There’s almost no conversation as they pick at their fruit and fish the next morning. Hayley, sick with unease, just swigs at a bottle of water. She tastes it carefully first, an automatic check she’s taken to performing on everything she consumes, just to be safe.
A lethargy has settled over the group. The survival skills that seemed dramatic and exciting in the first week have become monotonous. Their immediate fears of acute thirst and hunger have been allayed by the supplies they’ve built up, at least for the time being. In the first few days, there was always someone scanning the sky, checking for any sign of rescuers, stiffening in excitement when they thought they heard a faint noise that might be a distant engine. But every day that passes without any sign of relief blunts their hopes. Nobody is looking skyward today.
Jessa and May are sharing a coconut, taking turns to scrape unenthusiastically at the white flesh. May is humming under her breath as usual, something upbeat and poppy, and Jessa’s nodding along to the beat, but Hayley sees how her eyes dart sideways toward Elliot every now and then. Could Jessa and Elliot be working together? What did Jessa do that Elliot knows she is keeping secret? Could it really have been Jessa who spiked May’s drink? But why?
Hayley is still mulling it over when the girls set off on yet another a fruit-picking expedition, leaving the boys rattling around the camp like aimless marbles. She considers just coming straight out and confronting Jessa, telling her what she overheard and asking what it was about. But something holds her back. Even though the crash has obliterated some of their social hierarchy, there are still deep-seated boundaries, unwritten rules she doesn’t feel able to break. Jessa, May, and Shannon are still those girls, still somehow distant and unreachable from Hayley’s vantage point even though she’s a member of their squad. Things are shifting slowly, but she still can’t bring herself to accuse Jessa of something outright. Not yet, anyway. And she doesn’t want to scare people off, alert them to the fact that she’s listening and watching, probing into the cracks, trying to put it all together. Her confidence is returning as she tries to solve this mystery, but for now, she’s still more comfortable gathering pieces of the picture and weaving them together from her place in the shadows.
The weather is mercifully cooler today, with thick, low bands of gray clouds blocking out the worst of the sun’s direct heat. But the air feels muggy and full, pressing in around them and making it harder to breathe. Everything feels quiet and mysterious. The light among the trees is dappled and dark green, the thick air muffling noise as if they are swimming in a deep lake. Even the birdsong is absent today, and Hayley wonders if they know another storm is coming, if they’re holed up in their nests and crannies, waiting in safety for it to pass. Wonders what’s coming next.
Suddenly, May shrieks, her piercing voice ripping through the cotton-wool air, and Hayley’s head snaps in her direction, her chest pounding. But it’s just a bug, scuttling over May’s hand as she steadies herself against a tree trunk.
“Ugh, ugh, ugh, get it off me.” She shudders, shaking her hand frantically and spinning around.
“Aren’t you supposed to be an animal-loving vegan, May?” Shannon can’t resist asking with a sly smile.
“Vegan. Does. Not. Equal. Bug. Lover,” May gasps disjointedly, jerking around as if she can feel its scratchy legs clinging to her skin.
They walk on, the forest grasping at Hayley’s feet every few paces like an insistent child who will not be denied, clinging and encumbering her every step. In the quiet, close stillness, she notices the beauty in the trees around her for the first time. One trunk is enrobed in a fine mesh of thin red vines, the color so deep and lustrous it looks like a network of pulsating capillaries. A bush she has always avoided because of the vicious spikes that protrude from its waxy green leaves is sprinkled, on closer inspection, with the tiniest powder puff–pink flowers.
“I have the weirdest feeling we’re being followed,” May says under her breath, breaking the silence. “Like someone is watching us.”
“Someone is watching us,” Shannon says almost dreamily.
“What are you talking about?” Jessa looks alarmed, spinning around to peer through the trees that press close on every side.
“The island is watching us. I’ve felt it since the first night we arrived. We’re not supposed to be here.”
“I’ve felt that too,” Hayley says, aware of the vibrancy of the trees, alive and listening, the vines and plants crushed beneath their feet.
“It’s judging us,” Shannon says, looking up into the canopy.
May laughs uncertainly. “I don’t know about that. But I do feel very free here.” She sighs, picking her way carefully between two bushes, one crawling with shiny, black-lacquered ants.
“Free? We’re trapped!” Jessa speaks lightly, but Hayley recognizes the note of fear, never far from the surface.
