by Laura Bates
Her thoughts flit wildly like grains of sand caught in the storm.
‘Breathe in for two. Hold for two. Breathe out for two.’
‘You’ll be valedictorian one day, you know that?’ Grandma, neat hands curled around the tortoiseshell handle of her walking stick, smelling of lipstick and soap. ‘But don’t work too hard, my sweet girl, save something for you.’
‘Breathe in for three. Hold for three. Breathe out for three.’
The sea fizzes and hisses. A boiling kettle.
Elliot lying unconscious. Jason’s face, angry and taut. Jessa’s arm, heavy and useless, hanging from her body. The sticky remains of the iodine sparkling with slivers of glass.
‘Breathe in for four. Hold for four. Breathe out for four.’
‘C’mon, Hayley, come out.’ Nella, the girl who used to live next door, shaking her tight, blonde curls, clutching a pair of walkie talkies, perched astride her red bike with the stabilisers. Pouting. ‘You never come play any more.’ Going back to her spelling homework, turning up the volume on her headphones.
‘In for five.’
Standing quietly in the entrance at the South Florida Science Center, on the fifth-grade aquarium trip. Trying to blend into the glass tank behind her. Watching the others easily obey the teacher’s command to ‘get into pairs.’ Knowing she would be the odd one out.
‘And six.’
Smoothing out the Oak Ridge Tribune and staring, staring at her first-ever front-page byline. Smelling the fresh, crisp paper, the cheap ink transferring to her palms. Stroking it over and over.
‘Now seven.’
‘Come on, Mom. Do you think Woodward and Bernstein had time to go to their eighth-grade Spring fling? Believe me, I’m missing nothing.’
‘Breathe in for eight. Hold for eight. Breathe out for eight.’
Ninth-grade prize day. Kids shuffling up to the stage to collect their awards. Most improved. Best effort. Then the list. An unbearable seven subjects long. ‘Math, English, History, Biology, Chemistry, French, Geography… outstanding academic achievement in every single one goes to…’ the longest pause in the world… ‘Hayley Larkin.’ The sniggers. Pride and shame. Bite the inside of your cheek. Walk up, shake hands, look straight ahead. Don’t listen.
She never could get past eight.
The wind howls and a few sticks shift, leaving a gap above Hayley’s head. The sky is a deep, menacing grey. She can just make out the leaves of the palm tree whose trunk her shelter leans against, thrashing and writhing like wild things, trying to take off into the storm.
A squall buffets the side of her shelter and a cold spray of rain stings the side of her face.
Her eye smarts and burns. Hayley blinks, trying to dislodge a grain of sand, feeling it scratch painfully against her eyelid. She wishes she had some fresh water to wash it out.
Fresh water!
Without thinking, without pausing, she is out of the shelter and running full pelt along the beach. The storm is still howling in the distance, but it’s getting quieter here, muted, and the clouds have lifted enough for a little moonlight to leak back in. Her sneakers slop and slap against sodden mud, its stickiness seeping inside, her feet squelching.
The stumps crouch like squat sentinels in the gloom. She can see the plastic slung low between them, bulging now, stretching closer to the ground.
She plunges her wrists into the icy water. Three inches, maybe. Cool and silky on her skin. She cups her hands and brings a scoop to her lips: it tastes somehow sharper and cleaner than she remembered. She gulps another mouthful, feeling the chill race into her chest while the rainwater drips from her nose and earlobes, like she’s being cleansed inside and out at the same time.
When she gets back to the beach, the wind has dropped and it isn’t raining any more. She can see the pinpricks of stars piercing the velvet. There’s enough moonlight to make out the shape of Elliot’s shelter, his sneakered feet just visible at the entrance.
‘It worked, Elliot! It worked!’ She pats his ankles, awkwardly, wanting him to wake up, needing him to share this, to let him feel the same rush she does now that something positive has finally happened.
‘Okay, okay, you don’t need to shout,’ comes a grumpy voice.
‘You’re awake!’ She shrieks it so loudly that heads poke out of other shelters. The others gather around, grinning, as Elliot shuffles out like an ungainly caterpillar. They all look as bedraggled and soggy as Hayley feels.
