Never mind.

Gonna depress myself, if I don’t watch out.

Anyway, back to the introductions.

Connie, daughter of Billie and Andrew, is my “girlfriend.” We’re both freshmen at Belmore University. That’s how I got to know her. We kept being forced together by the alphabet: she being a Collins, I a Conway. At a university, you can’t remain strangers for long with the person who immediately precedes you in the ABCs. Soon, we began talking to each other. After a while, we started going out. Before I knew it, she was inviting me to spend spring break with her family on a yacht in the Bahamas.

You don’t turn down an offer like that.

I don’t, anyhow.

I decided to postpone the inevitable—breaking up with her—until after the excursion.

Now, there might not be an “after.” Yee gads, stuck with her for life. No no no. Won’t happen. We’ll probably be rescued shortly. There’s just no way this can turn into some sort of Robinson Crusoe deal. At most, we might spend a few days here. More likely, we’ll be picked up before dark; that’s if somebody heard or saw our boat explode.

It was one hell of an explosion.

For a while, crap kept falling out of the sky and plopping into the water. Pieces of the boat—and undoubtedly Wesley. (I expected to see a foot or a head or a big looping coil of entrails coming down, but nope.) Many of the pieces were on fire. They got snuffed out when they landed in the water. Nothing came down on the beach, luckily.

Then mere wasn’t much left but a bunch of junk floating on the water, and a smudge of drifting smoke.

At the time it went up, we couldn’t spot any aircraft or boats. We sure did look. Some of us did, anyhow. Not Thelma, of course. That’s when Thelma clutched the sides of her head and started shrieking, “No! No! Oh my God, no! Wesley! My poor Wesley! No!” And like that.