Reality Gold

by Tiffany Brooks

“Why don’t you just handcuff us together?” Rohan exploded.

  “Don’t tempt me. I might.”

  Obviously this meant the boys had been fighting over Willa. No surprise there, although I was definitely going to find out exactly why.

  The Sol team chose Porter, Cody, and Alex to sit out, sending Taylor to join Deb’s new least favorite trio. That seemed like an odd choice to me, since Taylor wasn’t exactly the strongest competitor, but then again, what wasn’t odd anymore? Odd was the new normal.

  “Not fair,” Porter called out. “I always wanted a shot at winning a Tri-Wizard tournament.”

  “I’m warning you, Porter,” Deb replied. “I’m not in the mood for your nonsense today.”

  The challenge wasn’t bad. Not too hard, but not too dumb, either. Each team had to search for four parts of a map inside a maze, an actual maze made to look like a jungle, with vines and trees and small lagoons. Once we found the four parts, we had to put the map together, solve the clues, and the prize would be revealed.

  Drones zoomed overhead and a cameraman followed us inside the maze. I couldn’t see what was going on in the Sol maze, but occasionally I could hear them arguing. Good. We really needed them to lose.

  It took a while to find the map pieces. The last one was in a log, half submerged in a lagoon. AJ swore it didn’t happen, but I thought I saw Harry signal him to take a second look. Once we had that last corner, AJ had no problem reading the map, so the rest was easy. The clues led us to a gold crown buried beneath a vine-wrapped tree, and just to mess with her, we chose Maren to be the High Priestess so she’d have to wear it at Council. It went well with her T-shirt: hot pink with the word Extra scrawled diagonally across the front.

  “Obviously we’re sending the vote to Sol,” Maren said. “Let those idiots choose someone for once.” I wasn’t about to point it out, but the crown seemed to be putting her in a decent mood. She wore it even after the challenge ended.

  Everyone knew it would be Sol staying for a vote. It was also pretty clear, even to Taylor, that she was probably going to be one of the two to leave. She was incredibly weepy on the boat ride over.

  “I had the best time with you guys, you know?” she wailed. “Promise me we’ll be friends forever, no matter what, no matter who leaves tonight.”

  And then before Council started, she hugged everyone on her team and told them she loved them all so much.

  “Girl, get your shit together,” Maren muttered, adjusting her crown.

  There were just four of us left on Huaca—me, AJ, Maren, and Maddie. We sat by the fire pit and made bets on who besides Taylor was likely to leave. The guesses were split between Justin and Rohan. Porter seemed safe, which was a relief, but there was no way both Justin and Rohan could remain—they were each too bitter. My money was on Rohan, the pot stirrer. AJ and Maren both backed Justin, but I doubted that would happen. Justin belonged to Willa, and no one was going to vote against someone she wanted.

  But I was wrong. Later, when they returned, Justin wasn’t in the boat. As predicted, Taylor was the other player voted off. Oddly, I missed her. When I went back to the cabin for a sweatshirt, Katya was stripping her bed. I stood there for a second after Katya left, thinking about all the things I’d been crying about last night. The empty beds, the disappearing friends.

  It was only going to get harder from here on out.

  “Bye, Taylor,” I said softly to her empty bed, turning off the light as I went out.

  28

  The phones had been collected and downloaded while we were at Council, and on my way to the fire pit for the evening I saw Phil bringing them back to the charging station.

  “No cameras will be at camp tonight,” he told me. “I’m headed back to the editing room, because it’s all hands on deck. Encourage everyone to take pictures and videos with their Demons tonight, so we get something to use from camp.”

  “Will do.” I signed my phone out and signaled to AJ at the fire pit that I had it. He excused himself, saying he was going to get more firewood, and we looped back around the huts to my usual satellite spot.

  “Ah, my old friend Internet.” AJ cracked his knuckles. “For my first order of business, I really need to see if Sean really did set himself on fire. What’s that dumb name he uses?”

  “Boom_Sean_alaka,” I reminded him.

  “Oh,” he said quietly a few seconds later.

