by Laura Bates
She sees May gently ease Jessa’s head onto a folded sweatshirt and walk over to help Jason, sorting through the growing heap of supplies next to the plane. Her willowy frame bends and straightens, bends and straightens as she sorts through the items.
Hayley watches as May stacks a small tower of those foil-covered trays of plane food on top of each other, watches as they slide down in all directions, crashing into the sand. She sees the exasperation on May’s face as she wipes beads of sweat from the bridge of her nose, running her hand over her perfectly groomed, arched, black eyebrows. Numbly, Hayley thinks that the food shouldn’t be left there in the sun. Someone should move it into the shade. But she can’t move. ‘It’ll spoil so quickly in this heat,’ her mom tuts, unexpectedly, in her head.
Mom.
Hayley sees her walking towards the front door, frowning, glancing at her watch. Taking off her glasses, wiping them automatically on her sleeve and tucking them in the collar of her jumper. Swiping her dark blonde hair back over her shoulder with one hand as she reaches for the doorhandle with the other. Sees the panic cross her face as red and blue lights cross her forehead. Sees Dad appear behind her at the open front door, place a hand on her shoulder, start barking urgent questions at the police officer as Mom falls silent. Sees the tension in the tendons of his neck, stiffening beneath the short cut salt-and-pepper hair, jaw clenching, dark brown skin carefully clean shaven.
‘A phone,’ she croaks, surprised to find how sore her throat is. ‘Does anyone still have their phone?’ Shannon looks up from where she’s kneeling beside Brian, one dark eyebrow raised in the sort of patronising expression Hayley has become far too accustomed to in cheer practice.
‘Don’t you think we’ve already tried? No signal,’ she replies curtly, tossing her phone into the sand at Hayley’s feet with a soft thud. Shannon and Jason grin cheesily in the lockscreen picture, all wide white smiles, his teeth practically sparkling. They look like an advert for All-American high-school sweethearts. Shannon’s right. No bars.
Shannon moves practiced hands to Hayley’s ankle, rotating it expertly as Hayley winces and draws a sharp breath. ‘It’s swollen but it’s probably just a sprain. You wouldn’t be able to put any weight on it if it was broken.’ And she’s so grateful for someone taking charge, to be touched with firm, confident fingers that show her limbs where to move and when, that she doesn’t find Shannon’s know-it-all tone as annoying as usual.
‘The soreness in your chest is probably from smoke inhalation,’ Shannon adds, almost smugly. ‘Lucky I took my first-aid extension certificate last month.’
‘Or bruising from the crash?’ Hayley asks, indicating a nasty bruise blooming below Shannon’s collarbone.
‘Maybe,’ Shannon agrees, handing Hayley an open bottle of water. She takes it and swigs great gulps, then suddenly stops, the bottle still raised to her lips.
‘Should we be…’ It sounds so silly, so melodramatic. ‘Should we be saving our water?’ she asks uncertainly.
‘I don’t think it’s going to come to starvation rations.’ Shannon smirks. ‘It’s the Gulf of Mexico, not the Bermuda Triangle – I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t found us by sunset.’
‘Speaking of sunset…’ Hayley glances at the horizon. The sun pulses egg-yolk orange, lower in the sky now, and the incoming tide, while still distant, has crept closer, so that she can see a faint white line where the frothy edges of the waves meet the shore.
Hayley passes the water bottle to Jason and he swigs thirstily, wiping his lip with the back of his hand, his eyes on Shannon, who is hovering over Jessa again.
‘So,’ he says, sitting down in the sand with his legs out in front of him, knees bent. Hayley notices little grains of sand hanging onto his sun-bleached blond leg hairs. They all turn towards him instinctively. It’s as if, with Erickson gone, he’s the natural source of authority. As if being captain on the court has anything at all to do with this. As if a carefully crafted defensive play is going to help them now. Hayley feels giggles fizzing inside her again. It is all so completely absurd.
Jason holds up seven fingers. ‘Shannon, Hayley, May, me – all okay or near enough.’ He nods at each of them, folding down his fingers one by one as he checks them off.
