by Laura Bates
She’d never had any classes with Shannon, but she had tried to interview her once, the year before she joined the squad, on assignment for the school paper. There had been a huge party at someone’s parents’ beach house, and it had ended badly; the police were called and there were rumours that Chad Maxwell, the star quarterback from a private high school in Tampa, had been taken away in handcuffs. But apparently he was back at his school the next week and nobody at Oak Ridge seemed to be talking much about what had happened. Or at least, when they did, they weren’t talking about Chad. They were talking about some girl who’d been working at the party, a waitress. How she’d been drinking on the job… caught Chad’s eye and seen her chance. How she fancied bringing him down and getting a cut of the family fortune and five minutes of fame in the process. It hadn’t worked, though, they said, with satisfaction, as they murmured about it in the oak-panelled hallways between classes. Police must’ve seen right through her.
So Hayley had pored over Instagram posts from the night until she spotted a familiar figure; Shannon framed in a doorway in a metallic silver halter top, Jason’s hand draped around her hip. Hayley had visited the school office with a sob story about needing to lend notes for chem class to her lab partner and left with Shannon’s address on a scrap of paper.
She’d figured Shannon would be less likely to give her the brush-off if she turned up on her doorstep. But Shannon hadn’t been home when Hayley arrived outside a small, one-storey terraced house in Dillard Park. Cheap peach paint peeled around the windows and a bucket stood beneath a leaking gutter. There was a beat-up old sedan in the driveway and a greying Rottweiler barking half-heartedly at the end of a heavy chain. It occurred to Hayley that she’d never seen Shannon’s car, though she’d assumed she had one. She’d only ever seen her hopping lightly into the back of Jason’s Jeep, waving to a crowd of friends as they sped off. And, once, Jason reacting furiously as the metal buckle on Shannon’s bag scraped his paintwork, shouting something that Hayley couldn’t hear as he pulled away, Shannon’s back rigid in the passenger seat.
Just as she rechecked the address, the door was opened by a quiet, mousy woman with owl-round glasses and an oversized cardigan clutched tightly around her; Hayley noticed her fingernails were all bitten down to the quick. For a moment something flickered across her face when Hayley said she was from Oak Ridge; Hayley thought it might have been relief, or pleasure, and she gave a little ‘Oh’, as if it was a surprise. She asked Hayley in to wait and led her into a modest sitting room with slightly faded pink wallpaper and a vase of plastic flowers in the empty fireplace. Hayley had just accepted a glass of iced tea when Shannon swept in, eyes flashing, refusing to comment on the party and insistent that she had no idea what Hayley was talking about. ‘So, is that everything?’ she’d asked, pointedly, and Hayley had found herself standing on the other side of the front door inside of three minutes, her drink left untouched.
She’d never got any further with the story – some other staffers on the paper poked around a bit without turning anything up except a furiously worded letter from the Maxwells, lawyer threatening a libel suit – but Hayley had been anxious the episode might count against her, when she came to try out for the cheer squad.
She needn’t have worried, though. Shannon barked ‘Name?’ when she entered the audition room, and wrote it down blankly without a flicker of recognition. Like she didn’t even remember having met her at all.
And in spite of Shannon’s spikiness, in spite of her sharp tongue and stand-offishness, there’s a part of Hayley that wishes she could break through that outer shell and just talk to her. Wishes she didn’t feel so nervous and tongue-tied around her. Because deep down, she suspects they’ve got far more in common than Shannon knows.
* * *
They’d almost finished seven shelters when Jason and Brian returned disconsolately with only saltwater-soaked clothes, sun-singed shoulders and a sore foot to show for their troubles. ‘Stood on a goddamn anemone,’ Brian gasps, wobbling on one leg and squeezing his big toe with both hands.
‘Not as easy as it looks?’ Hayley asks, sympathetically, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing.
Brian looks more and more aggrieved, his face contorting as he hops around. ‘That’s it, sorry, guys, I’ve got to pee on it. Look away now or don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘Er, Brian?’
He hooks his thumbs into the swimming trunks he’s been wearing for the past several days, and bends over, pulling them down in one quick motion.