‘It worked, it worked! Elliot built a rain reservoir in the trees to catch water and it worked – there’s a few litres in there at least!’ Hayley garbles, excitedly.
‘I’m glad,’ Elliot says slowly. ‘But it’s not our first priority.’ He is carefully scanning the faces around him.
‘What are you talking about? What else is more important than water?’
Elliot looks at her.
‘Finding out who pushed me.’
* * *
They can’t get the fire to light on the wet sand, so there’s no warmth and there aren’t enough dry clothes to go round. They sit in a shivering circle, lit weakly by the grey beams of the moon, apart from May, who returns immediately to her bed after saying they’re all being ridiculous, and nothing will change before morning so they might as well get some sleep.
‘Tell us again, Elliot,’ Shannon says, with the tone of a sceptical but patient teacher trying to get to the bottom of what she suspects might be a tall tale. ‘What happened, exactly?’
Elliot sighs, frustrated, and rubs a hand through his unruly curls, leaving them even wilder than before. ‘We were at the top of the hill. I was looking up, trying to spot the plane, doing everything I could to get the mirror to reflect and signal the pilot. It was loud and windy and it all happened really fast, but I felt a pair of hands shove me, hard, in the small of my back, then I was falling. The next thing I remember is hearing Hayley’s voice and waking up here.’
‘Elliot,’ Jessa speaks slowly and gently, like she doesn’t want to upset him. Hayley notices that she’s cradling her arm, sitting very still, trying to avoid any sudden movements. ‘Isn’t it possible that you just slipped?’ she asks, calmly. ‘If everything happened so fast?’
‘Yeah, it was super chaotic up there,’ Jason latches eagerly onto this explanation. ‘I couldn’t hear myself think, everyone was shouting at once and the weather was crazy…’
‘No. No.’ Elliot shakes his head irritably. ‘I felt it. I felt somebody push me.’
‘Okay, but we were all looking up, all trying to get the plane’s attention,’ Brian chimes in. ‘Maybe someone did push you, but by accident? Like they sort of banged into you or shoved you by mistake?’
Elliot starts to shake his head, but Brian is in full flow: ‘I mean, most of us had never been up there, we didn’t know the lay of the land… I totally didn’t realise that drop was so steep…’
Elliot gets to his feet and turns around. ‘I felt two hands, here and here.’ He balls his fists and places them on either side of his spine, just above his shorts. ‘It was hard, and quick… definitely deliberate.’
He sits heavily back down.
‘That’s silly.’ Jessa says, eventually. ‘Why would anyone want to hurt you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Elliot admits.
‘I mean, totally apart from anything else, you’ve basically been saving our asses since the day we got here,’ Brian chimes in, with surprising warmth. ‘It’s not like we’d even have survived this long without you.’
Jason gives a tiny snort.
Suddenly, something else occurs to Hayley. ‘Could it have been about the mirror?’
Elliot frowns at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What if they weren’t trying to hurt you, but they wanted to stop you from signalling the plane? Someone who didn’t want us to get off the island?’
‘This is ridiculous,’ Jessa sighs impatiently. ‘Why are we talking about this as if it’s an unsolvable mystery? If one of us shoved Elliot
, they should own up.’
There is a long, uninterrupted silence. Hayley feels gooseflesh rising on her forearms that has nothing to do with the cold.
‘So…’ Brian raises his eyebrows and jerks his thumb towards May’s shelter. ‘Then I guess…’
‘Oh, shut up, Brian,’ snaps Jessa. ‘May would never do something like that.’
‘Well, someone did,’ Brian says. ‘Apparently,’ he adds, looking at Elliot a little sceptically. ‘Sorry, man, but you did bang your head hard enough to pass out. Maybe you’re just imagining it.’
‘Or maybe someone was so angry with me they wanted to punish me,’ Elliot says, quietly, and everybody turns to look at Jason.
‘Oh sure, just because I pointed out his idiocy with the fire, I must have tried to murder him,’ Jason says, bullishly. ‘Yeah, that makes loads of sense, I’m definitely guilty.’
