The Trial

by Laura Bates

Hayley finishes his sentence for him. ‘It has to be one of us.’

  DAY 8

  Of course, nobody owns up. Even when May wakes up with a horrible hangover the next morning and swears blind she had no idea there was vodka in her drink. ‘Yes, I know it tasted weird,’ she snaps at Brian when he questions her. ‘But that damn coconut stuff always tastes disgusting. I just thought it was grosser than normal.’

  They look at each other, the accusation hanging heavily over the camp.

  ‘Was it you, Brian?’ Jessa, blurts out, directly.

  ‘What?’ His voice is squeaky with indignation. ‘Why are you accusing me?’

  Jessa squirms. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just… it seems like the kind of prank you might play. You did fill half the team’s water bottles with washing-up liquid on that second tour game…’

  ‘Yeah, for a joke!’ Brian splutters. ‘And don’t pretend you weren’t laughing when bubbles started coming out of Tom Allen’s nose, Jessa.’

  ‘So was just this another joke?’ she persists. ‘We won’t be mad, if you tell us. It’d be much better to own it.’

  ‘No. Jesus. I wasn’t even the one who filled up the bottles: that was Elliot.’

  ‘And why would I want to get May drunk?’ Elliot asks, immediately. ‘Besides, if whoever did this was also the person who pushed me then that puts me in the clear, doesn’t it? I wouldn’t exactly give myself a serious head injury on purpose.’

  Hayley watches him closely, the tense narrowing of his full, dark eyebrows, the cut on his cheek all but completely faded now, the bruise on his temple faded to a faint, dark yellow, trying to sense whether or not he is lying.

  ‘But you were the one that filled the bottles,’ Shannon says, slowly, narrowing her eyes at Elliot. How did the vodka get in there if you didn’t put it in?’

  ‘We were all rushing around getting stuff ready,’ Elliot protests. ‘The bottles were left in the trees to keep cool, anyone could have slipped something in while they were getting wood or going to the bathroom. We all had the opportunity.’

  ‘But who wanted to?’ May whines, furiously. ‘If you’ve got a problem with me, say it to my face,’ she shouts, defiantly.

  But nobody says a word. And eventually they fall into a dissatisfied silence.

  Hayley can’t stop thinking about it all. The party. The more she tries to connect the dots between what happened to Elliot and May, the more convinced she becomes that the party is the key to unravelling it all. And though she wouldn’t admit it, there’s a part of her that feels energised, almost buoyed up by finally feeling that there’s a role for her on the island. So she wasn’t cool under pressure in the first days. And she doesn’t have any particularly useful survival skills. But uncovering the truth? Getting people to reveal more than they intended? This is Hayley Larkin’s wheelhouse. If anyone can work out what is going on, she can. Ideally before anyone else gets hurt.

  The only problem is, none of it adds up. The only person with a clear motive to hurt Elliot was Jason: jealous of his new leadership role in the group. But why would Jason want to hurt May? Why would anyone want to hurt May? One thing is certain: Hayley can cross Jessa off the list of suspects. Elliot says he was pushed with two hands, and Jessa’s injured arm is practically immobile. And there’s no way Jessa would ever do anything to hurt her best friend.

  * * *

  There is always something that needs doing. It’s laborious repetitive work, but it distracts them from arguing about whether Elliot’s attacker was real or imagined, whether May was deliberately poisoned with alcohol, or stole the vodka herself and lied about it.

  The main jobs are collecting and boiling any rainwater, catching fish, picking fruit and coconuts, and keeping the fire burning from dawn to dusk. If another search party comes close, they’ll be ready.

  They’ve decided not to worry about keeping the fire burning after dark, since rescuers would be less likely to be out looking at night anyway. Elliot is convinced the island would be too small to support any predators so there doesn’t seem to be much need for a night-time guard, and that was a disaster the only time they tried it. (Or at least, as Elliot darkly adds, they don’t need guarding from anything outside the camp.)

