The Trial

by Laura Bates

  May starts to cry.

  ‘I’m sorry, Shan. I’m really sorry. It’s hard being your friend sometimes, you know? I love you but you’re so controlled and poised all the fucking time. It can feel exhausting just to exist next to you. It was so stupid.’

  Slowly, one by one, heads are turning towards Shannon, who is sitting very, very still.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Brian says slowly, his head swivelling from May to Shannon and back again. ‘That’s the same thing that happened to you, May. That day when we explored the island. You said your drink had been spiked…’ he trails off, his eyes widening.

  ‘And—’

  ‘Then—’

  ‘If spiking May’s drink was revenge for her spiking Shannon’s drink at the party, then that means the person who’s been doing all this…’ Elliot looks shocked.

  ‘It was you?’ Jessa whispers, turning to her captain and friend in disbelief.

  They are all dumbfounded, staring at Shannon as if they’ve never seen her before. Jason is weakly opening and closing his mouth, his forehead deeply furrowed.

  Hayley breaks the circle. It’s like the last piece of the puzzle has finally fallen into place. Suddenly, she realises what she’s been missing. It’s been right in front of her since the very first day, when Elliot lit the fire. She moves across the sand to the overhead locker, and rifles through it until she finds his sketchbook.

  ‘Exhibit A,’ she says, softly, flipping it open to the picture of them all on the plane, moments before the crash. Elliot has captured the whole group as vividly as if it were a black-and-white photograph. May and Jessa tangled together in the back row. Brian looking like he’s about to hurl. Jason reclining imperiously, earphones in. Hayley gazing out of the window, lost in thought. And Shannon. Shannon in a two-seat row on her own. Shannon with the faintest smudge of what could almost be a shadow beneath her left collarbone. Shannon’s eyes, piercing and preoccupied. Shannon, before the crash, viscerally, visibly in pain.

  ‘That bruise just under your neck, the day we landed. You didn’t get it in the crash, did you?’

  Shannon hesitates for the tiniest fraction of a second. ‘Of course I did. We were all banged up.’

  ‘But it was yellow round the edges. Not fresh.’

  Gently, Hayley rips out the piece of paper from Elliot’s notebook and passes it to her. ‘You had the bruise before the crash.’

  Shannon’s whole face slips and her shoulders slowly sink. Her collarbones are like blades, pushing out through translucent skin. She lets out a long sigh. She almost looks relieved.

  ‘Why?’ Hayley asks her, simply.

  ‘Chad Maxwell. All the Chad Maxwells,’ she answers, straight away, her voice neutral, detached.

  ‘Chad Maxwell?’ It’s not the answer Hayley was expecting and it takes her a minute to place the name. ‘The guy from the beach party last year?’

  ‘And every guy like him.’

  ‘That guy who was arrested last year at Anastasia Wahlberg’s house?’ Brian is trying to keep up. ‘What’s he got to do with any of this?’

  Hayley’s head is whirling. ‘But you said— I thought you didn’t even know who he was?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I said. Because that’s what everyone says. It’s just what you do. You keep quiet. You protect the status quo.’ She traces a pattern in the sand with her fingertips. ‘Especially when it happens to someone else.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Hayley is turning the pieces over in her brain, trying to get them all to fit together.

  ‘Star athlete. A school champion. Probably going pro.’

  The words echo in Hayley’s head, reminding her of something. The letter the school paper had received from the Maxwell family’s lawyer, warning them off the story. ‘Star athlete… bright future ahead of him… spurious accusations… ruin lives… no foundation in truth.’

  Shannon is still staring rigidly into the fire.

  ‘That girl at Anastasia’s party, she was drunk off her face. She was out of control. The whole thing was practically inevitable. If it hadn’t been him, it might’ve been a car on the way home or God knows what else. She was a mess. Like I was a mess, the last night of the tour. Not the kind of person whose story stands up. Not against star power and a letter jacket.’