‘Elliot too, though I don’t know where he’s gone.’ He folds down the thumb, leaving a curled fist and two fingers still sticking up on the other hand. ‘Jessa – hurt but conscious.’ They all turn to look at Jessa, curled in a foetal position, her long, glossy twists splayed on the sand, lips slightly parted to reveal the gap between her front teeth. There’s some swelling around her shoulder, but the blood on her upper arm has congealed to a dark paste.
A small fly lands inquisitively at the edge of the dark blood. May brushes it away angrily, glaring at the others as if all this is their fault. Jessa has always been hers, as long as anyone can remember. They’ve come as a pair since day one of first grade, fingers interlaced in a wordless playground pact before the bell even rang. Jessa’s gentle, considered thoroughness and May’s spiky, scrappy boldness somehow fitted together and made a whole.
‘The mouth on that girl,’ Hayley’s mom had gasped, half admiring, half disapproving, after she’d stopped by to pick up Hayley after practice one night, just in time to hear May unleash a stream of profanities in the direction of a truck that had blocked her in the parking lot. Hayley has never seen May without a comeback. But she looks shrunken and lost without Jessa awake and alert by her side. Her straight black hair hangs around her shoulders like a silk curtain. Like she’s already in mourning. Her delicate features look crumpled, long black eyelashes shining with tears.
They all stare at the seventh unchecked finger. Jason doesn’t need to say it. Brian’s body lies motionless in the shade, his meaty calves and forearms limp, his thick neck looking strangely delicate and vulnerable.
Only a few hours ago, they’d been ribbing him on the plane for having to wear his basketball jersey because he’d run out of clean laundry two days before the end of the tour. He grinned proudly and started explaining how underwear lasts twice as long if you turn it inside out, at which point Hayley very deliberately stopped listening.
Now Brian’s arms and legs glow an angry red, his fair skin burned under the relentless sun before Jason found him. The pale brown freckles that usually dust his round cheeks have been swallowed into the new rose pallor, which clashes with the ginger of his messy curls.
‘He’s breathing,’ Jason says, a little too loudly. ‘Maybe he just needs to sleep it off.’ Hayley resists the urge to point out that he hasn’t regained consciousness yet: that the situation is significantly more serious than an extended nap. She looks at Brian’s slack face again and feels a wave of nausea rise in the base of her throat. She swallows it down and looks away.
‘OH MY GOD, NAKED TWIN LESBIANS!’ Jason shouts suddenly, leaning towards Brian and shaking his leg. Brian’s head lolls loosely to one side, his cheek pressing into the sand.
‘Yeah, he’s genuinely unconscious.’ Jason smirks, apparently oblivious to the fact that he’s the only one who seems to find this amusing.
‘We queer women don’t only exist for your amusement, Jason, you might be shocked to hear,’ May mutters, without looking up. And Jason at least has the grace to look awkward, though he doesn’t apologise.
‘Has anybody seen Erickson? Or the pilot?’ Hayley asks.
Jason shakes his head. ‘I walked pretty deep into the trees looking for Brian. He must have been thrown further from the wreckage because he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt. But there was no sign of anyone else, or the front of the plane.’
‘It probably broke away much earlier,’ Shannon says grimly, looking out to sea. Her pale, angular face is serious, dark circles making her eye sockets look hollow and gaunt where usually she exuded an unusual kind of sharp glamour. ‘That grinding, screeching noise started a good minute or two before we crashed. It could be miles away.’
‘Or it could be somewher
e else on the island,’ May snaps. ‘They could be injured, or worse – they might need our help.’
‘I don’t think so, May,’ says a quiet voice, and Elliot steps out of the bushes, his curly, chestnut brown hair wild, his arms piled with sticks and twigs. There’s a thin diagonal cut across his right cheekbone and his knee-length, khaki shorts are torn. He bends down, carefully piling the wood in the sand.
‘There’s a pretty steep incline to the north.’ He jerks his head back towards the trees and to the right. ‘I climbed up far enough to get a sense of the whole island and I didn’t see anybody else, or anything that looked like it was from the plane. There’s a lot of tree cover across the centre of the island, so I guess it’s possible there was something I didn’t spot, if part of the plane went down there… but I’d still have expected to see some debris; broken branches… something. I think Shannon’s right. We’re on our own.’
There’s a surprised silence. Hayley isn’t sure she’s ever heard Elliot talk uninterrupted for that long. She sees a sudden flash of him skulking into the first joint practice at the start of the semester, head bowed, not meeting anyone’s eye.
