Of course, nobody admits to anything, Even when May wakes up with a horrible hangover the next morning and swears blind she had no idea there was vodka in her drink. “Yes, I knew it tasted weird,” she snaps at Brian when he questions her. “But that damn coconut stuff always tastes disgusting. I just thought it was grosser than normal.”
They look at each other, the accusation hanging heavily over the camp.
“Was it you, Brian?” Jessa blurts out directly.
“What?” His voice is squeaky with indignation. “Why are you accusing me?”
Jessa squirms. “I’m sorry, it’s just…it seems like the kind of prank you might play. You did put dish soap in half the team’s water bottles during the second tour game…”
“Yeah, for a joke!” Brian sputters. “And don’t pretend you weren’t laughing when Tom Allen started spitting bubbles, Jessa.”
“So was this just another joke?” she persists. “We won’t be mad if you tell us. It’d be much better to own it.”
“No. Jesus. I wasn’t even the one who filled up the bottles. That was Elliot.”
“And why would I want to get May drunk?” Elliot asks. “Besides, if whoever did this was also the person who pushed me, then that puts me in the clear, doesn’t it? I wouldn’t exactly give myself a serious head injury on purpose.” Hayley watches him closely, the tense drawing together of his full, dark eyebrows, the cut on his cheek that has all but completely faded now, the bruise on his temple that’s now a faint yellow, trying to sense whether or not he is lying.
“But you were the one who filled the bottles,” Shannon says slowly, narrowing her eyes at Elliot. “How did the vodka get in there if you didn’t put it in?”
“We were all rushing around getting stuff ready,” Elliot protests. “I left the bottles under the trees to keep cool, so anyone could have slipped something in while we were getting wood or going to the bathroom. We all had the opportunity.”
“But who wanted to?” May whines furiously. “If you’ve got a problem with me, say it to my face!” she shouts defiantly.
But nobody says a word. And eventually they fall into a dissatisfied silence.
Hayley can’t stop thinking about the party on the last night of the tour. The more she tries to connect the dots between what happened to Elliot and May, the more convinced she becomes that the party is the key to unraveling it all. And though she wouldn’t admit it, there’s a part of her that feels energized, almost buoyed, by finally feeling that there’s a role for her on the island. So she wasn’t cool under pressure in the first days. And she doesn’t have any particularly useful survival skills. But uncovering the truth? Getting people to reveal more than they intended? This is Hayley Larkin’s wheelhouse. If anyone can figure out what is going on, she can. Ideally before anyone else gets hurt. The only problem is, none of it adds up. The only person with a clear motive to hurt Elliot is Jason. It doesn’t take a crack journalist to see he’s jealous of Elliot’s new leadership role in the group. But why would Jason want to hurt May? Why would anyone want to hurt May? One thing is certain: Hayley can cross Jessa off the list of suspects. Elliot says he was pushed with two hands, and Jessa’s injured arm is practically immobile. And there’s no way Jessa would ever do anything to hurt her best friend.
***
There is always something that needs doing. It’s all laborious, repetitive work, but it distracts them from arguing about whether Elliot’s attacker was real or imagined, whether May was deliberately poisoned with alcohol or stole the vodka herself and lied about it.
The main jobs are collecting and boiling rainwater, catching fish, picking fruit and coconuts, and keeping the fire burning from dawn to dusk. If another search party comes close, they’ll be ready.
They’ve decided not to worry about keeping the fire burning after dark, since rescuers are less likely to be out looking at night anyway, plus they’re all completely exhausted by the end of each day and, though nobody mentions it directly, the last attempt at a night watch was such a total disaster. Elliot is convinced the island is too small to support any predators, so there doesn’t seem to be much need for guard duty anyway. (Or at least, as Elliot darkly adds, they don’t need guarding from anything outside the camp.)