  But keeping the fire burning during daylight means collecting firewood. Lots of firewood. Hayley, whose family has one of those neat little electric fires behind glass for the rare winter night that’s cold enough to turn it on, had no idea that woodfires gobbled up so much fuel. Within the first week, they’ve gathered and burned every piece of driftwood and most of the obvious, large sticks in the trees that line the beach. Which is why Hayley finds herself deep in the dense, wooded central part of the island with Elliot on the afternoon of the eighth day, her back and thighs aching, her forearms ribboned with livid scratches, painstakingly adding piece after piece of wood to the backpack she has slung across one shoulder.

  ‘I think my splinters have splinters,’ she grumbles, inspecting her reddened palms. The cuts and bruises left by the crash have almost all healed, but they’ve been replaced by other sore spots, souvenirs of a week on the island. There’s a half-healed cut where she accidentally gouged herself with a fishhook whilst trying to bait it. A scrape down the side of her shin, grazed by tripping over a vine on a fruit-gathering expedition. A nasty bruise on her left thumb from taking aim at a coconut with the cutting stone and accidentally bringing the blunt side smashing down on her hand instead. And a little, smooth blister on her right index fingertip from a cooking accident.

  They have started to attempt slightly more sophisticated ‘cooking’, of a sort. Elliot showed them how to make a mini stove with a Coke can. He cut a hole in the side of the can to allow hot stones and tinder to be pushed inside, and the top provided a stable base for a kind of cooking container made of half another tin can to stand on. They’ve boiled sea snails, plucked slimily from rough rocks at low tide, and steamed pieces of white fish (more of them caught with Jessa’s hook than Elliot’s spear), wrapped in supple, green leaves.

  Everything is an effort. They don’t eat, drink or rest without working for it. It can take an hour or more to catch a single fish. By the time they’ve scraped off the scales and pulled out the hundreds of bones each one is barely a mouthful. And there are seven hungry mouths to feed. By the time they’ve prepared the fish, collected wood, made the fire, eaten, cleaned up again, it’s time to start scavenging for the next meal immediately.

  Hayley sighs and adds another stick to her bulging pack. ‘Can you believe we’ve been here over a week already?’

  Elliot has his back to her, bent over a dead tree trunk, trying to break off some pieces of dry wood. But she can hear the care in his voice, like he’s trying not to scare her. ‘It’s not a very good sign,’ he says, slowly. ‘If they had any means to find us easily – like if our radar had been working until the last minute, or we hadn’t strayed very far from the planned flight path – then we should have been found in the first couple of days, tops.’

  ‘So not being found quickly means we might not be found at all?’

  Elliot nods, apologetically.

  ‘No.’ Hayley is embarrassed by the hot prickling behind her eyeballs. She can handle this. Just because Elliot’s been camping a lot, doesn’t make him the final authority on all things desert island. He’s guessing, just as much as anyone else.

  ‘They’ll keep looking until they find us,’ she says firmly, trying to keep a wobble out of her voice. ‘It doesn’t matter how long it takes. Our parents aren’t going to stop. And you can bet Jason’s parents will pay for a private search, even if the authorities give up. May’s too, come to think of it.’ In fact, the combined wealth of the families of the cheerleading squad alone could probably finance a round-the-clock rescue operation for months, before you even started on the boys.

  ‘Yeah, I can believe there’s not many of those booster club parents who’ll take no for an answer,’ Elliot says, drily. ‘I guess we should think ourselves lucky it works in
our favour this time around.’

  ‘This time?’

  ‘As opposed to, say, when we’re applying for college places and our recommendation letters are being written by the school, but we’re in competition with classmates whose parents can afford to fund a new library.’

  Elliot wrenches at the dead wood, twisting great clumps of it off and piling them beside him.

  ‘Or competing for basketball scholarships with kids whose parents have been paying for them to fly around the country playing in the off season for years, sending them on pricey summer camps since they were in elementary school. Kids who basically bought their ball skills instead of spending a thousand hours late into the night shooting at a single rusty hoop screwed into their backyard wall because they can’t afford to go out anywhere anyway.’

