by Laura Bates
‘So much for staying in the shade,’ Hayley whispers, but nobody answers her, and she’s not surprised. This new May is appealing and joining in with her obvious state of denial is tempting. Last night’s vulnerability long forgotten, it would be so comforting to block out the crash, Erickson, the possibility of running out of water… to stop worrying.
What if this is the Spring Break nobody ever would have invited her on? Her one chance to be part of something – how had Mr Curtis put it? – outside her comfort zone. Well, she’s definitely out of her comfort zone now.
By midday, Hayley’s stomach is clenched tight with hunger and the single bread roll she has been allotted for the whole day is already a distant memory. When her eyes slide towards the remaining food trays for the third time, she decides she needs to distract herself. There is still no sign of Elliot, which makes her feel uneasy. She feels untethered here, insecure. If a plane can fall out of the sky, suddenly there are no guarantees any more. No safety. And as much as Elliot’s dire warnings scared her, the idea of not being near him somehow scares her even more. He’s the only one who seems to have any idea how to survive.
She sets off in the direction Elliot headed last night, passing Jessa sitting in the shade, examining the crusted wound on her arm and tentatively trying to rotate her shoulder, biting her lip in pain.
Purposefully striding into the trees, Hayley finds herself almost immediately tangled in the matted vines and creepers that cover the floor. She has to pick her way forward, grabbing onto tree trunks for leverage and ripping through patches of thorns that bite at her shins and leave gleaming pearls of blood on her forearms. Once, she freezes as a snake ripples liquidly across the path ahead, paying her no notice. A few minutes later, she thinks she sees a scorpion glinting on a tree trunk, but it scuttles into the shadows before she can be sure. She shudders and spends the next few minutes swiping phantom insects from her arms and back. Each leaf that brushes her bare shoulder might be a two-inch spider, each weed tickling her ankle a millipede’s myriad legs.
There’s a smell amongst the thickness of the plants, a kind of woody, vegetable wetness like the humid tang of her mom’s greenhouse. There seems to be less air here than out on the breezy beach, the trees catching any movement in their net of stillness, bearing quiet, slow witness. Some of them are breath-taking, their ancient bark scarred and gnarled, brittle pieces peeling back to reveal softer flesh. They wear their curling necklaces of creepers lightly, reaching effortlessly up to tangle their branches in the dense canopy. Hayley wonders if another human being has ever been here, feels like she is intruding on something silent and precious. With every footstep she feels she is being somehow weighed, judged by the island.
Which Hayley does it see? The dogged student journalist who chases down leads, holding the school board to account for failing to keep its promises on recycling food waste from the cafeteria? Or the awkward girl on the edge of the crowd, wishing she could find the words to blend in?
She can see herself, picking at her chicken burger in the corner of the red leatherette diner booth after their first tour game, wishing she had Jessa’s easy laugh or May’s quick wit. Watching while Jason ordered for Shannon without even having to ask her what she wanted to eat, while May reduced everyone to fits of laughter with her impression of Erickson falling asleep on the bench in the last quarter. Jason dropping his AMEX on the table to cover everyone’s bill: ‘Someone else can get the next one. I’m looking at you, Brian, you freeloader.’ Brian grinning and stuffing his triple burger with chilli fries while May pretends to vomit into her milkshake.
‘I’m not hungry.’ This from Elliot, counting out the change for his Diet Coke and putting it in a neat pile next to Jason’s card. ‘But we should talk strategy. Am I the only one who’s bothered that we lost that game by thirteen points?’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Brian told him. ‘It’s tour, it doesn’t count for anything. It’s about the free ride, loosen up and enjoy it.’
As she thinks of this, wondering how it could only have been six days ago, she hears a raspy, gnawing sound. There’s a thud and a muffled curse that comes from her left. She turns away from the incline where the trees start to rise, pushing further through the bushes on the flatter ground instead. Elliot is sitting on the floor, sucking the palm of his hand. It can’t be called a clearing exactly – the vegetation is too dense for that. But next to him there’s a sort of gap where two saplings have been roughly broken off at shoulder height, a third bent and splintered but still standing.
