Patrol when I got done but I was in no shape to suit up and go swimming. Dad said nothing and did it all by himself. I guess it wasn't that big a deal - he's been caring for these fish long before I got here. I was back at the Grill again the following day.
After about a week, I had the process down. It was still hot and miserable but even hot, miserable jobs can be fun. Good jobs have you focused on what you're doing. A bad job makes you focus on what you can get away with. If there was a 'Good Job' out here, you better believe they weren't wasting it on me. We would take turns hosing off the deck with a saltwater hose but Jeb stopped this after our fifth hose fight. We started had impromptu snowball wars with the leftovers from the shaved ice bin. When girls would cruise by, we'd try and talk with them - we kept score on numbers, email addresses and anything that suggested we might get past first base.
The girl operation was pretty simple - between the two of us we had a sex appeal factor of zero and thus it was more of an obnoxious extreme sport. We thought up the weirdest pickup lines and then dared each other to use them. Some girls laughed, some tried to slap us. I tried one on this hot white chick who was a few years older than us and here visiting with her boyfriend. He got mad and then tried to pick a fight with me after the grill shut. Jeb saw what was going on but refused to give me up.
"If you catch him, he's yours," he said and it was all I needed to hear. The guy had just arrived and it was nothing to lose him in the colony - after you leave the gangplank there's eighteen ways to hide and it just goes from there. I guess you could say that I was learning the lay of the land out here. The guy was a retard, though. He showed up the next day to start some trouble but Jeb told him that the offer expired at midnight.
We ran out of propane for the grills one Tuesday but Jeb refused to let us leave early. Riley had screwed up the cash register and he was pissed off about it. Neither one of us were allowed to go. I was bored out of my mind and re-reading a 20-year-old hunting magazine when I heard something scuffle behind me.
"Heads up!"
I looked up just in time to get a raw squid slapped across my face. The gooey, briny mass slithered off my face and landed on the deck. I immediately stuck my face out of the nearby window and started dry-heaving. Sometimes I kid like that but not this time - I really lost my lunch.
Pranks grew crazier and weirder over time. The only rule we had was: don't get caught. If you get caught, you're on your own - we both agreed to not narc on each other. Riley built a launcher out of some surgical tubing and we'd find leftover fish or other disgusting junk to send out over the water. This led to a formal complaint from the Phoenix after two boats reported being pelted with rotting fish.
The more stuff we screwed up on, the angrier Jeb got and the angrier he got, the harder we laughed. Behind his back, that is. Jeb would yell at me, yell at Riley and then yell to my Dad who either ignored Jeb or made me sleep in the cold on the top deck, whichever one he felt like. He yelled at me but he refused to fire me. I didn't understand why until later.
I was finishing up with scraping the grill one afternoon when Riley appeared. All that crap that builds up on the flat cooking surface of our grill filled a 5-gallon bucket by the end of the day. It was every bit as disgusting as you can imagine.
"I have an idea," he announced. Reaching into the bucket of greasy, sooty junk that I just scraped, he grabbed a handful and started painting his face with it. I stared at him - had he finally snapped?
"Now, you," he said. I thought to myself: Why not? I took some and started gingerly dabbing it onto my face, but Riley shook his head. "No, you gotta get serious." He took a handful of sooty grease and smeared it across my forehead.
I gagged on the smell. It was completely nauseating. "That's
After about a week, I had the process down. It was still hot and miserable but even hot, miserable jobs can be fun. Good jobs have you focused on what you're doing. A bad job makes you focus on what you can get away with. If there was a 'Good Job' out here, you better believe they weren't wasting it on me. We would take turns hosing off the deck with a saltwater hose but Jeb stopped this after our fifth hose fight. We started had impromptu snowball wars with the leftovers from the shaved ice bin. When girls would cruise by, we'd try and talk with them - we kept score on numbers, email addresses and anything that suggested we might get past first base.
The girl operation was pretty simple - between the two of us we had a sex appeal factor of zero and thus it was more of an obnoxious extreme sport. We thought up the weirdest pickup lines and then dared each other to use them. Some girls laughed, some tried to slap us. I tried one on this hot white chick who was a few years older than us and here visiting with her boyfriend. He got mad and then tried to pick a fight with me after the grill shut. Jeb saw what was going on but refused to give me up.
"If you catch him, he's yours," he said and it was all I needed to hear. The guy had just arrived and it was nothing to lose him in the colony - after you leave the gangplank there's eighteen ways to hide and it just goes from there. I guess you could say that I was learning the lay of the land out here. The guy was a retard, though. He showed up the next day to start some trouble but Jeb told him that the offer expired at midnight.
We ran out of propane for the grills one Tuesday but Jeb refused to let us leave early. Riley had screwed up the cash register and he was pissed off about it. Neither one of us were allowed to go. I was bored out of my mind and re-reading a 20-year-old hunting magazine when I heard something scuffle behind me.
"Heads up!"
I looked up just in time to get a raw squid slapped across my face. The gooey, briny mass slithered off my face and landed on the deck. I immediately stuck my face out of the nearby window and started dry-heaving. Sometimes I kid like that but not this time - I really lost my lunch.
Pranks grew crazier and weirder over time. The only rule we had was: don't get caught. If you get caught, you're on your own - we both agreed to not narc on each other. Riley built a launcher out of some surgical tubing and we'd find leftover fish or other disgusting junk to send out over the water. This led to a formal complaint from the Phoenix after two boats reported being pelted with rotting fish.
The more stuff we screwed up on, the angrier Jeb got and the angrier he got, the harder we laughed. Behind his back, that is. Jeb would yell at me, yell at Riley and then yell to my Dad who either ignored Jeb or made me sleep in the cold on the top deck, whichever one he felt like. He yelled at me but he refused to fire me. I didn't understand why until later.
I was finishing up with scraping the grill one afternoon when Riley appeared. All that crap that builds up on the flat cooking surface of our grill filled a 5-gallon bucket by the end of the day. It was every bit as disgusting as you can imagine.
"I have an idea," he announced. Reaching into the bucket of greasy, sooty junk that I just scraped, he grabbed a handful and started painting his face with it. I stared at him - had he finally snapped?
"Now, you," he said. I thought to myself: Why not? I took some and started gingerly dabbing it onto my face, but Riley shook his head. "No, you gotta get serious." He took a handful of sooty grease and smeared it across my forehead.
I gagged on the smell. It was completely nauseating. "That's
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