Reality Gold

by Tiffany Brooks

  “Aha! So this is where you keep your stash.” I finished extricating myself from the bush. “I know your secret now.”

  Cody looked at the bottle and then at me. “A man who controls the supply, controls the minds of men,” he said, very seriously, probably quoting someone famous.

  I nodded, as if this was the wisest thing I’d ever heard. And in the moment, it kind of was.

  “You know what? You’re . . . smart,” I said, not so smartly. But it was true. The patents, the brainy quotes, the secret hiding spot. He liked to talk and dress and play up the redneck thing, but that wasn’t real. It was just a front.

  He wagged his finger at me, and returned to his usual self. “And you know what else? You’re drunk. That’s okay, darlin’, but I think you might need to call it a night. You might not even remember tomorrow, but just in case, how ’bout this: I keep your secret, and you keep mine.”

  That made me think it was a good idea to start saying “Shhhhhh,” crack myself up, and then say “Shhhhhh” again, a cycle that repeated several times during the walk to my cabin, where Cody—quickly—steered me inside and said goodnight.

  I made my way to my bed. The bottom bunk had been a good call, although I could have moved to another spot if I wanted because there were so many empty beds now. That made me sad. So many things empty. So many people gone. So many mistakes, and so many failures. I could cry, the world was so full of loss and betrayal, and then suddenly I was crying.

  I wish that sober me could harness the thought process displayed by sad drunk me. In less than a minute I blurred the timeline between now and last year, so that empty beds and people leaving the island had morphed into old worries about empty seats next to me in the lunchroom, people deleted from my phone and gone from my life. Maybe it was a form of PTSD; the last time I’d had a drink was the last party I’d been to, the one where I realized my old friends were never going to accept me. I knew people who couldn’t drink certain kinds of alcohol because it had produced a bad night once. No doubt I was destined to forever associate the taste of vodka with loss.

  I’d already had quite a lot of it—both vodka and loss—before I worked up the nerve to go to Maria Kang’s Christmas party. She lived in a double-wide Victorian with a full-floor basement on Divisadero Street near Alta Plaza Park. Izzy and I always went over together, but she hadn’t texted me. The lack of a message was a message of its own.

  “I guess you’re still mad,” I said, when I found Izzy by the Ping Pong table, sorting Jell-O shots onto trays. Even though Izzy had left school before me, she’d stayed in touch with everyone. It was different for her—no one had any bad feelings toward her. If anything, they felt sorry for her.

  “Why would I be mad?” Izzy asked.

  “We always go to Maria’s parties together, and tonight we didn’t, because you didn’t text me, so . . .”

  “You didn’t text me, either,” she pointed out. All her attention went to lining Jell-O shots up perfectly on the tray.

  She finished with the shots and looked at me. “I thought you might have made your own plans. You seem to be doing that a lot lately.”

  That was unfair. Practically the entire class had tried to get me kicked out of school. Of course I’d pulled back. Was I just supposed to pretend I didn’t notice that everyone hated having me around?

  “So you are mad,” I said.

  “Wrong word.”

  “Then what? Fine, I didn’t text you tonight, you’re right. But everyone keeps telling me how it’s not fair that you got kicked out and I didn’t.”

  “Am I the one focusing on things being fair? Or is it you?”

  Wait, stop. This memory was wrong. That wasn’t what we had said.

  Or was it? In this version, Izzy didn’t seem to be mad at me for not being kicked out. Instead, she seemed angry that I’d pulled away from her.

  I had finally reached my bed. Stumbling in, I bonked my head on Maddie’s bunk. Ow, that hurt. Words hurt, too. Izzy’s words. What were they again? I tried to remember but everything was fuzzy.

  I pulled my covers up to my neck. Focus. Remember.

  “You’ve been keeping me in the dark lately,” Izzy was saying, back at that party. “So maybe I’ve always been in the dark about you. Maybe we were never friends the way I thought we were.”

  Dark.

