The morning doesn’t begin well. Hayley makes an early pilgrimage through the trees, enjoying the rich, earthy smell that rises up from the wet ground after last night’s deluge. The birds are noisier than ever, shrieking exuberantly as if to celebrate their victory over the storm. A beautiful golden-yellow blur flutters to a stop on a branch just yards away from Hayley, its shining black eye fixed on her with bright curiosity. She holds her breath, amazed at the glossiness of its feathers, drenched in color, the buttercup hue gleaming against its delicate black-and-white wings.
For one ridiculous moment, she entertains the fantasy that it has come to tell her something: to warn her, perhaps, or to help her. There is such intelligence in that fierce little eye. “Who did it?” she almost asks out loud. Then it tilts its head to the other side, as if to chide her for hers silliness, and is gone as quickly as it came.
She walks on eagerly, a backpack full of empty water bottles slung over her shoulder, glad to have a purpose to distract her from the murky fears and questions hanging over the camp. The memory of the clear, cool water she gulped down last night dances tantalizingly on her tongue, pushing her forward, making her stumble in her eagerness.
But when she reaches the shady clearing, she stops dead.
Rocket the raccoon is floating on his back in the water, his body horribly bloated, his eyes milky and unseeing. Hayley cannot bring herself to touch him, although she knows she should remove the carcass and discard the contaminated water. She trudges dejectedly back to the camp.
“Not Rocket,” May wails, while Jason smashes his fist into a tree trunk in frustration when Hayley breaks the news.
“We’ll try again,” Elliot says quietly. “At least it worked.”
Brian has decided they have to check the island. He’s calling it a search party, which May says is stupid, because how can you search for something if you don’t even know what you’re looking for? Elliot says it’s stupid too, but for different reasons. He doesn’t think someone could have slipped out of the trees and shoved him and then melted away again without anybody noticing, even in the chaos of the storm.
Jason says looking will give them an answer once and for all.
Hayley can’t decide what’s worse—the threat that there might be someone else hiding on the island, waiting to launch another attack, or the idea that one of them could hurt Elliot so badly and then lie about it. She looks over at him, a purple bruise protruding from his temple. It could have been so much worse. But he looks different somehow, more alert, his eyes darting here and there, and he jumps a little when someone bumps into him from behind. It’s like he can’t relax because he doesn’t know who to trust. And Hayley can’t blame him. She’s starting to feel the same way herself.
She takes in each of the others, one by one, as they pull on shoes and drag random items of clothing out of the overhead bins, getting ready to head out on what they all know is probably a wild goose chase.
May sniffs cautiously at the armpits of a yellow T-shirt before wrinkling her nose and throwing it to one side in disgust, choosing to pull one of the boys’ jerseys over her head instead. It swamps her, but that seems preferable to wearing clothing that’s stiff with someone else’s encrusted sweat.
Brian is thumping the bottle of sunscreen, trying to get it to spit the last dregs out into his palm. His nose has started to peel so violently it looks like he’s permanently shedding scraps of white confetti. Shannon is readjusting Jessa’s sling, tying the orange scarf tighter and trying to find a more comfortable position for her arm. Jessa’s face is rigid with concentration; she’s staring down at the sand as if she can’t actually see it.
Jason is sketching something in the sand with a sharp stick, pointing to different areas and murmuring to himself. Elliot is hunched at the edge of the trees, his features set in a stubborn frown, draining the water out of the last of the brown coconuts into small bottles he’s scratched their initials into, making sure they each get an equal share. He’s shaking his head and muttering about not getting dehydrated on a pointless mission.
Nobody looks like they’re hiding anything. Hayley feels a stab of annoyance at herself. She ought to be able to figure out what’s going on. She’s an investigative journalist, for goodness’ sake, or at least one in training. But nothing’s jumping out at her like it should. Someone ought to be looking guilty, making excuses, trying to avoid detection. But there’s nothing. Absolutely no clues at all. She watches them bustling around the camp, clearing away their breakfast things, fetching fresh wood to build up the fire. She watches Jason the longest. He’s the only one with something approaching a motive. But he does nothing to give himself away.
Could there really be someone else on the island after all?
“Okay, guys, huddle up.” Jason waves them all over, wiping his hands on his bright red jersey.
