Touch and Glow - The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House - page 185

Colin and Denise, our new best friends, followed up with a phone call the next day.
This was both surprising and slightly dismaying. In effect, they'd called our bluff.
We met up that night at the tour company's “base camp,” a dilapidated building on
Route 996 near Esperanza.
Colin and Denise were as delightful sober as they were tipsy. They seemed genuinely
excited that we had come, which of course made us glad, in turn, that we'd made the effort.
“So it took a couple of strangers to get you off your butts,” Denise remarked in her quiet
way. It was if she were delivering the closing argument of a criminal prosecution, though
in the nicest way possible.
“That's true,” Michael said without missing a beat. “Our real friends couldn't possibly
have convinced us to do this.”
Colin pronounced Michael “a stitch.”
I told him he didn't know the half of it.
☼ ☼ ☼
By seven-thirty our bio-bay tour group was ready to rumble.
Our fellow adventurers were, to say the least, a mixed bag. There was a chubby Cana-
dian couple with three rambunctious young boys; a severely-sunburned quartet of Scand-
inavian seniors (how do you say “sunblock” in Swedish?); and a gay couple from Wiscon-
sin whose age difference was so vast they gave the term “May-December relationship” a
whole new meaning.
Our tour guide was drearily perky. Clad in a T-shirt that read I Glow in the Dark , she
introduced herself as Cate with a “C” before regaling us with a host of arcane information
about the history of the bio-bay, its current state of decline, and its shaky future. After a
numbingly long fifteen minutes, one of the Canadian urchins raised his hand.
“But what makes the people glow?” he asked.
Everyone heaved a sigh of relief—this was, after all, the question we all wanted to ask
(even those of us who had done a little reading beforehand and thought we knew the an-
swer).
Cate paused. She cleared her throat. She shifted from foot to foot. Was it possible she
didn't know the answer?
“It's magic!” she said at last.
But the little boy wasn't about to fall for this.
“No, it's not, it's science,” he stated.
Cate smiled lamely.
“Of course it is!” she agreed.
“But what causes it?” continued the persistent little guy, who clearly had a future as a
D.A.
Cate looked blank.