It’s Brian who first suggests they try diving for conch. He’s the strongest swimmer in the group, a member of the water polo team before he switched to basketball. He’s been joining May on her daily swims, and he says he’s spotted some shells deep in the clear water off the island.
“It sounds dangerous,” Jessa warns, chewing her bottom lip. She’s sitting on the beach, tipping a little spring water at a time into her hand from a plastic bottle, then delicately working it into her hair, massaging her twists, patting down the frizz that has started to grow at the roots.
“I’ve got this.” Brian swaggers, pulling on the tattered pair of old shorts he always uses for swimming. “Want to guess how long I can hold my breath?”
“Why don’t you show us?” May teases. “Give us all a few minutes of peace and quiet.” She shakes her head. “Those conch might look close because the water’s so clear here, but I’d guess they’re at least twenty feet down. No way you can get down to them and bring one back up all in one breath.”
“Watch me.” Brian strides confidently off toward the water, his swagger slightly undermined by the peeling patches of red sunburn on his back.
“That sunscreen run out, did it?” May calls after him, laughing. He pretends not to hear her.
“Just you wait,” he calls over his shoulder. “You’ll be thanking me when you’re eating fresh conch for dinner!”
“Ugh,” May mutters. “Do I need to remind you that I’m a vegan?”
“NO!” everybody shouts in unison, and Hayley cracks up at the affronted look on May’s face.
“I’ll come with you a little ways,” Hayley shouts, hurrying after Brian. “I could use a dip.”
Hayley’s been waiting for a chance to get Brian on his own to ask him about the party, but this is the first time he hasn’t been shadowing Jason. Now that they’re almost completely reliant on Elliot’s fish to eat and his fire to cook it, Hayley feels like she’s watching Jason’s grip on the group get looser every day. And he isn’t taking it well. He’s surly and withdrawn, snapping at anyone and everyone, making fewer attempts to approach even Shannon. And he relies on Brian more and more to be by his side, like still having his right-hand man to slap on the back and share dirty jokes helps to mask the vulnerability of losing his authority. But today Jason’s out of sight, crossing the island to collect fresh coconuts, finally leaving Brian alone. And Brian is the only person left whom she hasn’t asked directly about the party, Hayley realizes, apart from Jason himself.
“Want to know my secret?” Brian asks as they walk down the beach side by side, leaving parallel paths of footprints, his nearly double the size of Hayley’s.
“Huh?”
“I practice holding my breath every morning. Nearly doubled my lung capacity that way,” he says proudly, patting his chest. “And I’ve read a lot online that says it increases your sperm count too. And makes you last longer, if you know what I mean.” He glances sideways at Hayley. “Something to do with physical control, I guess.”
“Oh.” It suddenly occurs to Hayley that there is nobody within earshot. She glances casually over her shoulder, back toward the camp, but the others must have gone looking for firewood or fruit, because there’s nobody in sight. She suddenly feels very exposed. Very aware of how close to her Brian is, how few clothes they are both wearing. She hears May’s words again as if she’s whispering them in her ear: “Let’s just say he wasn’t exactly being complimentary to women… It was disgusting.”
Almost imperceptibly, she shifts her shoulders, angling her body away from him. She lengthens her strides just a little, extending the distance between them. Don’t be stupid, she tells herself sternly, trying to calm her swiftly accelerating pulse. Nothing’s going to happen.
“So, Brian,” she says casually as their soles slap the wet sand. “Did you have a good time at the party? The night before the crash?”
He stops dead and looks her straight in the eye. “Why, what did you hear? You talk to one of the Duke girls?”
She stumbles backward, then starts walking again.
“No. I was just making conversation. What did you think I heard?”
“Nothing. Nothing.” He seems relieved, falling back into step beside her. “I was just wondering what you meant.”
“So you didn’t see anything out of the ordinary that night?” Brian glances immediately back up the beach, toward the camp, before his eyes flick back to Hayley.
“Why are you asking now?”
“I’m just…testing a theory. Humor me.”
“Well…” He looks conflicted. “There was one thing, but I don’t know if I should say.”
“I won’t tell anyone.” Hayley speaks in her most soothing, reassuring reporter voice, usually reserved for reluctant sources in the school administrators’ office. “It’ll stay between us, I swear.”
He looks to the beach again. “It was after Truth or Dare finished. I went up to the bathroom and as I walked past one of the bedrooms, I saw the door was ajar. I wasn’t peeping, I swear.” He looks panicked, like he’s regretting the conversation already.
“Of course not.” Hayley smiles, nodding encouragingly.
“Well, I saw Jason and Shannon through the door, having a major fight.”
Hayley is careful not to act surprised. She says nothing, letting the silence stretch until he feels compelled to fill it with more details.