“I know. I know it’s a strange thing to say. I’m worried about getting off the island, obviously. But in those moments when you let yourself focus on the present, it just feels so different from home.” May looks like she’s trying to find the words to explain. “There’s such freedom in being able to explore a forest like this…or walk down the beach alone in the middle of the night…”
“I know what you mean.” Jessa nods. “I thought about it that first night, when the boys were so preoccupied with wild animals and protection. And I was thinking, this is the safest I will ever feel camping out, knowing for sure that my body isn’t going to be found in some ditch in the morning.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Shannon sounds pensive. “The things that scare us are so very different from the things that scare them.”
“Well, until now, anyway.” May’s voice is low and serious. “Now I’m not sure how safe any of us are anymore.”
“Do you guys really think there’s someone going around deliberately hurting people?”
“I think the boys have vivid imaginations.” Shannon is curt and to the point. “Like May says, feeling exposed and threatened is a new experience for them. It’s not for us.”
“I don’t know what to think,” Hayley admits. “That whole thing with the glass… It’d be such a weird thing for someone to do, but on the other hand, it would also be really odd for Jason to make it up. Do we seriously think he could have had a nightmare that vivid?”
“Don’t look at me,” Shannon says as the others automatically turn to her. “My sleeping shelter isn’t even next to Jason’s. I have no idea what he is or isn’t dreaming about.”
“What’s going on with you guys, Shan?” Jessa asks gently, curiously.
Shannon sighs. “I don’t know,” she says in a small voice. “Everything just feels different somehow.”
“Did something happen?” May asks with characteristic bluntness.
Shannon shakes her head. “It’s hard to explain.”
“But you’re Jason and Shannon.” Jessa smiles. “You’re the real deal! My world wouldn’t make sense without you guys together.” She’s speaking lightly, but Hayley senses a real, childlike fear underneath.
“Did something happen at the party?” Jessa asks, and May stops in her tracks, staring at Shannon as if she already knows the answer.
“He got mad at you for dancing with that Duke guy,” Jessa says sympathetically. “Was that it?”
“No,” Shannon murmurs vaguely, shaking her head. “No, no, that was nothing. Jason had a headache. He’d already left before the dancing started.”
“Where did you guys go?” May asks, looking uneasily between Shannon and Jessa. “When the party moved out into the backyard, I didn’t see either of you. I ended up getting a cab to the hotel because I thought I must have missed you, but when I knocked on your room doors, you weren’t there. And your phone was off, as always,” she shoots reproachfully in Jessa’s direction.
“I was there,” Jessa replies, quickly glancing away. “I went back to the hotel early. The whole party scene gets a lot less fun really fast when you’re the only sober one left. I must have already been asleep when you knocked.” Hayley notices that Jessa doesn’t meet May’s eyes.
“I was with one of the Duke girls,” Shannon says. “I went up to use the bathroom and found her in there sobbing. I stayed with her for about an hour. We went into one of the bedrooms to talk.”
“About what?”
“She’d had a…bad experience,” Shannon says, lowering her voice as if she thinks they might be overheard.
“What do you mean?” May asks.
“Well…” Shannon pauses as if she’s not sure whether to continue. “She’d been…I think…” She stops and then says uncertainly, “I think maybe she’d been raped?”
“You think?”
Shannon shrugs. “She said she’d been making out in a bedroom with some guy, and it was all moving really fast, and she thought it was what she wanted, but then at some point she panicked and changed her mind.”
“So she had sex with him and then regretted it?” Jessa asks.
“No, she changed her mind before the sex started, but he just carried on and did it anyway.”
“That’s awful,” Jessa gasps. “Did she go to the police?”
Shannon shakes her head. “She said she had a boyfriend and she didn’t want him to find out what had happened.”
“She had a boyfriend, and she was making out in a bedroom with some other guy?” Jessa holds up a hand. “Was it because she was worried about what the boyfriend would say that she called it rape?”
Hayley feels as if Jessa has reached out and squeezed her stomach with an ice-cold hand, but Jessa continues with sincerity, “You know they call it buyer’s remorse, right? When a girl has sex but then regrets it, so she says she was raped?”
“Jessa!” May shoots her a shocked look.
“I don’t think that’s an actual thing, Jessa,” Shannon says. “And she seemed pretty upset.”
“Well, did she actually tell him no?”
“I don’t think so. She said she just kind of froze. She said he was heavy, that his body was pinning her down. But he must have been able to tell she wasn’t into it, right?”
“Maybe,” Jessa says slowly. “But isn’t there a difference between rape and having sex with someone who’s not that into it?”