  “What?”

  “See? There’s a new video,” he said. “From the hospital, it looks like.”

  With a few stops and starts, we were able to watch it. Sean’s friendly, goofy personality was nowhere to be seen. He was in a hospital bed, wrapped in bandages and attached to some ominous-looking tubes, and he was very serious.

  “Listen, he’s talking about his fall,” AJ said, turning the volume up. Sean described the beach and his climb to the top of the cliff.

  “And then something happened up there,” he said. “I was pushed. Intentionally. Someone tried to kill me, and I have no idea why.” He held up a bruised hand, his forefinger and thumb almost touching. “I was this close to the end. Just one centimeter to the right, and I’d have broken my neck. The doctors told me I’m lucky to be alive.”

  The video cut out. AJ whistled.

  “Whoa,” I said. “Did he just say someone—someone here—tried to kill him?”

  AJ shrugged. “He’s a full-time Youtuber, which means he lives on ratings. Who knows what happened up there. Maybe it’s just a stunt.”

  Maybe, but I was doubtful. That was a pretty serious accusation to make up.

  AJ shook his head when he saw how little battery was left. “A little less than half? You couldn’t have let me in on this before you drained the juice?”

  We didn’t stay online very long, just long enough to search for alternative ways to read a map that might explain where we’d gone wrong. We made a brief stop at Smokey Joe’s, and I was relieved not to get any more messages from DeadSea. I showed AJ the MrJackSparrow conversations. We both agreed that the fact he hadn’t been online lately meant he could be the treasure hunter who was here right now. He certainly had intimate knowledge of the island, which showed he knew how to get access.

  “We’ll figure out that marker,” AJ told me on our way back to camp. “Hopefully we can get up there tomorrow. We’re so close to cracking it, and I’m feeling lucky.”

  “We can’t tell Cody we’re searching for it, though,” I said. “I heard him apologizing to Deb for the party and telling her that we’re all totally dedicated to making sure the show continues. If it does get canceled, he wants to announce the discovery of the shrine, but in the meantime, he doesn’t want anyone doing anything that could jeopardize things with the main challenges.”

  “What, he’s the boss now? It’s not that hard to sneak off. Even if we have another challenge, we’ll manage,” AJ said. He decided to go to bed early. We bumped fists and said good night.

  “Tomorrow’s our lucky day!” he said, pointing at me as he walked backward on the path. “Plan to bring it.”

  I arrived back at the fire pit to discover Joaquin was our designated chaperone for the night, and he must have been irritated at Deb for shaming him because as the night went on, he didn’t demonstrate any interest in enforcing lights out. He had even taken off his costume as a symbolic act of rebellion.

  “Deb’s still fighting off the network,” Joaquin explained. “They don’t have any confidence this’ll be any good, so she’s putting together a teaser reel to prove them wrong.”

  It was worrisome that things were still so dicey. I’d thought since everything went well today it meant we were back on track. Tomorrow couldn’t come soon enough, and I really hoped we didn’t have another challenge. We needed to crack that marker before MrJackSparrow figured it out.

  The mood was definitely not as festive as the night before. It was actually
tough to lose two people at this point, good friends or not, so everyone was dealing with it in different ways. I had thought Willa might stay in the cabin, mourning Justin, but instead she stayed by the firelight looking weepy and pretty. Annoyingly, she’d perched herself on Porter’s other side.

  “I wanted a little more time with Justin,” she said at one point, putting her head on Porter’s shoulder. Ugh. I didn’t like that at all.

  “I know what we need,” Maddie volunteered cheerily. “More vodka!”

  “Well, look at you,” Porter said. “Little Miss Sunshine has turned into Little Miss Party Girl. Too bad you guys drank it all last night.”

  Joaquin leaned in conspiratorially. “I know Cody has a bottle hidden somewhere.”

  Maddie brightened up. “I’ll go ask him.”

  “I know where he keeps it,” Joaquin said. “Let’s go get it ourselves before he comes back. Then he can’t say no.”