  He breathes heavily, concentrating on the stump, not meeting Hayley’s eyes. She has no idea what to say. She feels a strange mixture of embarrassment and irritation that Elliot so often manages to make her feel like a naïve child. She likes to think of Oak Ridge as her beat – prides herself on knowing it inside out. But she’s never heard a story like Elliot’s before. Partly because she’s never spoken to a scholarship kid. Not because she’s avoided them… just because, she suddenly realises, she’s never known who any of them are. And she’s beginning to understand why.

  Hayley’s parents aren’t off-the-scale wealthy, not by the standards of a lot of her classmates, but they live comfortably, managing the school fees with enough left over to take a nice holiday every few years if they budget carefully enough. Somehow she’s always just assumed her peers’ lives were all broadly similar… apart from the significant handful whose gold-plated existence revolves more around private pools, skiing chalets and Dior clutch bags, that is. And, she is slowly beginning to realise, being around those kids has always made her think of herself, by comparison, as… normal. But talking to Elliot, she’s beginning to realise just how lucky she is. And just how little she’s ever really stopped to appreciate it.

  ‘Elliot,’ Hayley begins, hesitantly, ‘Do you really, honestly think someone pushed you off those rocks?’

  He sighs and turns to look her directly in the eye, wiping his hands on the same scruffy khaki shorts and thin grey T-shirt he’s been wearing since the day they arrived, only taking them off to rinse them in the sea once or twice.

  ‘Come here,’ he says, walking over to her, until they’re so close that she can see a slight dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose. Elliot takes her shoulders and gently spins her around so she’s facing away from him. Then suddenly, before she has time to realise what he’s about to do, he shoves her, hard, in the back with two fists, sending her crashing to the floor.

  ‘OW!’ Hayley protests, rubbing her elbow and picking leaves out of her hair. ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘Do you think you could have “imagined” that?’ Elliot asks. ‘Might you have just tripped over? Could you be confused?’

  ‘Okay, okay, I get your point,’ Hayley mutters, grumpily, dusting herself down.

  She looks at him for a moment, weighing him up. Out of everyone on the island, he’s the person she probably knew the least before they crashed. But somehow, now he feels like the one she’s most willing to trust.

  ‘I think maybe something happened at the party and that’s why someone pushed you, and maybe why they spiked May’s drink as well.’ She lets it all come out in a rush before she changes her mind about confiding in him.

  Elliot looks troubled. ‘At the party? Why?’

  ‘Think about it. Everyone’s been acting weird ever since the morning after, we just didn’t really notice because the crash happened. Shannon and Jason haven’t been the same, Jessa says May was acting strangely that night, nobody seems to want to talk about it…’ She runs her hands through her greasy hair, frustrated. ‘I can’t explain it, exactly, I just feel sure that whatever happened that night holds the key to what’s going on here.’

  Elliot thinks for a while. ‘I guess you could be right,’ he says, thoughtfully. ‘It was kind of a crazy party. But it was Shannon who was acting the weirdest, if you ask me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It was like she was high or something, the way she threw herself into that game of Truth or Dare, the way she was dancing with that Duke player later, them grinding up against each other like that…’

  Hayley remembers the sweaty, heaving, swaying mass of bodies, arms coiling and necks arched, hands twisting and finding flesh, colours whirling and legs rubbing and hair sticking to the side of your neck. By that point, Hayley had been comfortably numbed by the vodka, sliding into that sweet spot where her knees tingled and a cloak of somebody else’s confidence was softly draped over her shoulders. Not yet at the point when her tongue started to grow rubbery and floppy so she had to concentrate hard on her words in order to avoid tripping over them. Surrounded by an invisible force field of protection from her own constant inner monologue of self-consciousness. The whispering voice in her head – you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re totally out of your depth, everyone’s looking at you – finally quietened. And it hadn’t hurt that really nobody was looking at her, at all. Brian was huddled in the corner, in a sort of sweaty, pulsing ecosystem of his own with two of the Duke cheerleaders. Jason seemed to have disappeared. Shannon, head thrown back and nostrils flaring, was dancing like her life depended on it with the tall, muscular Duke basketball captain, his light blond hair elaborately gelled into place. May was dancing alone, throwing beautiful, angular, unpredictable shapes and somehow completely pulling it off as only May could. She couldn’t remember seeing Jessa. And Elliot was on the table, feet splayed and propped on one arm, his top ripped off, humping the air, his groin plunging and arching to the music. Surrounded by a chanting crowd of faces, a buzzing muddle of admiration and mockery.

