36Scoop, pour, pinch. Scoop, pour, pinch. Scoop, pour, pinch.
“. . . if you could just . . . a minute and . . . to me!”
“. . . good it . . . do.”
The strident voices drift through the camp. From my place at the kitchen tree, I listen to the poorly concealed argument as I serve one bowl of oatmeal after another.
“. . . can’t just . . . away from me!”
Scoop, pour, pinch. Scoop, pour, pinch.
A ladle of oatmeal, a splash of milk, and a pinch of cinnamon sugar. I’ve assigned myself breakfast duty every day for the past week now, and in that time, I’ve become an expert at oatmeal service.
“. . . want to hear it!”
Beads of sweat hover at my hairline, and I briefly pause to swipe at them with the back of my arm. It’s a blistering ninety degrees, the hottest day we’ve had yet, and everyone’s feeling the heat—including, apparently, Djen and Jovan, who have been going at it for the past fifteen minutes now.
Taking another swipe at my forehead, I go back to dishing up oatmeal for the final few people until at last the line ends. No one left to serve, I put down the ladle and sidle up through the grass, casually making my way through the loosely forming crowd until I have a good view of the arguers. Though I already have a pretty good idea of what’s happening, I lean over to Xylla and ask, “What’s going on?”
“Haven’t you heard?” she whispers loudly. “Djen’s totally pregnant. She’s thrown up, like, every single morning this week. She tried to deny it, but I was like, come on, we all know what’s going on! I guess word finally got around, and Jovan dumped her!” Her eyes glint with malicious glee, and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it was she who made sure “word got around.”
Over by the shelters, the argument continues as Jovan demands, “Yeah, and what do you expect me to do?”
“What do you mean?” Djen asks incredulously.
“I mean, it’s your problem. You deal with it.” He starts to walk away, but Djen’s not giving up so easily. She lunges forward and grabs his arm. With a loud curse, Jovan yanks away, brushing her off so forcefully she stumbles and falls. He leans over her, an ugly sneer on his face.
“What do you want from me? It’s probably not even mine, anyway.” At Djen’s gasp, he continues, “What? You don’t think I remember how eager you were to crawl into my tent the minute Vida left for a few days? Who knows who else you’ve been slutting it up with all this time?” He nods at a nearby group of guys including Trey, Kieran, and Zane. “Admit it! You’ve probably slept with half the camp by now.”
All the color drains from Djen’s face. A collective gasp goes through the camp at the bald-faced claim.
“Hey, now.” Trey steps forward, brow furrowed in mild indignation at the obvious implication, but before he can say any more, Xylla rounds on him, her momentary glee suddenly faltering in light of this new uncertainly.
“T-Trey?”
“What? No! Xyl—” He takes a step toward her, but Xylla is already storming away.
Shock turns to fury as Trey swivels around to face his now-former best friend. He gives Jovan a hard shove on the shoulder. “What is wrong with you? Everyone knows Djen’s had a crush on you since forever. Like she’d even look at another guy with you around.”
Disgust written clearly on his face, Trey gives Jovan another hard shove before jogging off in the direction Xylla went. Everyone silently watches him go, no one—not even Jovan, who’s clearly still shaken by his friend’s abrupt desertion—seeming to know what to do.
I hesitate, wondering if I should step up, but the crowd across from me suddenly parts, and Vida appears. She steps into the center of the circle, face inscrutable as she stares down at the friend who betrayed her, now slumped on the ground before her. Sensing Vida’s presence, Djen slowly raises her tearstained face to her former friend. I catch my breath, uncertain just what will happen for the first time since this whole debacle started.
Very deliberately, Vida steps in front of Djen, facing off against Jovan like a mother bear defending a cub. Her voice, when she finally speaks, is as cold as the vacuum.
“I think you’ve said enough.”
An amazed look comes over Jovan’s face, and he starts to object, only to be cut off by Kieran. “She’s right, Jov.”
Murmurs of agreement sound from the crowd. Jovan glances around the circle, a dazed look coming into his eyes as if he’s only now realizing that for once, the group is not on his side. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, scanning once more for a sympathetic face that isn’t there to find, and then, without a word, he turns around and walks away. Seconds later, he disappears into his tent.
Vida lets out a slow breath, looking not so much triumphant at seeing her enemies vanquished as simply relieved the whole thing’s over. She starts to walk away, but at the last moment, a hand snags her ankle.
“Vida!” Djen stares up at her former best friend, a pleading look in her eyes as she whispers, “I’m sorry, V. I’m so sorry!”
A heartbeat passes. Bending down, Vida carefully removes Djen’s hand from her ankle. “We are not friends,” she informs the other girl, and then walks away.
The spectacle over, I turn to head back to my tent, but though I do my best to play as dumb as everyone else, I can’t quite keep the satisfied smile from playing across my lips.
Two days later, Djen gets her period, and her pregnancy scare officially comes to an end. Not that it matters by that point; the damage has already been done. Jovan has shown his true colors, and after being so summarily kicked to the curb in her time of need, even Djen can’t put the scales back over her eyes. Lacking Jovan’s support, she crumbled under the pressure of the situation and crawled back into Vida’s shadow. Now her glares of resentment, previously reserved for Vida, are only for him.
Not that Jovan got off unscathed—far from it. The girls are still mad about the way he deserted Djen, and the guys resent his attempt to shift the blame onto them. With everyone against him, Jovan goes from alpha male to camp pariah in an instant, tolerated by the others, but just barely. Only Ri has stayed loyal, and in doing so, he has fallen to the bottom of the hierarchy with his friend, leaving Trey to fill the power vacuum. While a great soldier, Trey has neither the smarts nor the ambition to lead the group, leaving me unequivocally in charge.
