Adrift on St. John Read Online Free

tying up the meager strands into a scraggly ponytail at the base of his neck.
    The gray chest hair that poked out through the loose buttonholes on the man’s shirt more accurately reflected his advanced age. Self-consciously, I ran a hand over the top of my own head, hoping my gray-masking attempts were somewhat less conspicuous.
    The man hefted a guitar case out of the airport shuttle’s back storage cavity and sidled up next to me on the dock.
    “Howdy, love,” he said smoothly, tilting his head with a broad, suggestive smile. “You headed to
Saint John
too?” He drew out the two-word moniker of the island’s name, clearly anticipating the arrival at his final destination.
    I tried to grin my way out of a reflexive grimace. “Mmhmm,” I replied, weakly nodding in affirmation.
    “I’m from New York,” the man said proudly, pointing to a faded “I heart NY” sticker on his guitar case. It was one of many appliqués plastered on to the side of the battered container.
    “Mm-hmm,” I replied again, trying to shift my gaze out toward the harbor, but the chatty hippie was intent on making my acquaintance.
    “Brooklyn actually,” he clarified affably. “To be specific.”
    I risked a quick glance at my new friend. The skin on his face was shrunk back against his skull, the tissue weathered and anemic from many years of hard living—and, I suspected, more than a smidgen of recreational drug use.
    “I’m Conrad,” he said, pausing as he waited for my reciprocal identification.
    I sighed uncomfortably before complying. “Pen,” I offered stiffly. “Nice to meet you.”
    “Pen, Pen, Pen…” Conrad mused speculatively. “That’s short for…” He let the sentence hang in the air, waiting for me to complete it.
    “Pen,” I replied curtly. “Just Pen.”
    “Ah, well, just Pen it is, then.” Conrad leaned back in a stretch, seemingly pleased at having extracted my name. Thewind plastered his shirt against his narrow barreled chest. You could almost see his ribs protruding through the fabric.
    “So, Pen,” Conrad said, leaning against the guitar case as he looked me up and down, “I’ve been coming to St. John since, oh, let’s see, 1971. I always stay out on the north shore of the island—at the eco-campground near Maho Bay.”
    He pumped the narrow arches of his eyebrows at me. “I’ve reserved one of their teepee tents.”
    Mercifully, the ferry’s crew began to load us. I marched purposefully into the lower deck of covered seating and slid onto a bench seat about halfway down the boat’s length, grateful for the chance to get in out of the wind and hopeful I might distance myself from Conrad’s amorous overtures.
    It was no use. I heard the clunking sound of a guitar case sliding across the metal bench immediately behind me.
    Conrad’s squirrelly head popped up near my shoulders as he leaned forward over the back of my seat.
    “Now, Pen, let me see if I can guess your birthday.”
    My face furrowed skeptically.
    “No, seriously,” he insisted. “I have a knack for these things. Here, first, let me absorb your aura.”
    I felt the pressure of his fingertips against my temples as he began to rub them in a circular motion against the sides of my head.
    “Were you born…ah, say…between January and March?”
    I stared up at the ferry’s ceiling. “No.”
    “Hmm,” Conrad replied thoughtfully. From the confident tone of his voice, his faith in his powers of divination appeared undiminished.
    “How about…er…between September and December?”
    “Nope.”
    “I know! I know!” he exclaimed as if suddenly receiving new information from his massaging fingertips. “It’s between April and May!”
    I shook my head, my lips puckering with wry amusement at his luckless persistence. I turned around in my seat to face him.
    “July.”
    “Aaaah.” He exhaled disappointedly, thumping the flat metal surface of his seat with the palm of his hand. “That was going to be my next