Free In Too Deep by Coert Voorhees

wiping the liquid from the meat of his hand. “Cut her off!”
    It was midnight by the time we finally took a taxi back to the hotel. Katy was drunk enough that she didn’t talk to me, which was fine. I collapsed into bed. It might not have been the Presidente InterContinental, but the sheets were clean, and I fell into a deep sleep almost the moment my head touched the pillow.
    Less than an hour later, I awoke to a fierce pounding at the door.

TEN
    “ A nnie and Katy!” Alvarez yelled between knocks. “Wake up and get dressed. I need everyone at Tango Divers in five minutes.”
    He moved on to the boys’ room and pounded some more. He knew everything—I was sure of it. He’d probably already called my parents, who were probably already on their way down here.
    “Katy,” I said, shaking her. “Wake up!”
    I heard Nate’s groggy voice through the walls. “Go to hell!”
    “No thanks,” Alvarez said with a laugh. “Be at the dive shop in five minutes—no, make that four.”
    “What’s going on?” Katy said, rubbing her eyes.
    “He must have followed us,” I whispered. “He must have known exactly what we were doing.”
    Katy waved me away as if I had BO, which I totally didn’t.
    “Please shut up. Please.” She shuffled to her drawer and threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I did the same. We met up with Nate and Josh outside our room and trundled silently across the street like a quartet on death row.
    Just as we reached the door of the dive shop, I leaned over and whispered, “Josh, what—”
    “You need to keep your mouth shut, Annie,” Nate said.
    Alvarez and Wayo sat with their arms crossed in the plastic chairs next to the corner table, which was now covered with a gray beach towel. The only lighting came from two exposed bulbs in the middle of the ceiling. We stood before them in a police lineup.
    Say nothing, say nothing, say nothing, I reminded myself. I pretended to look around the shop, but my eyes were tracking Alvarez the whole time. He pushed himself to his feet and walked toward us with his arms dangling at his sides.
    He was doing one of those torture scenes where the interrogator rolls out a tray of rusty instruments, the wheels squeaking on the stained linoleum floor, and lets his silence make the pitiful victim crack.
    “We have to get some things out in the open.” Now he was pacing in front of us like a drill sergeant.
    All I could think about was my mom and dad. The disappointment on their faces. Where did we go wrong? they’d say to each other. Tears were welling up in my eyes so that I almost couldn’t see Alvarez as he turned back toward the table. A single drop broke free and rolled down my cheek.
    “Get a hold of yourself,” Katy whispered through clenched teeth.
    Alvarez grabbed the towel and yanked it off the table with a flourish. His change in mood was so unexpected that it gave me an excuse to rub the tears from my eyes. I waited for the lecture, but it didn’t come. For some reason, we’d been given a stay of execution. I stepped closer.
    “I may not have been completely honest with you guys about why I wanted to come down here,” Alvarez said.
    The table was covered with maps and charts, some of which were new color printouts while others were clearly hundreds of years old. In addition to the documents I recognized as de la Torre’s journal, there were others. Photocopies of the Spanish calligraphy with corresponding translations.
    “You had the English version already?” I said, picking up a page of the journal to reveal an ancient map of the Yucatán Peninsula. “You could have saved us a lot of time.”
    I tore my eyes away from the table just long enough to see that everyone was either drunk and tired, or as confused as I was, or a combination of all three.
    “This was not part of my plan,” Alvarez said. “You were supposed to do your volunteer work, get your credit. Those of you who cheated would have your slates wiped clean. But when