“I’ve divided the island into quarters.” He points with the stick, a rough circle drawn in the sand in front of him. “This is the crash site and the camp, along the beach here. We’ve spent the most time in this area and the trees immediately adjacent to the beach, collecting wood. And we haven’t seen anybody. So we can assume this area is clear. But here…” He stabs to the left with the stick, indicating the southernmost quadrant. “This is the most densely wooded area, where the girls found the fruit trees. We haven’t searched that whole area yet, and it’s possible someone could be hiding among the trees. Jessa, you can show us the way. Hayley, you’re with us. And you, babe.” Jason slides an arm around Shannon’s shoulders and pulls her tightly to him. “I’m not leaving my girl alone with some lunatic running around the island trying to kill people.”
“Jeez, overexaggerate much?” mutters May under her breath.
Jason pretends not to hear and slides the stick over to the opposite side of his map. “Meanwhile, Elliot, Brian, and May should go sort out the water tarp, then head back to the north, to the hilltop, and search the area around there. Elliot can try to pinpoint exactly where he was when he felt the push. See if you can figure out where someone might have taken cover.” Elliot rolls his eyes but seems to have decided that there’s no point in arguing.
“Then head to the beach where the coconut trees are,” Jason continues, “and search for any sign of a shelter or someone hiding out.”
Hayley grabs one of the water bottles Elliot has prepared from their makeshift “fridge” pit. She takes a sip. The liquid is unpleasantly warm with an overpowering sweet aftertaste, a little like a compost heap.
“I know,” Elliot says, seeing her grimace. “Sorry, it’s quite strong. I think it’s because the coconuts were left out in the sun. We’ll get some more green ones tomorrow.”
Hayley follows Jason as he strides off to the south, Jessa and Shannon close behind her.
“I swear, if we ever get out of here, I’ll never moan about my little brother again,” Jessa pants as they start picking their way through the undergrowth. “He’d love all this. Deserted island…jungle adventure…it’s like his idea of heaven. I can’t stop thinking about him.”
“We’re going to get out of here.” Jason says it firmly, like his word is the final say on the subject. Hayley wonders if he’s ever experienced what it’s like not to get his own way. It’s an open secret that at the end of junior year, Jason told his guidance counselor he wanted to take AP Latin after the Princeton Review recommended it as a good way for law school applicants to boost their admissions prospects.
The trouble was, Oak Ridge offered only eight AP courses, and Latin wasn’t one of them. But a week later, a Latin tutor miraculously joined the staff, and two weeks later, it was announced that a generous endowment had been made for a new classics wing in the school library. The Angel Wing. As in Jason Angel.
In fact, she suddenly realizes, even their current situation is partly due to Jason always getting what he wants. Hayley heard a rumor that the off-season basketball tour might be canceled this year because of funding issues before Jason’s parents stepped in with their offer of private jets and free accommodations. None of them would even be here if it wasn’t for Jason Angel and his charmed life.
“Have you guys thought about what our families must be going through?” Jessa asks, breathing heavily as, climbing over a particularly knotty vine, she uses her one good arm to grab a tree trunk.
“I’ve been trying not to,” Shannon admits. “It’s easier that way. We can’t do anything about it, so it’s best not to think about it.”
“I know it’s stupid,” Jessa says softly, “but I have this idea, this hope, I suppose, that somehow my mom just knows…” She sniffs. “That she knows I’m okay. Because we’re so close that she’d have some kind of sixth sense if I were dead. It’s dumb, I know.”
“It’s not dumb,” Shannon says quietly.
“I got my brother one of those stupid touristy cowboy hats at the airport,” Jessa whispers. “I was gonna write ‘My sister went to Texas and all I got was this stupid cowboy hat’ on the back in magic marker.”
Hayley swallows hard. She really, really doesn’t want to think about how her mom and dad must be feeling. Partly because it hurts too much. Partly because on a good day, she can almost trick herself into thinking that things aren’t so desperate…that they’re on a wild adventure rather than trapped in an incredibly dangerous situation they might actually not survive.
She needs to think about something else. Anything else. So, as she automatically scans the ground ahead for tangles of vines and treacherous rocks, her brain is scanning too, going back over everything that has happened, trying to make sense of Elliot’s fall, of his certainty that he was pushed.
If he’s right, if someone pushed him, they must have had a reason. They’d have been acting differently, maybe, not seeming themselves. Hayley sighs. That could describe all of them. Nobody has been themselves for a week, and who could blame them? But then Hayley thinks back further. It isn’t just being on the island that’s changing people, is it? Not entirely. She remembers that stupid cowboy hat. Suddenly, an image pops into her head: Jessa snapping at May when she knocked it onto the floor as they waited to board the plane. She thought it was weird at the time. People have been behaving oddly since before the island—ever since the morning of the crash. The night after the party.
