THE MOJAVE DESERT
BASE CAMP
NOVEMBER 2ND
8:48 P.M.
Allie lagged behind her fellow castaways, stress-Purelling and shivering in the cold night air. She wished she had thought of offering to stay behind and tending to the fire—wild animals just weren’t her thing. She didn’t even like touching cats! There was something about them she just didn’t trust. Huddling close to Mel and Skye, she hoped whatever was behind the plane was gone now, or at least that it was friendly. She clamped a hand over her mouth to keep her Whitestrip-enhanced teeth from chattering—fear combined with the frigid desert night had turned her chompers into castanets.
The group pressed forward, heading toward the plane, when that same scratching sound reached Allie’s goosebumped ears. She grabbed Skye’s toned upper arm and squeezed it in terror. “Did you hear that?”
Skye whirled around, the whites of her eyes glowing in the moonlight. “Ow! Let go of my arm.”
But there it was again. This time, Skye heard it.
“Guys! It’s that way!” Skye whisper-screamed and poked a thumb toward an outcropping of boulders just to the left of the plane.
Allie was too spooked to speak.
She ran behind Mel and cowered, holding onto his broad shoulders and burrowing her head into his back, though she wasn’t sure what good it would do her. When they’d left the fire pit, Mel had grabbed a can opener from the mess kit they’d found on the plane. What was Mel planning to do, open the wolf to death? She rolled her navy blue eyes, annoyed that her boyfriend didn’t have the sense to at least grab a stick and light it on fire. Everyone knew animals hated fire. Didn’t they?
But just like her, Mel was more at home in a mall than he was in the wild. She peeked over his shoulder, standing on her tiptoes. Waiting was the worst part. Let the fur fly and the carnage commence, she thought. Anything beat going out of her mind with anticipation.
She braced herself for teeth. For snarling, for some kind of wild beast. Suddenly, she felt certain the animal would be a wolf. She tried to calm herself by thinking about how cute Taylor Lautner was in Twilight: Eclipse, but her teeth began to chatter again. She preferred her wolves onscreen, where they belonged: shirtless and sexy, not out here in this ice-cold, pitch-black kitty litter box, where they were more likely to have beady eyes, bad breath, claws, and an appetite.
Just then, something green and faintly fuzzy stirred behind the boulder nearest them.
“Hey.” AJ appeared, her scratchy voice more grating than Parmesan. She hopped over a boulder to join the group, casually adjusting her green tam as if she’d bumped into them in the Alpha Pavilion.
Allie blinked. Had their chili been tainted? Was she hallucinating?
Ohmuhgod. An agonized groan escaped Allie’s mouth before she clamped it shut with her hand. The group all stared at AJ with shocked expressions on their faces. Which meant that sadly, AJ wasn’t just a vision of Allie’s nightmares. She was the real thing.
Allie would have preferred a murderous wolf over this. Was there not anywhere on Earth that she could go to get away from the stinky songstress?
“What are you doing here?” Skye shrieked.
AJ aimed her seaweed-green eyes straight at Allie as a thin smile spread over her pointy face. She swallowed the remains of a BrazilleBlast bar she must have filched from the PAP. “You guys never include me in anything, so I decided to include myself,” she said at last.
Allie looked at her friends, wrinkling her nose as a whiff of AJ’s patchouli essential oil found its way into her airspace. “Am I having a nightmare, and you’re all in it?”
Mel narrowed his pale green eyes. “You snuck onto the plane, you mean,” he said coldly.
AJ stood blinking at the group, smiling calmly in spite of the angry silence hanging in the air. “Okay, yeah. I hid in one of the rear compartments. It wasn’t so hard, if you haven’t noticed, I’m tiny.” AJ stretched her spindly arms out as though trying to prove it. “I heard you guys talking about the plan last night. I muted my aPod when I had my headphones on. I don’t embrace the competitive spirit, but I felt like I should be a part of this experience.” The words hung pointlessly in the air like a pair of old sneakers draped over a telephone wire.
“That is extremely weird,” Darwin murmured, shaking his head.