But keeping the fire burning means collecting firewood. Lots of firewood. Hayley, whose family has one of those neat little electric fires behind glass for the rare winter night that’s cold enough to turn it on, had no idea that wood fires gobbled up so much fuel. Within the first week, they’ve gathered and burned every piece of driftwood and most of the larger sticks in the trees that line the beach. Which is why Hayley finds herself deep in the dense, wooded central part of the island with Elliot on the afternoon of the eighth day, her back and thighs aching, her forearms ribboned with livid scratches, painstakingly adding piece after piece of wood to the backpack she has slung across one shoulder.
“I think my splinters have splinters,” she grumbles, inspecting her reddened palms. The cuts and bruises left by the crash have almost all healed, but they’ve been replaced by other sore spots, souvenirs of more than a week on the island. There’s a half-healed cut where she accidentally gouged herself with a fishhook while trying to bait it. A scrape down the side of her shin from tripping over a vine on a fruit-gathering expedition. A nasty bruise on her left thumb from taking aim at a coconut with the cutting stone and accidentally bringing the blunt side smashing down on her hand instead. And a smooth blister on her right index fingertip from a cooking accident.
They have started to attempt slightly more sophisticated “cooking,” of a sort. Elliot showed them how to make a mini stove with a Coke can. He cut a hole in the side of the can to allow hot stones and tinder to be pushed inside, and the top provided a stable base for a cooking container made of half another tin can to stand on. They’ve boiled sea snails plucked from rough rocks at low tide and steamed pieces of white fish (more of them caught with Jessa’s hook than Elliot’s spear) wrapped in supple green leaves.
Everything is an effort. They don’t eat, drink, or rest without working for it. It can take an hour or more to catch a single fish. Once they’ve scraped off the scales and pulled out the hundreds of bones, each one is barely a mouthful. And there are seven hungry mouths to feed. By the time they’ve prepared the fish, collected wood, made the fire, eaten, and cleaned up again, it’s time to start scavenging for the next meal.
Hayley sighs and adds another stick to her bulging pack. “Can you believe we’ve been here over a week already?”
Elliot has his back to her, bent over a dead tree trunk, trying to break off some pieces of dry wood. But she can hear the care in his voice, like he’s trying not to scare her. “It’s not a very good sign,” he says slowly. “If they had the means to find us easily—like if our radar had been working until the last minute or we didn’t stray very far from the planned flight path—then we should have been found in the first couple of days, tops.”
“So not being found quickly means we might not be found at all?”
Elliot nods apologetically.
“No.” Hayley is embarrassed by the hot prickling behind her eyeballs. She can handle this. Just because Elliot’s been camping a lot, that doesn’t make him the final authority on all things island. He’s guessing just as much as anyone else.
“They’ll keep looking until they find us,” she says firmly, trying to keep a wobble out of her voice. “It doesn’t matter how long it takes. Our parents aren’t going to stop. And you can bet Jason’s parents will pay for a private search even if the authorities give up. May’s too, come to think of it.” In fact, the combined wealth of the families of the kids on the island could probably finance a round-the-clock rescue operation for months.
“Yeah, I can believe there aren’t many of those booster club parents who’ll take no for an answer,” Elliot says drily. “I guess we should consider ourselves lucky it works in our favor this time around.”
“This time?”
“As opposed to, say, when we’re applying for college and our recommendation letters are being written by the school, but we’re in competition with classmates whose parents can afford to fund a new library.”
Elliot wrenches at the dead wood, twisting great clumps of it off and piling them beside him.
“Or competing for basketball scholarships with kids whose parents have been paying for them to fly around the country and play in the off-season for years, sending them to pricey summer camps since they were in elementary school. Kids who basically bought their ball skills instead of spending a thousand hours late into the night shooting at a single rusty hoop in their backyard because they can’t afford to go out anywhere anyway.”
He breathes heavily, concentrating on the stump, not meeting Hayley’s eyes. She has no idea what to say. She feels a strange mixture of embarrassment and irritation that Elliot so often manages to make her feel like a naïve child. She likes to think of Oak Ridge as her beat, prides herself on knowing it inside and out. But she’s never heard a story like Elliot’s before. Partly because she’s never spoken to a scholarship kid. Not because she’s avoided them…just because, she suddenly realizes, she’s never known who any of them were. And she’s beginning to understand why.