  That left me, Porter, and Willa at the fire pit. Maren was immersed in her sketches over in the Huaca hut, AJ was probably already asleep, and Alex was writing in her journal at one of the tables in the Snack Bar. I really wished Willa had someone else’s shoulder—literally—to cry on. She and Alex were friends, right? Why wasn’t Willa in the Snack Bar with Alex taking “we survived the fourth challenge” selfies?

  Cody and Rohan were further down the beach with a football. I wondered what Cody would think when he got back and saw Joaquin had retrieved his stash of vodka. Of all of us, Cody was the one who wanted the game to proceed without any issues. Another party would definitely count as an issue. This show was something else—there was something wrong when the teenagers were more concerned with rules than the chaperones.

  Wait a minute. There was more than just one thing wrong with this scenario. Joaquin and Maddie had gone off together. Maybe I should run this by Alex, because that was the kind of thing she’d been hinting at.

  On Porter’s other side, I heard Willa say, “. . . and I had no idea it was coming. He was standing at the edge of the stage, scanning the audience, and it felt like he saw me. I felt a connection, and then suddenly this huge guy tapped me on the shoulder . . .”

  Oh, God. She was telling him about how her Instagram fame started after Justin Bieber picked her to be a One Less Lonely Girl at one of his concerts. Those of us in the girls’ cabin had heard it as a bedtime story a few times already. It even had a name: Maren had dubbed it “The Rise of Willa Kisses.”

  And then it hit me—Joaquin had said he knew where Cody’s hiding place was. I’d been a little out of it last night, but not out of it enough to forget that the stash was somewhere behind the boys’ cabin. Joaquin and Maddie had gone in the opposite direction.

  I really didn’t want to leave Porter now, and I really, really didn’t want to leave him with Willa, but I had to.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told Willa and Porter. “Like, right back. Five minutes, max.”

  The full version of Willa’s story went on for at least that amount of time. She still had to cover how once people had blown up her Instagram she changed the look of her photos, made them sexy and artsy—which is apparently very hard to do, much harder than people realize—and how she’d moved to LA full-time, blah blah. That would take at least five minutes.

  “Wait,” Porter said. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me onto his lap. I felt a surge of heat and I understood why attraction was described as electric. It felt as if there was a crackling bit of energy surrounding us. I didn’t need to be worried about Willa. There was definitely something happening between us.

  “Where are you going?” he asked. “Stay here.”

  “I’ll only be five minutes,” I said, undoing Porter’s arm from around my waist. I felt better about leaving, although I wanted to leave even less than I had before.

  “Hurry up,” Porter said, adding I’m begging you under his breath. Willa had only reached the part where the bodyguard had brought her onto the stage. There was a lot left to tell.

  I went to the Snack Bar. “Hey, Alex.” I was nervous. It was a strange subject to talk about. Maddie and Joaquin . . . together? Surely if they were, then Maddie wanted to be with him, which meant it was fine. Wasn’t it?

  Alex looked at me funny. “You okay?”

  “I don’t know. It’s probably nothing, but . . . remember that night in the bathroom? When you said if I ever felt weird about Joaquin?”

  Alex put her pen down and looked around. “Yeah, of course I do. Why? Where is he?”

  “He and Maddie went to—”

  She stood up quickly. “Let’s find them,” she said.

  We walked around camp, but there was no sign of them until we stopped at the usually locked Quack Shack. There was a little bit of light creeping out from under the bottom of the door. Alex pushed open the door, and they were inside. Together. Fully clothed, but still. Joaquin had spread a blanket out on the floor and it was obvious where things were headed.

  “Hey!” Maddie said to us. “A little privacy?”

  “Privacy?” Alex said. “Joaquin, are you kidding me? Maddie’s underage, in case you forgot, and you’re what, twice her age?”

  Maddie looked indignant. “Love knows no bounds,” she said. Her arm was around his neck and I could see her hand gripping his shoulder tightly.

  “Alex, Riley. Girls, come on,” Joaquin said to us. He turned on the full range of his charming personality, smiling that cute dimply smile and spreading out his arms as if to say nothing to see here. “There’s really no need to make a big scene.”

