Free On the Island by Tracey Garvis Graves

stuck out of the sand, the pincer opening and closing. We ran out of the water.
    “I’ll grab my sweatshirt,” he said.
    “Hurry, it’s trying to bury itself.”
    T.J. returned in record time, wrapped his sweatshirt around the crab, and pulled it out of the sand. We went back to the lean-to and T.J. shook it out onto the fire.
    “Oh God,” I said, thinking for a second about the crab’s violent demise.
    I got over it fast.
    We cracked the legs with the pliers from the toolbox, gorging ourselves. The crabmeat—even without hot melted butter—tasted better than anything I’d eaten since we’d been on the island. Now that we knew where they buried themselves, T.J. and I would have to check the shoreline daily. I was so tired of fish, coconut, and breadfruit that I could hardly choke them down sometimes, and adding crabmeat would provide a little variety, something that was desperately lacking in our diet.
    When the crab was nothing more than a pile of split shells, I took the blanket out of the life raft and spread it under the coconut tree. We stretched out next to each other. The shade from the tree helped keep us cool during the hottest part of the day, and it had become our favorite place to nap.
    A big, creepy, hairy spider—its body the size of a quarter—crawled lazily across T.J.’s shoulder and I flicked it off him with my finger. “That one even freaked me out,” I said.
    T.J. shuddered. He hated spiders, always shaking our blanket out, checking for them before he put it back in the life raft. Personally, I hated snakes. I’d already stepped on one and the only thing that kept me from being completely traumatized was the fact that I was wearing my tennis shoes. I hated to think about stepping on one barefoot; whether or not they might be poisonous was too stressful to think about.
    I thought T.J. had already fallen asleep, but then he said, “What do you think’s gonna happen to us, Anna?” His voice sounded drowsy.
    “I don’t know. I think we just keep doing what we’re doing and try to hold on until someone finds us.”
    “We’re not doing too bad,” T.J. said, rolling over onto his stomach. “I bet that would surprise a lot of people.”
    “It surprises me.” My full stomach was making me drowsy, too. “It’s not like we had a choice, T.J. We either figured it out or we died.”
    T.J. lifted his head off the blanket and looked at me with a contemplative expression. “Do you think they had funerals for us back home?”
    “Yes.” The thought of our families holding memorials hurt so much that I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself to sleep, hoping to escape the images of a crowded church, an empty altar, and my parents’ tearstained faces.
    After our nap we gathered firewood, an endless, tedious chore. We kept the fire burning constantly, partly so T.J. wouldn’t have to make a new one and partly because we both still held out hope that a plane would fly overhead. When it did, we’d be ready, our pile of green leaves sending up smoke signals as soon as we threw them on the flames.
    We added the firewood to the pile in the lean-to. Then I filled the container that had held the life raft with seawater, added a capful of Woolite, and swished our dirty clothes around in it.
    “It must be laundry day,” T.J. said.
    “Yep.”
    We strung a rope between two trees and hung the clothes to dry. We didn’t have much; T.J. wore shorts and nothing else. I spent my days in a bikini, sleeping in his T-shirt and a pair of shorts at night.
    Later that night, after dinner, T.J. asked if I wanted to play cards.
    “Poker?”
    He laughed. “What, you didn’t get your ass kicked enough last time?”
    T.J. had taught me how to play, but I wasn’t very good. At least, that’s what he thought. I was starting to get the hang of it, and I was about to take him down.
    Six hands later—I won four—he said, “Huh, I must be having an off night. Want to play checkers instead?”
    “Okay.”
    He