Exactly as it should be.
Tipping my chair back from the desk, I let a small smile of satisfaction drift across my lips. This has all worked out even better than I hoped. Now that the fighting has ended and Jovan is out of my hair, there is nothing to stop me in my quest to win this war.
The tent flap stirs, and in walks Vida.
Well, almost nothing.
Face tilted down toward my tip-pad, I watch her covertly from under my eyelashes as she rifles through her bag. She’s been sleeping here since that first night I let her stay, and though I had no intention of taking on a roommate, I never had the heart to kick her out.
Unsurprisingly, Vida has weathered the storm to come out on top once again, the indisputable Queen B whom no girl and very few guys dare to question. She is the one wild card in my equation. With Jovan in disgrace and Trey disinterested in power, Vida is now the only person who could challenge me for command. She shelved her longstanding grudge against me during her relationship crisis, but now that it’s over, all bets are off. It was a risk quashing the love triangle in her favor; now it’s time to find out if it will pay off.
Having retrieved the item she came for—a hat—Vida heads toward the door. As she starts to lift the flap, I call out to her. “Hey, V.”
She stops, cocking one hip and folding her arms across her chest in the posture of someone who clearly has better things to do than talk to me. “What do you want?”
“Nothing, really, just can you toss that out when you go?” I ask, pointing to a clear plasti-sak full of rinds sitting by the door. “It’s starting to stink.”
Vida rolls her eyes and gives me a look, no doubt wondering why she should be the one to take out my garbage, but she stoops down and grabs it anyway. After all, she lives here too. Anything I have to smell, she has to smell. Reaching for the tent flap, she glances down at the sak and suddenly stops. “These are ychava gourd rinds.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Why the hell do you have all of these? Didn’t you say your ribs healed a week ago?” She stares at me suspiciously. “Please tell me you haven’t started eating these. The last thing we need is for someone to start puking in here . . .”
Vida’s voice trails off as she realizes: There’s only one person who’s been puking her guts out lately, and it sure as hell isn’t me. All the blood drains from her face in an instant. “You didn’t.”
I only shrug one shoulder in answer.
A strange mix of incredulity and amazement flashes across her face. “Why?”
I turn my tip-pad around in my hands and consider my answer. There are a lot of reasons I could give her: That I was sick of the drama, and I just wanted it to end. That the situation was threatening to split the group apart, and I didn’t think we could survive it. That I’d had enough of Jovan’s bullslag and had finally decided to give him just enough rope to hang himself. Any and all of those answers are true enough, and yet . . .
And yet.
What keeps coming back to my mind is that moment when Vida walked through my door and asked if she could sleep here. Helpless and alone, she cried herself to sleep in the corner, though her worst enemy lay only a meter away.
If that wasn’t a cry for help, I don’t know what is.
Vida continues to stare at me, still waiting for an answer, and at last I shrug. “You came to me for help, so I helped.”
A strange sort of wonder comes over her face. She stares down at the bag of rinds in her hands, the undeniable proof that in the moment she felt most alone, someone had her back. Tears suddenly well up in her eyes, glistening softly in the warm light filtering through the tent.
Swallowing a few times, she blinks back the tears and whispers, “Thank you. Just . . . thank you.”
Clutching the bag to her chest, she lifts the tent flap and runs out.
A few hours later, Zane comes by, a bemused look on his face as he pushes through the tent flap. “I just heard the weirdest thing.”
I tip my chair onto its back legs. “Oh?”
“A couple of the freshman girls were complaining about the chore roster you put out for this week. You know, just the usual sort of griping, nothing serious, but . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, they may have said a few not-so-nice things about you,” he reluctantly admits.
I laugh. “I don’t know where you come from, but where I’m from, it’s not particularly weird for teens to complain about chores.”
“No, it’s what happened after that! Apparently, Vida heard them, because a second later she came storming over and read them both the riot act. She told them they’re lucky to have you in charge, and if anyone has a problem with it, they can come see her.”
“It’s Vida,” I answer with a casual shrug. “Who knows why she does anything?”
“It’s just—” Zane stops, and I recognize that slight scrunching of his face that says he’s trying hard to work something out. He takes a breath, lets it out, and then takes another. “It’s just that I couldn’t help noticing that of the two people here who could’ve challenged you, one has been branded an outcast overnight, and the other has suddenly become fanatically loyal to you.”
The corner of my mouth lifts slightly. “Lucky happenstance.”
“Is it?”
I spread my hands in purported innocence. “What else would it be? Jovan burned his own bridge. It was his choice to throw Djen over when he thought she was pregnant, and I was as surprised as anyone when he tried to shift the blame onto the other guys.”
My mouth quirks again. That’s actually true. While I knew he was an irresponsible null who didn’t give a slag about Djen and would drop her the moment she became an inconvenience, I didn’t know he’d go that far. Nope, blaming his friends was just icing on the cake.
“I suppose not.” Zane slowly nods, but despite his ostensible agreement, he continues staring at me, as if sensing he’s missing something but unable to quite see what it is. Not for the first time, I can’t help thinking I may have seriously underestimated him. I hold his gaze, waiting to see if he’s able to put it all together, but whatever he’s searching for, he doesn’t find it. After a long minute, he shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking, really.”
He turns to go, and I can’t help calling out to him as he leaves, “It was you who originally advocated for me, back at the lazaretto. It was you who told the others to follow me. Now I’m incontestably the leader. Do you regret it?”
Zane stops, considering. “Not yet,” he finally answers.
Then he walks out.