The End

"You must be the Baudelaires," she said, as Friday followed her into the tent carrying a stack of bowls fashioned from coconut shells, "and you must be starving, too. I'm Mrs. Caliban, Friday's mother, and I do most of the cooking around here. Why don't you have some lunch?"

"That would be wonderful," Klaus said. "We're quite hungry."

" Whatya fixin?" asked Su

Mrs. Caliban smiled, and opened the jar so the children could peek inside. "Ceviche," she said. "It's a South American dish of chopped raw seafood."

"Oh," Violet said, with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. Ceviche is an acquired taste, a phrase which here means "something you don't like the first few times you eat it," and although the Baudelaires had eaten ceviche before—their mother used to make it in the Baudelaire kitchen, to celebrate the begi

"They're runcible spoons," Friday explained. "We don't have forks or knives in the colony, as they can be used as weapons."

"I suppose that's sensible," Klaus said, although he couldn't help but think that nearly anything could be used as a weapon, if one were in a weaponry mood.

"I hope you like it," Mrs. Caliban said. "There's not much else you can cook with raw seafood."

" Negihama," Su

"My sister is something of a chef," Violet explained, "and was suggesting that she could prepare some Japanese dishes for the colony, if there were any wasabi to be had."

The younger Baudelaires gave their sister a brief nod, realizing that Violet was asking about wasabi not only because it might allow Su

"We don't have any wasabi," Mrs. Caliban said. "We don't have any spices at all, in fact. No spices have washed up on the coastal shelf."

"Even if they did," Ishmael added quickly, "I think we'd just throw them in the arboretum. The stomachs of the colonists are used to spice-less ceviche, and we wouldn't want to rock the boat."

Klaus took a bite of ceviche from his runcible spoon, and grimaced at the taste. Traditionally a ceviche is marinated in spices, which gives it an unusual but often delicious flavor, but without such seasoning, Mrs. Caliban's ceviche tasted like whatever you might find in a fish's mouth while it was eating. "Do you eat ceviche for every meal?" he asked.

"Certainly not," Mrs. Caliban said with a little laugh. "That would get tiresome, wouldn't it? No, we only have ceviche for lunch. Every morning we have seaweed salad for breakfast, and for di

"Let's drink a toast," Friday suggested, holding upher own seashell. Mrs. Caliban raised hers, and Ishmael wiggled in his clay chair and opened the stopper of his seashell once more.

"An excellent idea," the facilitator said, with a wide, wide smile. "Let's drink a toast to the Baudelaire orphans!"

"To the Baudelaires!" agreed Mrs. Caliban, raising her seashell. "Welcome to the island!"

"I hope you stay here forever and ever!" Friday cried.

The Baudelaires looked at the three islanders gri

"I won't force you," Ishmael said quietly to the children, and the Baudelaire orphans wondered if that were true after all.

Chapter Five

Unless you are unusually insouciant—which is merely a fancy way of saying "the opposite of curious" — or one of the Baudelaire orphans yourself, you are probably wondering whether or not the three children drank the coconut cordial that was offered them rather forcefully by Ishmael.

Perhaps you have been in situations yourself, where you have been offered a beverage or food you would rather not consume by someone you would rather not refuse, or perhaps you have been warned about people who will offer such things and told to avoid succumbing, a word which here means "accepting, rather than refusing, what you are given." Such situations are often referred to as incidents of "peer pressure," as «peer» is a word for someone with whom you are associating and «pressure» is a word for the influence such people often have. If you are a brae-man or brae-woman—a term for someone who lives all alone on a hill—then peer pressure is fairly easy to avoid, as you have no peers except for the occasional your cave and try to pressure you into growing a woolly coat. But if you live among people, whether they are people in your family, in your school, or in your secret organization, then every moment of your life is an incident of peer pressure, and you ca