by Laura Bates
‘We’re going to get out of here.’ Jason says it firmly, like his word is the final say on the subject. Hayley wonders if he’s ever experienced what it’s like not to get his own way. It’s an open secret that at the end of sophomore year, Jason told his guidance counsellor he wanted to take AP Latin after the Princeton Review recommended it as a good way for law school applicants to boost their admissions prospects. The trouble was, Oak Ridge only offered eight AP courses, and Latin wasn’t one of them. But a week later, a Latin tutor miraculously joined the staff and a fortnight afterwards it was announced that a generous endowment had been made for a new classics wing in the school library. The Angel Wing. As in Jason Angel.
In fact, she suddenly realises, even their current situation is partly down to Jason always getting what he wants. Hayley had heard a rumour that the off-season basketball tour might be cancelled this year because of funding issues, before Jason’s parents stepped in with their offer of private jets and free accommodation. None of them would even be here if it wasn’t for Jason Angel and his charmed life.
‘Have you guys thought about what our families must be going through?’ Jessa asks, breathing heavily as, clambering over a particularly knotty vine, she uses her one good arm to grab a tree trunk.
‘I’ve been trying not to,’ Shannon admits. ‘It’s easier that way. We can’t do anything about it, so it’s best not to think about it.’
‘I know it’s stupid,’ Jessa says softly, ‘but I have this idea, this hope, I suppose, that somehow my mom just knows…’ she sniffs, ‘like she knows I’m okay. Because we’re so close she’d have some kind of a sixth sense if I was dead. It’s dumb, I know.’
‘It’s not dumb,’ Shannon says, quietly.
‘I got my brother one of those stupid touristy cowboy hats, at the airport,’ Jessa whispers. ‘I was gonna write “my sister went to Texas and all I got was this stupid cowboy hat” on the back in magic marker.’
Hayley swallows hard. She really, really doesn’t want to think about how her mom and dad must be feeling. Partly because it hurts too much. Partly because, on a good day, she can almost trick herself into thinking that things aren’t so desperate… that they’re on a crazy adventure rather than trapped in an incredibly dangerous situation they might actually not survive.
She needs to think about something else. Anything else. So, as she automatically scans the ground ahead for tangles of vines and treacherous rocks, her brain is scanning too, going back over everything that has happened, trying to make sense of Elliot’s fall, of his certainty that he was pushed.
If he’s right, if someone pushed him, they must have had a reason. They’d have been acting differently, maybe, not seeming themselves. Hayley sighs. That could describe all of them. Nobody has been themselves for a week, and who could blame them? But then Hayley thinks back further. It isn’t just being on the island that’s changing people, is it? Not entirely. She remembers that stupid cowboy hat. Suddenly an image pops into her head, Jessa snapping at May when she knocked it onto the floor as they waited to board the plane. She’d thought it was weird at the time. People have been behaving oddly since before the island: ever since the morning of the crash. The night after the party.
The group assembled at the airport terminal that morning had been uncharacteristically quiet. Brian had sat on his own, excusing himself repeatedly to go to the bathroom. Elliot was hidden behind his sketchbook, Jason leafing through the same few pages of a sports magazine over and over again without seeming to take in a word. Hayley had tripped and spilled a takeaway coffee over May’s white sneakers but she’d barely looked up, preoccupied and biting her lip, none of her usual spiky attitude on display. Jessa had seemed on edge somehow, drumming her fingers annoyingly on the armchair of the uncomfortable, plastic terminal chair. Shannon arrived at the last minute, her face hidden behind a huge pair of sunglasses, and swept onto the plane without a word to anyone.
Then there were the little moments on the plane: things that seemed meaningless on their own but looked like something more substantial now. Shannon and Jason sitting apart. May and Jessa’s whispered conversation. The way people reacted when Erickson mentioned the party – right before the plane went down. Had something happened that night?
They are deeper into the trees than Hayley has ever been. The sunlight filters down in long, glittering bars. It feels still here, like the island is trapped in this single moment. The golden light is like amber, preserving everything for eternity, as though they’ve somehow slipped outside time. Hayley wants to be able to examine other moments, frozen, like this one, to turn them over in her fingertips and look at them from every possible angle.