Hayley recalls the fury that had passed over Jason’s face, the spittle in Elliot’s eyebrows, and doesn’t know what to think. Could Jason really have been so pissed at Elliot, so desperate that the plane wasn’t seeing them that he’d lash out? Surely not. Jason was all charm and bluster. He wouldn’t actually hurt somebody… would he?
They talk each other around in circles, Elliot continuing to stick stubbornly to his story, the others trapped between his certainty and their own unwillingness to believe that one of them could have done what he describes, Jason angrily maintaining his innocence.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he finally explodes, stumbling to his feet. ‘It doesn’t even matter whether you believe me or not, does it? It’s not going to change the fact that we’re never getting off this goddamned island.’
The silence he leaves behind is heavy, loaded with each of their fears and unspoken anxieties. Hayley runs her fingers over and over the deep cut on the back of her wrist, sealed over now with a thick scab. What if Jason’s right? What if that plane was their one real chance of rescue? She picks at the edge and feels the wetness seeping out.
* * *
One by one, tiredness catches up with them and they traipse off to try and sleep. And as Jessa settles in for the night, it is the first evening that Hayley doesn’t hear a soft, rhythmic murmuring of prayer coming from inside her shelter. Only silence.
The last thing Brian says before they leave the campfire does nothing to raise anyone’s spirits.
‘Guys. I’ve been thinking about it every which way. My man Elliot says he was pushed.’ Elliot raises his eyebrows, looking like he doesn’t know whether to be amused or grateful that his accident has suddenly made him far more popular with his teammates.
‘Okay, so he was pushed. And each of us says we didn’t push him, right?’ There’s a pause, some nodding. ‘Well, there’s another possibility, isn’t there?’
Hayley watches the others’ baffled faces. She thinks she knows what is coming; she’s been trying not to think it ever since Elliot’s bombshell.
‘There might be someone else on the island.’
DAY 7
The morning doesn’t begin well. Hayley makes an early pilgrimage through the trees, enjoying the peaty, rich smell that rises up from the wet ground after last night’s deluge. The birds are noisier than ever, shrieking exuberantly as if to celebrate their victory over the storm. A beautiful golden yellow blur flutters to a stop on a branch just yards away from Hayley, its shining black eye fixed on her with bright curiosity. She holds her breath, marvelling at the richness of its feathers, drenched in colour, the buttercup hue gleaming against its delicate black-and-white wings.
For one ridiculous moment she entertains the fantasy that it has come to tell her something: to warn her, perhaps, or to help her. There is such intelligence in that fierce little eye. ‘Who did it?’ She almost asks, out loud. Then it tilts its head to the other side, as if to chide her silliness, and is gone as quickly as it came.
She walks on, eagerly, an empty water bottle grasped in each hand, glad to have a purpose to distract her from the murky fears and questions hanging over the camp. The memory of the clear, cool water she gulped down last night dances tantalisingly on her tongue, pushing her forwards, stumbling in her eagerness.
But when she reaches the shady clearing, she stops dead.
Rocket the raccoon is floating on his back in the water, his body horribly bloated, his eyes milky and unseeing. Hayley cannot bring herself to touch him, although she knows she should remove the carcass and discard the contaminated water. She trudges disconsolately back to the camp.
‘Not Rocket,’ May wails, while Jason smashes his fist into a tree trunk in frustration when Hayley breaks the news.
‘We’ll try again,’ Elliot says, quietly. ‘At least it worked.’
Brian has decided they have to check the island. He’s calling it a search party, which May says is stupid, because how can you search for something if you don’t even know what you’re looking for? Elliot says it’s stupid too, but for different reasons. He doesn’t think someone could have slipped out of the trees and shoved him and then melted away again without anybody noticing, even in the chaos of the storm.
Jason says looking will give them an answer, once and for all.
Hayley can’t decide what’s worse – the threat that there might be someone else hiding on the island, waiting to launch another attack, or the idea that one of them could hurt Elliot so badly and then lie about it. She looks over at him, a purple bruise protruding from his temple. It could have been so much worse. But he looks different somehow, more alert, his eyes darting here and there, jumping a little when someone bumps into him from behind. Like he can’t relax, because he doesn’t know who to trust. And Hayley can’t blame him. She’s starting to feel the same way herself.