‘BRIAN!’ Shannon steps towards him, not exactly averting her eyes. ‘That’s jellyfish.’
‘Huh?’
‘Jellyfish. You pee on jellyfish stings. Not anemones.’
‘Oh. Well, okay then. Good. I’m gonna—’ He pulls his pants up and hobbles off towards the campfire, arms swinging, neck glowing like a beacon.
* * *
Later, after picking unenthusiastically at her apportioned fruit and coconut, Hayley finds herself wandering along the beach, feeling the grainy resistance of the sand beneath her heels and listening to the soft swish of the waves. The sun is dipping behind the trees, sending long, waving shadows stretching towards the water’s edge. For the first time in four days, she doesn’t feel terrified or panicked. The reality of their situation is starting to set in. This morning for the first time she awoke without a fluster of disorientation. And there is space to breathe, now the immediate threat of dehydration and hunger has receded, loosening the squeezing cage of anxiety around her lungs.
Just for a moment, she lets herself follow May’s example, and tries to trick herself into believing this is a free holiday; a wild adventure she’ll tell her grandchildren about someday. She walks down to the edge of the water, letting it whisper over her bare toes. If she stands very still, with the warm breeze brushing her arms and the salt tang of the air on her tongue, she can almost imagine herself on a beach break, about to head back to the fluffy towels and crisp white sheets of an air-conditioned hotel room.
‘Want to help?’ Elliot has followed her down the beach, a battered backpack slung over one shoulder, a slender stick grasped in his left hand. He settles himself in the sand, pulling somebody’s phone out of the backpack. For a moment, her heart jumps. Has he found a way to rig up the phone somehow, to send an emergency call? If anyone could, it would surely be Elliot. But the phone is dead, the screen dull and lifeless.
‘E.T. phone home?’ she asks, lightly, trying to ignore the lurch of disappointment.
‘Better.’ He grins, pulling the phone case open with his fingernails and starting to gently separate its internal components. ‘E.T. catch fish.’
She watches closely as he peels apart the circuitry inside; the complex web of electronics that can power a thousand tasks in the palm of her hand at home, and yet lies completely flat and useless here. First, Elliot removes a mirror about the size of a credit card, which he turns over thoughtfully in his palm and then slips into his pocket. Next, he takes out a dark green circuit board, criss-crossed with silver lines like a tiny map and littered with gold and silver dots. ‘It’s very soft,’ he explains, holding the thin wafer of metal delicately between his thumb and forefinger and gently scraping it back and forth against a hard stone. One corner quickly wears down and then another, until a knife-sharp, metal arrowhead rests gently in his palm. He pulls a pair of white headphones from the backpack and splits open their plastic casing, separating the fine, coppery wires inside. Taking a single, fragile strand, he binds the blade tightly to the long, thin stick.
‘You really know your stuff, don’t you?’
He shrugs. ‘I’ve really been on that many camping holidays. But if you want to hear about shopping centres in Dubai or diving the Great Barrier Reef, you might want to ask one of the others.’ He checks himself, perhaps realising how bitter he sounds. ‘Want to try your luck?’ He smiles at Hayley and hands her the spear; she tries not to notice the brush of his fingers against hers,
and together they wade into the shallow water.
The sea rests motionless in that long, lazy, moment when late afternoon turns imperceptibly to early evening. The water is turquoise, so still that they can see the sun shining on the seabed like a silver net, irregular loops shifting and sliding across the sand. She watches their toes, sand seeping up between them to anchor their feet in position, sucking them into the fabric of the place. There’s an exhilaration about feeling rooted in, a closeness to the sensations of the natural world that Hayley has never experienced before.
A silver flash ripples beneath the surface, breaking her chain of thought. It’s gone before she can draw breath, but there’s another, and another – a shoal of tinfoil scraps, darting and hesitating, pouring themselves between rocks and soaring upwards again like liquid smoke. They move as a single body, iron filings drawn by the same magnet, moving so swiftly that it seems impossible she could ever catch one. But she crouches, grips the spear tightly in her right hand, jabs it through the water as suddenly and quickly as she can, aiming wildly not at an individual fish but at the middle of the shoal itself. A silver firework explodes in the water, her hand at its epicentre; she stands, frozen, as the fish vanish in all directions. She draws back her arm. Nothing. The spear is empty, the tip clean.
