Surrounded by Sharks Read Free Page A

was the boat last night?”
    “One million pounds!” he said.
    Her mom gave him a swat.
    Her parents held hands and looked out at the water. Drew clasped her own hands together as a joke, but there was no one to appreciate her humor. She kicked at a seashell with her flip-flop. She was wearing a parentally approved combo of shorts and a light T-shirt. (“You can’t just go walking around in your bathing suit all day,” her mom had said. “You’re English!”) Even as early as it was here, she already felt the sun on her arms and legs. At least she’d get a tan. Those were hard to come by in Knutsford.
    She looked out to sea, too, but it all sort of seemed the same to her. She tried the island side, and there, sitting up against the trunk of a palm tree, was another boy. This one looked older, almost her age. He was somewhat tan, too, but she thought it might be the natural kind with him. He was in the shade and reading a book, after all.
    He raised his head as she passed, but looked down quickly when he saw her.
    Quiet as a church mouse, that one , she thought. He’ll be no fun at all .
    Her parents didn’t even notice him. They’d just spotted the bar.

Davey stood up and brushed the sand from his butt. He was just going to have to move if there were going to be English people running all over the place. It was distracting. He’d heard enough to identify their accents and not much more. He had a pretty solid grasp of English accents from PBS.
    This family didn’t have the posh accents from Downton Abbey (his mom’s favorite show). They sounded more like some of the characters on Mystery! (his dad’s). And by some of the characters, he meant the criminals. And the guy who played Gimli the Dwarf in the Lord of the Rings movies. He didn’t think they were really criminals, the way the parents held hands and joked around. And they definitely weren’t dwarves.
    The problem — the distraction — was their daughter. At least he assumed it was their daughter. Whatever branch of the family tree she fell off of, her T-shirt was so light that he could see her bathing suit right through it. Or, wait … was that her bra ?
    Yep, waaaaay too distracting. Their voices had faded away at this point, but he figured they’d be back. Or someone else would, probably wearing a tiny bikini or something else that would make it impossible for him to concentrate on reading his book. Plus, he was sitting, like, twenty yards from the bar stand. What if it opened up and he got drunk on the fumes? It seemed possible. He knew from science class that alcoholic solutions were prone to evaporation. He took a deep breath as he started walking back toward the pathway. The air did smell a little different. Was that the ocean or just a whole mess of rum? Man, he’d be in trouble then. Stumbling back into the hotel room completely blitzed on alcohol vapors.
    He’d be in trouble anyway. He’d realized that right around the time he’d fully woken up, just outside the hotel door. One of his parents was going to wake up and see that he wasn’t there. Then that one would wake up the other one so they could both have a mutual parental freak-out about it. He rehearsed possible excuses in his head:
    “I was just sooo excited to get started on our awesome vacation!”
    “I saw a beached whale from the window and went out to help.”
    “Brando was farting.”
    He didn’t think any of those would cut it, so to speak. He tried to think of others, but the best he could come up with was: “Where was I going to go? It’s a frickin’ island!”
    It was hopeless. He was thinking about that girl again. He wondered what her name was. Had they said it, in their criminal dwarfen accents? The only thing he remembered them calling her was “luv.” And if he called her that, he’d straight up get smacked.
    Luv … Now there’s something he didn’t hear in his family, not anymore. He picked at that thought for a bit until he saw the next family. They