Then the reality of what he has said hits her like a cold blast. On our own. Stranded. Stuck. The enormity of it is so great she almost can’t think about it at all. She looks down at her bloodied hand, and notices that her torn fingernail is beginning to throb. Somehow it’s easier to focus on that one small thing, the immediate pain, than it is to contemplate what Elliot is telling them. There’s a wave of panic hovering, threatening to completely overwhelm her. She picks at the nail and earns herself a sharp stab of pain. The panic recedes a little.
‘How do you know that’s north?’ May blurts it at Elliot like she wants to pick a fight. Hayley looks at May’s dark, glinting eyes and knows that she isn’t the only one at risk of being swept away by that wave of fear.
Elliot holds out his arm, showing them a worn leather watch whose soft, threadbare strap is the same sandy golden brown as his skin. ‘You can work it out by pointing the hour hand at the sun: a line drawn between the hour hand and 12 points south.’ The others stare at him. ‘My family camps. A lot,’ he adds, awkwardly.
‘Anyway.’ Elliot crouches and starts arranging little twigs and scraps of wood in a pyramid. ‘It’s going to get dark and cold pretty quickly once the sun goes down. And if anyone comes looking for us, a fire is the best way to get their attention.’
Hayley feels like an idiot. They’ve been sat here for hours – why didn’t any of them think of a fire?
‘Nobody has a lighter,’ Jason scoffs, shifting his weight forwards like he wants to draw the others back towards him. Heads obediently swivel in his direction. On the court, Elliot might’ve ducked his head in embarrassment, danced to Jason’s tune, but here he ignores him, walking over to the pile of supplies by the plane.
‘I said there aren’t any lighters or matches, man,’ Jason repeats, a tougher note in his voice daring Elliot to contradict him.
Elliot picks up a plastic water bottle, murmurs to himself, and starts walking up and down the beach, picking through the debris. With a grunt of satisfaction, he pulls his sketchbook out from under a pile of clothes and shoes, flicking past a half-finished picture of them sitting in the back of the plane, and carefully rips out a piece of paper covered in dark pencil lines.
Hayley leans forward to watch, wondering how he can manage to stay so calm. Bending close to the tepee of twigs, Elliot folds the paper in two and holds it in his left hand, then gently tilts the water bottle back and forth using his right hand. A bright spot of light appears on the paper, a circle that grows and shrinks, as he experimentally moves the bottle around. When the light is at its brightest, a tiny, concentrated pinprick, he holds it still, and almost immediately the paper begins to smoulder and smoke. A dime-sized circle scorches out from the centre, the edges curling white. Jason raises his eyebrows and puts his arm around Shannon’s waist. ‘Nice trick, cub scout.’
Elliot’s lip twitches with a tiny smile as he gently waves the paper back and forth, feeding it oxygen, patiently encouraging it until an orange flame flickers up. He pokes it between the twigs he’s arranged, pulling a handful of dry, dead grass from his pocket and stuffing it into the gaps.
Elliot puts his cheek to the sand and blows gently and a little spiral of bluish smoke rises up again, chased by tiny tongues of flame licking at the twigs.
There’s a low whistle. ‘Impressive,’ croaks a voice. Brian is struggling weakly to raise himself up on one elbow.
Hayley feels the relief thrum warm in her chest.
‘Fuck’s sake, Brian. Do you have any idea how long you’ve been out?’ Jason’s voice is rough, accusing, even. He wipes his hand swiftly across his face and frowns at Brian like he’s committed five fouls in a game and been benched.
Brian grins sheepishly. ‘Where are we? What happened?’ He looks around, taking in his surroundings, and mutters ‘Jesus.’ He raises his hand to the back of his head and winces.
‘The plane crashed,’ Shannon says, simply. ‘We’re on an island.’
‘Is everyone okay?’
‘Everyone except Jessa… she’s been conscious, but her arm is hurt. We don’t know about Erickson and the pilot. We think they went down somewhere else.’
Brian’s gaze wanders from the fire to the trees to the plane, then out over the beach towards the sea. The heat of the sun is waning now, a breeze rushing up the beach and into the tree canopy above them as if to whisper that the sea is coming, coming. They can smell it – the wet, fresh scent of salt and seaweed that tethers Hayley to reality, forces her to acknowledge that this is actually happening.