“No big deal,” AJ said brightly, her attitude maddeningly serene. “Why don’t we all go back to the fire and chill out? Anyone up for a sing-a-long?” Before they could answer, she led the way.
At the fire, AJ threw a few sticks onto the blaze and plopped down to warm her hands, seemingly oblivious to the glares being shot at her from six still-incredulous sets of eyes.
Allie couldn’t believe AJ had snuck onto the plane, but at least she wasn’t a rabid animal or a deranged criminal hiding from the law. That we know of. The silent joke made Allie giggle.
Sighing as her sandaled feet began to thaw, Allie resolved not to let AJ being here get the best of her. There were way bigger threats to her safety now that they were stranded in the desert. What could the teeny greenie do to her out here? Allie leaned her head against Mel’s shoulder and inhaled the scent of his Aveda sandalwood pomade. This whole thing was kind of romantic, if you looked at it the right way. Staring into the campfire, her beau beside her, Allie took on the character of a heroine in an old Western movie. If only Mel could ride her off into the sunset, or at least get the plane working.
She turned to look at her boyfriend and couldn’t keep a tiny laugh from escaping her lips. His silver leggings and gauzy babydoll top didn’t exactly fit the cowboy bill, but he was still a mega-hottie.
Allie began to brood over what tomorrow might bring. If Charlie couldn’t fix the GPS and they couldn’t alert anyone to their whereabouts, it was fully possible they’d all die out here. Allie began to imagine all the news stories that would run if the worst happened. The girls weren’t celebrities, of course, but the Brazille boys had been on magazine covers for as long as Allie had known how to read. Their dramatic death would be covered everywhere—from TMZ to CNN. Her grieving parents would probably be on Oprah. The national tragedy would be almost on par with Princess Diana’s death, or Marilyn Monroe’s.
Allie shivered at the thought. Perversely, she began to picture her ex-boyfriend Fletcher and ex-bestie Trina cutting out her picture from all the papers, maybe even making a little shrine to Allie, whom they had betrayed by hooking up with each other on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. They would blame themselves for her death, for hooking up and forcing a betrayed Allie to join Alpha Academy to forget about them. Hopefully, word would get out that Allie died the girlfriend of Mel Brazille, who topped Fletcher in every way possible.
She turned to Mel again, but his back was to her this time as he nodded vigorously, engrossed in conversation with… huh?
AJ sat on the other side of Mel, and he pushed his white-blond hair off his forehead and nodded in agreement with something the jolly green midget had just said. “I know what you mean about playing music. Modeling is the same way. Once I finally got over stage fright and was fully confident in myself, that’s when my modeling really took off.”
“Exactly,” AJ drawled, meeting his eyes with her faux-earnest gaze. “The audience trusts you when you trust yourself.”
Allie’s navy blue eyes shot skyward while her face burned with jealousy. How dare AJ try to bond with Mel by recycling stale self-help clichés! She was lucky to get a BrazilleBlast bar and a warm spot by the fire—no way was she going to monopolize Allie’s boyfriend.
“I feel exactly the same way about acting,” Allie piped up, attempting to join the conversation.
“No offense,” AJ sneered, a stray lock of her dyed-black hair escaping her crusty green tam, “but didn’t you just start acting, like, three weeks ago? It takes years to get comfortable onstage. You wouldn’t really understand—”
“Of course she would,” Mel laughed. “Have you seen this girl act? She’s a scene stealer.”
Take that!
“Yeah, Allie’s always been quite good at impersonating others.” AJ tossed her stringy, awapuhi-cleansed locks and turned toward Charlie and Darwin.
Allie grinned as she nuzzled her cheek against the crook of Mel’s beefy shoulder, not even caring that it was clothed in a poly-blend boatneck shirt. Mel wasn’t just perfect, he was loyal. Which was even more important to Allie, especially after what she’d been through with Fletcher and Trina.
So Mel didn’t wrangle a horse out of thin air and whisk her off into the sunset—he had just proven there were other ways to rescue a damsel in distress.