  ‘But Chad wasn’t in Texas…’

  ‘It wasn’t Chad at the tour party. Obviously. But it might as well have been. Because the story is the same. Another star athlete. Same story. I wanted to, until I didn’t. There was dancing. Everything was moving so fast. I was angry with Jason, wanted to punish him.’ She doesn’t look at Jason, who is gasping, as if he can’t quite pull enough oxygen out of the tight, hot air.

  ‘I walked upstairs on my own two feet. I wasn’t in control, exactly, but I was conscious. I knew, even as we went upstairs, I knew it wasn’t what I wanted. But I thought—’ She breaks off, for a moment, scooping up handfuls of sand and letting it run through her fingers.

  May is looking absolutely horror struck, tears rolling down her cheeks as Shannon talks.

  Shannon sighs. ‘I don’t know what I thought. It was like I couldn’t think, like my skin was electric and my brain was on a fairground ride and everything was spinning and I wanted to get off but I didn’t know how and the music wouldn’t stop.’

  She runs a hand over her face, pushing her wild black hair, made wilder by the sea air, back out of her eyes. She suddenly looks exhausted, and very young.

  ‘He was on me before the door closed. As powerful as he had been on the court. I didn’t, couldn’t say no. I didn’t say yes, either. I didn’t move. It felt like I didn’t breathe. I didn’t look. I didn’t feel. It was like he was in there with nobody. He must have known I wasn’t there. I don’t know if he liked that, or if it just didn’t matter to him either way. I tried to get up at one point, near the beginning. I tried to get away. But he had his whole body weight on me.’ Her fingertips hover above the yellow stain of the bruise, as if she can’t quite bring herself to touch it. ‘The base of his hand, like this, and his fingers, near my throat.’

  She takes her hand, spread wide, thumb straining one way and her four fingers together stretching in the opposite direction, and plunges it into the sand, knuckles taut. ‘He was too strong.’ She moves her hand and for a split second there are five deep welts where her fingers have been. Then the grains of sand slide in, and the holes disappear. ‘I waited until he was finished and then he left. And I just lay there and waited for the feeling to come back again. But it didn’t.’

  There is a stunned silence. Somewhere far away the first roll of thunder growls and an unpleasantly humid breeze moves across the circle.

  ‘What?’ Jason says, stupidly, his jaw slack, his eyes moving from Hayley to Shannon and back again as he tries to process what he has just heard. Like his brain desperately doesn’t want him to.

  ‘It wasn’t some girl from Duke, was it?’ May is catching on faster, nodding slowly as she starts to put it together. ‘It was you. I’m so sorry, Shan,’ she sobs, over and over again. ‘Oh God, I’m so, so sorry.’

  Shannon nods wearily. ‘It was me. And no, Jessa, before you ask, I suppose I didn’t fight back.’

  And then the rain comes. In a rush of tropical fury, slashing across their faces like knives, punctuated by lightning so vivid it seems to split the sky in two, forcing them to scatter. A cacophony of noise and water, forcing itself into their mouths and eyes as they race to carry Brian to his shelter and each to dive into their own, huddling desperately underneath the plaited leaves, Hayley’s mind racing to make sense of it all as the sky turns black and the storm rages on into the night.

  DAY 14

  Everybody has questions. So many questions it’s difficult to know where to begin.

  ‘You spiked May’s drink,’ Elliot says, cautiously, when the scattered circle reforms in the thin morning light. The tide is out, a vast glassy slick of wet sand stretching away towards the distant whisper of the waves, like the da
y they crashed. The sun has barely breached the horizon and the sky is soft and grey. The storm has cleared the air and the breeze is fresh and cool. Hayley can taste sea salt on the back of her tongue.

  He says it quietly, like he’s afraid Shannon might break into pieces if he speaks to her too harshly. Like she’s suddenly an alien thing, a fragile exhibit in some bizarre story about female fury. ‘So all the other stuff was you too? It’s been you, all along?’

  She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t deny it either. Just looks down at her hands.

  ‘You were raped?’ Jason demands, bluntly. He’s shaking his head like he can’t accept it, like he’s waiting for someone to tell him the punchline, tell him it’s all been a stupid prank. ‘You were raped.’ He says it again, as if it will help him to understand. ‘Raped by who?’