Hayley’s parents aren’t off-the-scale wealthy, not by the standards of a lot of her classmates, but they live comfortably, managing the school tuition with enough left over to take a nice vacation every few years if they budget carefully. Somehow, she’s always just assumed her peers’ lives were all pretty similar, apart from the significant handful whose gold-plated existence revolves more around private pools, skiing in Aspen, and buying whatever luxe thing is trending on TikTok, that is. And, she is slowly beginning to realize, being around those kids has always made her think of herself, by comparison, as…normal. But talking to Elliot, she’s beginning to realize just how lucky she is. And just how little she’s ever really stopped to appreciate it.
“Elliot,” Hayley begins hesitantly, “do you really, honestly think someone pushed you off those rocks?”
He sighs and turns to look her directly in the eye, wiping his hands on the same scruffy khaki shorts and thin gray T-shirt he’s been wearing pretty much constantly since the day they arrived.
“Here,” he says, walking over to her until they’re so close that she can see a slight dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose. Elliot takes her shoulders and gently spins her around so she’s facing away from him. Then, suddenly, before she has time to realize what he’s about to do, he shoves her hard in the back with both fists, sending her crashing to the ground.
“OW!” Hayley protests, rubbing her elbow and picking leaves out of her hair. “What did you do that for?”
“Do you think you could have imagined that?” Elliot asks. “Is it possible you just tripped? Could you be confused?”
“Okay, okay, I get your point,” Hayley mutters grumpily, brushing herself off.
She looks at him for a moment. Out of everyone on the island, he’s the person she probably knew the least before they crashed. But somehow, now he feels like the one she’s most willing to trust.
“I think maybe something happened at the party and that’s why someone pushed you, and maybe why they spiked May’s drink as well.” She lets it all come out in a rush before she changes her mind about confiding in him.
Elliot looks troubled. “At the party? Why do you think that?”
“Think about it. Everyone’s been acting weird ever since the morning after—we just didn’t really notice because the crash happened. Shannon and Jason haven’t been the same, Jessa says May was acting strange that night, nobody seems to want to talk about it…” She runs her hands through her greasy hair, frustrated. “I can’t explain it, exactly. I just feel sure that whatever happened that night holds the key to what’s going on here.”
Elliot thinks for a while. “I guess you could be right,” he says thoughtfully. “It was kind of a rowdy party. But it was Shannon who was acting the weirdest, if you ask me.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was like she was high or something, the way she threw herself into that game of Truth or Dare, the way she was dancing with that Duke player later, them grinding up against each other like that…”
Hayley remembers the sweaty, heaving, swaying mass of bodies, arms coiling and necks arched, hands twisting and finding flesh, colors whirling and legs rubbing and hair sticking to the sides of their necks. By that point, Hayley had been comfortably numbed by the vodka, sliding into that sweet spot where her knees tingled and a cloak of somebody else’s confidence was softly draped over her shoulders. Not yet at the point when her tongue started to grow rubbery and floppy so she had to concentrate hard on her words in order to avoid tripping over them. Surrounded by an invisible force field of protection from her own constant inner monologue of self-consciousness. The whispering voice in her head—you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re totally out of your depth, everyone’s looking at you—finally stopped. And it hadn’t hurt that really, nobody was looking at her at all. Brian was huddled in the corner in a sweaty, pulsing ecosystem of his own with two of the Duke cheerleaders. Jason seemed to have disappeared. Shannon, head thrown back and nostrils flaring, was dancing like her life depended on it with the tall, muscular Duke basketball captain, his light blond hair elaborately gelled into place. May was dancing alone, her long limbs making beautiful, angular, unpredictable moves and somehow completely pulling them off as only May could. Hayley couldn’t remember seeing Jessa. And Elliot was on the table, feet splayed and propped on one arm, his top ripped off, humping the air, his hips plunging and arching to the music. Surrounded by a chanting crowd of faces, a buzzing muddle of admiration and mockery.