“Not really,” May says firmly. “It depends what you mean by ‘not that into it,’ I guess. If he didn’t know whether she consented or not, I’d say that was rape. You need an enthusiastic yes, or you stop.”
“What, like you have to get the other person to stop and sign a contract before you begin? Sounds sexy.”
“What would you know about what’s sexy, Jessa?” Shannon asks sharply. Jessa stops in her tracks, as startled as if Shannon has actually slapped her across the face.
“Nothing, I guess,” she says slowly, cheeks flaming.
“Actually,” Hayley interrupts, and it’s as if the other girls have totally forgotten she was even with them, “it depends where you are when it happens.”
“What? What are you even talking about?!”
“The laws about rape. They vary by state—I looked into it when I was writing an article about that guy who got arrested at the house party, Chad Maxwell.” She glances quickly at Shannon, but there’s no flicker of recognition on her face when Hayley mentions the case. “We were in Texas the night before the plane crash, right? Texas is one of the ones I remember, because it really shocked me. In Texas, it’s legally rape only if the rapist uses force or violence or threatens it. Or if the person is unconscious or unable to fight back. In other words…”
“She’d have had to try to push him off her,” Jessa finishes.
“Yeah,” Hayley admits. “It’s completely messed up.”
“But in the guy’s defense, how did he know she thought he was raping her? She was kissing him,” Jessa protests again.
“You’d never say that about anything else,” Shannon says. “You’d never say, well, how was he supposed to know she didn’t want him to take her phone? It was right there in her pocket, he might have thought she wanted to give it to him—that’s why he robbed her. Why are we so willing to give a guy the benefit of the doubt when it’s rape?”
“And why couldn’t he take the time to damn well check?” May adds hotly. “If you’re not sure, it should be on you to make sure. The onus is on him to know for certain she wants it, not on her to find a way to fucking protest.”
“Amen,” Hayley says, and Jessa rolls her eyes but doesn’t say any more.
They walk on, the silence awkward at first. But at some point, May announces that this road trip needs a soundtrack and starts belting one out with gusto, flipping between Kesha, vintage Dolly Parton, and Beyoncé with wild abandon, Shannon and Jessa occasionally joining in on backing vocals. Their singing is harsh against the silent undergrowth, and Hayley feels like they are desecrating something sacred, like they should apologize and lower their voices. But she doesn’t know how to ask them to without sounding mad, so she says nothing and follows quietly in their wake.
Picking the fruit is harder work than Hayley imagined. The guavas are the easiest to harvest, their smooth, slightly textured skin turning from green to yellow as they ripen. She targets those the color of tennis balls, twisting the stems delicately until they pop off into her palm, trying not to wonder whether she’ll ever feel a real tennis ball in her hand again.
She stubbornly blocks out the memories that come flooding in: summers at the court with her mom, Dad arriving to pick them up and honking from the parking lot, stopping for ice cream on the way home. When she told her parents about the tour, her mom pointed out that it’d take up half of summer break. “It’s my last chance to beat you at tennis, kiddo,” she said lightly, ruffling Hayley’s hair, trying to keep the catch out of her voice. “You’ll be heading off to college next summer, far too busy to hit the ball around with your old mom.”
And Hayley dismissed her. Or at least she was impatient, focused on her Ivy League dreams and getting the cheer squad on her applications. “We’ll play when I get back, Mom, I promise,” she said carelessly. Not “I love you, I’ll always have time for you.” Not “Mom, I’ll never be too busy to come back for a game, wherever I go to college.” Just “We’ll play when I get back.” And now…
No. She isn’t letting herself do this. Hayley Larkin is in control. She can’t control the weather, or the island, or the bugs, or whichever one of the others is playing stupid, dangerous pranks, but she can and will control her own brain. And she is not going to break down now. On the flight home, Hayley has promised herself, she’ll let herself break. Let herself acknowledge for the first time how terrifying and lonely this ordeal has been. Not. Yet.
The low-hanging fruit isn’t difficult to reach, but they soon run out of easy pickings. Hayley stands, legs apart, knees shaking as May sits on her shoulders, reaching for ripe guavas and complaining that Hayley isn’t steady enough.
“I’m doing my best,” she fires back through gritted teeth. “You’re not exactly the Sugar Plum Fairy okay?”
May leaps down, landing light on her feet, catlike. She grins. “It’s taken a month of practice, a two-week tour, and more than a week stranded on an island for you to stand up to me, Hayley Larkin. I like it.”
And Hayley’s smile might be a little uncertain, but it definitely reaches her eyes.