Elliot looks up and holds out a large stone with a sharp, narrow edge. ‘Got myself by mistake,’ he grunts. Hayley wordlessly takes the stone and starts to attack the tree trunk. It’s a lot harder than she expected. The fibrous trunk is tough and sinewy, and hacking at it makes no headway whatsoever.
‘Like a saw,’ Elliot offers, and she starts to rub at it with the edge of the stone instead, feeling the fibres give way one by one like cutting through a thick rope. Her hands, already cut and sore, start to chafe against the stone within moments, but she doesn’t stop until she’s panting and hot in the cheeks. She leans against the trunk for a minute then starts again, painstakingly making a few millimetres progress at a time. She wonders how long Elliot’s been at it.
‘Here.’ He takes the stone from her, his hand wrapped in a bandana from his pocket, and starts sawing away again.
Hayley watches his back, taut with the effort, his narrow shoulder blades lifting his thin, grey T-shirt away from his smooth, light brown skin. He’s different here, too. Her eyes are drawn to the damp hair that curls at the base of his neck, the sinews of his hip tautening above the waistband of his scruffy khaki shorts as his T-shirt lifts slightly.
She shakes her head and looks away. ‘What are we doing?’ she asks.
‘Trying to make a water collection point,’ he gasps, without looking up. Hayley sees the plastic kitbag lying on the floor and understands the plan, though she can’t see how he intends to fix it to the tree stumps.
Experimentally, she picks at one of the thin green vines snaking across the floor. It’s wiry, but when she wraps it around each hand and pulls hard it snaps in two quite easily.
‘Going to plait them,’ Elliot pants, looking up. His eyes are golden brown, a metallic, amber glint there that Hayley has never been close enough to notice before.
As he continues hacking at the sapling, Hayley starts to forage for vines, tracing them across the floor and around tree trunks, gathering the longest ones she can find. When she’s collected three, she ties the ends in a firm knot, clamps it between her knees, and starts to plait.
They work in a silence that is broken only by Elliot’s heavy breathing, the buzzing of insects and the occasional shriek of a bird.
‘So, why’d you wait until eleventh grade to try out for the team?’ she asks.
Everyone was kind of surprised when Elliot signed up for the tour squad since he wasn’t exactly jock material. But he turned out to be a natural shooting guard, his instinctive ball handling and near-flawless basket record causing something of a sensation at try-outs.
The steady rhythm of his stone grinding against the tree fibres pauses, stutters, resumes.
‘Couldn’t afford it before.’
Hayley, expecting a different answer, feels stupid and embarrassed. Suddenly the unbranded kit she’d always taken for a snobbish aesthetic choice, the dodging of diner visits, even the out-of-control curls make more sense. She’s glad he has his back to her as she composes her face, hiding her surprise.
But then he turns, shrugs like he’s letting go of something and looks her straight in the eye.
‘I can only play in the off season because in term time I work a part-time job with the groundskeeper after school and weekends. The past few years tour team members have paid for their own flights, which ruled me out. But it was different this year when Jason’s parents offered their firm’s jets.’
‘I didn’t know.’
&
nbsp; ‘Yeah, well it’s not exactly something you advertise at a school like ours.’
Suddenly Hayley pictures Elliot at the bottom end of the school fields, bent over a lawn mower in a pair of mud-covered boots, watching through his curls as the other kids start their flash cars or jump into their parents’ SUVs at the end of the school day. Oak Ridge is one of the most prestigious private high schools in the state, sandwiched between similar upmarket schools in Fort Lauderdale. Close enough to Miami for the wealthy business owners and real estate magnates whose kids attend, near enough to the coast for the students to get a local reputation for lavish beachfront parties with occasionally scandalous outcomes.
‘Hope nobody from that firm needs to fly anywhere any time soon,’ Hayley jokes, trying to break the tension. ‘I wonder if they’ll be liable for the crash…’
‘I doubt it,’ says Elliot shortly, turning back to his task. ‘People like that tend to protect themselves.’