And without saying a word to anyone, Hayley slipped out, shutting the door gratefully on the wall of noise and damp heat, writhing bodies, and pulsing music. She walked slowly back to the hotel in the moonlight, going over the night the way Shannon would analyze her performance in a complicated routine. It had been a solid non-disaster as far as Hayley was concerned. Which, for her, was a big success. And as she snuggled down between the crisp hotel room sheets, she’d whispered quietly to herself, “You went to a party. An actual party. And you didn’t totally suck.”
“So what about you?” She looks sideways at Elliot to gauge his reaction as she continues picking at the wood on the stump. “Shannon wasn’t the only one who let her hair down that night, was she?”
Elliot blushes. “If by letting your hair down you mean being forced to drink the most disgusting cocktail known to man, then I suppose you could say that. I don’t remember very much after that, if I’m totally honest.”
“Shannon said she found you on the bathroom floor.”
“Oh God.” He cringes. “That was much later, I think. She sort of flew into the bathroom and collapsed over the sink, spitting into it and rinsing her face. That was when she spotted me. But then she disappeared again. I don’t know, I think I passed out.”
“You guys need any help?” Jason appears behind Elliot, flicking a bug off the sleeve of his grubby white T-shirt.
“Yeah, thanks,” Hayley answers quickly, wondering how much of their conversation Jason overheard. “We’re trying to break down this stump for firewood.”
It occurs to Hayley, absurdly, that this might be one of the only times Jason Angel has addressed her directly. Unless you count him making her feel extremely uncomfortable at her first-ever cheer practice, which she doesn’t, since he didn’t even bother to find out her name. Not that he deliberately ignores her, exactly. It’s more that he just never seems to notice her. On tour, he’d talk to Jessa and May in front of her, and he was always with Shannon, of course, turning up to collect her from practice, shepherding her from their locker rooms onto the court. (“So everybody knows you’re my girl. Don’t want any of those opposing fans getting ideas.”) But it’s like he’s never really seen Hayley. It’s the way she imagines famous people just don’t notice the aides who buzz around them, getting things done every day. Jason’s not the sort of person who needs to notice everybody around him. Everybody else takes notice of him instead.
He took notice of Shannon, though. The day she arrived as a transfer student halfway through ninth grade, Jason picked her out. People were a little surprised, actually, back then. Jason could have chosen almost anybody, and Shannon wasn’t the most obvious pick. She had a regal poise and pale, dramatic looks. But she wasn’t the stereotypical prom queen type, not like May with her exuberant, social-butterfly popularity or Jessa with her dimples and her massive brown eyes and eyelashes that went on forever. But there was something about Shannon. And on Jason’s arm, she walked into the world of cheerleading royalty with every door swinging open in front of her. That was a long time ago, though. Now Shannon is cheer captain, calling extra practice sessions and running drills like military exercises. It’s hard to remember the coltish, shy girl who turned up in second-period math and slid quietly into a seat next to Jason.
Jason gets his nails into a crack in the stump and starts to heave, ripping off a substantial strip and sidestepping as a stream of tiny bugs with shiny black shells swarms out from underneath it. He’s just starting to pull at a second piece when he stops suddenly.
“What was that?” Jason sounds uneasy. They all stop and listen.
The noise comes again: a cascade of descending notes like tinkling laughter. The skin on the back of Hayley’s neck start to crawl. She tries to slow her breathing, standing frozen, straining in the direction the noise seemed to come from.
It comes again like a silvery waterfall of noise, so quick and light that it seems to slip through her fingers. But this time there’s a pause and then a dry rustling noise, which sounds like it’s coming from the trees behind Elliot.
Jason looks absolutely terrified. He quickly takes a few steps toward Hayley, putting Elliot between him and the noise.
“I think it’s a bird,” Elliot whispers, breathing heavily.
A flurry of dry leaves puffs into the air and a bird the size of a rooster struts confidently out of a bush just yards away from them. Hayley’s hand flies to her mouth, the shock of its unexpected appearance making her heart leap.