The brownish fruits that Hayley thought looked like avocados are firmer on the tree than the wrinkled specimens she has eaten so far, tapering to points like overgrown, slightly squashed kiwis. These are harder to reach than the guavas, the tree trunks slender and tall, their leaves and fruit only appearing several yards off the ground. But May wriggles up the trees like a monkey, her skinned shins more than worth it for the abundant bunches of fruit she finds, clinging together like clusters of dark golden eggs. She picks them one at a time and drops them carefully into Shannon’s waiting hands.
“Did you ever think about becoming a baseball catcher?” May asks with a low whistle of appreciation as Shannon dives for a stray fruit and catches it in the outstretched fingertips of her left hand.
“I’ll keep it in mind as a backup.” Shannon grins.
They eat as they go along, digging their teeth into any fruit that splits or bruises as they pick it, letting the juice run down their chins and congeal stickily on their arms. Hayley is just piling the last mango neatly on the heap they’ve collected when she hears the faintest noise, something at once strange and deeply familiar.
“Can anyone else hear that?”
“Hear what?” Jessa panics, shrinking closer to the others.
“It’s not a person or an animal or anything.” Hayley cocks her head. “Keep still a second.” They all stand frozen, ears straining. Hayley hears the noises of the forest—a tree creaking slightly, a scuttling in the undergrowth, the rustle of leaves overhead. Then, in a moment of stillness, she catches it again: the faintest trickling noise, like somebody has left a tap on in another room.
“Have you heard that before?” The others shake their heads.
“It’s always been windy when we’ve been here before,” Jessa explains. “There was a lot more noise from the leaves.”
Concentrating hard, Hayley tries to follow the sound. Every few steps, she has to stop and listen again, creeping forward painstakingly, the noise almost out of reach, her ears clinging to the very edge of the sound.
Even when she’s standing right on top of it, she doesn’t see it at first. The forest floor is so overgrown, and there are so many vines and dead leaves sprawling over one another. But she can hear it, a soft trickle, and when they scrape away moss and mud with their hands, they find it: a little spring, bubbling up among some rocks and flowing for a few yards in a shallow stream before trickling away between some bushes.
“It must run down from the top of the hill and under the ground.” Shannon traces the path with her finger. “But it only comes up here in this one spot—it’s so quiet and small, it’s no wonder we never spotted it before.”
“Well, I’m glad we found it.” Jessa grins, pulling off her shoes and socks and sighing in pleasure as she dips her hot, sandy feet in the cool water.
“Never mind washing our feet, we’ve got water!” Hayley feels elated and buoyant, like a huge weight she didn’t even realize she’s been carrying has lifted from her shoulders. “We won’t have to rely on rain and coconuts anymore. We can collect water from here and boil it to clean it.” She’s surprised that nobody else seems to be as excited as she is. Don’t they realize how precarious their situation is?
“Ew, ew, ew, ew!” Jessa jumps up, scrambling to put her shoes and socks back on, physically recoiling from the stream.
“What, what?” May scans the water for some horrifying predator.
“Sorry, nothing major, but there are leeches in there.” Jessa points and they all lean forward, spotting the slug-like brown creatures glistening in the water.
“Just when you thought this island couldn’t get any creepier.” After her morning brush with bugs, May looks like she is taking the leeches personally. But her outraged face is so funny Hayley can’t suppress a giggle, and before she knows it, she is crying with laughter, infecting them all with it, giddy with the relief of that tight, tight knot in her stomach unwinding just a little.
That afternoon, the girls lie on their backs in the shade of the fruit trees. The clouds have lifted and a light breeze has swept away the thickness of the morning air, leaving Hayley feeling fresher, less constrained. She watches as the dappled sunlight plays across her forearm, highlighting the soft dark hairs.
At home, she’d have been worried about them. For years she’s fought a pitched battle with her mom, who doesn’t believe in arm waxes and calls her body hair “a beautiful part of my beautiful daughter.” A beautiful part she’s been teased about since grade school, leaving her self-conscious and always pulling her sleeves down over her wrists. “Just because you’ve never seen them before doesn’t mean they’re not normal,” Grandma used to say, stroking her hands with long, papery fingers. “You just haven’t seen them because all we see are white models with blond, invisible hair.” She ran a translucent palm down Hayley’s arm. “It doesn’t mean this is any less beautiful, just because they choose not to show it to us.”
“I know that, Grandma,” she moaned, cutting her off quickly before she launched into the tirade about who “they” are. “The problem is, nobody else does.” The breeze strokes her arms, and she closes her eyes, yearning for her grandmother’s touch. The hair doesn’t seem to matter so much here.