‘It would be pretty ironic,’ she concedes. ‘Jason’s dad founding one of the most successful law firms in the country and then getting sued himself. I wonder how much you have to pay out for a plane crash…’
‘Depends whether anyone ever finds us alive or not,’ Elliot replies, without turning around, and Hayley falls silent, seeing those blue lights again, Dad’s hand clenched on Mom’s shoulder.
By the time Elliot finally rips through the last stubborn bit of bark and punches the air in satisfaction, Hayley has plaited two long, tough lengths of vine ‘rope’. Elliot runs them through his hands and nods his approval. ‘We can use the drawstring from the bag for the third one.’
He carefully removes the drawstring, spreads the plastic out flat and then lashes it to the three tree stumps in a rough triangle, leaving enough slack for it to sag in the middle, creating an improvised basin suspended about two feet off the floor.
‘Looks great.’
‘Sure,’ says Elliot. ‘If it actually rains.’ They both look up at the sky through the canopy of leaves above. There’s not a cloud in sight. Hayley can feel the thirst like dry clay cracking in the walls of her throat, sticking her tongue to the roof of her mouth.
Apparently, she’s not alone. Before they even get back to the beach, they can hear a cacophony of raised voices. They look at each other and start to move faster, stumbling over rocks and plants.
‘—was supposed to be for everybody, you selfish asshole!’ It’s May’s voice, sharp and fierce. She’s leaning forward, fists clenched at her sides, screaming furiously into Brian’s face.
‘—not that big of a deal—’ Brian is protesting, his hands raised defensively.
‘—point is about knowing we can trust each other—’ comes Jessa’s voice softly, half drowned out by the others.
‘—time of the month?’ Brian shoots churlishly at May, who looks like she’s inches away from raining a hail of blows down on him.
‘What’s going on?’ Hayley waves her hands above her head to grab their attention and they all fall mutinously silent. Shannon sighs like an embarrassed parent admitting to her child’s misbehaviour. ‘Brian drank a bottle of water while nobody was looking.’
Hayley almost laughs. It sounds like something a kindergarten teacher might say; the punchline to a joke about a petty argument whipped out of all proportion. Except that it isn’t petty here. Here a single bottle of water might be the difference between life or death. She looks at May’s contorted face, Jessa’s distress, Shannon’s scowl.
‘You can’t just decide things unilaterally,’ she shoots at Brian, surprising herself.
‘Uni what?’ Brian asks sarcastically. ‘Sorry, we’re not all on the honour roll, Hayley.’
‘On your own,’ she snaps, feeling heat rising in her neck. ‘It’s not fair. We’re in this together.’
‘Jeez, stop being so melodramatic.’ Brian tosses the empty water bottle in the sand behind him. ‘I’m the one who was unconscious with a head injury, remember,’ he adds sulkily. Though he has seemed much more like his usual, bullish self today, Hayley realises with wry relief.
Elliot is looking at Brian like he’s never seen him before.
‘How long is it going to take?’ he asks, and his quiet fury is more alarming than May’s explosive anger and Jessa’s disappointment put together, ‘Before you all stop pretending and realise how serious our situation is? How long is it going to take until you start to listen?’
DAY 3
It takes three days.
By morning on the third day, the food and snacks are long gone. The water has been administered in stricter rations under watchful eyes since the ‘incident’. But even the careful single swallows, measured out three times a day, have emptied the bottles. And there isn’t any sign of rain.
That morning, the last phone battery dies. They all sit around and watch it as it flicks down from two per cent to one per cent and finally goes black. Their last remaining connection to the outside world. Dead.
It’s a thirst like nothing Hayley has ever experienced before. Sometimes it pulses angrily in the back of her throat. Sometimes it blurs into hunger, her stomach gnawing desperately at itself and releasing only the painful warmth of bile. Mostly it makes them weak and irritable, sniping and arguing with each other endlessly. They spend a lot of time asleep, finding brief release in semi-conscious snatches of rest, but Hayley is plagued by fitful dreams and cruel visions of cool lemonade splashing freely into a glass just out of reach. At first, she swallowed too much. Now her throat is too dry to let her swallow at all.
