Stranded by Don Prichard, Stephanie Prichard Page A

to not kick Betty in the face.
    “Stop! Please.” Beach, palm trees, and bright morning light flashed on and off around her like a blinking neon sign.
    Betty dropped Eve’s foot that she'd been massaging. “Am I hurting you?”
    “Yes!” Eve’s head spun. She jerked onto her elbows and turned her head just in time to retch onto the sand instead of on her shirt.
    “I’m sorry. What should I do?” Betty tottered to her feet, her voice shrill against Eve’s wobbling eardrums. 
    Eve’s breath jolted into her lungs and back out. Go. Just leave me alone. She collapsed onto her back and waited for the world to stop twirling.
    Betty squatted next to her, careful to avoid Eve’s vomit. “Would you like to sit up?”
    Eve gritted her teeth. Mother Teresa was not going to leave her alone. She grunted her assent.
    Betty gripped Eve’s bare shoulders, and white-hot vises clamped onto raw, tissue-thin skin. Eve shrieked.
    “Don’t worry, I’ve gotcha.” Betty tugged Eve upright and steadied her. “There you go.”
    Eve gasped and thrust stiffened arms to her sides. She peered at her sunburned shoulders sizzling with ten white ovals where Betty had grasped her.
    Was there any part of her that didn’t hurt? Top to bottom, inside and out, every cell in her body crackled with pain. There was no marrow in her bones. Only smoldering coals, glowing, pulsating, feeding off the tinder of her body.
    Crossing her legs in front of her, she tilted forward enough to free her hands and poke her big toe. She drew in a hissing breath. She might as well have used an ice pick.
    “How about some coconut juice?” Mother Teresa snatched away a hulled coconut from some ants in a fire brigade line and brushed them onto the sand. “Jake’s got a supply stacked here, but this one’s open.”
    Eve held out a trembling hand. She’d crunch an army of ants if that’s what it took to get moisture inside her.
    She lifted the nut to her mouth and took a sip. Her lips throbbed, but not like they had last night. The pinpricks in her fingertips were subdued too, almost gone. But the coconut juice pinched her stomach, and she gagged the last swallow back into her mouth. She spat it out and let the nut fall to the ground.
    Sleep. That was all she wanted, to curl up in the fetal position and let time nurse away her aches and pains.
    “Eve, you’re awake!” Crystal sped across the beach, arms outstretched, her path a direct collision course with Eve.
    Eve whimpered.
    Betty stepped between them and caught Crystal. “Careful, child. You don’t want to hurt her.”
    “Oh.” Crystal peeked around her aunt, the eagerness on her face shifting to uncertainty.
    Eve shammed a smile. “How about a rain check on that hug?”
    “Okay.” Crystal dropped onto the sand and sat cross-legged like Eve. “What happened to you? We woke up on the lighter and you were gone.”
    “I fell off. It’s as simple as that.”
    “Jake rescued you. You saved us, and then Jake saved you. He swam out and got you.”
    Eve glanced at Jake trudging barefoot toward them from the beach. He hadn’t told her that last night. Guilt punched another red-hot poker into her body. He’d saved her, but not his wife. She swallowed the ash in her throat. He must never, ever find out about her part in Ginny’s death.
    “Guess what? A snake bit Aunt Betty. See?” Crystal pulled up the hem of her aunt’s shorts to expose two red, puckered dots.
    Betty touched them with the tip of her finger. “It hurts, but at least the snake wasn’t poisonous.”
    Eve’s skin pricked into goose bumps. “I hate snakes.” She couldn’t even look at them in zoos. She did a three-hundred-sixty-degree scan. “Do they slither onto beaches?”
    “They’re more afraid of you than you are of them.” Jake grinned at her from where he stooped over a pile of four coconuts.
    Bile rose to the back of Eve’s throat. Her father used to say that, the same smirk on his face. “Which is precisely why it