  The hair that was shiny and coiffed when they’d arrived at the airport, just days and yet years and years ago, is greasy now, clinging to Jason’s scalp in an oily slick. His face looks hollower, the usual sparkle in his baby blues replaced with a glinting metallic glare.

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ He moves towards Elliot like a predator advancing on its prey, arms outstretched, fury written in his tensed bicep as he draws back his arm. ‘It was you,’ he half shrieks, ‘that’s why she pushed you, that’s why you were the one she started with, you dirty, thieving—’

  ‘No!’ Shannon is in front of him, eyes blazing, and for a moment it looks as if the blow will land on her instead, but with a visible effort, Jason halts, drops his arm.

  ‘Then who?’ His hands are on her shoulders, fingernails digging in, knuckles white. ‘No more games, Shannon.’ And there’s a warning in his voice.

  ‘Nobody. Nobody on the island. One of the Duke players at the party.’

  Jason isn’t the only one who looks completely floored.

  ‘I don’t understand, Shannon. You did all this? Because some other guy who isn’t here –’ he looks around at the others ‘– it wasn’t any of us that hurt you?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Shannon says, quietly. And Hayley thinks she is beginning to understand.

  ‘It was all of us,’ she whispers. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘I thought I could bear it at first,’ Shannon says, almost under her breath. ‘Instinct kicked in, at the beginning when the crash was so fresh, and it drove everything else away. It was a relief, to be that person again, to play the role of that Shannon, the captain who would look after everyone else, would always know what to do. Like an escape. But later, when it all came back, when I realised we were trapped here, I thought I would die. I thought that I could not physically be here with this group of people who I realised had all been part of it, that it would end me.’

  ‘And then, it was like…’ She spreads her hands, looking up at the vast expanse of the sky as if she’s searching for the right words to explain. ‘… like I slowly started to feel that the island was on my side, somehow. Like it knew. Like it would help me hold you all accountable, somehow.’

  ‘Hold us accountable for what?’ Brian snarls, and Hayley can tell that he has more to say, that he hasn’t even begun to unleash his fury, but he’s catching up too, slowly piecing it together like the rest of them.

  ‘So what, you formed a plan, to create your own punishments?’

  ‘No. No.’ Shannon’s eyes are liquid, her voice urgent. ‘I never meant to – not any of it. It just sort of happened. It was that night, the night of the storm. We were there on the hilltop and everyone was shouting at once and the rain was slashing down and my hair was soaked and the airplane was roaring and it honestly felt like it might be the end of everything and then suddenly, in the chaos, there was this moment when I saw him, right there, in front of me, his back turned.’

  ‘Elliot?’ Hayley says. But before she can ask what Elliot had to do with it, Shannon is rushing on, words tumbling out frantically, like she needs them to understand.

  ‘And everyone else was looking up at the sky and I just, I don’t know, something just coursed through me and it was like time slowed right down and I looked at him standing there for the longest moment, thinking about how he’d walked past me that night, how he’d left me hanging there, when all I needed was one piece of solid ground under my feet… one hand on my shoulder to stop me from falling…

  ‘He saw me, Hayley. He saw me going upstairs with that guy, and he must have seen that I wasn’t right, that I was out of it, and he just smiled. Smiled. What did he think was happening? And I tried to meet his eyes because there was still some part of me that sensed he could say something, disrupt the situation, somehow, and I tried to signal to him, I gave him a look, and his eyes just kind of slid over me and I swear it was like he almost winked at the guy. Like some kind of bro code or something.’

  Her face darkens. ‘Fucking Elliot. Elliot, who wasn’t ever one of the guys. But that was the moment he chose to suddenly try and fit in? The one moment I needed him not to? And I just looked at his back, there in the rain, inches from the edge, and suddenly I realised he could feel it too. Feel what it was like to have somebody let him just slip over the edge. Feel the ground falling away underneath him and nobody put out an arm. He was almost there already.’