Brian is eyeing Jessa. ‘Is it just her arm? Because I saw something like this on Grey’s Anatomy where they thought the guy was totally fine because he was awake and talking, but then he had a delayed brain bleed and he just died.’ Brian snaps his fingers, ‘like that.’
‘Oh, good.’ Shannon rolls her eyes, ‘I didn’t realise we had a qualified brain consultant with us.’
May’s eyes shoot daggers at Brian as he shuffles into a sitting position, wincing and rotating his head from side to side.
‘What? They have medical advisers to make it realistic, you know.’
* * *
It’s quiet around the fire as they peel back the metal foil from the food trays and start picking at the contents with plastic forks. Cold macaroni cheese isn’t exactly appealing but at least it fills their stomachs. Hayley peels the plastic wrapper off a small bread roll and is about to take a bite when Elliot walks out of the trees, carrying another large armful of sticks which he dumps in a pile near the fire.
‘What are you all doing?’ Elliot pants, gaping at them.
They blink at him, this new, different Elliot who isn’t sitting on the side lines with his patched backpack guarding the seat next to him, listening silently to post-practice pep talks, emerging from the locker room like a ghost after the other boys have tumbled out in a loud group.
‘What do you mean, what are we doing?’ Shannon looks at her macaroni and wrinkles her nose ‘We’re eating dinner, if you can call it that.’
‘Guys,’ Elliot speaks urgently, angrily. ‘You can’t just eat everything. We have no idea how long we’re going to be stuck here. We need to ration our food and drink.’
‘Oh, come on, man,’ Jason drawls, taking a bite of a candy bar he has helped himself to from the supply pile.
‘No, “man”, you come on,’ Elliot shoots back. ‘The plane only had food on board for one meal, plus whatever snacks people had on them. That’s it. How long do you think we’re going to last if we eat it all at once?’
There’s an uncomfortable silence.
‘It’s only a matter of time till someone finds us,’ Jason says, dismissively. ‘My parents are going to have people out looking, believe me.’
‘I’m sure they will,’ Elliot retorts, drily. ‘But do you have any idea how big the Gulf of Mexico is? H
ow long it could take? We’re talking about more than a million square miles.’
‘They know our flight path,’ Hayley points out, swallowing a claggy mouthful of macaroni and trying to quell the rising fear Elliot’s words are igniting in her stomach. ‘Houston to Miami. That’ll narrow it down.’
‘Sure, if we’d stayed on it. But who knows how far we zigzagged or what went wrong with the plane? We have no idea whether the radio transmitter was still working, whether the pilot was able to issue a mayday call…’ Elliot frowns. ‘Even in the act of falling out of the sky the plane could have covered miles and miles! And they might have lost track of us long before we went down.’
‘Aren’t we on a barrier island?’ May asks, uncertainly. ‘I assumed we were somewhere close to land, just not close enough to see it.’
Elliot shakes his head. ‘I’ve been fishing off some of the barrier islands with my dad. They’re basically just big sandbars. They’re flat, grassy.’ He waves his hand at the thick trees behind them and the darkening shadow where the land rises to the right. ‘Nothing like this.’
‘Right.’ Jason claps his hands loudly, speaking over Elliot. ‘I think we need a plan. Let’s assume it could be a few days before we’re rescued. We need to do an inventory of our supplies and ration them out.’
There are six untouched, foil-packed plane dinners left in the pile, and a smattering of squashed confectionery.
‘Each tray has a carton of macaroni, a salad, a bread roll, crackers and cheese,’ Jason announces. Let’s call that four portions of food.’ He pauses, and Hayley physically bites her tongue not to do the sum for him. ‘Twenty-four portions in all. There’s seven of us, so that’s enough for three days if we each eat just one portion per day. Plus, two Snickers, a Slim Jim, three bags of Cheetos and a few sweets. There’s no way it’ll take them more than three days to find us.’
‘They better find us faster,’ Brian mutters. ‘This puny salad is not a day’s worth of calories. Although,’ he says, brightening, ‘If Jessa doesn’t wake up tomorrow, I shotgun her macaroni.’
