Never Ever

by Sara Saedi

  “Everything’s okay!” It was Maz’s voice calling to them. “We’re all safe. I’m going to let you out now.” The drum of multiple footsteps could now be heard as the door to the panic room opened. Light flooded the basement and Wylie closed her eyes, blinded by the brightness. When she opened them, everyone around her was clamoring to get out.

  “Take my hand, Wylie,” Maz ordered.

  Wylie grabbed his hand and he pulled her aboveground. One by one each girl emerged, while the guys trickled in from the outside, still gripping their weapons. Reunions abounded as relieved and happy couples embraced and held each other tightly. Wylie spotted Phinn heading toward her, but she breezed past him and ran to the back of the dining room as Joshua and Micah entered, both clumsily holding spears. The last time they looked this scared and vulnerable, they were on the side of the road in Montauk.

  “Are you guys okay?” Wylie asked, frantic with worry.

  “We’re fine,” Micah said, fighting back tears. He was only fifteen. He wasn’t old enough to go running toward an explosion without any explanation or warning.

  “What the hell is going on?” Wylie asked loudly, more angry now than scared.

  “You’re asking the wrong brother.” Micah gave a nod to Joshua. “No one will tell me anything. Not even my own flesh and blood.”

  Tinka made her way over to them and punched Micah in the arm.

  “Glad you’re not dead,” Tinka said, half joking.

  “Right back at you,” Micah answered.

  The energy shifted in the room as the tears quickly evolved into a mix of laughter and elation.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Wylie asked Joshua.

  “I think it’s better if you hear it from Phinn,” he answered.

  Wylie searched the room for Phinn and as usual, he was surrounded by a group of kids. From a distance, it looked like he was offering them hugs and words of comfort. Bandit followed closely behind, making notes on a clipboard as they moved from group to group. Wylie was Phinn’s girlfriend. He should have checked on her by now, but she sensed she was being punished for hurtling past him and going straight to her brothers. She took a moment to gather herself, and then calmly walked toward him.

  “Phinn.” She said his name gently and he held up a finger, signaling for her to wait. After a few minutes of watching him console other residents, Wylie’s patience ran thin.

  “We deserve to know what happened,” Wylie said, more forcefully now.

  “Wylie, let it go,” Lola whispered desperately.

  “But we were locked in a basement,” Wylie replied. “I think that warrants an explanation. Or does this happen all the time around here? ’Cause it didn’t make it into the Minor Island handbook.”

  No one took Wylie’s side or rallied behind her. They simply hung back and stared at her blankly. Even Phinn didn’t bother to respond. Instead, he turned to Bandit and asked, “Is everyone accounted for?”

  Bandit checked his clipboard and nodded. “Yes, no one’s gone missing.”

  The room breathed a communal sigh of relief.

  “Oh, thank God. I really thought it was happening all over again.” The panicked voice from the basement belonged to a girl named Stacy. She was friendly with Lola, and the three of them had spent some afternoons together lounging around the parvaz field.

  “What was happening all over again?” Wylie asked, but again no one answered. She was starting to feel like she was trapped in a zombie horror movie and she was the only one who hadn’t been infected with a flesh-eating virus. “Can anyone hear me? Am I invisible?”

  “Wylie, that’s enough,” Joshua said from the back of the room. He stormed over, grabbed her by the arm, and dragged her toward the exit.

  “Let go of me!” Wylie said, doing her best to squirm out of his grip.

  “Do what she says,” Phinn spoke up, and Joshua instantly let go.

  “Wylie has every right to be upset right now,” Phinn said. “Stacy is referring to the lost kids.”

  “The lost kids? What do you mean?”

  “Six months ago, some of our residents went missing. We call them the lost kids.”

  Never forget to live life to the fullest. Do it for the troubled; do it for the lost. The days may feel shorter; the nights may feel long. But when we remember, our memories grow strong.

  The poem wasn’t about those left behind on the mainland, Wylie realized; it was about kids who’d gone missing from the island.

  “How did they go missing?”

  “They wanted to camp out one night, but the next morning, they didn’t come back. We searched the entire island for them, but they were gone.”

  “How many people?” Wylie asked.

  “Twelve.”

  “Where did they set up camp?”

  “On the Forbidden Side . . . before we knew it was dangerous.”

  “Did they go back to the mainland?”

  Phinn shook his head. “None of our boats were missing.”

  Wylie turned to Joshua. “Did you know about this?”

  “Don’t be mad at your brother,” Phinn urged. “He wanted to tell you and Micah, but I asked him not to.”

  Wylie glanced at Joshua, but he looked away guiltily. The only secret of consequence she’d ever kept from him was the one about their dad’s affair, and even then, she’d finally come clean. No job title was worth betraying your siblings for. The entire room shifted uncomfortably as they continued to gape at her.

  It reminded Wylie of one sunny afternoon in a downtown Manhattan park. “Keep your voices down,” she’d begged her parents that day. “People are starting to stare.” They were at her dad’s company picnic, and her parents were dangerously close to coming to blows in front of all his colleagues. They were normally skilled at keeping their domestic disputes confined to the privacy of their home, but some comment her dad had made set her mom off and they ended up arguing loudly enough that other people could hear them. Wylie had never felt more embarrassed in her life. Don’t turn into them, Wylie told herself now. She took a deep breath and turned to Phinn.