The bird is beautiful. At first, Hayley thinks it’s a peacock, with its powder-blue head and long, decorative feathers, darker at the back but shining all over with a gasoline sheen. It has a little red comb on the top of its head and a red ring around each eye, with small decorative lumps like red and yellow baubles clinging to its face. Its pink scaly legs end in sharp claws that scratch and scrabble surefootedly through the debris on the forest floor. A moment later, it sees them and stops, looking more curious than afraid. It cocks its wrinkled face to one side and fixes them with its little currant eye.
“We have to kill it,” Elliot breathes, barely even moving his lips.
“What?!”
“We need the food,” Elliot replies immediately, his eyes darting around the clearing, already making calculations for a hunt.
“It’s stunning,” Hayley hisses, “and defenseless…and it’s probably never seen humans. It won’t even know to run away. It’s not fair!” And what she wants to say, but doesn’t, is that she feels, somehow, that the island will never forgive them if they kill this beautiful, majestic bird. It’s bad enough that it has been forced to accept their rough intrusion without them spilling blood as well.
“All the better.” Jason grins, moving quietly into a crouched position, his arms outstretched.
The bird flicks its head to the other side, staring unblinkingly at Jason. With a quiet whoosh, it fans out its tail feathers, a gorgeous array of intricate black-and-white patterns, each feather tipped in blue and gold as if it has been dipped in a shimmering inkpot.
“It’s like some kind of turkey,” Elliot whispers as the bird puffs out its green wing feathers, glinting mermaid-like, and extends its neck. It gives that beautiful call again, the pure notes scattering carelessly through the trees.
Elliot is cautiously moving to his right, blocking off a gap between the trees. “Jason, block its escape that way. Hayley, see if you can get around behind it so it can’t go back the way it came.”
“Uh-uh. No way. I am not involved in this.”
“Hayley,” Elliot whispers out of the corner of his mouth, never taking his eyes off the bird. “Do you and your family celebrate Thanksgiving?”
“Well, the holiday is problematic, but—”
Elliot cuts her off. “Do. You. Eat. A. Turkey? Yes or no?”
Hayley sighs. She can see where this is going. “Yes.”
“Okay, then. This is no different from that. Actually, it’s a lot more honest. We are killing this bird for survival. It is absolutely necessary. It’s not a cranberry-filled, sentimental celebration of American ego and colonialist brutality. It’s not cruel. It’s biology. It’s life and death. Survival of the fittest. It’s nature.”
Hayley crosses her arms and tries not to look the turkey in the eye.
“Do you want to eat something other than fruit and fish bones in the next month? Or is going to the bathroom five times a day a hobby you’re happy to continue?”
She grimaces reluctantly. “Okay, okay. Fine. But I’m not participating. I’m conscientiously objecting.”
“You’re not going to eat any of the meat, then? The juicy, tender white breast meat, barbecued over a smoky fire? Or the tasty dark leg meat that slips off the bone?”
She feels her mouth start to water in spite of herself.
“You don’t get to eat it if you aren’t prepared to help catch it. It’s dishonest. It does the animal a disservice. Those sterile, bloodless packages we pick up in the supermarket distance us from the reality of our food chain. They separate us from respecting and acknowledging the animals we sacrifice for our survival—”
“Dude, can we please just get on with it?” Jason hisses, as the turkey starts to move again. “Rock on with your natural-world philosophizing and all that, but it’s going to get away if we don’t shut up and catch it.”
“Fine. I’ll do it.” Hayley starts inching to her right, trying to creep around behind the turkey. But it’s too clever for her, or she’s too unskilled a hunter. As soon as she moves toward it, it starts to panic, kicking up the leaves and scrambling to run, letting out a horrible, screaming gobble, lurching toward the gap between Elliot and Jason.
Jason and Elliot both dive toward the bird like linebackers, Jason half crushing it beneath his body, its feet clawing helplessly in midair, its body writhing as it continues to make that awful squalling screech, so different from the melody of its earlier call.
“Kill it,” Jason squeals, panting, twisting his face to the side just in time as the bird arches its neck backward, trying to peck him with its sharp, curved beak. It rears, and its beak dives again, scalpel-like, finding its target this time and sinking into Jason’s forearm.
