Free The Raft by S. A. Bodeen

a pounding headache. My thirst was becoming unbearable.
    I pinched a piece of skin on the back of my hand and let go. The skin stayed up, in a little mound, before slowly going back.
    Sick.
    Normally, if you pinch the skin on your hand like that, it springs back immediately. But when you’re dehydrated it’ll stay up, take longer to bounce back.
    I pinched the back of Max’s hand. I had to turn away when I saw his skin took longer to settle than mine had. So much longer.
    Although, maybe he was always like that. I had no way of knowing.
    I was stuck on a raft with a person I knew hardly anything about. I wondered if being there with someone I knew would have been easier. But there were plenty of adults I knew that I most definitely would not want to be stuck on a raft with.
    I had my own theories about adults. Mostly, they fell into two categories. The first, the ones I called the Regurgitators, think you want to know everything about them. Even when they ask you a question, like “So what do you like to do?” they still find a way to turn it around and make it about themselves.
    The second are the Hoovers, they keep asking and asking and asking about you, sucking you dry of every bit of your life story.
    Of course, some adults ask and tell equally.
    “Max, where are you from?” I waited a moment, but he didn’t answer.
    And then there are people like Max. I put him in the couldn’t-give-a-crap category. I knew he was injured and maybe sick, but still …
    Max didn’t seem shy. He didn’t seem to care what I was doing on the plane without my parents, why I lived out in Midway, none of that.
    Maybe I was being mean, since he did save my life. But I was stuck in a raft with him. And I was beginning to think he might be the last person I ever talked to.
    There were a few things I could figure out on my own. He was a pilot. He was definitely new in the G-1 job, and he probably just got his pilot’s license in the last few years. And he had to go to some kind of aviation school to do that, so he must be smart. Pilots had to know math and physics and other difficult subjects.
    He probably had a girlfriend. No ring, so no wife. Although he could have lost it or maybe just didn’t wear it. Or he could be divorced. There really wasn’t any way to tell much at all. Which brought me back to the silver thumbprint. It had to belong to a girl. A girl that meant enough to Max that he wore her print around his neck.
    My eyes went to the ditty bag and that spiral notebook with handwriting in it. A journal? Max didn’t seem like the journaling type.
    Just as I was seriously thinking about invading his privacy, he moved. “That’s mine,” he said.
    “I know, sorry.” I didn’t want to hand him the bag. If he hadn’t seen me freaking out in the water over the Skittles, he’d only have to look in the bag to see they were gone and then he’d know what I’d done. So I put it back in the corner of the raft.
    “It’s my journal.”
    “I didn’t read it.” It was the truth; I couldn’t feel guilty about that.
    “What do you want to know?”
    Was he going to open up and actually talk about himself? I shrugged. “I’m not nosy, I just … I mean, we’re stuck here, together, and it’s weird I don’t know anything about you really. Like where you’re from.”
    He shrugged. “I don’t like to talk about where I’m from. People have a way of making you feel stupid when you aren’t from somewhere they’ve heard of. Like being from a city everyone knows about makes you better than other people.”
    I nodded. “Sometimes I feel that way too. No one has even been to where I’m from.”
    “I’m not from anywhere that anyone has ever heard of. I grew up on a ranch in the high desert of eastern Oregon, middle of flippin’ nowhere. Nearest Walmart was two hours away.”
    I rolled my eyes. “I’ve got that beat. On Midway, my nearest Walmart is thousands of miles away.”
    “Our town was okay. Not much there,