Sugar & Squall

by J. Round

  There was so much noise. It was my first day at Carver all over again. People were pushing past me in the bustle. I picked out one face above the rest.

  Jemma ran at me from across the crowd. She too was rugged up in a blanket, her skin a few shades whiter, but otherwise exactly as the night we’d all gone down to the beach.

  It was good to have somebody respond. I relished the contact, pulling her against my body and deliberately pushing away former indiscretions.

  “What happened?” I asked, flushed, breaking off.

  She ran a renegade strand of hair over her ear. “They found us. Can you believe it? I thought that was it for sure, but they found us.”

  “That’s great news,” I enthused, trying feebly to arrange my features into a smile. I’d almost forgotten how. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “No, they got everyone. What happened to you but? They said you were on the island alone with that Logan guy, that you had to fend them off. They’re calling you a hero.”

  I laughed. “Hardly. Logan’s the real hero. I was just doing what anyone would.” The truth, however, was that I felt relieved more than anything. They’d found the boat in time. But a hero? They could never know.

  “Where is he?”

  “He was injured, but he’ll be right.”

  “Injured? Shit, is he okay?”

  “Stabbed, yeah, but fine now.”

  “Did you two, you know?”

  It was funny how even with all the heightened state of drama around us teenage gossip would trump more urgent matters. I tried to play it down.

  “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you everything later.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “You did–”

  “Really, no–”

  “Kat! You’ve got to tell me everything before these other skanks get wind.”

  She’d used that name. No one had bothered to tell her who I was.

  “Did you see the reporters outside, too? We’re going to be famous.”

  “Joy,” I replied.

  Then that nagging was back. I was having trouble letting that night on the beach go.

  She sensed it almost immediately. “What’s wrong? Is it me?”

  “You know what Xavier did to me that night, don’t you?”

  “No. What, what is it?”

  “He tried to drug me, you know, on the beach. Have his way with me.”

  She looked genuinely shocked. “That little shit.”

  She didn’t question me, instead panning around for him and muttering expletives.

  “Honestly,” she said, pleading, “I had no idea, none of us did. And we never would have let you go off with him if we knew. I swear to God.”

  I nodded, accepting it.

  “What happened to you guys that night? I asked, changing tack.

  Jemma hung her head, trying to piece it together. As she spoke the words, it was as if every single one of them pained her, assaulting her sanity.

  “We heard noises first, coming from the school, not long after you guys walked off.” She paused. “Xavier came running over without you. He asked if we’d heard it, too.

  “Then what happened?”

  “We went together over the top of the sand hill to get a better look. There were men there. One of them grabbed me, here,” she let the blanket slide off her left shoulder to reveal an ugly ring of purple around her arm. The others tried to run, but they caught them as well. Xavier just stood there. He didn’t even try and put up a fight, the pin-dick, pissed his pants instead – literally.”

  I smirked ever so slightly.

  Jemma went on. “They were in a hurry, didn’t bother to go down to the beach where you were. None of us could really speak. We were freaking out, you know? We didn’t mention you either. I guess you can say that for Xavier. Even later, when they were asking if anyone was missing, he kept his mouth shut. I don’t think we could’ve if we wanted but, not after the security guy.

  I remembered the body at the pier. “The beat-off guy. They shot him, didn’t they?”

  Jemma nodded her head. “He finally did something. He tried to put up a fight on the pier, so one of them, the tall one, just up and shot him, right there.”

  I saw the pool of blood. I felt myself drop down again into the sea, feeling it surge around me, pulling me under.

  Jemma brought her left hand across to her right elbow, locking it in place. “They threw the body into the water. It was horrible, Kat.”

  She stared past me at nothing in particular, her eyes glazy and distant.

  “Some of the older guys were whispering about trying to take them on, you know,” she continued, “but no one did anything after that.”

  She looked concerned. “You okay? I can call someone over.” She spun around. I reached out and held her hand.

  “No, it’s fine, really.”

  A middle-aged lady approached in a bright yellow jacket, herding Jemma back away to the body of students being led into the adjoining corridor.

  “Find me later, okay?” Jemma said, as she was guided away to the others. “I want to know every dirty little detail.”

  Every detail – I decided then I’d keep certain events to myself. If I brought all of what I’d witnessed, what I’d done, to the surface I might never escape it. I’d be caught in the current, dragged out into the deep.

  I went back to Logan. There was definite color in his face now. That was certain. I waited patiently for him to open his eyes, but nothing. Early light fell through the windows, diffusing his features in such a way he radiated perfection unlike any boy I’d seen. I couldn’t fathom how he’d fallen for an idiot like me.

  I tried to guess his age. Eighteen? Nineteen?

  The doctors said he would wake up at any moment. As such, I was reluctant to leave his side, even for the most minute moment.

  The following morning Dad arrived. I marched down to the foyer to meet him, repeating to myself how I was going right into attack mode. But I was unprepared for his reaction. He had never been the most emotive of parents, but now he embraced me tightly, pressing the air out of me.