‘What did you guys think of the end-of-tour party?’ She asks Shannon and Jessa, casually, walking a little faster to catch up with them. Jason is still ahead, out of sight, though the occasional rustle of a bush or crack of a stick makes him easy enough to follow.
‘Why?’ Jessa asks, immediately, shooting Hayley a suspicious look. ‘Has someone said something about it?’
‘No, no. I was just wondering, that’s all. I didn’t stay to the end,’ she says. She’d escaped back to the hotel just before she was drunk enough to make a fool of herself.
She tries to think back to that night. It was only a week ago, but it feels like a lifetime.
It was stuffy in the living room. The windows were open, but it was a warm evening and there were bodies crowded in; thighs pressed against each other, elbows knocking, the loud, throbbing beat of the music pressing in close. And laughter, crashing over her like a wave as she came in from the kitchen, her red plastic cup of stronger-than-she-really-wanted vodka orange clutched tight like a talisman against her insecurity. Hayley couldn’t have said how it compared with other parties, because she didn’t really know. Did everyone usually just sit around like this? Sandwiched together and chatting, trying to look casual while sweat dripped a slow, uncomfortable path between their shoulder blades? Laughing too loudly at the loudest person’s jokes? Was that what you did to show you were part of it all, in the zone, one of the crowd? She remembers wondering whether everyone else at the party was spending as much time as she was thinking about whether she looked like she was enjoying the party.
‘It was pretty standard,’ Jessa says, dismissively. ‘Not much happened, right, Shan?’
‘Mmhmm.’ Shannon nods, focusing on her feet.
‘There was a lot of alcohol, right?’ Hayley asks, thinking back. ‘There was that keg the Duke guys set up in the front yard, and the cheerleader, the redhead… her name was Sasha, right? She’d set out all her parents’ liquor in the kitchen with mixers and things.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Jessa says, dismissively. ‘I don’t drink. May was acting a little weird, though, now you mention it. Like halfway through the evening, she suddenly seemed all jittery and nervous. I don’t know why. Then she started acting pretty extra, even by May standards. Dancing on the tables and all sorts. Like she was trying too hard to have fun.’
‘Elliot could tell you how much liquor there was.’ Shannon smirked. ‘I found him in the bathroom towards the end of the night, getting pretty cosy with the toilet bowl, if you know what I mean.’
‘That wasn’t his fault,’ Jessa protests, ‘did you see the concoction they made him drink during Truth or Dare? It was gross.’
The game had come later. The atmosphere was different by then, the living room smudged somehow by the blur of alcohol and sweat and awkward excitement. Hayley should have been terrified of Truth or Dare, but it actually came as a relief. There were obvious pitfalls: dares that could expose her inexperience or questions that could reveal gaping holes in her pop culture knowledge, but at least it was organised. It had rules, structure, a pattern she could follow.
Brian had already stolen a gnome from the next-door garden, one of the Duke cheerleaders had toilet-papered a mailbox and Shannon had begun to perform a pretty explicit feat with a banana and a can of whipped cream, at least until
Jason had yanked her down from the table she was standing on, shouting ‘Show’s over, folks.’ Elliot, who’d been hovering awkwardly on the edges of the party, had downed a disgusting concoction of every spirit in the house mixed together with a squeeze of toothpaste stirred in. Hayley didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed that her turn never seemed to come.
‘Right, how close are we to the fruit?’ Jason asks from up ahead, crashing out of the trees and interrupting Hayley’s train of thought.
‘They’re over this way.’ Jessa moves forward confidently, pointing at some nearby tree trunks. ‘I tore bark and branches off trees on the way last time so we’d be able to find our way back.’ Now she knows what she is looking for, Hayley can see the snapped-off, splintered ends and scratched sections on several of the trees they walk past, their green muscles bristling through the torn skin. She remembers what Jessa said about Elliot not being the only scout in the group.
‘So what are we supposed to be looking for exactly?’ Hayley asks.