“I dunno what they were arguing about, but he had her hotel key card; he pulled it out of his pocket and kind of flicked it at her hard so it clipped her right in the face.” He looks guiltily at Hayley. “He must have had good reason to be so pissed.”
“Sure.” Hayley nods. “Sure. Did he say anything?”
Brian scrunches up his face like he’s trying to remember. “He sort of hissed, ‘Walk yourself home, then,’ and then he stormed out so fast he didn’t even seem to see me, and he charged downstairs and slammed the front door behind him.” He shrugs as if it’s all beyond him. “Okay, well, those conch aren’t gonna collect themselves. See you later, Hayley.”
And she feels her whole body relax as he splashes through the shallow waves, leaving her alone.
Out of everyone she’s spoken to, Brian is definitely the worst liar. But if he was willing to break his best friend’s confidence to tell her about the fight, then what else is he still hiding? And what exactly was he joking about that night?
Hayley watches as he begins to swim, his head little more than a bobbing dot against the glimmer of the sea.
She does a few hundred yards of breaststroke. The water soothes and caresses her tired limbs. Hayley is more active here than she has ever been in her life. The constant fetching and carrying, crossing the island, and climbing trees has produced muscles where she never had any before. By the time she falls asleep each night, she is thoroughly, achingly exhausted.
Eventually, she drags herself out of the water and heads up the beach, toweling herself off with somebody’s spare hoodie and pulling on a newly rinsed tank top and a pair of shorts.
They’ve dried in the sun and their salty stiffness chafes against her skin, but at least they don’t smell, which is more than she can say for the boys recently.
There’s work to be done, as always. Hayley starts trying to cover a hole in one side of her shelter, where some of the sticks have shifted and the wind has started blowing in. She swears in frustration as the sticks she tries to shove in slip through her fingers and fall to the floor. She needs more of the narrow palm leaves to braid together and make a kind of base.
It occurs to her that she could borrow some leaves from a pile Jessa keeps near her sleeping shelter, weighted down by a few large rocks. But as she reaches the leaves, everything happens at once. May emerges at the edge of the trees, not seeing Hayley where she kneels, stooped, half hidden behind Jessa’s lean-to. She looks both furious and terrified, a strange sort of panic on her face that Hayley has never seen before. And she is speaking in a low voice trembling with emotion to somebody in the trees behind her.
“You could have killed me, I hope you realize that. I easily could have slipped and hit my head on a rock with that much alcohol in me. I could’ve gone for a drunk swim and drowned! I know it was you. And I know why you did it. I’m sorry, okay? I shouldn’t have done what I did, and I’m really, really sorry. I don’t even know what got into me. But two wrongs don’t make a right.” She pauses like she’s listening to somebody speaking too quietly for Hayley to hear. “You know perfectly well I can’t tell everyone what you did without them finding out what I did, too. But if you’re the one who’s behind all the other things as well, you have to stop, okay? You have to stop before someone gets really hurt.”
And Hayley half rises, ready to sprint toward her, ready to crash into the trees and unmask whoever May is talking to, when a cold, thin, horrifying scream slices the moment in two. She turns instinctively and stumbles toward the noise, and suddenly they are all there, in a jumble of people that gathers so fast she doesn’t know where everyone comes from—May and Jessa and Elliot and Jason and Shannon, all wearing the same expression of sheer panic, all fumbling to count heads, all turning in unison to the sea and realizing at the same moment that the awful noise is coming from Brian.
Hayley squints, trying to see among the flashes of light that bounce up off the water. The sea swells and shifts restlessly, distorting her perspective.
“Is that him?” She sees a bobbing smudge that might be a head and next to it a hand flicking upward, jerking, writhing, almost. There’s no further sound except the soft shushing of the water, no more screams or cries for help, yet there is something frantic and desperate about the movement of that figure in the water. Suddenly, the head jerks, then snap backward, and, for a horrifying, endless moment, it slips under the water and disappears. Then it surfaces again, barely moving, a floating speck, and Hayley knows, looking at it, that something is terribly, terribly wrong. Elliot has already started pulling off his shirt as he runs toward the water, and Hayley follows him, not thinking, not asking questions, just gripped by a terrible sense of dread.
Dimly, she hears the others racing behind them, hears a voice she thinks might be Shannon’s rise in a question, but there isn’t time to stop; she is running, her feet pounding across the hot, soft sand, her legs splashing into the shock of the cold waves, wading out as quickly as she can, pushing against the firm resistance of the water.
They’re closer now, though still at least twenty yards away, and she can make Brian out, starting to swim toward the shore, toward Elliot, who is a few yards ahead of her. Brian’s face is awash with terror, his eyes skating across the surface of the water, his head jerking frantically as he scans the waves around him.