They try again and again, standing stock still in the water, waiting until the fish swarm confidently around them before pouncing, holding the tip of the arrow to the very surface of the water to bring it as close as possible. Still, nothing. The fish are too fast, or the arrow too blunt. Elliot clicks his tongue.
‘Why do you think nobody has found us yet?’ Hayley asks, resting the spear in her hand as she waits for the fish to settle again.
Elliot sighs. ‘There could be a million reasons. It wasn’t a big, commercial flight with hundreds of passengers on board. Maybe there are fewer resources available to look for a private jet than the kind of massive searches when a big airliner goes down. Maybe they are looking, but there’s bad weather somewhere affecting the search. My best guess is that whatever went wrong with the plane killed its communication systems and they have no idea where to start. Maybe the pilot flew off course to try and correct the problem and we’re not where we should have been.’
‘They could be looking in completely the wrong place,’ Hayley whispers, horrified. But part of her has grimly noted the passing days and is not so surprised.
‘That’s not the worst of it,’ Elliot says, quietly, glancing back towards the shore, where the others are starting to build up the fire, adding extra sticks in anticipation of nightfall.
‘What?’ Hayley asks, flatly.
‘What if they’ve found the other part of the plane?’ Elliot whispers, even though they are much too far away for anybody else to overhear. ‘What if they’ve found it and it’s completely mangled, or floating in the middle of nowhere, and maybe Erickson and the pilot… you know… and they assume the rest of us must be dead too?’
‘You mean they might have given up looking altogether?’
‘I don’t know,’ Elliot says, suddenly sounding weary and irritated. ‘I don’t have all the answers, okay? It’s just a thought I had, that’s all. But there’s no point freaking everyone out.’
‘Mind if I try?’
It’s Jessa, standing next to the abandoned backpack with the remaining strands of copper wire in her good hand. She wades in to meet them, uncurls the fist of her injured arm to reveal a metal ring pull, taken from a drinks can. She has snapped one side of the metal loop, filed it down on a stone into a sharp point and bent it outwards slightly.
‘A fishhook.’ Hayley grins, impressed, grateful for Jessa’s interruption, happy to push the conversation with Elliot aside.
Elliot stumbles sideways in the water as Jessa approaches, splashing awkwardly, water slopping up his front.
‘I’ll see you later,’ he mumbles, and Hayley watches him go. For a moment, she thinks she sees disappointment flicker over Jessa’s face, but she’s soon smiling again, twisting the strands of copper wire together to create a single line and threading it through the ring pull.
‘How did you—’
‘My dad’s taken me fishing every summer since I was seven. Elliot’s not the only scout in the group you know,’ Jessa says quietly, pulling a handful of coconut scraps from her pocket and delicately piercing one with the hook, wincing a little as she uses her injured arm. ‘One year I forgot my rod and he showed me this. I’d have thought of it sooner but I was –’ she glances down at her arm – ‘distracted.’
She drops the hook into the water and gently pays out the wire, letting it trail deeper. Almost immediately, the wire goes taut, a rippling circle skidding over the surface of the water as something beneath pulls it from side to side. Jessa tugs on the wire and the hook flies up to break the surface, glinting emptily, the coconut gone. ‘Cheeky nibbler,’ she murmurs, spearing another piece of coconut and releasing the hook again. They watch the wire drift lazily with the sea’s gentle movements, feeling the cool silk of the water caressing their calves. The fierce heat of the day has gone, replaced by a gentle, soothing warmth. Nothing happens.
Jessa frowns silently and Hayley sees her eyes flick down to her arm again. The swelling has subsided around her shoulder, but it’s tightly strapped to her chest with a neon orange chiffon scarf she remembers May wearing on the last night of the tour, the deep cuts bulkily swathed in a bandage Jason found in the single first-aid kit to have survived the crash.
