The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:

Characters: Deep sea diver and a disgraced teacher

Genre: Young adult

Setting: The Everglades

Trope: It seemed like a good idea at the time

POV/tense: 1st/present

And the result:

He calls me Huckleberry. I don’t think it’s funny. My name’s Finn and I got called Huck all the time. Been beating up other kids all my life for calling me that. But not Mister Jim. I’d never beat him up. Truth is he’s too soft for me to do that to him.

“So there’s this money here,” he tells me. Sure I think he’s full of shit but I don’t say that to him because he’s paying me. Not a lot, mind you, but cash is cash.

“Listen, Mister Jim, I know you mean well and all, but this here’s the swamp. Chances are even if there is money out here, it would be all rotted.”

“Never mind that,” he says.

I steer the boat around the mangroves following the map, the one he kept folded up in his billfold. The air’s thick with gnats. The sun’s high in the sky and as we motor through the thickest part of the grove we get some blessed shade.

“Hey, how do I know I can trust you,” I tell him.

Mister Jim scratches his beard. It’s wild and tangled and if it wasn’t for the way he’d ramble on abouut literature I’d have assumed he was a junkie. Hell, he probably is one anyway.”

“You don’t,” he says. “That’s why you’re out here, because you like the danger. Plus you’re a fatherless boy. I can spot them from a mile away.”

I slow the boat. Birds squauk through the humidity. “Just to let you know, I know these Everglades, better than you do. You try anything funny when I’m down there—or when I’m up here—and they’ll never find you.”

“Oh, Huckleberry, listen to you. Do you actually think I’d do anything to you.”

“Yes. Maybe. No.” I stare at his eyes, brown and wet and I wonder what they’ve seen. “So what is it you did?”

“Did?”

“Yeah. You’re a teacher. Out here in the Everglades with a seventeen year old looking for some money supposedly. Why aren’t you in some air conditioned high school classroom?”

He stretches and looks behind him. “They don’t take to you coming into class strung out from a lost weekend. Or a lost week. Or OD’ing during the middle of a class on Hamlet.”

“My mom tried to read some Hamlet to me. She said it was my father’s favorite. I told her if she ever tried to read it to me again I’d burn the house down.”

“And what did she do?”

“She cried,” I tell him. “Not like it was my fault. Shit. I know why he left her. I blame him, of course, but I know exactly why. So are we really looking for money or are you just playing with me, Mister Jim?”

He stretches out on the back of the boat as if its his, as if he owns it, as if all the world belongs to him, and I can’t tell if I hate him or if I’m just fooling myself. “There’s got to be,” he says so softly I can barely hear him.

“So where did this so-called money come from?”

“My brother in law robbed a bank. He hid the cash here. Told me so just before he got himself killed in a wreck.”

I don’t know if I believe him but he’s right. All I care about is the adventure. So I rev the boat and follow his map. A half hour later we get to the tree. There’s a letter carved on it. A big A.

“Yes, yes,” he says. “This is it. Just like he promised.”

I side eye him and get to putting on my wetsuit. Then the tank. He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Aren’t you afraid of alligators?”

“Alligators are the least of my problems in this life,” I tell him.

“Aren’t you afraid of being out here with a strange man all alone.”

Before I tip over the edge I laugh at him. I don’t tell him that he’s the one that should be afraid of me. I don’t tell him there’s a reason that my father disappeared without a trace. No one knows what’s hidden in these waters better than me.