She has almost drifted off to sleep when Jessa speaks in that small, almost childish voice. “Is it any of you? Honestly? Look, no judgment, I swear, and I won’t tell the guys, but I’m scared, and I just want to know what’s going on. So…is it? Any of you?”
Hayley glances around. Jessa is looking determinedly straight up at the clumps of green mangoes huddled among the leaves above her head. There’s liquid pooled at the corner of her eye. She and May are curled around each other like squirrels, May’s arm slipped loosely over Jessa’s hips, Jessa cradling her bad arm with her good one. They’re breathing slowly, as if they’re using each other’s heartbeats to tether themselves.
Shannon is like something out of a classical painting, her dark waves of hair spread out across the ground, her slightly hollow cheeks still, tiny veins visible in her translucent eyelids. It looks like she’s already asleep.
Nobody answers.
When Hayley wakes, disorientated and warm, the sun is much lower and the forest is striped with slanting shadows. She gingerly rotates her cricked neck, propping herself up stiffly on her elbows. Her eyes are still heavy with sleep, her scalp damp and hot.
The others are stirring too, Jessa yawning and blinking and Shannon sitting up, pulling her hair back into a ponytail. It’s Hayley who sees them first, but the shock hits her so hard she can’t even speak. She sits there frozen, feeling ice rush through her veins. But something in her face makes Shannon look down, and her scream is enough to send the others leaping to their feet.
“What, what is it, where?”
“Our legs,” Hayley manages in a strained whisper. They all look down.
“Get them off, get them off NOW!” May is high kicking, thrashing her leg around like a cancan dancer. But it doesn’t make any difference. The leeches are stuck fast.
Four or five fat, globular bodies cling to each of them, dotted from their thighs to their calves, pulsating and swollen like balloons, suggesting that they have been feeding for some time.
Jessa is doubled over with what Hayley thinks are silent tears until she draws a trembling breath and lets out a shriek of laughter. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she wheezes, her shoulders shaking. “You just look so funny. It’s like you’re trying to make your own foot fall off.” And she dissolves into tears of helpless laughter again.
“I’m. So. Glad. This. Is. Entertaining. To. You.” May speaks through gritted teeth, each word punctuated with another wild flail of her legs. When the leeches remain stubbornly in place, she squeezes her eyes shut and reaches down to try and pull one off. “Grossgrossgrossgrossgrossgrossgross…”
“Wait,” Jessa shouts, grabbing May’s hand to stop her. “I had a leech bite once when I was fishing in a river; you can’t just pull them off. They can regurgitate bacteria into your bloodstream or leave their mouth parts behind in the wound and infect it.”
“MOUTH PARTS?” Shannon looks utterly disgusted. And something about her outrage, about the way she says “mouth parts,” tips Jessa back over the edge until she’s wheezing with laughter.
When she finally gets herself under control, she says, “You just have to use your fingernail—slide it under the mouth to break the suction, and then you can flick it off.” Jessa demonstrates, her fingernail nudging under the thin end of one of the leeches that is gorging on her thigh. It subsides reluctantly, leaving a horrible little wound that immediately starts to trickle blood.
“It’ll bleed for a while,” Jessa says matter-of-factly. “When leeches start feeding, they release something into your blood to stop it from clotting so they can get full quicker.”
“I think I’m gonna be sick.” May gingerly starts to prize off her leeches, copying Jessa’s technique.
Hayley looks down at her own unwanted passengers and almost gags. “Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it,” she whispers to herself as she slides her fingernail under the end of one, feeling the slight release as the suction breaks and flinging it as far away from her as she possibly can. She shudders and wipes her hand on her dress. A few minutes later, they stand, panting among the shadowy trees, their legs striped with long, narrow trickles of blood.
“Remind me never, ever to fall asleep near a stream again.” May shudders, trying to stop the wound on her thigh from bleeding using the edge of her tattered violet cheerleading skirt. “I still feel dirty.”
Jessa has stopped laughing. She’s standing very still. “I don’t think the leeches made it from the stream on their own,” she says suddenly.
“What do you mean?”
“The last time I got bitten by a leech, it was because I was wading thigh-deep in a river for two hours trying to catch a fish. They aren’t exactly speedy creatures. Look where we are. The water is at least fifteen feet away. I find it very hard to believe that two dozen leeches somehow made it out of the spring and across all these leaves and rocks and vines and then evenly divided themselves up between us.”