  She’s pleading, her eyebrows knitted together. ‘He was this close to slipping by himself. He might have done, even. And I didn’t plan it. I swear. But before I knew what was happening my arms had done it. They’d just done it and he wasn’t there any more.’ Shannon draws a deep, shaky breath, as if something has physically left her body and there’s a void behind.

  Elliot is standing in front of her, his arms slack at his sides, genuine hurt and confusion on his face.

  ‘I never meant to hurt you badly, I swear,’ Shannon addresses him directly for the first time. ‘I didn’t realise how steep it was, or that there were rocks. I thought you might fall a metre or two, have a scare, that’s all. And once you were okay, once you recovered, and nothing too serious had happened, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I could make you others feel things, too. Things you’d never feel otherwise. Things you’d never have to feel at home. And it just took me over somehow. I never meant it to go this far. But I couldn’t stop it either. I knew at any moment we might get rescued and it would be over and there was some urgent, hot part of me that needed it done, before we went back and I had to live with it, carry it with me. Like this could lighten the load.’

  Hayley puts out a hand. ‘Wait. Slow down. I’m trying to understand, Shannon, I really am. But you intentionally hurt everybody, right? You’re going to have to walk us through this. Elliot left you hanging. You felt like he had a chance to step in and he didn’t, I get that. I’m not saying I agree with you. I think Elliot was nervous and embarrassed at that party. He was trying to fit in and he’d drunk that disgusting cocktail… but I get it. You wanted him to feel the way he’d made you feel…’ She frowns, thinking fast. ‘And… you spiked May’s drink, because that’s what she did to you?’

  Shannon nods. ‘When I thought back the next day, I realised she must have put something in that cocktail. It was the only thing I drank that night, so it was the only thing that made sense. I didn’t realise it at the party, everything was happening too fast, it was like a dream. But the next day when I woke up, I felt so awful, my head was pounding and I could barely open my eyes. That was when I figured it out.’

  May looks like she wants to sink into the sand.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Shan. I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I never, ever wanted something like that to happen to you. I was just so pissed at you for forcing us to watch those stupid tapes when the tour was over, and Jessa was all “yes, captain, of course, captain, oh captain, my captain,” and I guess it made me feel jealous. I never meant to hurt you. Or to let someone else hurt you.’

  ‘I wanted you to see what it feels like,’ Shannon says, in a low voice. ‘To be scared, to feel out of control, like your own body won’t do what you wan
t it to do. To feel that confusion and terror.’

  Hayley frowns, remembering May flopping around the camp the other day, the fear and frustration in her eyes. An eye for an eye?

  ‘It was just one bad day for you,’ Shannon goes on. ‘It didn’t lead to anything else. It won’t affect you forever.’

  ‘What about Brian?’ Hayley asks, gently, and Shannon’s face crumples in anguish.

  ‘I never meant it to go that far. I just needed him to know what it felt like. To be really afraid of something bigger and more powerful than you. To feel physically vulnerable. To feel such visceral fear that you can’t even move. He wouldn’t make those jokes again if he’d ever experienced that. He wouldn’t laugh about those things, not if he’d ever known that feeling. And I couldn’t stop thinking about whether what happened later… about whether that guy would have felt so comfortable just taking what he wanted if they hadn’t all been laughing about it downstairs just a couple of hours earlier.’

  Jessa is shaking her head. ‘But, Shannon, he could have been killed. And he didn’t do anything to you, you know, directly.’

  Shannon looks down at the sand, tracing patterns around her legs. ‘I didn’t really expect anything to happen. At worst, I thought he might see something small like a barracuda or a nurse shark or something.’

  Hayley remembers Shannon’s white face and shaking hands as they’d helped Brian out of the water. She hadn’t been acting, Hayley was certain of it.

  ‘I just wanted him to know what it was like, to feel that same fear. The fear we all feel practically every fucking day. A kind of fear he might go his whole life without ever once experiencing. And okay, I took a risk. But don’t we play fast and loose with girls’ lives every single day? I never really thought anything would happen, though, Brian, honestly I didn’t.’