Free Rainy Season by Adele Griffin Page A

backward a little from where he’d been hammering. I stand up, too, stretching out the crick in my back. It looks better than good; I can see the beginnings of a real war fort: two solid walls of rough-cut wood sunk tight into the ground over the skeleton box Ted, Dan, and Charlie had constructed. Mary Jane’s and my work has cleared the ground to a floor of solid dirt. Steph’s and Rat’s plywood door is sanded and hinged, ready to slot into place once the third side of the fort is put up.
    Ted looks up. “Time to go swimming.”
    “I could use the bath,” Dan announces. “I stink.”
    “So let’s get over to Miraflores.” Ted starts replacing scattered tools and nails into his toolbox. “Before it rains, right?” He pretends to pop Steph on the head with his hammer.
    “I’m ready. Pack up and ship out!” Steph’s voice is hard and fast enough to make us all remember why she wants to get going.
    I check Mary Jane for signs of nervousness. She’s kneeling on our new fort floor, spitting into her hands and scrubbing them together to wash off the grass and dirt stains, but doesn’t look scared about the tower or her jump. I bet she’s plotting her escape. That would be a pretty interesting, Nancy Drewish thing to do. Except that Nancy would already have jumped off the tower bravely and afterward laughed while shaking out her dampened curls.
    “Creo que va a llover.” Ted speaks to the sky. “Tengo mucho calor y estoy sudando.”
    “Huh?” Steph laughs and blinks her eyes at him. “Translation, please.”
    “Just that I wish it’d rain—I’m hot and bothered.” He ruffles his hair so that it stands up in spikes.
    Ted and his parents talk a lot in Spanish—they’re not like a lot of other Zonians, who only speak Spanish if they absolutely have to, and then use a flat American accent. That kind of Spanish sounds strange, though, like bad acting in a dubbed movie. It’s almost as if the Zonians are trying to insult the words while they speak them. Ted says the dialect makes Zonians feel more separate from the locals, more like Americans.
    “Ted Tie, Touch and Die!” Steph tries to give herself a man voice. She picks up Ted’s toolbox. “Ted, does that mean if I touch you, I’ll die?”
    “Only from ecstasy at my physique.” Ted flexes an arm, and then seizes his toolbox from her.
    “Oh right.” Steph laughs and draws her own bony self up to full height.
    Sometimes, especially when they aren’t arguing, the combination of Ted and Steph needles me. I’m always sort of half-waiting for the day those two decide they don’t like the rest of us. I could see Steph counting us off with her fingers— Dan’s too weak, Charlie’s too unstable, Lane’s too quiet, and Mary Jane’s too girly. Rat can be slow … Although Steph would never ever completely turn against Rat, she’s quick to dismiss him with her mean eyes and her teacher-talk.
    As we walk back to the truck, loaded like pack mules with scrap wood and tools, Mary Jane is suddenly at my elbow.
    “Lane, I was fixing to tell you something.” Her voice is secretive and I turn to look at her. She’s pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and finally I can see her face, pale and easy to read.
    “You never jumped, right?” I say.
    “No.”
    “That’s too bad.”
    “Think she’d push me off?” Mary Jane’s forehead puckers slightly as she frowns.
    “No way.” I watch Steph striding ahead, talking casually to Ted and Rat in a way that nevertheless looks like she’s giving orders. “But if I were you, I’d rather jump and hurt myself than not jump and—”
    “Yeah, I know. Have Steph on my back until we relocate.” Mary Jane cuts me off. “Don’t go gabbing about it to anyone, okay?”
    “I wouldn’t.”
    She brushes past me then, rushing to the front of the line as if suddenly she’s impatient to get the jump over and done with.

9
    T ED HAS THE RIGHT identification to use the dock and the Canal patrol skiff