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She frowns. “I have one in my bag.” She glances around. “Wherever that is. I think I left it on the floor before we crawled into the cabinets.”
“I think we need two, though.” I didn’t grow up on the seaboard, but I vaguely recall the double-bottle technique from my textbook.
“The cup holding the ocean water doesn’t have to be a water bottle,” she says. “It just has to fit inside it.”
“Right.” I remember that now.
“Let’s go look. If there’s cups, they might collapse enough to push inside the bottom of the water bottle.” She frowns, her expression adorable as two lines appear between her arched brows. “But we’ll have to cut the bottom off the bottle and fold it in.”
“There’s shears in the shed.”
“Oh. Good then.” She pushes the rest of her pickle in her mouth and brushes her hands against each other.
We both head to the brush-laden back of the hut. I cleared the floor around my cabinet, but the corner is filled with debris.
“How did mud get in here?” Bailey asks.
“No idea. It was quite a storm.”
We move branches aside to reach the corner cabinet.
“My bag!” Bailey cries, pulling it out from under a palm branch. It’s muddy and wet, but she slings it onto a bare spot of the counter.
“My notebook,” Bailey says, trying to flatten a bent spiral pad with an illustration of an orange tabby on the cover. At the bottom, the words, “I heart Maxwell” have been sketched in.
Right. Maxwell.
I focus on my work, wishing for gloves as the limbs stab at my skin. I stack them in the back corner as neatly as I can. We might want to build a fire later.
The idea of spending a night on the island brings me pause. I’ve walked and swum about half the perimeter, but we haven’t tried to penetrate the brush of the interior. It’s unlikely there is any dangerous wildlife, but there could be snakes or poisonous insects.
Nothing living here will be used to humans invading their nighttime.
“Here’s the water bottle,” Bailey says, holding up a hefty half-liter bottle, mostly empty. “It’s pretty wide, so a cup could easily go inside it if we can find one.”
“Didn’t we barely get any usable water out of the experiment, though?” My memories of this are hazy.
“Yeah, I feel like it was only a few drops from condensation. But maybe here it will be more? We were inside with air conditioning. And you know, we were kids. We weren’t trying to survive.”
I nod. I’ve cleared a path to the corner cabinet, so I pull it open. There’s two boxes inside. One says, “Paper cups.” The other, “Wood utensils.”
I pull out the box of cups.
“Perfect!” Bailey says. “We can modify them and make lots of desalinators!”
I feel dubious about it working. “We can make some. For now, though, we’re all right with the melted ice. We need to stay out of the sun and keep as cool as possible.”
Bailey leans on her elbows, watching me stack another pile of branches. “You, Rhett Armstrong, are never cool.” She spreads her straw bag out to dry. “And when you’re firing someone, you are the least cool of all.”
There’s no answer to that.
The cup box is half full, and I pluck out a stack. “You thirsty?”
“After the pickled oyster? Totally.”
We head back to the cooler. I carefully untie one of the ice bags and pour two cups of water.
Bailey holds hers against her cheek. “I’m so grateful for this.”
