Fish
It was on the fifth day that I began to suspect the fish was cheating. According to the internet, most fish can’t survive out of water for more than a few minutes, and the few that can, well, none of them looked like Baton. Baton wasn’t a mudskipper or a lungfish or an air-breathing whipor, Baton was definitely a tuna, and tuna definitely can’t survive out of water for more than a few minutes.
It was part of our unspoken gentleman’s agreement that I didn’t call him on it. If I had, he might in turn have question how I, a perfectly normal and unassuming college student (perhaps one better-looking than most, but I leave that judgment to my peers) was managing to survive for so long without breaking myself. I’d given him every indication that I required air to live, after all, just as he’d implied to me that going too long without immersing himself in a saltwater environment containing at least a minimal amount of dissolved oxygen was death to him. And I knew that I was cheating, so that conversation wouldn’t go well.
So there we were, late in the evening of the fifth day, and the thought crossed my mind that maybe he was cheating, too. If I was going to win our bet, then I would have to out him somehow in a way that left my own (equally unsporting) behavior under wraps. I considered bringing in a doctor and an ichthyologist, allegedly out of concern for Baton’s health. The ichthyologist would reveal — and I would be shocked, shocked! to learn — that Baton was cheating. Meanwhile the physician, whom I would have bribed beforehand, would declare my survival a medical miracle.
For verisimilitude’s sake, she could make disparaging remarks about possible brain damage. This would soften the blow Baton felt upon losing, to see me humiliated by the doctor. I was at this point picturing a buxom blonde doctor, with her medium-length hair in a loose bun and half-serious mocking disapproval looking out over her wire-frame glasses. I would bribe her with dinner and a movie, I thought, and my fantasies may well have gone further, if not for the sudden explosion of color.