  I opened my eyes. The room was spinning. The room was dark.

  No, wait. That wasn’t the darkness I needed to think about. Someone had been talking about dark, being in the dark.

  The shrine was dark. The woods, too. Someone was hiding something I wasn’t supposed to see. Another person was hiding behind a tree. I knew them, but they kept slipping away before I could catch up.

  “Stop,” I mumbled.

  “Stop what?” It was a real voice. Not one in my head. Not a memory. There was a face above mine, but it was blurry, as if I was looking through a kaleidoscope to see it. Dark hair. Silver earrings. A nose and mouth.

  “You missed all the excitement,” the mouth was saying.

  “Izzy, no,” I said. It was hard to get the words out. “You don’t understand.”

  I needed to make her understand. I also wanted to keep my eyes closed. The blurriness, the spinning. Too much.

  “I didn’t know that you weren’t mad at me. I thought you were.”

  Words were coming out of the mouth again. Laughter, too. “Dude, you are such a lightweight. Go to bed.”

  “Will everything be better? All better when I wake up?” I asked. It felt important I fix this, whatever it was, before I went to sleep.

  The face, the brown eyes and dark hair, hovered for a second.

  “Yes,” the mouth said. The voice was kinder, nicer than it had been a second ago. “Go to sleep. Everything is fine. You’ll be fine.”

  For the first time, I felt like things might be.

  “Tomorrow we’ll catch that person in the woods,” I said. “I think I know who it is.”

  And then I fell asleep.

  27

  I hadn’t heard the gong in days, but that’s what woke me up. Not once, and not twice. Many times, over and over, as if someone was beating the heck out of it.

  That someone was Deb, and she was mad.

  She was waiting for us on the beach with Joaquin, Phil, and Katya, all of them standing in a grim line. Scuttling around the huts doing cleanup were more crew members than I’d seen in days.

  “All right, children, playtime is over,” Deb said. Did my head hurt, or was she yelling? I squinted. The beach was so bright, it made it hard to think. “And if you object to being called children,” Deb was saying—no, she was yelling, definitely yelling—“Then don’t behave that way. I’m going to pretend I don’t know what went on here last night, and I’m going to pretend that my surrogates had the handle on the situation that I assumed they did, and we’re going to move on. We’ve had a rough few days but we have to make up quite a bit of lost time. It’s our tenth day today. We don’t have a lot of time left, and there’s a lot we need to do. Therefore, we’re going to be doing two challenges back to back. One today, and one tomorrow. Furthermore, everyone is confined to camp. By that I mean everyone, and by camp, I mean this beach and these cabins. That’s it. No one is to go one step further or I will personally escort them off this island and out of the game, is that understood?”

  Deb’s hair was loose today, wilder than usual, as if her outrage was powering jolts of electricity through her body.

  “First thing we are going to do is have some confessionals to explain to our future audience the sudden appearance of the black eyes and the bloody noses, so everyone who participated in Fight Club last night, which most definitely includes Justin and Rohan, meet me at the boat,” Deb ordered. “You’re coming over first. The rest of you will join us in exactly one hour. Do not make the second boat wait even a single
minute for you, or you’re out. Oh, and no one will be checking out a Demon today, which means every single one of them needs to be accounted for at the charging station or it’s bye-bye. Got that?”

  The phones! I had one last chance to tell AJ to return his. He hadn’t been around last night, so I’d forgotten all about it. There was a lot about last night I wished I could forget. I hadn’t felt nauseous before, but I certainly did when the memories starting flowing back. The baby talk with Porter. Tripping over myself—I guess that explained the skinned knee—and oh, wow: telling Cody you’re smart. Had I really said that? I wanted to die.

  Well, that thing with Porter was fun for the five minutes it lasted. He’d ditched me pretty fast when I started acting so dumb. What did he say, his stomach hurt? Well, I couldn’t totally blame him. Maybe I would, later, when I started feeling better, but for now all I could think was how great it would be if there was any way to ditch myself. I vaguely remembered dreaming about Izzy. Oh, God. Had I been talking to someone about her?