  “Did you say love?” Alex ignored him and addressed Maddie. “You met Joaquin ten days ago.”

  “Sometimes you just know,” Maddie said. “Like Willa and Justin, and Riley and Porter. I didn’t get in the way of either of their romances, so don’t get in the way of ours!”

  Romance. It was such an old-fashioned, strange word to use, and it made me realize that something had been happening right in front of us over the past ten days and we hadn’t noticed. All the teasing, the piggyback rides, the late-night card games—they’d all been part of a courtship. Although, was that really the right word to use? Maddie would turn eighteen in a few months, so the age thing really didn’t bother me. It just felt a little squirrelly. More like teacher/student. Boss/employee.

  Alex was comfortable—happy, even—to confront Joaquin, but all I could think about was how awkward it was going to be tomorrow when we had to face him in the light of day. Shouldn’t we have kept everything light to preserve the illusion that all of this was fine?

  I tried that approach. “I’m really sorry, Maddie. We didn’t mean to interrupt, but we came to find you because, um, we wanted you on the beach. Girls game. Cornhole.”

  “No, thanks,” she said firmly. Her arm was still glued to Joaquin’s shoulder.

  “Oh, it’s fine,” Joaquin said, extracting himself from Maddie’s embrace. He stood up and stretched, as if all of this was perfectly fine, perfectly normal. “I wouldn’t want to interfere with Alex and Riley’s important plans. Go on, play their little game. We can see each other tomorrow.”

  “No!” Maddie said. She looked at us in frustration while Joaquin picked up his walkie and called Katya to take his place for lights-out duty. I’d never seen Maddie angry before, but her face was bright red and her arms were rigid at her sides, her fists balled. “Thanks a lot!” she hissed at us.

  Joaquin folded up the blanket, tossed it casually over his shoulder, and walked out of the Quack Shack, calmly and slowly. I was really starting to regret all of this. Surely if there was something illicit going on, he’d be acting worried. Wouldn’t he? Maddie hopped along beside him on the path to the beach, trying to convince him to stay.

  Alex and I followed. At first I was surprised she hadn’t wanted to retreat to the girls’ cabin after the confrontation. But really, why did it matter where we went?
We had nowhere to go that was off limits to Joaquin, because he was the one in charge of making sure no trouble happened at camp. No thought had been given, obviously, to a situation where the chaperone might be the trouble.

  Alex and I stood at the edge of the tree line, watching them as they walked down to the water to meet Katya’s boat. Maddie gestured toward us and made some exaggerated hand motions. Her body language looked apologetic. At one point, she shook her head and then tipped it into her hand, in a can-you-believe-that pantomime.

  She stormed back the way we’d come, walking angrily toward our cabin.

  “Wait!” I ran to catch up with her. “Whatever was going on with him seemed sketchy, but isn’t it up to Maddie to decide if it was or not? She’s obviously not mad at him, so maybe there’s nothing to panic about.”

  “There is, and you know it. She’s seventeen with the maturity of a twelve-year-old. This is a girl who wears unicorn pajamas to bed! He took advantage of her intentionally, and right now she’s displaying classic symptoms of victimization. Not that anyone would ever really know how to recognize the true signs, because if you read the newspapers or the court reports, a victim can only be someone who cries. Someone who falls apart and is so clearly devastated that she can’t function. A victim immediately points her finger at the attacker and never wavers, and if she does change her description of the events, even a tiny bit, then she’s a liar and made the whole thing up. Oh, and she can’t ever talk to the jerk, and God forbid she does, to try to keep peace and attempt to maintain any civility around him, because that’s definitely not allowed. Real victims would never do that.”

  “Oh.” It sounded like Alex knew a fair bit about this. I got the feeling she wasn’t talking about Maddie anymore. She had to be talking about herself. I didn’t even really know what to say or how to say it, but I felt like I needed to try. “How do you know all this?”

  “Trust me,” she said, suddenly looking very old and very tired. “You don’t want to know.”