She takes in each of the others, one by one, as they pull on shoes and drag random items of clothing out of the locker, getting ready to head out on what they all know is probably a wild goose chase.
May sniffs cautiously at the armpits of a yellow T-shirt before wrinkling her nose and throwing it to one side in disgust, choosing to pull one of the boys’ jerseys over her head instead. It swamps her, but that seems preferable to wearing clothing that’s stiff with someone else’s encrusted sweat.
Brian is thumping the bottle of sunscreen, trying to get it to spit the last dregs out into his palm. His nose has started to peel so violently it looks like he’s permanently shedding scraps of white confetti. Shannon is readjusting Jessa’s sling, tying the orange scarf tighter and trying to find a more comfortable position. Jessa’s face is rigid with concentration: she’s staring down at the sand as if she can’t actually see it.
Jason is sketching something in the sand with a sharp stick, pointing to different areas and murmuring to himself. Elliot is hunched at the edge of the trees, a stubborn frown etched into his features, decanting the milk out of the last of the brown coconuts into small water bottles he’s scratched their initials into, making sure they all get an equal share. He’s shaking his head and muttering about not getting dehydrated on a pointless mission.
Nobody looks like they’re hiding anything. Hayley feels a stab of annoyance at herself. She ought to be able to figure out what’s going on. She’s an investigative journalist, for goodness’ sake, or at least one in training. But nothing’s jumping out at her like it should. Someone ought to be looking guilty, making excuses, trying to avoid detection. But there’s nothing. Absolutely no clues at all. She watches them bustling around the camp, clearing away their breakfast things, fetching fresh wood to build up the fire. She watches Jason the longest. He’s the only one with something approaching a motive. But he does nothing to give himself away.
Could there really be someone else on the island after all?
‘Okay, guys, huddle up.’ Jason waves them all over, wiping his hands on his bright red vest.
‘I’ve divided the island into quarters.’ He points with the stick, a rough circle drawn in the sand in front of him. ‘This is the crash site and the camp, along the bea
ch here. We’ve spent most time in this area, and the trees immediately adjacent to the beach, collecting wood. And we haven’t seen anybody. So we can assume this area is clear. But here…’ He stabs to the left with the stick, indicating the southernmost quadrant. ‘This is the most densely wooded area, where the girls found the fruit trees. We haven’t searched that whole area yet and it’s possible someone could be hiding amongst the trees. Jessa, you can show us the way. Hayley, you’re with us. And you, babe.’ Jason slides an arm around Shannon’s shoulders and pulls her tightly to him. ‘I’m not leaving my girl alone with some lunatic running around the island trying to kill people.’
‘Jeez, overexaggerate much?’ mutters May under her breath.
Jason pretends not to hear and slides the stick over to the opposite side of his map. ‘Meanwhile Elliot, Brian and May should go sort out the water tarp then head back to the north, to the hilltop, and search the area around there. Elliot can try to pinpoint exactly where he was when he felt the push: see if you can work out where someone might have taken cover.’ Elliot rolls his eyes but seems to have decided that there’s no point arguing.
‘Then head to the beach where the coconut trees are,’ Jason continues, ‘and search for any sign of a shelter or someone hiding out.’
Hayley grabs one of the water bottles Elliot has prepared from their makeshift ‘fridge’ pit. She takes a sip. The liquid is unpleasantly warm, with an overpowering sweet aftertaste, a bit like a compost heap.
‘I know,’ Elliot says, seeing her grimace. ‘Sorry, they’re quite strong. I think it’s because the coconuts were left out in the sun. We’ll get some more green ones tomorrow.’
Hayley follows Jason as he strides off to the south, Jessa and Shannon close behind her.
‘I swear, if we ever get out of here, I’ll never moan about my little brother again,’ Jessa pants, as they start picking their way through the undergrowth. ‘He’d love all this. Desert island… jungle adventure… it’s like his idea of heaven. I can’t stop thinking about him.’