The group assembled at the airport terminal that morning was uncharacteristically quiet. Brian sat on his own, excusing himself repeatedly to go to the bathroom. Elliot was hidden behind his sketchbook, Jason leafing through the same few pages of a sports magazine over and over again without seeming to take in a word. Hayley tripped and spilled a coffee over May’s white sneakers, but she barely looked up, preoccupied and biting her lip, none of her usual spiky attitude on display. Jessa seemed on edge somehow too, drumming her fingers annoyingly on the arm of the uncomfortable terminal chair. Shannon arrived at the last minute, her face hidden behind a huge pair of sunglasses, and swept onto the plane without a word to anyone.
Then there were the little moments on the plane, things that seemed meaningless on their own but looked like something more substantial now. Shannon and Jason sitting apart. May and Jessa’s whispered conversation. The way people reacted when Erickson mentioned the party—right before the plane went down. Had something happened that night?
They are deeper into the trees than Hayley has ever been. The sunlight filters down in long, glittering bars. It feels still here, like the island is trapped in this single moment. The golden light is like amber, preserving everything for eternity, as though they’ve somehow slipped outside time. Hayley wants to be able to examine other moments, frozen, like this one, to turn them over in her fingertips and look at them from every possible angle.
“What did you guys think of the end-of-tour party?” she asks Shannon and Jessa casually, walking a little faster to catch up with them. Jason is still ahead, out of sight, though the occasional rustle of a bush or crack of a stick makes him easy enough to follow.
“Why?” Jessa asks immediately, shooting Hayley a suspicious look. “Has someone said something about it?”
“No, no. I was just wondering, that’s all. I didn’t stay to the end,” she says. She’d escaped back to the hotel just before she was drunk enough to make a fool of herself.
She tries to think back to that night. It was only a week ago, but it feels like a lifetime.
It was stuffy in the living room. The windows were open, but it was a warm evening and there were bodies crowded in. Thighs pressed against each other, elbows knocked, the loud, throbbing beat of the music pressing in close. And laughter, crashing over her like a wave as she came in from the kitchen, her red plastic cup of stronger-than-she-really-wanted vodka orange clutched tight like a talisman against her insecurity. Hayley couldn’t have said how it compared with other parties, because she didn’t really know. Did everyone usually just sit around like this? Sandwiched together and chatting, trying to look casual while sweat dripped in slow, uncomfortable paths between their shoulder blades? Laughing too loudly at the loudest person’s jokes? Was that what you did to show you were part of it all, in the loop, one of the crowd? She remembers wondering whether everyone else at the party was spending as much time as she was thinking about whether she looked like she was enjoying herself.
“It was pretty standard.” Jessa shrugs. “Not much happened, right, Shan?”
“Mm-hmm.” Shannon nods, focusing on her feet.
“There was a lot of alcohol, right?” Hayley asks, thinking back. “There was that keg the Duke guys set up, and the cheerleader, the redhead…her name was Sasha, right? She put out all her parents’ liquor bottles in the kitchen with mixers and things.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Jessa says dismissively. “I don’t drink. May was acting a little weird, though, now that you mention it. Like, halfway through the evening, she suddenly seemed all jittery and nervous. I don’t know why. Then she started acting pretty wild, even by May standards. Dancing on the tables and everything. Like she was trying too hard to have fun.”
“Elliot could tell you how much liquor there was.” Shannon smirked. “I found him in the bathroom toward the end of the night, getting pretty cozy with the toilet bowl, if you know what I mean.”
“That wasn’t his fault,” Jessa protests. “Did you see the concoction they made him drink during Truth or Dare? It was gross.”
The game had come later. The atmosphere was different by then, the living room smudged somehow by the blur of alcohol and sweat and awkward excitement. Hayley should have been terrified of Truth or Dare, but it actually came as a relief. There were obvious pitfalls—dares that could expose her inexperience or questions that could reveal gaping holes in her pop culture knowledge—but at least it was organized. It had rules, structure, a pattern she could follow.
