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close, and suddenly Abby started to cry. Only then did Jordan let go.
    The front door opened. Adrenaline flooded through his body. Mandy craned her neck, eyes wild with panic. “Where’s Timmy?” she cried. The boy was gone. She pulled out her knife and ran to the door.
    Looking through the window, Jordan saw Timmy skip down the steps. When Timmy was halfway to the sidewalk, he launched into the air and landed in a crouched position. Scampering over to the dying boy, he removed the water bottle from around his neck. Then, with no waste of time, he raced back to the stairs with his bounty, where Mandy met him, knife drawn.
    Jordan watched in horror as others swooped in and stripped the dying boy of his valuables. Two different kids pulled off his boots, and each headed off with a single boot.
    Jordan took a deep breath, fighting back tears. It didn’t help that Abby was weeping beside him. Had his decision to hold her wrist led to the gruesome scene outside? No, the boy was too far gone. He would keep telling himself that until he believed it. Then he surrendered to his tears and sobbed openly.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Abby rifled through the kitchen cabinets in search of containers with lids. They needed to store water for the trip home, and she had suggested they could get water from the kiddie pool down the street where Mandy had filled her bottle. Nobody had argued with her, but then again, nobody had said it was a good idea either.
    Jordan was staring out the front door, Mel was slumped on the couch, Mandy sat at the kitchen table with a deeply furrowed brow, and Timmy was playing Jenga.
    The busier Abby kept her hands, the less time she spent thinking. She couldn’t shake the image of the dying boy. If they had moved him inside and given him a pill, he might have been recovering now. On the other hand, he might have died anyway. They would never know.
    She understood why Jordan and Mandy had stopped her from going outside. Help one kid, turn around, and there’s another kid just as desperate, and another… The boy was a grain of sand in the desert, and if she had saved that single grain, they would have had one less pill for their friends on the island.
    She didn’t blame Timmy for what he had done, either. He was living by the rules of the mainland, the same rules which he had been following since the night of the purple moon. Survival of the fittest. Or was it survival of the cruelest? Abby’s mind could make sense of these things, but not her heart.
    She reached deeper into the cabinet until her shoulder bumped against the frame. Patting her hand along the shelf, she felt a spaghetti strainer, then a waffle maker. Memories of family dinners and her mom cooking breakfast exploded in her mind like dazzling fireworks. Her mouth watered, reminding her of how badly they needed more than bugs to eat.
    She swept aside mouse droppings, and her fingers followed an electric cord to a blender. Her pulse quickened when she brushed a metal clasp. In the far corner of the shelf, behind a curtain of sticky cobwebs, she felt a lunch box and another one beside it.
    In the second grade, she had proudly carried her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to school in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lunch box. Jordan had lugged a Power Rangers lunch box, believing that it gave him superpowers. How they could use those superpowers now!
    She flipped open the clasp of her lunch box and removed the thermos. She did the same for Jordan’s. If they filled both thermoses and Mandy’s bottle, the five of them would have enough water to survive three days at sea.
    She stood before the others. Timmy was the only one not moping or lost in thought, he was having too much fun adding blocks to his teetering tower.
    “Mandy, you and Jordan can get water,” Abby said. “We’ll stay here and catch more bugs for the trip home.”
    She couldn’t make Jordan and Mandy be friends, but if they worked together, she hoped they would start to forge a bond of