He screams and rolls to the side, and the bird half rises, scrambling straight toward Elliot now, blind with panic, its shining feathers dirty and stuck with leaves, some broken and twisted, sticking out horribly at the wrong angles.
“It’s suffering!” Hayley screams, and she finds herself lurching forward, her hands reaching out for the bird’s neck, thicker and firmer than she’d anticipated, muscular beneath her fingers. And without really knowing what she is doing, without letting herself think too clearly, she twists with all her might, wrenching the gleaming blue softness to the side with a sickeningly muffled crack.
There’s quiet. Its body lies grotesquely spread and broken, legs sticking comically up in the air, robbed of its grace and elegance. Its beady eye, it seems to Hayley, is trained on her still, reproaching her.
“Come on,” Jason mutters, and there’s a kind of shame on his face as he grabs it up by the neck so its heavy body dangles limply next to his leg.
“Oh man,” Elliot groans, pulling a single blue-green feather from his hair. “May is not going to like this.”
Her tirade begins the moment they trudge back into camp with the dead bird. “What gives you the right to take away its life? You’re murderers, you know that? Murderers. I just hope you can live with yourselves after you’ve picked its greasy carcass clean.”
“May.” Elliot takes the bird, sits down, and calmly starts to rip out great handfuls of its jeweled feathers, twisting and bracing against its body as he wrenches them out of the skin. “We have to eat. Okay? You literally wouldn’t be here if your ancestors hadn’t killed animals to survive. Humans are carnivores. Get over it.”
“Humans also used to live in caves and walk around naked,” May retorts. “Are you suggesting we do that too?”
Brian raises a hand. “I would just like to say for the record that I for one have no objection to that.”
It turns out plucking the bird is the easy part. Disemboweling it and removing the wings, feet and head are far more of a challenge with only sharp stones to help them. Hayley has to turn away as Elliot hacks at the bird’s neck, flecks of blood and chunks of raw flesh spattering out in wet bursts. When it’s finally done, he pulls out the slick, shining mess of its innards, saving them carefully in a plastic bag to use as fish bait.
But when it is finally prepared, threaded onto a long spit over the fire and resting on two forked sticks, the rich, smoky smell of meat and sizzling golden skin calls irresistibly to her tastebuds. Hayley’s stomach growls and clenches like a wild thing as drops of translucent fat drip down to crackle in the embers.
“For the first time ever,” Brian says, watching hungrily as Elliot turns the stick to roast the bird’s pale belly, “I can honestly say this is the kind of spit roast I am most excited about.”
Jason guffaws while Jessa and Hayley exchange embarrassed looks but say nothing. Suddenly, Hayley is powerfully reminded of an afternoon in seventh grade when she’d sat uncomfortably in her plastic chair while the boys in her science class excitedly passed a novelty pen round, taking turns to turn it upside down and watch while the skimpy bikini slowly disappeared to reveal a nude, busty model grinning blankly back at them. She wishes she knew what to say now just like she wished it then, but somehow the words to describe how gross it makes her feel just won’t come. And she knows, like she did then, that she’ll be called a prude or accused of being uptight if she tries to object. So she says nothing at all.
They eat the bird the moment it’s cooked, crouching in the sand around the fire, tearing off pieces of meat with their fingers and stuffing it into their mouths, the crispy skin melting away. The meat is deliciously, satisfyingly chewy after a week of sinking their teeth into soft, yielding fruit. May watches them from a safe distance, throwing them the occasional accusing glare while she chews sourly on some strips of coconut they’ve experimentally dried in the sun.
Hayley’s brain plays tricks on her. There are moments when she feels almost normal, as if this life is something she knows, something expected. Her body cannot sustain the sensation of shock and fear, not for days on end. So there are times, even whole hours, when life just goes on. Even given the strangeness of the situation, they can almost mimic normality for a few suspended moments here and there.
“That needs to be washed,” Shannon says, nodding at the greasy plastic tray they used to serve the turkey, which is exactly what Hayley’s mother would have said, and Jason nods and sits still, which is what her father would have done. Shannon picks it up and takes it down to the sea, and Hayley sees her mother’s back curved over the sink as she bends to scrub it.