I coughed, scrambled to my feet, and splashed him back. “I call foul!”
He splashed me again, angling his palm against the water to produce maximum effect.
“Not fair!” I cried, pushing water back at him. “You’ve had a lot more practice than me.”
“You can say that again.” He placed his fist on the surface and squeezed, sending a cunning little stream right at me. I hopped, and splashed back, but my own waves fell short.
Poe kept advancing, both fists now squirting jets of water in tandem.
“Stop!” I cried, laughing and wading away as fast as my feet would take me. But Poe was quicker, and then he leapt for me and we both went under.
I held my breath this time, and when he pulled me to the surface moments later, I wasn’t coughing at all.
“There,” he said, wrapping his arms around my waist as we bobbed. “You can do it.”
I pulled him close. Amazing how much less afraid of water I was when it became my preferred make-out spot.
Since we planned to put on the pageant before sunset (“The better to let them see us with, my dears,” as Odile said), the club of D177 congregated in the main house for an early dinner. The Myers were there, of course, presiding over their seafood feast, and some of the other patriarchs showed up to enjoy the atmosphere as well as the drawn butter. Salt was in a great mood, and Malcolm and Poe convinced him to whip up a batch of his apparently infamous Bahama rum punch, which tasted strongly of Campari and dyed red the lips and tongue of anyone who tasted it.
“Watch out for these,” Poe whispered to me on the sly, as I finished my first serving. “They’re sweet and you can drink them like water, but there’s a reason they call it ‘punch.’”
“Party pooper,” I said, reaching for the almost empty pitcher. I refilled my glass with the dregs.
“I’ll get more!” Darren volunteered, laying down his fork and grabbing the pitcher out of my hands.
“Good pretriarch,” George said, and ripped into another tail. We’d invited Darren to join our table for dinner, since he’d given us so much help with the preparations for the skit.
A few minutes later he returned and grabbed his own glass first.
“Uh, uh, uh,” Jenny said, lifting the filled-to-the-brim pitcher out of his hands. “The last thing we need is to get in trouble with your folks.”
“Any more than we already are?” Clarissa said. “Let the poor kid have a drink.”
“Yeah,” said Odile. “Drinking ages are for wussies. It’s not like he’s about to get in a car or anything. There’s no safer place to experiment.”
But Jenny handed the pitcher off to Ben, on her other side, and Darren watched it make the rounds without him getting so much as a taste.
I just rolled my eyes and sipped (carefully!) at my drink. Interesting flavor, but I think I preferred the tang of our official drink, the 312, to the bitter/sweet taste of the punch. Darren pouted for a few moments, then brightened when George sneaked him a flask and a can of Coke.
Thus fulfilling our quota of illegal activities for the evening, we settled down to dinner. I dug into my blackened snapper and watched Ben and Clarissa have a lobster-cleaning contest (Ben won, but admitted he was still ashamed at the trouncing he’d received from Demetria on the tennis court that afternoon).
As the mountain of seafood dwindled and the bottle of Campari started running low, we all drank a toast to our providers, Malcolm, Poe, and the Myers, and packed up for the hike out to the crescent beach. It was decided that Ben and Demetria would take the skiff out around the island, since I wasn’t yet comfortable enough around water to play navigator. I’d only get in the rowboat once they’d pulled it into the relatively shallow zone of the lagoon.
So off we went, into the gathering Florida dusk. The roar of crickets and other insects in the woods drowned out the sound of the waves from the nearby shoreline. I kept my eyes turned toward the treetops, hoping for another glimpse of the ospreys, but we were all making too much noise for them to show themselves.
Odile had a steady lecture going as we walked. “And then, Kevin, you have to make sure to angle the sword so it gets the light of the sun, or they won’t be able to see it. You don’t need to move fast—it’s more for looks than any—” She froze, covered her mouth with her hand, and gagged, shoulders convulsing so hard that she lost her balance and fell to her knees on the path, gasping as she began to vomit into the bushes.
Moments later, everyone else joined her.
17. Suspicions
There were several occasions, during the horrible quarter of an hour that followed, that I thought I, too, was going to be sick to my stomach. Projectile vomiting is not something anyone can watch with impunity. I almost lost my cookies just from listening to them.
Eventually, they recovered enough to stagger back to the main house. The skit was clearly off, even if half of our costumes hadn’t been ruined in the deluge.
Oh. Ick. Amy… Would it be okay if I just skipped the details? Suffice to say I can go a long, long time without seeing anything like that again. Or hearing it. Or…smelling it.
“Food poisoning,” I gasped out to Salt as I deposited my last semiconscious fellow knight on the porch. “I think they all need water. Or Gatorade. Or something.”
Actually, I thought they all needed to be airlifted back to the mainland to have what was left inside their stomachs pumped.
Why hadn’t I gotten sick? True, I’d stuck to the snapper rather than the spiny lobster, my Midwestern roots expressing horror at the idea of eating things with obvious eyes.[12] But still, every single lobster would have had to have been contaminated.
Harun was standing there, shaking his head at the carnage before him. He looked ill, to be sure, but then again, I bet I hardly looked the picture of health myself at that moment. Had he gotten sick?
“How do you feel?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Sympathetic dry heaves. I can’t stand watching people throw up. Otherwise…fine.” He met my gaze and we spoke in unison. “What did you eat?”
Frank and Kadie Myer appeared on the porch, aghast at the sight before them. “What happened?” the patriarch asked in dismay.
“Your seafood, that’s what,” George replied, rolling onto his side. “Christ, what did you do? Ferment that shit in a shed?”
“How dare you!” Kadie cried, stepping forward (but not, I noted, near enough to be in smelling distance). “We had those fish in ice the moment we caught them! Why do you blame everything that happens to you on someone else?”
“Specifically, on us,” Frank said. “I’m getting sick and tired of the prejudice this club harbors against its patriarchs.”
Clarissa moaned. In the distance, I saw two more figures emerging out of the dark. Demetria and Ben, arms wrapped around each other for support, heaving their way up the path.[13]
Poe and Malcolm arrived on the scene soon after, looking none the worse for wear. “What happened?” my big sib asked, while Poe pulled the seething Myers aside and began talking to them in low voices.
“You don’t want to know,” I said, almost gagging at the thought. “Disgustingly vicious food poisoning.”
Salt arrived with a giant pitcher of water and a stack of paper cups and we set upon rehydrating the troops. Luckily, the worst seemed to have passed. No one was looking green anymore, and there were no more relapses into uncontrolled…well, you know.
“Did anyone else eat the shellfish?” I asked. “Have you spoken to the other patriarchs?”
“Darren,” Odile rasped. “Someone check on Darren.”
“I’ll go,” Kadie said with a dismissive sniff. “You people smell like trash anyway.”
“Don’t be long, honey,” Frank called after her. “We’re leaving first thing tomorrow morning.” Poe looked as if he was about to say something, but Frank stopped him. “No,” he said. “I mean it. I’m sick of this. We have done everything we could for these bitches, bent over backward, humbled ourselves like you wouldn’t believe, and they still treat us like we’re somehow the enemy. I’m not going to stand here and be accused of things again and I’m certainly not going to let you keep insulting my wife like this. It’s disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves. And that goes for you, too, James. Where’s your pride? You should be ashamed of tapping a club of Diggers such as these.” And then he stormed off.
12
The confessor can do tails alone, but add the entire body, complete with green tomalley, and the deal is off.