  Hayley had slipped out, shutting the door gratefully against the wall of noise and damp heat, writhing bodies and pulsing music. She walked slowly back to the hotel in the moonlight, going over the night the way Shannon would analyse her performance in a complicated routine. It had been a solid non-disaster as far as Hayley was concerned. Which, for her, was a big success. And as she snuggled down between the crisp hotel-room sheets, relishing the night’s final rebellion of slowly sucking the chocolate on her pillow even though she’d already brushed her teeth, she’d whispered quietly to herself. ‘You went to a party. An actual party. And you didn’t totally suck.’

  ‘So what about you?’ She looks sideways at Elliot to gauge his reaction as she continues picking at the wood on the stump. ‘Shannon wasn’t the only one who let her hair down that night, was she?’

  Elliot flushes. ‘If by letting your hair down you mean being forced to drink the most disgusting cocktail known to man, then I suppose you could say that. I don’t remember very much after that if I’m totally honest.’

  ‘Shannon said she found you on the bathroom floor.’

  ‘Oh God.’ He cringes. ‘That was much later, I think. She sort of flew into the bathroom and collapsed over the sink, spitting into it and rinsing her face with cold water. That was when she spotted me. But then she disappeared again, I don’t know, I think I passed out.’

  ‘You guys need any help?’ Jason appears behind Elliot, flicking a bug off the sleeve of his grubby white T-shirt.

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ Hayley answers quickly, wondering how much of their conversation Jason has overheard. ‘We’re trying to break down this stump for firewood.’

  It occurs to Hayley, absurdly, that this might be one of the only times Jason Angel has addressed her directly. Unless you count him making her feel extremely uncomfortable in her first-ever cheer practice, which she doesn’t, since he didn’t even bother to find out her name. Not that he deliberately ignores her, exactly. It’s more like he just never seems to notice her. On tour, he’d talk to Jessa and May in front of her, and he was always with Shannon, of course, turning up to collect h
er from practice, shepherding her from their changing rooms onto the court (‘so everybody knows you’re my girl… don’t want any of those opposition fans getting ideas…’). But it’s like he’s never really seen Hayley. It’s the way she imagines famous people just don’t notice the aides who buzz around them getting things done every day. Jason’s not the sort of person who needs to notice everybody around him. Everybody else takes notice of him instead.

  He took notice of Shannon, though. The day she arrived as a transfer student, halfway through ninth grade, Jason picked her out. People were a little surprised, actually, back then. Jason could have chosen almost anybody, and Shannon wasn’t the most obvious. She had a regal poise and pale, dramatic looks. But she wasn’t the stereotypical prom queen type, not like May with her exuberant, butterfly popularity, or Jessa with her dimples and her massive brown eyes and eyelashes that went on forever. But there was something about Shannon. And on Jason’s arm she walked into the world of cheerleading royalty with every door swinging open in front of her. That was a long time ago, though. Now Shannon is cheer captain, with her extra practice sessions and drills run like military exercises, it’s hard to remember the coltish, shy girl who turned up in second-period math and slid quietly into a seat next to Jason.

  Jason gets his nails into a crack in the stump and starts to heave, ripping off a substantial strip and sidestepping as a stream of tiny bugs with shiny black shells swarms out from underneath it. He’s just starting to heave at a second piece when he stops suddenly.

  ‘What was that?’ Jason sounds uneasy.

  They all stop and listen.

  The noise comes again: a cascade of descending notes like tinkling laughter. The skin on the back of Hayley’s neck start to crawl. She tries to slow her breathing, standing frozen, straining in the direction the noise seemed to come from.

  It comes again, like a silvery waterfall of noise, so quick and light that it seems to slip through her fingers. But this time there’s a pause and then a dry rustling noise, which sounds like it’s coming from the trees behind Elliot.