Diana Peterfreund - Rites of Spring (Break)

“When I said I’d smash the Nazi plates in the tomb for you?”

“A lover’s token?” I said with a little laugh.

“Yeah, but for that kind of vandalism, I’d expect a lover’s reward.” Now he laughed, too, right before he got serious again. “I wish it could be easy, Amy. I do.”

I nodded, slowly.

“Sorry.”

Not as sorry as I was.

The rest of the evening passed with relatively little drama. Whatever affliction my fellow knights had suffered, it was entirely gone by the time they were back from their showers, and everyone was in high spirits again. There was even talk of returning to the crescent beach and actually doing the stunt, but as soon as we surveyed the damage to the costumes, we nixed that idea flat.

Good thing, too, because apparently Ben and Demetria hadn’t turned their faces over the side of the boat when they got sick. They said the sea monster was a real mess.

Instead, we settled into the couches of the rec room and sampled the meager offerings of Cavador Key’s video library. And I do mean video, as in VHS. Let’s put it this way: I had no idea that Steven Seagal made as many movies as he did.

“Are you kidding?” Demetria exclaimed, pushing the first into the ancient VCR. “He’s a legend! He’s an eco-warrior!”

“And a vegetarian Buddhist,” Kevin added.

“And so not as hot in real life,” Odile said.

Everyone stared at her.

“Well, he’s like sixty now,” she said in her own defense.

“And not hot…like ever!” Clarissa pointed out.

Jenny looked at the screen, tilted her head to the side, and made a noncommittal grunt. I noticed she was sitting next to Harun, their shoulders all but touching, and began to feel some of that jealousy Clarissa had mentioned.

Wait a second…vegetarian? Wasn’t Poe one as well? I’d certainly seen vegetarian cookbooks in his apartment last fall, and I’d never actually seen him eat a piece of meat. When we’d gone out for pizza that time, I’d been the one to try the white clam, while he’d stuck with tomato, basil, and mozzarella on his slices. Furthermore, for all Malcolm’s talk of spearguns, I never got the impression that Poe had taken part in bringing in the catch.

And yet, he said he’d eaten “just as much lobster as the next person.” Either he ate seafood after all or…he was lying.

The only question was, why?

I didn’t sleep well that night. Every time a twig snapped in the woods, I was sure it was the vandals, back to finish the job on our cabin. Anytime one of my cabinmates rustled on her bunk, I was positive I was in for another round of bearing witness to their retching. And every time I started to drift back into unconsciousness, a single thought nagged at me: Poe had lied.

He’d fed me this big lecture about how I wasn’t being fair to him, and all along, he’d been handing out bullshit of his own. He’d lied before, too, whenever it worked in his favor. Keeping secret his pact with Gehry, going all over town to help me find Jenny, without ever once admitting that he wanted to find her to see what she knew about Elysion. He did it so smoothly that I hadn’t caught him in the act until it was way too late.

But what would he gain by lying about eating lobster? What was the point? It made no sense. If he wanted to prove that all the lobster wasn’t contaminated, he could have pointed out that Malcolm and Myer had eaten it, too, not to mention several other patriarchs.

There was another rustle from the vicinity of the bushes outside, and I rolled over and pulled my pillow on top of my head. That sounded way too big to be a night bird or a reptile. Were there raccoons on this island, or had Salt taken that “night patrol” suggestion to heart? Maybe it was the people from the other island. If so, I wished they would keep it down. Vandalism was one thing, but the least the intruders could do was let me get a good night’s sleep.

At breakfast the next morning, I watched carefully to see if Poe added any bacon to his plate (he didn’t). There was, however, milk in his coffee and he seemed to have no problem downing a pile of scrambled eggs. But all that meant was that he wasn’t a vegan.

And perhaps that I watched him a tad too much.

The members of my club were famished, seeing as how they’d all emptied their stomachs the previous evening. The Myers were back at their table, pointedly ignoring the students. They’d even placed their luggage between their table and our own, like a monument to their affronted attitude. Demetria merely rolled her eyes when she saw it. In her opinion, she had informed us that morning, folks get one chance to apologize. Kadie’s had been when she offered us lobster. Demetria’s had been last night, when she tried to explain that they hadn’t thrown it all up on purpose. When Kadie didn’t accept, the gauntlet had been tossed.

“What did you do,” Jenny asked. “Drill holes in their hull?”

But Demetria wouldn’t tell us. “Don’t want you implicated in my crimes, chicas ,” she said with a wink.

“Ten bucks, she slipped a snake in Kadie’s toiletry bag,” Clarissa said.

But if Demetria had left the cabin this morning, I hadn’t seen it. As I said, I was up almost all night.

All during breakfast, Kadie Myer spoke in whispers to another patriarch’s wife.

“Talking about us, I assume?” Clarissa muttered into my ear.

“No,” Jenny said, in a voice almost too low to hear. “Shhh…” She pulled out her Sidekick and started typing away. It took the rest of us a moment to understand she was transcribing:

K: Thy ddnt evn no whr ther son ws. F he ws evn in house.

O: No!

K: Gry ws thr, lukin v ragged + strnge. Lk he ws on drugs.

O: Lk wife?

K: Xact. I sed thr ws prob w/food, ws D OK? Wife ddnt luk 4 hm. Sed daren? lk she ddnt no who he ws.

O: Thrs sumfin rely f* up w/thm.

K: U sed it! Thn ltl grl went upsters 2 chk, cme bk sed he ws n bed sic.

O: Wht parnts do?

K: Lukd releevd.

“How can you understand them?” Clarissa whispered. “How can you even hear them?”

Jenny just rolled her eyes and kept typing. They looked relieved that their son was ill? What kind of parents were the Gehrys? Or were they merely relieved that he was in his bed, since apparently, prior to that, they hadn’t the slightest clue. Poor kid. No wonder he’d been vying for attention all week. He certainly wasn’t getting enough at home. “Appointments” with his father, indeed!

Jenny’s uncanny sense of hearing further revealed that the inside of the cottage was relatively neat, with a few exceptions. The couch in the living room was a mass of bedclothes. “Someone’s not sleeping in their bed,” Kadie mocked, in a voice loud enough for all of us to hear.

Around this time, I excused myself from the table to get another grapefruit half off the sideboard. I think I’d miss the citrus when I left Florida. My timing sucked, however, and I found myself reaching for the sugar canister at the same time as Poe, who’d come for a coffee refill. His fingers closed around the glass a split second before mine. Our thumbs almost brushed.

“Good morning,” he said.

I kept my eyes glued to the sweetener packets. Maybe I should just grab a few Splenda and call it even.

He held the sugar out to me. “Ladies first.”