  I was definitely going to hide in the cabin for the next hour, and that seemed to be everyone’s plan. I followed Alex up the beach, with Willa, Maren, and Maddie trailing behind.

  “Hey, Frisco, don’t you want some nice, gooey cheesy eggs and grease-pit bacon?”

  My stomach lurched, and not in a good way, even though the call-out meant Porter wasn’t pretending I didn’t exist.

  He waved at me from the Snack Bar. “Come sit.”

  He hadn’t been lying simply to make me queasy—he did have all that food. Oh, right. He was the only one who stayed sober last night. Lucky him.

  “Yum. Orange juice?” He held out his glass.

  I shook my head violently.

  “You look about as good as I thought you would.”

  “You and Maren are both really good at giving compliments,” I told him, sitting down. “Whenever I’m feeling bad, I’ll be sure to find one of you to make me feel better.”

  “If you want a hospital recommendation, I know of a good one.” I made a face and Porter shook his head. “You know, now that I think about it, I don’t know why I was so surprised you plowed through those drinks. I forgot about Quiz Night—you were the one who almost got expelled. Shoulda known you were trouble. Sure you don’t want some eggs? These are really good.”

  I moved my chair away from the table. No way.

  “Yeah, about that,” I said. I definitely didn’t want to bring up the op-ed, but he did deserve an explanation. “The expulsion thing is kinda sorta related to why I got so drunk so fast. It’s a long story, but first I got suspended, and that led to problems with my friends, which led to other bad things like me getting homeschooled since January, so I haven’t exactly gone to a ton of parties lately. I guess I’m out of practice.”

  “You can say that again.” Porter finished and waved his plate under my nose before putting it on the neighboring table. He was definitely finding humor in torturing me. “But say no more. I get it.”

  “How? I didn’t tell you anything yet.”

  “You don’t need to. You said it was friend troubles, right? That means girls. And I don’t understand anything girls do to each other and I never will, but I don’t doubt that something nuts happened.”

  “Oh. Sexist much?”

  “No, seriously. Take our first vote. I thought Alex and Chloe were friends. Or at least liked each other, but Alex was dead set on Chloe leaving. Made Cody and me promise we’d vote her off. Had to be Chloe, and she didn’t care about anyone else. It made no sense. I’m sure the girls in your story are equally messed up, so whatever your side is, don’t worry, I’m taking it. I don’t even have to hear it.”

  My surprise quelled my feminist ire for the moment. Alex had insisted on voting Chloe off? Porter was right, that didn’t make any sense at all. They had seemed really friendly to each other in the beginning. I was starting to think Alex might be doing a lot of game manipulation. Was there no one trustworthy here?

  Hopefully Porter was.

  “You know, sometimes it’s a letdown when someone takes your side without hearing the story,” I told him. “Because you really need to have someone nod along as you give all the details and then jump in to say how horrible the other person is. That’s basically the most important part. You don’t really get the same satisfaction if the listener just admits up front they’re going to agree with everything.”

  “Oh, good to know. Do I need to get really mad and say things like I’m going to kill her! Or will a simple that sucks suffice?”

  “That sucks is perfect. But don’t think you can space out and stop listening,” I warned. “Because you have to say it at the right time, and say it like you really mean it.”

  “Got it. Thanks for the lesson. Now let’s hear it.”

  “Hear what?” My brain was fuzzy this morning.

  “The story about your jerk friends. Or, wait, I meant the story about your friends who I definitely haven’t decided are jerks yet.”

  I wasn’t really ready to go into it, which was a good thing because we were interrupted.

  “Riley,” one of the trees said. Or rather, someone hiding behind one of the trees. It was AJ. “I need to talk to you.”

  Porter waved his fork. “The jerk friends can wait. Go strategize. I don’t want to see you getting voted off.”