Brian had already stolen a gnome from the next-door garden, one of the Duke cheerleaders had TP’d a mailbox, and Shannon had begun to perform a pretty explicit act with a banana and a can of whipped cream, at least until Jason had yanked her down from the table she was standing on, shouting, “Show’s over, folks.” Elliot, who’d been hovering awkwardly on the edges of the party, had downed a disgusting concoction of every drink in the house mixed together with a squeeze of toothpaste stirred in. Hayley didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed that her turn never seemed to come.
“Right, how close are we to the fruit?” Jason asks from up ahead, crashing out of the trees and interrupting Hayley’s train of thought.
“It’s over this way.” Jessa moves forward confidently, pointing at some nearby tree trunks. “I tore bark and branches off trees on the way last time so we’d be able to find our way back.” Now that she knows what she is looking for, Hayley can see the snapped-off, splintered ends and scratched sections on several of the trees they walk past, their green muscles bristling through the torn skin. She remembers what Jessa said about Elliot not being the only Scout in the group.
“So what are we supposed to be looking for, exactly?” Hayley asks.
Now that they’re actually in the trees, Jason seems a little less confident than he was with his simplistic sand diagram on the beach. The tree trunks are choked with vines so thick they’ve solidified like bones, the ground uneven and cluttered with small plants and bushes underfoot. The visibility is limited because the vegetation is so dense. Hayley finds it pretty hard to believe that anyone could be living in all this, but if they were, she’s not convinced they’d be able to find them anyway. It wouldn’t be difficult to stay hidden, dodging behind trees, hiding in bushes, cutting back behind the group once they’d passed—especially given the amount of noise their search party is making as they crash and stumble along.
“We’re looking for any evidence of someone living here,” Jason hisses. “A shelter of some kind…probably a camp setup.”
“Nobody else picked up the coconuts,” Hayley says suddenly, stopping so abruptly that Shannon bumps into her from behind. “The ones we found on the other side of the island. If someone else was living here before we arrived, then all those brown coconuts wouldn’t just have been left lying there on the ground, would they?”
Shannon is frowning. “That’s a good point. It’s a small island—they’d have covered it within a week. If they’d been here any time at all, they’d have needed those coconuts. So can we just agree this is completely absurd?” she asks, hands on her hips. “It’s a huge waste of our time and energy combing a clearly deserted island looking for a phantom pusher when the obvious explanation is that Elliot had an accident.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to admit that he slipped,” Shannon continues. “He’s certainly enjoyed playing the hero these last few days. And falling down a steep drop and knocking himself out doesn’t exactly fit with the skilled hunter-gatherer image, does it?”
Jason grunts approvingly.
Hayley doesn’t know what to think. It does seem unlikely that anyone else could have survived for a long time on this island—and even if they had, why wouldn’t they have made contact with the new arrivals after the plane crash? Why would they want to hurt Elliot?
After another hour of searching through the untouched undergrowth, they’ve seen nothing suspicious or strange at all. Until they get back to the camp.
At first, Hayley thinks May is just joking around.
“We found…NOTHING!” She shouts it loudly as she comes crashing back through the trees with the rest of her group, attempting a drum roll on a tree trunk and missing. “Nothing like a dasted way, hey?” She frowns, chews the words in her mouth, tries again: “Wasted day! Way hey!”
She does what Hayley thinks is supposed to be a sarcastic celebration dance, but it looks like her arms and legs are getting messages from completely different brains. As she whirls wildly, she sings at the top of her voice, something about mixed messages and a wild-goose chase, but the notes don’t seem to be coming out in the right order, and the words are all garbled and slurred. Eventually she becomes tangled up in her own limbs, lurching to the ground and subsiding into silence.
“She’s been like this half the journey back,” Elliot says uneasily.
Hayley takes a step toward May, watching her closely.
“S’all right Sh…shayley?” May attempts to stand up and give Hayley a hug but almost misses and ends up sort of hanging around Hayley’s waist, her face level with Hayley’s belly button. May dissolves into helpless giggles and slides back to the ground.
“Ow,” she says thickly, trying to sit up and falling over again.
Jason is laughing, clapping her on the back and whistling. But Hayley feels sick. Something is very wrong.
May has never voluntarily hugged her in her life. The more Hayley stares at her, the more she notices the slack jaw, the slightly glazed, unfocused eyes.
“What’s going on?” Shannon crouches down next to May, looking uneasy. “May, can you look at me?”
May spins around, her gaze landing on a spot somewhere over Hayley’s right shoulder.
“May. Focus.”
“Hmmm?” May’s starting to look less confident now. Hayley can see her eyes starting to flit quickly from side to side. A look of panic is creeping in.