  Warm tears ran down my cheeks. For once they were not my own. He kept saying my name over and over. There was not a camera in sight.

  Instead of the tirade I had planned, I apologized, for nothing in particular, and everything.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” I said.

  “I know, baby,” he replied. “I know.”

  He enquired about Logan, asked to see him.

  He need not have bothered. When we returned to his room, all we found was an empty bed.

  17. REBIRTH

  I sat at the parlor table, not eating.

  It had been a month since Carver.

  Logan had it right detail for detail. The kidnappers had planned the attack over a prolonged period. They’d gone to great lengths to place the janitor at the school.

  They came at night, heavily armed, and took the school by force, loading up the students on a small freighter, The Lotus. Their intention was to swap ships once they were in international waters, where our government would be useless to act.

  They’d rigged the school with explosives. That was the worst part of it. How Logan and I didn’t see any of it, I don’t know. They had a wireless camera hidden down by the pier, waiting for help to arrive. Waiting to press the trigger and blow the first-responders to kingdom come, to prove they were serious. The thought of innocent people coming to help only to become victims themselves still sickened me.

  All those days and we’d only walked down the pier once, but that was enough for them to see us on their screens. Of course, it took them a while to work out who we were, if we were valuable enough to send a search party back for. Other students knew us as Kat and Logan, but one idiot made mention that I looked like the President’s daughter, and that’s when they went to the principal. She wouldn’t talk at first – until they threatened her daughter, a freshman. After that, once they knew who I really was, once it was confirmed,
they had to have me at any cost. With me on board, they could demand anything.

  Logan, however, was considered expendable. They were simply going to shoot him.

  It was funny actually. Although they’d intended to demand the release of every terrorist in US custody and the like, it all came down to money in the end. They never planned to return the students, instead trafficking them off to the highest bidders as slaves, workers or worse. Powerful men in their country would have paid handsomely for girls, or boys, from privileged families. The janitor had even been forwarding school ID files to potential buyers, whetting their appetites, so to speak. Many had paid up front, funding the operation.

  Everything had gone like clockwork. They were all set to carry out one of most elaborate mass kidnappings in history. They hadn’t factored on some saggy-assed seventeen-year-old throwing a wrench in the works, nor Logan.

  An anonymous tip had been forwarded through a few days after everyone was taken. It didn’t give up many details, but it did rattle the appropriate cages. The principal always called the mainland mid-week, to check in. When the authorities got no call, they checked the lines and found they were down. Still, they were waiting for the weather to clear before sending the coast guard out, as routine, precaution. After my call, though, they’d decided to come there and then, storm or not. I’d “thrust them into action,” as one reporter had put it.

  They searched the helicopter when they arrived and were able to pinpoint from information on board where the kidnappers were headed. Half a day later a Special Forces team intercepted the freighter with no loss of life except for the kidnappers themselves, many of whom shot themselves upon realizing their dim fate. Help came just in time, too. Another few hours and the boat would have been out of international waters, and rescue.

  I’d never heard of their organization or their plight, but for the days and weeks following the attack these names filled every channel day and night. The fact I was the President’s daughter didn’t help. I’d seen my face on TV more times than any teenager should have to.

  I might have expected the media attention, but it still shocked me. Every news outlet in the world wanted a piece of me, my story, but I had little to give. Besides, I’d never been good at lying. I’d told not a soul what had eventuated between myself and Logan during these halcyon days when there were no kidnappers, no guns, no bloody wounds – nothing else but us.

  Funnily enough, Dad and I had grown much closer over the last few weeks. He’d put work aside, where possible, chaperoned me to and from various counselors and psychologists, not probing me any further when I rejoined him in the car tired from the one-sided discourse such parties demanded of me. He’d taken on the parental role with such enthusiasm I was entirely certain he’d soon be pulling brownies out of the oven and joining a book club. It looked good for him as well. The public lapped it up.

  He was protective, too. For the first two or three weeks hordes of wide-eyed reporters gathered outside every morning, their faces pressed into the fence. Traffic faltered for miles. I began to dread going out. Even taking the rear entrance, I’d watch from the car window as teams of agents fenced off cameras eager to capture the ‘the big one’, that first frame of me in public.

  We didn’t speak much about what happened. I’d made it fairly clear from the start it was something I was not prepared to discuss. Dad seemed okay with that, or at least okay with letting professionals deal with it.

  The aversion to knives was back. I decided I was better off without them. As before, I couldn’t look at them, touch them – their sheer presence on the dinner table made me cold.

  I looked at them and thought of not only Mom now, stabbed to death by a stranger in the street, but also Logan and the expression on his face when he’d realized who I was, and what I had done, the Eagle, he knife slipping in.

  There were nightmares. Almost every night it was the same. I’d be standing at the edge of the rat’s nest, hands ahead, bracing to push someone into the hole. Each night that figure would shift from Mom to Logan, to actors from TV or people I’d seen outside. Every time they’d fall silently until they hit the bottom, where the wet snapping of bones would echo in my ears.