Now that they’re actually in amongst the trees, Jason seems a little less confident than he had with his simplistic sand diagram on the beach. The tree trunks are choked with vines so thick they’ve calcified like bones, the ground uneven and cluttered with small plants and bushes underfoot, their visibility restricted to just a few metres because the vegetation is so dense. Hayley finds it pretty hard to believe that anyone could be living in amongst all this, but if they were, she’s not convinced they’d be able to find them anyway. It wouldn’t be difficult to stay hidden, dodging behind trees, hiding in bushes, cutting back behind them once they’d passed – especially given the amount of noise their search party is making as they crash and stumble along.
‘We’re looking for any evidence of someone living here,’ Jason hisses. ‘A shelter of some kind… probably a camp setup.’
‘Nobody else had picked up the coconuts,’ Hayley says suddenly, stopping so abruptly that Shannon bumps into her from behind. ‘The ones we found on the other side of the island – if someone else had been living here before we arrived surely all those brown coconuts wouldn’t just have been left lying there on the ground, would they?’
Shannon is frowning. ‘That’s a good point. It’s a small island – they’d have covered it within a week. If they’d been here any time at all they’d have needed those coconuts. So can we just agree this is completely absurd?’ she asks, hands on hips. ‘It’s a massive waste of all our time and energy, combing a clearly deserted island looking for a phantom pusher when the obvious explanation is that Elliot had an accident.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t want to admit that he slipped,’ Shannon continues. ‘He’s quite enjoyed playing the hero these last few days. And falling down a steep drop and knocking himself out doesn’t exactly fit with the skilled hunter-gatherer image, does it?’
Jason grunts approvingly.
Hayley doesn’t know what to think. It does seem unlikely that anyone else could have survived for a long time on this island – and even if they had, why wouldn’t they have made contact with the new arrivals after the plane crash? Why would they have wanted to hurt Elliot?
After another hour of searching through the untouched undergrowth, they’ve seen nothing untoward. Nothing suspicious or strange at all. Until they get back to the camp.
At first, Hayley thinks May is just joking around.
‘We found… NOTHING!’ She shouts it loudly as she comes crashing back through the trees with the rest of her group, attempting a drumroll on a tree trunk and missing. ‘Nothing like a dasted way hey?’ She frowns, chews the words in her mouth, tries again: ‘Wasted day! Way hey!’
She does what Hayley thinks is supposed to be a sarcastic celebration dance, but it looks like her arms and legs are getting messages from completely different brains. As she whirls wildly, she sings at the top of her voice, something about mixed messages or a wild goose chase, but the notes don’t seem to be coming out in the right order and the words are all garbled and slurred. Eventually she becomes tangled up in her own limbs, lurching to the floor and subsiding into silence.
‘She’s been like this half the journey back,’ Elliot says, uneasily.
Hayley takes a step towards May, watching her closely.
‘Ss’allright Hayleys?’ May attempts to stand up and give Hayley a hug, but almost misses and ends up sort of hanging around Hayley’s waist, her face level with Hayley’s belly button. May dissolves into helpless giggles and slides back to the floor.
‘Ow,’ she says, thickly, trying to sit up and falling over again.
Jason is laughing, clapping her on the back like a clown and whistling. But Hayley feels sick. Something is very wrong. May has never voluntarily hugged her in her life. The more Hayley stares at her, the more she notices the slack jaw, the slightly glazed, unfocused eyes.
‘What’s going on?’ Shannon crouches down next to May, looking uneasy.
‘May, can you look at me?’ May spins around, her gaze landing on a spot somewhere over Hayley’s right shoulder.
‘May. Focus.’
‘Hmmm?’ May’s starting to look less confident now, Hayley can see her eyes starting to flit quickly from side to side. A look of panic is creeping in.
Jessa comes back from a bathroom trip and takes in the scene, her eyes widening in horror.
‘Jessa, whaddami…’ May takes a breath, shakes her head heavily like a dog and tries again: ‘Wasssa…’ her speech slurs and her eyes lock onto Jessa’s, shining with fear. A tear escapes and slides slowly down May’s cheek.