  “Maybe we should talk in private,” she suggested.

  The two of them walked to Phinn’s room in relative silence. But once they arrived at his bungalow and the door was closed behind them, Wylie allowed her rage to surface.

  “Why didn’t you tell us there were kids missing from the island?” she asked.

  “No one’s gone missing for months. The whole episode is behind us.”

  “But there was an explosion on the island tonight!”

  “I hate that you had to go through all this on prom night,” Phinn said. “But I won’t let anything bad happen to you. I’m just trying to protect you.”

  “From what?” Wylie screamed, finally at the end of her rope.

  “From everything!” he yelled back.

  Wylie sat on the bed and let her face fall into her hands.

  “Can you be more specific?” she asked, her tone quieter now, but no less angry.

  “I’m trying to protect you from Hopper. If that means arming all the guys with weapons and hiding the girls in a basement, then so be it.”

  “If he’s so dangerous, why did you tell me I didn’t need to worry about him?” Wylie asked.

  Phinn explained to Wylie that this was a plan they’d always had in place. A drill they had practiced over and over again. If anything went wrong, the girls would hide in the basement and the boys would gather their weapons and fly or run to shore to ward off any possible intruders. So tonight, as the girls huddled beneath the floorboards, the boys had floated into the sky with their weapons aimed at the water’s edge. Wylie pictured them still in their tuxedos, an army of James Bonds.

  “The explosion was a couple of sticks of dynamite. Just a scare tactic. We didn’t notice it till we were halfway
up in the air, but there it was, in the sand . . . ‘Hopper Was Here,’” Phinn explained.

  Wylie felt a chill go down her spine.

  “He was on the island?”

  “We think so,” Phinn nodded. “But there was no sign of a boat.”

  “Do you think he’s responsible for the lost kids?”

  Phinn shook his head. “We know he was involved. The only thing we found on the Forbidden Side when our friends went missing was the message ‘Hopper Was Here,’ written in blood. That’s why we never go over there. It could be filled with traps and land mines.”

  “Do you think he . . . killed them?” Wylie asked.

  “I hope not. He could be holding them hostage. He could have taken them back to the mainland. We’ve looked for him everywhere, but we’ve found nothing. For a few weeks after they disappeared, his calling card would pop up on different parts of the island. Maybe someone has a twisted sense of humor and is just messing with us by writing his name everywhere.”

  “Who is this guy?” Wylie demanded. “What kind of person would do this?”

  “I met him almost two years ago at a high school in Queens. It was career day, which is always a good resource when you’re seeking out new recruits with talents that might be good for the island.”

  Hopper and Phinn had struck up a conversation outside the ROTC tent. Hopper admitted to Phinn that the only reason he considered joining the army was that eventually he wanted to be in the CIA. He was a spy junkie. He’d secretly bugged all the classrooms in his high school so he could eavesdrop on his teachers between periods.

  “Also,” Hopper told him, “I can skip class and still catch up on what I missed.”

  Hopper’s talents went beyond surveillance. He lived with a foster family in a rough neighborhood in Queens, so he’d single-handedly created an alarm system for their apartment building. The irony was that when Hopper went missing in the middle of the night, his foster parents assumed his invention had failed them all, but in fact Phinn had convinced him to give up his dreams of being an agent and use his talents of security and surveillance elsewhere.

  “The signs were always there. I just ignored them. It was like having that one person at the party who makes everything a little uncomfortable or weird. He didn’t make friends easily; he was aggressive, self-righteous at times. He didn’t even make good on his promise to build us any sort of security system. I could tell people were afraid of him. They didn’t like to be alone with him. I put up with it for an entire year. I kept thinking something might change, but it never did.

  “And then the cutting started. First on his arms, then his legs. When he mutilated his own fingers, I knew there was something very wrong, and that I was only hurting him by keeping him here. Everyone else agreed, so we exiled him. A few months went by without incident, until we think he came back, out for revenge.”

  Wylie suddenly remembered Lola’s roommate and the bracelet she’d found tucked away into her journal.

  “Charlotte? Was she one of the people who went missing?” Wylie asked.

  Phinn nodded. “She was . . . is . . . um . . . a really great person.”

  The beads of shell carefully strewn across Wylie’s dress now felt heavy and confining. They had been meant for a girl who’d disappeared into thin air. No one knew if Charlotte was dead or alive, if she was safe or in danger. And here Wylie had been, prancing around in her outfit, worried that people wouldn’t like her cooking.

  “Lola told me she’d been exiled,” Wylie managed to say.

  “I told her to tell you that. Sometimes it’s easier to pretend like nothing’s changed, so most of the time, that’s what we do. We thought about cancelling prom this year. It didn’t feel right to carry on with traditions when so many of our friends were still missing. But if we lived in fear forever, then Hopper would get exactly what he wanted.”

  “I’m never going down to that basement again,” Wylie said in response.

