like me. I guess he doesn’t go for redheads.
We do the usual “talk about the challenge” thing, which is just pretending that we don’t already know who we’re planning to vote for. As if talking about the challenge in front of this set of cameras is going to change anyone’s mind.
Blrr started crying, talking about how she’s let the team down. I think we were all embarrassed. I know Bubbles looked really uncomfortable.
Anyway, the deal went out and we all made our picks.
The first card up was me. I looked up at Blrr and she glared at me. It wasn’t much of a surprise. She knew I was gunning for her. But I had a nasty shock when the second card was also me. I glanced around the table, but no one else would meet my eyes. I won’t lie, I was sweating some.
Third card: Blrr. Fourth card: Blrr. Fifth card: Blrr. She started crying again. Her nose was red and she kept wiping the tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand. And everyone else was staring down at the table again and they all looked like they felt guilty as hell.
I mean, come on! I sucked just as bad as her, but you didn’t see me crying when those first two cards came up.
The final card: Blrr.
And then she was crying outright. Everyone crowded around her and hugged her. And Bubbles and Matryoshka were crying their fool heads off too. Even Jetman, who wouldn’t say poo if he had a mouthful, was rubbing his eyes. I wasn’t going to pretend that Blrr and I had been buddies, but I went around the table and gave her a quick hug. Then I left and came back here.
Yeah, it was a bit of a scary Discard, but every time you go to Discard you should be a little scared. You never know what might happen.
Confessional: Pearl Olsen aka Diver
I know I seem like a deuce. Breathing underwater is no big power on land. So I’m as surprised as you are that I’m still here. I’m not sure that first win was good for us, for the Clubs. We worked as a team but we didn’t spend the next week working out how to be a team, and we probably aren’t one yet.
Talk about a high proportion of alpha males! Stuntman has a lot of rage in him. Brave Hawk, now, he says he’s working for his people, but I think Hawk thinks of himself as a tribe of one. The Roller’s trail ends at a different place than the Apache Trail, for sure. If there’s a team player among us it’s probably Toad Man, but he doesn’t say much. We didn’t spend any time trying to figure out what to do with Spasm’s powers, or even talking about when or if they might be useful. And then, tonight, we voted Spasm off the team. That’s a first for us, and it wasn’t any fun.
I’m still trying to figure out how we could have used Jade Blossom to get that safe open. Maybe we could have had her get really hard and then have Toad fling her with his tongue, like a trebuchet missile. But we didn’t know what the treasure was, if it was a crystal goblet or something.
Actually, I like this team stuff with humans, because I’m on a more equal footing than I am with dolphins. I’m not fluent in their language because I’ve only been trying to learn it for a couple years. Three.
I don’t like to talk about drawing my ace. Look, if you had almost drowned, and didn’t, and woke up scared of water . . .
I’ll tell you where it happened. It was off the Nepali coast in Kaui. I was there visiting my mom, although my dad had custody. We lived in a lot of places; he’s retired navy.
I don’t know if either of them is watching. I didn’t tell them I was doing this. They are a fairly typical divorced couple, I suppose. Mom is back in Hawaii and won’t speak anything but Hawaiian, at any time, to anyone. Dad rents an apartment on a freighter that carries passengers, too. That’s where he lives now. He’s been rediscovering his Norse roots and I heard him describe a blood eagle once. Maybe that’s what saved me, the idea of lungs pulled through the ribs on the back. That’s what my gills are, they’re an extra, and much larger, set of lungs,