  I thought about Logan constantly. He consumed my whole world, a world that still seemed dark without his presence. I pressed Dad and his staff about it persistently, and was constantly fobbed off. ‘He’s with the agency, debriefing, recovering, re-assigned’, more re-s and –ings that did nothing to placate my worry. They didn’t tell me where he was, who he even worked for, classified this, classified that, but they did tell me he was alive.

  Thank God I was a shoddy stabber.

  I didn’t want to press too hard. I had told no one we’d been romantically involved on the island. Doing so would have different repercussions, and I wasn’t ready for more drama. If Dad knew what had really happened, Logan was right, he’d have him holed up in seconds.

  But it wasn’t just me asking. The public thirst for information was insatiable. Thankfully it wasn’t long before the matter drifted into the fast-growing tornado of speculation surrounding the event.

  I kept in touch with Jemma and some of the other girls as best I could. They told me having mysteriously spent days alone on the island with Logan, not to mention my true identity, would give me alleged rock star status if school ever went back. Talk was the students were to be divided between various other private schools in the state until they’d worked out exactly what to do with Carver, or what remained of it.

  Even when speaking to my new friends, though, I kept details of my relationship with Logan scant. Some of them doubted Logan even existed, part of the growing conspiracy theories spreading out over the internet.

  No one knew we’d kissed, or even grown close in that manner. But then I couldn’t even be sure we were even still together with him gone.

  I didn’t want anyone else to know about us. That was the thing. I was scared by confiding in someone else everything special about it would be lost. Something intimate and secret would become viral within minutes. All luster would be worn away by the buzz of IMs and Tweets.

  Every day blended into the next. Having to constantly come up with entertainment was exhausting, and I secretly longed for the structure of school again. I’d even pulled out a textbook or two.

  “The President would like a moment of your time.” Derrick was ogling at me again.

  I was eating leftover birthday cake, my spoon splitting the numerals ‘1’ and ‘8’.

  I stopped eating. “Fine.”

  “What’s up, Dad?” I said, throwing myself into one of the leather couches at the center of the Oval Office. “You already gave me a present, remember?” Not that the car was much use given a) I still had no license and b) I barely stepped outside.

  As if reading my mind, Dad paced over from his desk, seating himself beside me.

  “I think it’s time you got out a bit more.”

  It was true. I had become something of a White House recluse these last few weeks, stockpiling crème brûlée and shuffling off to bay windows, but I wasn’t quite prepared to hear it from my father.

  “You’re a healthy teenager. You should be out there enjoying life. Not stuck in here with a bunch of stale old advisors.”

  I eyed him suspiciously. “Where exactly are you going with this?”

  He buttoned his jacket and stood. “I’m assigning an agent to be with you 24/7, right by your side.”

  I immediately went to protest, but he held his hand out. “This is not up for discussion. I’ve made my decision. You have to get back out into the world, but I also want you safe.”

  There was no point arguing. When Dad did up his buttons, that was it – case closed. The thought of Derrick looking over my shoulder even more than he did already would drive me insane. I was certain of it.

  Dad picked up the desk phone. “Linda, please send the agent in.”

  I rushed up to him, hands on his chest. “Dad, please. I’ll go freaki
ng nuts!”

  He shook his head.

  I saw the agent enter from the office doors, the telltale black suit. And I knew. I knew instantly.

  “Logan?” I couldn’t move. I was in shock.

  Dad sat on the desk, a huge smile breaking over his face. “He came highly recommended.”

  I didn’t know what to do.

  “I’ll take it there are no protests?” And when he was met with silence, Dad left the room.

  Logan walked over. The office doors were open. We couldn’t be seen embracing.

  I actually felt like I was going to be sick.

  He walked over and held out something from behind his back. It was my diary, exactly as I’d left it on the island. Carver had been turned into a giant Exhibit A. I’d assumed everything there had been lost in the fire.

  I took it and flicked through the pages, to the DNB. Numbers one through four were crossed out.

  Logan stood in front of me, his eyes wet.

  I’d never really liked the name my parents gave me. It was a boy’s name, after all, but when he spoke it at that moment I cried, and whether it was joy or sadness I could not tell, only that I was alive.

  “You know, we never did get around to crossing out number five.”

  I was overcome with such a strong desire to kiss him then, to press him against me and drink him in that I had to steady myself against the desk.

  Fuck it, I thought, and I stood to face him until we breathed the same space.

  “There’s a pretty lonely laundry closet downstairs,” I said. I moved up against him. His body responded.

  “There is?”

  “Yeah, I think it poses a pretty significant security risk if you ask me.”

  “Maybe we should check it out – together.”

  “Maybe.”

  And when he replied, there was such a look of happiness on his face I knew whatever would stand in our way – Presidents, kidnappers, charity dinners – we’d be able to face it together.