‘It’s okay, May.’ Hayley tries to keep her voice steadier than her jangling nerves. ‘I think… have you guys eaten anything? Berries or roots? Or drunk something?’
Elliot shakes his head.
‘Mayday, Brian, have you guys been drinking without me?’ Jason raps the words out accusingly, sounding more team coach than team captain.
Brian looks surprised. ‘No, I swear!’ He holds up his hands like he’s protesting his innocence. ‘Honestly – we’ve been trawling along the beach the other side of the island looking for a hut or signs of a fire or something – the only thing we’ve drunk is that disgusting coconut water.’ He holds up his half-full bottle. ‘We really need to get some more green ones,’ he adds.
‘Where’s May’s bottle?’ Hayley asks. They look around. There’s an almost-empty bottle lying on the floor by the campfire, the initial ‘M’ just visible scratched into the side. ‘Is this it?’ She takes off the lid and cautiously sniffs the contents, then takes a small sip. ‘That doesn’t taste the same as mine,’ Hayley says, sipping from her own bottle to compare. ‘I think there’s something in it.’
May is limp now, her head resting on her knees. Without warning, she lurches forwards, vomiting into the sand.
‘Is there any fresh water left?’ Shannon snaps into action.
‘There’s half a bottle. That’s all we’ve got until it rains again.’ Elliot hands it over and Shannon crouches next to May, rubbing her back reassuringly. She helps her sip from the rainwater bottle while Jessa looks on, helpless and aghast.
‘Guys.’ Elliot has been poking around in the overhead locker. He holds out his cupped hands. He’s holding seven of the vodka miniatures they’d found in the back of the plane. They’re all empty.
‘May!’ Jessa shrieks, whirling to face her. May lets out a muffled groan and waves her off weakly. ‘What were you thinking? What, you just felt like a party? All by yourself?’
‘You could’ve shared at least,’ Brian chips in, resentfully.
‘Yes, because getting drunk and dehydrated is a fantastic idea in a survival situation with very little drinking water.’ Elliot frowns.
‘I DIDNNN,’ May drawls angrily, sweat standing out along her hairline. ‘Didnknow. Didn’t know.’ It takes her a supreme effort to separate the words, frowning as she forms them carefully and deliberately with her lips. She points vaguely in the direction of Elliot’s hands, before slumping ove
r again, cradling her head and groaning.
‘Is she saying what I think she’s saying?’ Jessa asks. The bottles clatter together noisily as Elliot hurries to put them down, like he doesn’t want to be the one left holding them. ‘Did someone spike May’s drink?’
‘Uh yeah: May spiked May’s drink.’ Jason shakes his head: ‘Can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself – those bottles were just lying there for the taking.’
‘Yeah,’ Brian says, but Hayley can see he’s uneasy. ‘She is kind of a party girl… look how wild she was the other night…’ He trails off sheepishly. ‘You can’t exactly blame her for wanting to forget –’ he waves his hand around vaguely ‘– all this, can you? She probably just overdid it.’
‘What, overdid it by seven bottles?’ Jessa sounds sceptical. ‘Drinking fourteen shots of vodka isn’t exactly something you do by mistake, Brian.’
‘Well, what other explanation is there?’ Brian asks. And his question hangs heavy in the air, because everybody knows the answer, but nobody wants to be the one to say it. Except Elliot.
‘Maybe it was the same person who knocked me out.’ He looks around at the circle of faces, slowly and uncompromisingly making eye contact with each of them in turn. ‘That coconut water was strong and sweet – the taste was so overpowering May wouldn’t have realised it was spiked until it was too late.’
‘And everyone’s bottles were labelled with their initials,’ Shannon says slowly, running her finger over the rough ‘M’ scratched into the plastic.
Rain starts to fall again, big fat droplets splashing onto Hayley’s face. But she can’t enjoy it, can’t let herself bask in the relief of the tarpaulin filling again, not while the creeping idea of sabotage is slowly seeping into the camp like poison.
Elliot takes a deep breath, with the expression of somebody who is about to take a dive off the highest diving board and knows there is no going back. ‘Someone is hurting people. And since we’ve searched the whole island and found no sign of anybody else…’