Jessa comes back from a bathroom trip and takes in the scene, her eyes widening in horror.
“Jessa, whaddami…” May takes a breath, shakes her head heavily like a dog, and tries again: “Wasssa…” Her speech slurs, and her eyes lock onto Jessa’s, shining with fear. A tear escapes and slides slowly down May’s cheek.
“It’s okay, May.” Hayley tries to keep her voice steadier than her jangling nerves. “I think…have you guys eaten anything? Berries or roots? Or drunk something?”
Elliot shakes his head.
“Brian, have you guys been drinking without me?” Jason snaps the words out accusingly, sounding more team coach than team captain.
Brian looks surprised. “No, I swear!” He holds up his hands like he’s trying to prove his innocence. “Honestly—we’ve been trawling the beach on the other side of the island, looking for a hut or signs of a fire or something. The only thing we’ve drunk is that disgusting coconut water.” He holds up his half-full bottle. “We really need to get some more green ones,” he adds.
“Where’s May’s bottle?” Hayley asks. They look around. There’s an almost-empty bottle lying on the ground by the campfire, the initial just visible, scratched into the side. “Is this it?” She takes off the lid and cautiously sniffs the contents, then takes a small sip. “That doesn’t taste the same as mine,” Hayley says, sipping from her own bottle to compare. “I think there’s something in it.”
May is limp now, her head resting on her knees. Without warning, she lurches forward, vomiting into the sand.
Shannon snaps into action. “Is there any fresh water left?”
“There’s half a bottle. That’s all we’ve got until it rains again.” Elliot hands it over and Shannon crouches next to May, rubbing her back reassuringly. She helps her sip from the rainwater bottle while Jessa looks on, helpless and aghast.
“Guys.” Elliot has been poking around in the overhead bins. He holds out his cupped hands. He’s holding seven of the vodka miniatures they’d found in the back of the plane.
They’re all empty.
“May!” Jessa shrieks, whirling to face her. “What were you thinking? What, you just felt like a party? All by yourself?” May lets out a muffled groan and waves her off weakly.
“You could’ve shared at least,” Brian chimes in resentfully.
“Yes, because getting drunk and dehydrated is a fantastic idea in a survival situation with very little drinking water.” Elliot frowns.
“I DIDNNN,” May drawls angrily, sweat beading along her hairline. “Didnknow. Didn’t know.” It takes her a supreme effort to separate the words, frowning as she forms them carefully and deliberately with her lips. She points vaguely in the direction of Elliot’s hands before slumping over again, cradling her head and groaning.
“Is she saying what I think she’s saying?” Jessa asks. The bottles clatter together noisily as Elliot hurries to put them down, like he doesn’t want to be the one left holding them. “Did someone spike May’s drink?”
“Uh, yeah. May spiked May’s drink.” Jason shakes his head. “Can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself—those bottles were just lying there for the taking.”
“Yeah,” Brian says, but Hayley can see he’s uneasy. “She is kind of a party girl. Look how wild she was the other night…” He trails off sheepishly. “You can’t exactly blame her for wanting to forget”—he waves his hand around vaguely—“all this, can you? She probably just overdid it.”
“What, overdid it by seven bottles?” Jessa sounds skeptical. “Drinking fourteen shots of vodka isn’t exactly something you do by mistake, Brian.”
“Well, what other explanation is there?” Brian asks. And his question hangs heavy in the air, because everybody knows the answer, but nobody wants to be the one to say it. Except Elliot.
“Maybe it was the same person who pushed me.” He looks around at the circle of faces, slowly and uncompromisingly making eye contact with each of them in turn. “That coconut water was strong and sweet—the taste was so overpowering May wouldn’t have realized it was spiked until it was too late.”
“And everyone’s bottles are labeled with our initials,” Shannon says slowly, running her finger over the rough scratched into the plastic.
Rain starts to fall again, big fat droplets splashing onto Hayley’s face. But she can’t enjoy it, can’t let herself bask in the relief of the waterbag filling again (after having been thoroughly washed out by Elliot in the sea), not while the creeping idea of sabotage is slowly seeping into the camp like poison. Elliot takes a deep breath with the expression of somebody who is about to take a dive off the highest diving board and knows there is no going back. “Someone is hurting people.
And since we’ve searched the whole island and found no sign of anybody else…”
Hayley finishes his sentence for him. “It has to be one of us.”