  Oh. I smiled. But then I felt sick. Nothing like reality to burst your bubble.

  AJ pulled me into the woods. “The shrine is real,” he said excitedly. “Look, I took my time and examined everything. The statue, the marker. I got a ton of pictures. There’s no way they faked it.”

  His excitement was catching. I grabbed his hand. Real! Not a ruse of Deb’s.

  “But if it’s real, then why couldn’t we find anything where the fourth marker sent us? Maybe we really do need to go south. Maybe the idea to flip the directions is wrong. We should go south a thousand paces—”

  I grabbed his arm. “Wait, we can think about that later. But right now, we have to deal with your phone,” I said. “You have to return it. We can’t let Deb take the phones away.”

  He shook his head violently. “That’s a hard no. We’re keeping this thing no matter what—it’s got our only proof on it. All those pictures. We need them.”

  It was the way he said we that made me decide to trust him. Until now, there had always been an element of selfishness that made me worry if it came down to it, he wouldn’t hesitate to toss me to the side.

  “I’ve got something to show you, but we’ve got to be fast,” I told him. “Come with me.”

  He was desperate enough to follow me without questioning why my big solution involved a trip to the girls’ cabin and a makeup compact. Once we were safely in the woods out of view, I opened it up and his face changed. AJ was a tech guy. He knew a satellite when he saw one.

  If I’d been worried he was going to be angry at me for holding out on him, his reaction showed otherwise.

  “Oh, baby.” He shot an admiring look at me while I hooked up his phone. “You, my friend, are full of surprises. Have you had this the whole time?”

  I winced. “What if I said yes?”

  “Why are you acting so weird? We’re all here to do whatever it takes, right?”

  It was an echo of what Maren had said back on the helicopter that first day. Was this how everyone felt? For the first time, I wondered if I was too rigid, too black and white. I’d let myself sink under the weight of the article and the “Can’t Even” Girl because I’d been so upset that those portrayals were false representations. That wasn’t me, I’d wanted to shout from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. What I was seeing here on the island, though, was that it might sometimes be okay to not always be yourself. Or, rather, maybe being yourself didn’t have to mean always being the same in every situation.

  I tried the question game. Me: Slavishly fixa
ted on defining myself and those around me, or just someone who likes to know where people stand?

  Two weeks ago, I would have said the latter, but now I wasn’t so sure.

  We downloaded the pictures and put AJ’s phone back, making it to the beach just in time to load into the boat.

  I was definitely not the only one who was cursing the fact that we always had to travel to Challenge Island by boat. The waves were higher today than I’d ever seen them, and I felt like heaving every time the hull slapped the water. No one threw up over the side, but I saw Alex lean over once.

  Rohan and Justin were waiting for the rest of their team by the usual Sol platform in the arena. They were standing pretty far apart, so I guessed whatever they’d been fighting over hadn’t been resolved.

  The whole place was buzzing with action. Joaquin’s costume was back on, and his accent, too. We were back in business.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Here we are, at our fourth challenge. How’s everyone feeling today?”

  There were some muted murmurs.

  “No way,” Deb said forcefully. “That’s not going to cut it, not by a long shot. I want enthusiasm and action, and I want it now.”

  I was glad we put the phone back. Deb was showing us her bad side, and I didn’t ever want to be on it.

  Joaquin repeated his greeting, and this time we all summoned a little more energy. It wasn’t just that I didn’t feel great. The fakeness was starting to get to me. The game, the whole show concept, the people.

  It was going to be a tough challenge. Sol still had seven players to our four, so we had to hope that the upcoming challenge was skewed in our favor. Knowing Deb and how this show worked, that wasn’t a crazy possibility.

  It turned out to be true. In the next breath, Joaquin announced that Sol would be required to choose three people to sit out the challenge so that the numbers were even. Well, okay. Things were starting to look up.

  “And those three people will not include Justin, Rohan, or Willa,” Deb called out. She was definitely not playing today.