She begins to get confused. She watches Shannon and Jason enter the gym together at the first tour game. The crowd goes wild, Jason jogging a lap and waving to the crowds, Shannon cartwheeling and backflipping behind him. She ends with a lift, his hand up her skirt, her arms in a triumphant V, both basking in the applause. But that’s not right. Hayley isn’t in that gym, sitting awkwardly on the bench while the other girls flash megawatt smiles and jump up and down, loving the pageantry and hullaballoo. The roaring in her ears is the rush of water on sand and grit, not the shouts of the home crowd welcoming the touring side.
The island looks soft and gentle, as it slowly squeezes the life out of her. The sand is like fine sugar, the heat radiating from it blurring her vision and throbbing in her head.
* * *
Elliot is trying to organise them, and Hayley knows she should listen, but it’s so hot and she is so tired. She watches a mosquito crawl slowly up her leg, pausing at the soft fuzz that has begun to regrow in the cleft next to her kneecap. She doesn’t have the energy to care if it bites her or not.
‘We have to split up,’ Elliot is saying, wearily. ‘We should have been taking survival measures from the moment we arrived: now we’re playing catch-up.’
‘All those who vote we survive by killing Elliot in his sleep and drinking his blood, raise your hands,’ croaks Jason. ‘What? Too soon?’ Hayley shudders and wonders if it is really cold or if her body is just starting to shut down.
Elliot hesitates, but ignores Jason, turning to the others instead. Behind him, Hayley thinks Jason looks like a lion lounging in the heat, powerful but prone, lacking the energy to lift a paw and take a swipe at the… what kind of animal would Elliot be? Her brain is too frazzled to finish the thought.
‘The most urgent thing is finding something to drink. We can’t just keep waiting and hoping. We have to act now, before it’s too late. The island’s covered in palms: there could be coconuts somewhere. I’ve been looking, but there’s too much ground for me to cover on my own. We should search through the denser vegetation for fruit trees or bushes and check for any sources of fresh water.’
He pauses and looks around, frowning, as if he’s waiting for the insults to begin. For the first time, nobody contradicts him or sneers. He looks a little surprised, then nods.
‘After that,’ he says, standing up a little straighter, ‘we should focus on ways to signal to rescuers. We need to collect a huge pile of wood for the fire
and we should make an SOS sign on the beach that’s big enough to be seen from the air. And we should make some kind of shelter for sleeping in. We don’t know what the weather’s going to do and we should really try to be prepared.’
Brian picks at the peeling skin on his sunburned forehead. ‘Maybe Elliot’s got a point,’ he mumbles, looking down at the sand, his head turned slightly away from Jason. ‘I could really use a fruit juice right about now.’
Hayley watches as Jason’s face contorts in quick betrayed fury, then flickers through a range of expressions, like he’s choosing which one to wear. For the briefest moment, she wonders if he’s going to cry.
‘Nice idea, Brian, maybe you should visit the juice bar with the girls,’ Jason laughs, sweeping his golden hair out of his eyes. ‘You stay here and rest, babe,’ he says loudly to Shannon, without looking at her. ‘I’ll get the wood for the fire.’ And he turns and crashes noisily into the trees, jolting Hayley out of the heavy daze that had settled on her like a blanket.
‘Brian, you and I should head to the opposite coast of the island,’ Elliot says, urgently, as Jason retreats. ‘The coconut palms are most likely to be along the beach.’
He turns to Hayley. ‘Can you guys look for fruit and make the SOS?’
She nods, wearily, dragging herself to her feet.
‘Jessa and I will look for fruit,’ May volunteers, and Hayley looks at Shannon, who hasn’t moved since Jason left. She shrugs. ‘Hayley and I will do the SOS then, I guess.’
‘Look for any edible fruits or roots, any water source,’ Elliot tells Jessa and May. But don’t eat anything you don’t recognise. Bring it back here first. Start with the trees and bushes to the south.’
May looks at him expectantly.
‘That way,’ He points, turning to the treeline and waving his hand to the left. ‘It’s where the trees are thickest, and the part of the island we’ve explored the least.’