  “I’m afraid you don’t have a choice,” Phinn said, holding her hand.

  “You can’t treat the girls like we’re a bunch of damsels in distress. If we were on the mainland, it would be totally archaic to hide us away like we’re some sort of liability. We shouldn’t be left down there wondering if the worst is happening. We shouldn’t have to worry that you all could be . . .” Wylie’s voice trailed off.

  What she’d really wanted to scream at Phinn in the middle of the dining room was, “How dare you make me love you, then put your life at risk?” But the voice she imagined coming out of her mouth sounded a lot like her mother’s, so she held it back.

  “Everything is going to be okay,” Phinn promised her. “Hopper can’t keep hiding forever. We’ll stop him from hurting us again.”

  Phinn cupped her face in his hands.

  “Wylie.” It felt so good every time he said her name.

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  He almost seemed surprised as the words came out of his mouth. Like he hadn’t planned to say them, but the moment had forced the truth out of him.

  “I love you, too.”

  She let the words hang there and bridge the divide between them.

  “I need you to promise me something,” she said.

  “Anything.”

  “No more lies. No more covering up the truth. I don’t care if you think it’s for my own good. If you’re ever dishonest with me again, we’re over.”

  “I’ll never lie about anything again.”

  “Can I sleep here tonight?” Wylie asked.

  Phinn nodded. Wylie put both her hands on his bow tie and gently loosened it. She could see his shoulders start to relax now that he didn’t feel like he was being strangled. He brought his lips toward her face, but she pulled away again. She didn’t want to kiss him yet. She finally had the courage to look straight into his eyes. And she kept her eyes fixed on him as she started to unbutton his shirt. Phinn put his hands behind her neck and fumbled for the zipper on her dress. It would have been easier for him if she turned around, but she wasn’t done looking at him yet.

  She knew it was early in their relationship to take this step, but it didn’t matter. There was no one here to judge her and no rumor mill she had to worry about, like she did back in high school. Even though they lived on an island where time didn’t function the way it did in the rest of the world, life was still short. Everything could change at a moment’s notice, just like it did that night in the Hamptons. She didn’t want to waste another minute.

  “Are you sure about this?” Phinn asked, unzipping her dress.

  “Positive.”

  As they melted onto his bed, Wylie decided that the few guys she’d hooked up with before no longer held significance. This was the only time she was giving herself to someone who knew there was more to Wylie Dalton than bright green eyes and pronounced dimples. Phinn knew the worst sides of her. He knew her mistakes and had witnessed her anger, and he wanted to be with her anyway. And she felt the same way about him.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  trouble in paradise

  “what was that?” Phinn asked.

  “Nothing,” Wylie answered.

  “Was that your . . . stomach?”

  “No!” Wylie pulled the blankets over her face and hid underneath them. Phinn slid down on the mattress and met her under the covers.

  “That was definitely your stomach!” he teased.

  Wylie placed both hands on her belly. Her stomach had a tendency to growl at the most inopportune times: in the middle of a final, during her first gyno appointment, throughout the eulogy at her grandfather’s funeral. And now it had betrayed her again, in bed with her boyfriend. Why had no one invented a way to prevent belly groans from embarrassing the hell out of you?

  “I’m hungry,” Wylie explained. “I barely got a chance to eat last night, with all the com
motion.”

  Grrrrrrrrr. Another rumbling sound filled the room, but this time it didn’t come from Wylie.

  “That wasn’t me!” Wylie announced proudly. “That was totally your stomach.”

  “I know. They’re talking to each other. Listen.”

  They both lay quietly as their stomachs continued to creak and moan like an old house settling.

  “What do you think they’re saying?” Wylie asked.

  “Mine says, ‘I can’t believe this amazing girl told me she loves me last night,’” Phinn translated.

  “Mine says, ‘How can we get some food delivered to this bungalow so we can stay in bed all day?’”

  “Your stomach knows what it’s talking about.”

  Now that the sun was up, they could hear the rest of the island rising. Bungalow doors opened and closed as locals made the walk to the dining room for their first meal of the day. Luckily, Wylie and Lola had planned for this. A continental breakfast was the only way to go the morning after prom if they wanted to enjoy themselves and not wake up at the crack of dawn to collect eggs and cook omelets for a bunch of starving, hungover teenagers.

  But even though she didn’t have to get up, Wylie wanted the noises from outside to go away. She could hear bits and pieces of people’s conversations as they walked past Phinn’s window, recounting the drama of last night. She didn’t want to think about any of that right now. Not the explosion, or the fact that kids on the island had gone missing, and definitely not the impending threat. Right now all she wanted to do was stay in bed with Phinn and pretend none of that had ever happened. The only memories she wanted to keep from prom were exchanging “I love you”s and spending the night together.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Phinn asked.

  “I’m just thinking about last night.”

  “I’m gonna recruit a team. We’re going to do another search for Hopper’s boat. He can’t hide forever. We’ll track him down eventually.”

  “Just don’t send my brothers to find him. Joshua will want to go, but you can’t let him. It’s not his battle to fight. We don’t even know Hopper.”