Girl Underwater Read Online Free PDF

lapping the shore. The temperature, too, is mild for November, although that can change. I don’t know where we are, but I hope it’s a small state park a few short miles from suburbia. I hope to God it isn’t the Rockies.
    â€œHere okay?” Colin stops and looks up. The brush is tangled and thick, overgrown with moss and spidery vines. The trees beyond it seem to stretch toward an infinite sky. If it rains—or, worse, snows—we might at least avoid the brunt of the storm.
    We assemble a few fallen branches and leaves and huddle together. The bark of these towering pines is roughly calloused, but the naturalness of it makes me feel better for some reason. Like it’s us against the world, and these trees are our allies.
    â€œI thought it would be colder,” I say.
    He tosses a few pine needles, gauging the wind. “Strange for this time of year here.”
    â€œWhere?”
    He looks down at his fingernails, caked with grit. His silence says it all: He doesn’t want to tell me.
    â€œWhat time did we crash?”
    â€œA little after one A.M. , Pacific time.”
    â€œSo we’re in the Rockies somewhere.”
    His answer comes after some hesitation. “Most likely.”
    I wrap my arms around my torso and rub my shoulders hard enough to bruise the skin. It’s going to get colder. Snowier.
    Worse.
    Our clothes are soaked. No wind right now, but that could change. The boys may not survive a frigid night in an alpine wilderness. I start to suggest moving into the woods for shelter, but one glance in that direction makes me uneasy.
    â€œWe should build a fire,” I say.
    â€œA fire?” Colin looks skeptical. “With what?”
    â€œAspen.” I clear my throat to summon some authority. “Rope, if we can find some. Shoelaces might work.”
    â€œHave you done this before?”
    Yes
, I’m embarrassed to admit. My father didn’t take us camping for fun. He took us camping—and hiking, and climbing, and rafting—“to learn something.”
    I nod.
    â€œWow,” he says.
    â€œIt’s not easy,” I rush on. “Not like they do it in the movies.”
    â€œIt never is,” he says teasingly.
    â€œWe need something sharp, though. A knife would be ideal.”
    â€œI’m guessing you didn’t carry any contraband onto the flight?”
    â€œNope.”
    â€œI have something,” the oldest boy says. He unfolds his fingers to reveal a sliver of his shattered iPad. “It’s sharp.”
    I don’t want to take it from him—
Hasn’t he lost enough?
—but he forces the shard of plastic into my hands.
    â€œThis is perfect,” I say, and he grins.
    The forest is a haven for aspens, so finding a suitable spindle isn’t a problem. The baseboard looks good, and thanks to dry weather, the kindling should work. No rope, but the boys are quick to surrender their shoelaces, and I use them to make a bow.
    Colin and the boys look on, fascinated.
If this fails . . .
    I try not to think about the consequences of failure. This will work. It
has
to work.
    When I did this with my father, my brothers and I had a knife. We had daylight. And if we failed, if the fire didn’t start, we got a lecture and then tried again. If we failed again, then someone whipped out a match and that was that.
    In this case, our knife is a piece of plastic, and it doesn’t take kindly to molding wood. Even after multiple attempts to sharpen the drill, it barely fits into the baseboard. It’s a cumbersome task, even with the bow, which makes it easier to spin the drill. I force it back and forth, back and forth, thinking,
Friction, friction, friction,
as if the thought itself will ignite a spark.
    Sweat pours off my nose onto the wood, which makes matters worse. The younger boys are whimpering. The older boy’s excitement has faded to a palpable anxiety.
    â€œHere,” Colin says, and