‘Jessa,’ Hayley asks, gently, ‘is your arm okay?’
‘It’s fine,’ she says quickly, ‘I’m fine.’
Suddenly there’s another jerk on the fishing line, and this time Jessa gently releases her grip, feeding more out instead of yanking it in, patiently waiting as the surface of the water seethes and froths. Another tug catches her off guard, the wire bumping against her injured arm and she lets out a single, high-pitched yelp of pain.
‘Can I?’ Hayley asks, and Jessa hands her the wire, putting one hand on top of hers.
‘Slowly, slowly,’ she whispers. Hayley gently starts to wind the line in, wrapping it around her left hand like a bobbin. She can feel resistance, something pulling determinedly in the opposite direction. It reminds her of flying a kite on the beach with her dad, running into the wind, feeling the pressure of the string like a wild thing pulsing in her hands.
With a little splash, the end of the line emerges from the water, a glittering peacock-blue fish the length of her hand twisting and whirling on the end. Hayley gasps and Jessa lets out a loud yell of triumph.
Beginner’s luck.’ She smiles, modestly, as they splash back across the shallows to deposit the fish in the backpack.
‘It’s weird,’ Jessa says, quietly, glancing up. ‘Everything’s different somehow.’ She laughs. ‘I mean, obviously everything’s different, we’re stranded on a desert island, but—’ she trails off.
‘I know what you mean,’ Hayley says. ‘It’s not just everything that’s different, it’s everyone.’
‘Yeah,’ Jessa agrees thoughtfully. ‘I never thought I’d see the day that Shannon and Jason would be anything less than rock solid but now… who knows?’
‘They’ve never argued before?’ Hayley asks, curiously.
‘Oh sure, they’ve fought, but not like this. Jason would fill the changing room with flowers, or he’d write some cheesy poem about Shannon and read it over the Tannoy while we were in the gym, or come in and sweep her off her feet in the middle of practice in front of everyone and it would always blow over, you know? She’d have to forgive him. But it’s different here. She’s different. And he is. It’s like your parents falling out or something.’
‘Do you know what started it?’ Hayley asks.
‘I wonder,’ Jessa starts, almost whispering, ‘if it’s to do with how Shannon was at the party—’
‘I doubt it.’ May is suddenly there behind them, wading through the shallows, peering curiously at the makeshift fishing line.
‘It wasn’t a big deal, and I don’t think Jason even saw, anyway.’
‘Not a big deal?’ Jessa sucks air through her teeth. ‘I’ve never seen Shannon like that. She was wild. I wonder what got into her?’
May looks briefly unnerved, or maybe it’s just the coldness of the water, but at that moment the line jerks again, then again and again in quick succession. The conversation is quickly forgotten as they rush triumphantly back to the shore with their treasure glittering in the old backpack.
While the others argue about how to prepare the fish, with May insisting they let it die ‘naturally’, and Elliot begging her to let him bash its head quickly on a rock, Hayley sits back, pleased to have been useful but wary. For the first time, today it feels like there is solid ground beneath them – food, water and shelter – but behind it, she knows instinctively that something is very wrong. And not just the pathetic amount of tiny fish to share between seven people and the terrible fear of not being found. Maybe it’s just the pressure of the situation, but she has a nagging feeling that there’s more to it than that. There’s something ‘off’ about the fabric of the whole group. Like a jigsaw where all the pieces have been slightly reshaped and none of them fit together any more.
DAY 5
By the fifth day, Hayley’s skin has darkened to a deep tan and her body is covered in bites, scratches and scrapes.
It’s uncomfortably humid inside her shelter, the armfuls of leaves she spread to soften her sleeping mat adding an unpleasantly musty scent to the already clogged air. Shifting her body weight, she’s uncomfortably aware of the smell of her own sweat, the stale sweetness that returns no matter how often she washes in seawater. Not that everyone is so concerned with hygiene: Brian can now be smelled from six feet away, as May disgustedly pointed out to him at dinner last night. (‘All I’m saying is, you either need to wash, or sit downwind.’)
