My lip quivers. “You’re not the tomatoes.” And when I throw myself into his arms, he collapses to the floor, and we lie there, sobbing together.

Forty-Nine

As my dad shakes his head and steps over us, apparently unconcerned, or mistaking our crying for laughter, Sawyer reaches up and holds my face with his cool hands and looks into my eyes. “Ben’s here too,” he rasps. His voice is gone.

I roll off him and my eyes threaten to start crying all over again. “Are you okay?”

He nods. “I am now.”

“I’ll be right back,” I say, feeling heartless, but having to see for myself. I take off for the living room, where Trey and Ben are locked in an embrace that looks like it may never end. I wrap my arms around them both and kiss Ben on the cheek, and then I kiss Trey on the cheek too. And I have no words for how this feels right now.

Rowan, the come-through champion, is somehow giving Mom an explanation of what’s happening. I have no idea if she’s making up some story or going with the truth here, and I don’t even care. I run back to Sawyer, who is still on the floor in the kitchen doorway. He smiles up at me through half-closed lids. He looks rough.

“Let’s get you home to bed,” I say.

“But I’m so tired. . . . I wanna sleep in your bed with you.” He slings an arm over his eyes. “Please?”

“Um, somehow I don’t think that’s going to be okay with the parentals. How about the couch?”

He nods and strains to get up.

“Does Kate know you’re okay?”

“Yeah, Trey just texted her for me. I don’t have my phone.” He starts crawling toward the living room.

“I know you don’t have your phone, you big jerk. What happened to you promising not to take your stupid life vest off? We had a deal!”

“I just knew you were going to yell at me,” he says glumly.

We round the corner and see that the couch is already occupied by Ben.

“Oh no.” Sawyer says. He looks longingly at the cushions, then collapses on the floor and lies there. It’s like he’s drunk with exhaustion or something.

“So what happened to you guys?” I say. “Have you slept at all?”

“In the taxi.”

“You took a taxi here? Why the heck didn’t you call?”

“I don’t know anybody’s phone numbers. Tried to get people on the street to let me google your landline, but they pretty much took one look at the two of us and ran. When I finally got the taxi driver to look the number up for me, he just wrote it down and wouldn’t let me use his phone at first. I guess we look like scary, drug-addicted homeless guys.” He takes a breath. “Later I finally convinced him I wasn’t going to steal it and I called, but I got the recording.”

“But—” I sputter. “But what about Ben? Didn’t he have his phone?”

“No,” he says sadly. “It fell in the water because I’m a loser.”

“You’re not a loser, you just need to fucking learn how to swim,” Ben says in a muffled voice from the couch. “It’s really not that hard.”

But Sawyer doesn’t respond. A moment later, I realize he’s asleep.

I look at Rowan and Trey, and we don’t know what to think. Finally I shrug and go into our bedroom, pull blankets from our beds to drape over them, and give Sawyer my pillow. All we can do is hang around and wait and make up more crazy shit to answer our parents’ questions about why Ben and Sawyer are crashed out in the living room.

When it becomes clear that Ben and Sawyer are down for the night, we three Demarcos go to bed early, since we’re exhausted too, and everyone sleeps until morning, when we finally get to hear the whole story.

Fifty

Rowan and I get up at five to take showers and make some breakfast. When I tiptoe past Sawyer, he grabs my foot and scares the crap out of me.

“Hey,” he says. He eases his way to his feet with a little help from me, and gives me a long hug. He follows me to the kitchen and sits by the table. “I just need to be near you,” he says in his hoarse voice.

By six forty-five, all five of us are sitting around the kitchen table.

“I’m so hungry,” Sawyer says. “I have never been this hungry in my entire life.” He shovels a forkful of scrambled eggs and a biscuit into his mouth, and Ben chows down as well. While they eat, I fill them in on what happened on our end, and how Tori couldn’t tell who the three dead people were, and how the news practically confirmed to us that it must have been Sawyer and Ben who had drowned.

“But I didn’t give up hoping,” Trey says. “By the way, information about the three dead was released this morning. They were the guy with the glass in his head, some woman I can’t figure out from the victim list, and the pilot, who I don’t think was even on Tori’s list, unless he looked like one of the other passengers. I don’t know what happened there.”

“We must have confused something,” I say. “I’m sad three people died, but that means we saved twenty-four. And our boys are alive, which means more than anything.”

Sawyer squeezes my thigh under the table.

“So tell us everything,” I say. “I saw you with the girl with the polka-dot headband up at the railing, but then I looked away and you were gone.”

“Ah, Bridget,” Sawyer says. “What a piece of work that girl is. I’m sure her ankle was broken but she was a total trouper.”