He sighed again, his body relaxing. A steady stream of urine still flowed into the basin. No wonder! Agony! And he’d still be locked in there, he thought, if he hadn’t finally figured out –
Behind him, he heard muffled shouts. He flushed the toilet and went back, crouching down by the storage compartment beneath the bed. He quickly unlatched it; another padded bundle unrolled, and Kelly appeared beside him.
“Hey, Kel,” he said proudly. “We made it!”
“I have to go,” she said, dashing. She pulled the door shut behind her.
Arby said, “We did it! We’re here!”
“Just a minute, Arb. Okay?”
For the first time, he looked out the window of the trailer. All around them was a grassy clearing, and beyond that, the ferns and high trees of the jungle. And high above the tops of the trees, he saw the curving black rock of the volcanic rim.
So this was Isla Sorna, all right.
All right!
Kelly came out of the bathroom. “Ohhh. I thought I was going to die!” She looked at him, gave him high five. “By the way, how’d you get your door unlatched?”
“Credit card,” he said.
She frowned. “You have a credit card?”
“My parents gave it to me, for emergencies,” he said. “And I figured this was an emergency.” He tried to make a joke out of it, to treat it lightly. Arby knew Kelly was sensitive about anything to do with money. She was always making comments about his clothes and things like that. Arid how he always had money for a taxi or a Coke at Larson’s Deli after school, or whatever. Once he said to her that he didn’t think money was so important, and she said, “Why would you?” in a funny voice. Arid ever since then he had tried to avoid the subject.
Arby wasn’t always clear about the right thing to do around people. Everyone treated him so weird, anyway. Because he was younger, of course. And because he was black. Arid because he was what the other kids called a brainer. He found himself engaged in a constant effort to be accepted, to blend in. Except he couldn’t. He wasn’t white, he wasn’t big, he wasn’t good at sports, and he wasn’t dumb. Most of his classes at school were so boring Arby could hardly stay awake in them. His teachers sometimes got annoyed with him, but what could he do? School was like a video played at super-slow speed. You could glance at it once an hour and not miss anything. And when he was around the other kids, how could he be expected to show interest in TV shows like “Melrose Place,” or the San Francisco 49ers, or the Shaq’s new commercial. He couldn’t. That stuff wasn’t important.
But Arby had long ago discovered it was unpopular to say so. It was better to keep your mouth shut. Because nobody understood him, except Kelly. She seemed to know what he was talking about, most of the time.
And Dr. Levine. At least the school had an advanced-placement track, which was moderately interesting to Arby. Not very interesting, of course, but better than the other classes. And when Dr. Levine had decided to teach the class, Arby had found himself excited by school for the first time in his life. In fact –
“So this is Isla Sorna, huh?” Kelly said, looking out the window at the jungle.
“Yeah,” Arby said. “I guess so.”
“You know, when they stopped the car earlier,” Kelly said, “could you hear what they were talking about?”
“Not really. All the padding.”
“Me neither,” Kelly said. “But they seemed pretty worked up about something.”
“Yeah, they did.”
“It sounded like they were talking about dinosaurs, Kelly said. “Did you hear anything like that?”
Arby laughed, shaking his head. “No, Kel,” he said.
“Because I thought they did.”
“Come on, Kel.”
“I thought Thorne said ‘triceratops.”‘
“Kel,” he said. “Dinosaurs have been extinct for sixty-five million years.
“I know that…”
He pointed out the window. “You see any dinosaurs out there?”
Kelly didn’t answer. She went to the other side of the trailer, and looked out the opposite window. She saw Thorne, Malcolm, and Eddie disappearing into the main building.