Hayley’s stomach feels cold. “What are you saying?”
Jessa looks angry. “Someone did this. No way it just happened by coincidence.”
Shannon looks from the stream to the clearing and back again. She slowly starts to nod. “I think you’re right. I didn’t believe it before, but I’m starting to think something really creepy is happening on this island.”
“Well, who was it?” May sounds furious, like she’s reached the absolute end of her tether. “Which one of you bitches put a bloodsucker on my leg?”
They’re all staring at each other. Hayley feels her cheeks getting hot, feels a prickle of shame and fear, as if they might see guilt written on her face even though it wasn’t her. The others look just as panicked as she does.
“It wasn’t necessarily one of us,” she points out. “We all woke up at the same time. What if it was one of the boys?”
“Yeah, we think we woke up at the same time.” May narrows her eyes suspiciously. “But how do we know one of us didn’t sneak up, get the leeches, then lie back down and pretend to be asleep again until we all woke up?”
“What, and cover her own legs in leeches too?” Jessa has a point.
“Well, yes, obviously,” May storms. “To cover her tracks.”
“We don’t have any way of knowing, do we?” Shannon automatically takes control. “So let’s get back to the camp. If someone is really trying to sabotage us, it’s better if we’re all together.”
Hayley likes the idea of safety in numbers. But it isn’t lost on her that they might also just be running right back to the person who attacked them in the first place. Everything is so uncertain. It’s like trying to find her way through fog. Suddenly, something else occurs to her.
“What if something happened to the boys while we were away?”
They crash back through the forest, ignoring the thorns and branches that tear at their hair and skin, jostling the fruits they’re carrying in haphazard armfuls.
But the camp is quiet, the boys subdued. There’s fresh fish cooking over the flames and a huge pile of firewood nearby.
Jason freaks when he sees Shannon’s legs.
“You’re not just messing with me now,” he shouts at nobody in particular. “You’re messing with my girl, and I will destroy you. Whoever you are, you don’t mess with me or what’s mine, you hear me?”
“Were you guys together all day?” Jessa asks seriously.
“No,” Elliot answers at once. “We were fishing and fetching firewood and stuff. Between that and, you know, bathroom breaks, we all went off into the trees at some point. It could have been any of us.”
Jessa raises an eyebrow.
“Not that I’m saying it was me!” he stutters. “It wasn’t me, I swear. But it could’ve been. I mean, except that it wasn’t, obviously. We all had the opportunity, is all I’m saying. On the upside, really great news about the spring, though.” He trails off nervously and turns to tend the fish.
Hayley and the others race to the sea, scooping up handfuls of water and rinsing their legs over and over again. But somehow, no matter how much water she douses her skin with, no matter how much she welcomes the sharp tingle of salt in the wounds, Hayley still feels gross, as if the leeches have left behind slimy trails that won’t wash clean.
She visits the plane in her dreams again that night. But everything is happening in slow motion. She’s floating like an astronaut in a cloud of fruit cups, loose pages, and pom-poms, the others drifting past her with wide, unseeing eyes, terror frozen on their contorted faces. She knows the plane is going down, knows there is nothing she can do about it, but still she tries to struggle, fighting against the heavy sluggishness of her limbs, wanting to make them move faster, wanting to run to the front of the plane, to help the pilot or grab the controls…something, anything. But instead it’s happening tortuously slowly, and she can’t speed it up, can’t speed herself up. There’s nothing she can do but wait for the inevitable impact.
She’s outside the plane now, watching it plummet toward the sparkling surface of the water inch by inch. She tries to scream but her voice doesn’t come out. She sees the island, and she’s falling toward it alone, so close now she can see every individual grain of sand, so close she feels her whole body tense in terrified anticipation…
And then it’s gone, and there’s just her mom’s face, strained and fearful, her eyes boring into Hayley’s, her fingers gripping Hayley’s shoulders so hard it hurts. “Hayley.” She’s trying to tell her something, trying to warn her, but Hayley can’t hear her properly; the wind is howling in her ears and her mom’s voice is distorted. “You’re not looking hard enough.” Her mom is fading, her fingers are slipping away, she’s being pulled in the opposite direction, they’re back in the plane and the force is too strong, smashing them into the sides of the cabin. “You’re missing something, Hayley…” Hayley strains toward her, trying to reach her with every fiber of her being, but she’s being pulled backward, can’t see or hear her anymore, and she wakes in the dark with tears in her eyelashes and her mom’s name on her lips.