra. It took little to guess what they spoke of with such intensity. Every two months an old seaplane arrived with a hired pilot and his son. The plane brought canned goods and other essential items we couldn't make for ourselves. Batteries for our flashlights, sugar, salt and spices for flavor, other things too. But this month our supply plane hadn't arrived, and no one knew why. We were running low on many necessary items.

La la dee dee dee la la. Shut up. I told the melody. But it didn't stop.

Motion along the narrow path that led up to the lighthouse caught my attention. My friend, Ethan trudged up the rocky trail, an air of grim determination in his long, athletic stride. Yesterday he'd left me a note and asked to meet before Assembly but I didn't have a clue why.

Alabaster Island ran on predictable daily patterns and habits. Anything out of the ordinary made me edgy. Slowly, I walked around the circular room and touched the frames of the windows, once each, for luck in every direction. Downstairs I heard the sound of breakfast preparations and Ethan's knock at the door. I ran down the spiral stairs.

"None for me," I heard Ethan say. "I already ate."

Something must have been extremely wrong for Ethan to turn down my Dad's mango pancakes. Ethan could eat an entire chicken dinner, plus dessert and still have room for his favorite meal, breakfast.

"You have another tooth ache?" Mom asked Ethan as I entered. Mom laid out plates, including one for him, just in case.

"Tooth's better," Ethan said.

"That's because it's gone," Dad said as he walked in with a steaming plate. "But maybe you have a new culprit." Dad was our resident dentist and had yanked one of Ethan's molars two days prior.

Ethan shook his head. "I'd rather not lose another one."

We sat down at the table and had an awkward breakfast. Ethan pushed a pancake around his plate while making polite small-talk that sounded nothing like him. I didn't have much of an appetite either. When Mom and Dad stepped away, I asked Ethan if he was okay.

"No," he said, square jaw clenched, blue eyes conflicted with an emotion I couldn't read. "I'm not okay. We need to talk. Privately. Can we go now?"

I made an excuse about needing to get to Assembly early and we said our goodbyes.

***

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