Unless it has to do with working on his truck or carrying a football from one side of the field to the other, Tim is not cut out for manual labor. So, this business with actually having to help build his own hut is not something he's doing well with. The guys in charge are pretty easy going and they do good work (as far as he can tell anyway), ( Read more... )

Claire had watched with interest as the cute men who were way too old but hot anyhow built the playground. She'd been spending lots of time just swinging and even more time laying on the merry-go-round, kicking her feet and riding it around and around and around. She felt young, like back when she only had one dad to worry about. One dad to love ( Read more... )

Claire and Violet had shoved the furniture around in the rec room and set up the projector. There was a table with snacks and sandwiches, and Claire would have given her favorite bear for some cola. There was a make up case and some hair brushes, and some glitter covered decorations...just in case anyone could mistake the teen-girl-ambiance that ( Read more... )

Everyone knows that when your supplies are limited, you can always find the best drugs in your mom's medicine cabinets. That wasn't really true with Tracy. Mom had stripped their cabinets bare when she'd started AA, and when Brady was around Tracy never dared to go after his stash. She didn't want to touch whatever shit he was on anyway. She wasn't ( Read more... )

Gus should have known, on reflection, that everything was going too well. He'd felt like he was settling in on the island (how different, after all, was one island from another, really?). He'd laid feelings for Jill to rest and could settle into being her friend now without complication. He was getting to know Mayko. He was even drinking less ( Read more... )

She finds the notebook sitting on her nightstand, the first thing she sees when she opens her eyes in the dimness of her basement room, just like it belongs there. She thinks it must be a joke, Billy snuck in the night before and put it there, or maybe even Hayley, but then she remembers that she'd never told anyone about it. Even if she had, they ( Read more... )

It had been a rousing success, as far as Jane would admit. For the whole day, she had spent it hanging the shimmery navy blue gauze from posts about the area in front of the compound, trusting the strange machines of the radio to broadcast music until it was too late, and then, she trusted to the musicians that were in attendance to play. There was ( Read more... )

Finally the ghastly things the clothes box spewed came in handy. It had even indulged him by providing stuff like orange tie-dye, rainbow-colored scarves and purple shorts. Perfect. He'd read that babies like stuff that's brightly colored and since the island was short on toys he was making some - and some that could be done mostly with one hand. ( Read more... )

Upon such a lovely day, Jane had been most eager to find her way to the Compound for dresses and decorations and so many lovely things. Though there had been a most foreboding air to her dreams that night (yet more nightmares she did not wish, of people disappearing from her life) she had shaken them off on her way to the Compound ( Read more... )

He was in front of the bookshelf and wondered if he wanted to make sacrifices to it this time or plead with it or just hope that it, in this very unique situation, either had some sort of sympathy - since another life or two was involved - or at least that its bizarre sense of humour would serve him this time ( Read more... )