“Elliot, move!” Brian’s voice cracks with urgency as he glances over his shoulder. “Get to the shore, NOW.”
Elliot doesn’t listen, his arms driving through the water like pistons until he reaches Brian, who throws his arms around Elliot’s neck, his face drained of all color, coughing through the spray. “Hayley, get back to the beach, get back as fast as you can.”
May has reached Brian too, supporting him from the other side, helping him swim faster, murmuring something reassuring that does nothing to ease the stricken look on Brian’s face. So Hayley turns and pounds back toward the beach, salt stinging her eyes. Half expecting at any moment to feel something grab her legs, tear at her skin, or pull her under the surface.
Elliot and May stagger out of the water, half dragging Brian between them. And it’s only as they tear him from the clutches of the innocent, feathery surf that they see the trail of blood staining the sand a horribly vibrant red.
“Shark,” Brian gasps, his mouth opening and closing, his arms twitching as his face creases in pain. “My leg.”
Shannon is white with shock, frozen next to him like a statue. It is the first time Hayley has ever seen her look truly helpless.
“Towels!” May screams. “Fetch anything, any clothing, anything.” And Hayley is running, stumbling across the hot sand, feeling a searing pain as a sharp rock cuts into her foot, racing on, scrabbling frantically in the overhead bin for every item of clothing she can find and racing back across the beach, faintly wondering where the quiet whimpering sound is coming from before she realizes it’s in her own throat.
“It must’ve been at least four or five feet. Came straight for me.” Brian is gasping for breath, grimacing every time he shifts his weight. He braces himself, clenching his fists and gritting his teeth, before he lets himself look down and inspect what’s left of his calf.
The leg is still there. It’s attached, his foot unharmed, but there’s a hideous groove of missing flesh, a cruel, gaping crescent like somebody has taken a giant knife from his ankle to his knee and carved at it. The blood is coming faster, gushing out into the sand and trickling down to mingle with the sea, spurting in time with his heartbeat.
“We have to stop the bleeding,” Shannon pants, still rooted to the spot.
Hayley and May crouch in the wet, bloody sand, swathing Brian’s leg as fast as they can in T-shirts, towels, everything they have.
“Pressure, put pressure on it,” Elliot urges, kneeling beside them and placing his warm, calloused palms beside Hayley’s, forcing the sides of the gash together beneath the cloth, pinning the wound shut as Brian screams in pain and jerks away. Elliot’s breath is warm on Hayley’s neck; he smells of sea salt and coconut and something else she can’t place.
“You’ll have to hold him down,” Elliot tells Jason grimly, and for the first time, Jason nods and obeys, all his bravado stripped away as he kneels beside his stricken best friend, his face slack and uncomprehending.
“It’s okay, Brian, you’re going to be okay,” he chokes as he grasps him by his meaty wrists, forcing them down into the sand. And as Elliot rips a strip off a T-shirt and ties a tight knot above Brian’s knee to cut off the blood flow, as more blood seeps out into the pool surrounding them, as Brian heaves and strains again and tries to move away, Jason falls across him, using his whole body to force him still, and sobs, “I’m sorry, man. I’m so, so sorry. This is for your own good. It’s for your own good.”
The blood seems to slow. Brian lies still, his face ashen, tears trickling out of the corners of his eyes to mingle with the blood and sand. The tourniquet is working. When Elliot discards the sopping layers of clothing saturated with blood and replaces them with a new white T-shirt, the bleeding is slower, visible but under control.
“Thank God,” Jessa repeats over and over again. “Thank God.”
Hayley doesn’t know how long they sit there, keeping silent watch as Brian drifts in and out of sleep, sometimes waking with a great shuddering, keening cry of pain, only to fade into merciful oblivion again moments later. Once he calls out for his mother, pleading for her like a baby until Shannon eases his head onto her lap, tears in her eyes, and strokes his hair. “Shh, shh,” she whispers, her voice breaking. “I’m here now. I’m here.” And he sighs a little and sleeps again.
It’s a subdued group that gathers around the fire for a dinner of fruit, fish, and no conch. Brian is asleep in the sand a little distance away, his head still on Shannon’s lap. She won’t leave him or swap with anyone else, refusing to take a break even to eat. She reluctantly accepts a bottle of water, which she drinks with one hand, careful not to disrupt for a moment the gentle rhythm of her fingers stroking Brian’s hairline. His absence hangs over the others like a heavy cloud though the evening is calm and warm, the golden pre-sunset light lazily licking across the sand. The sea glitters close, mischievous and taunting. Hayley can’t look at it. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to look at the sea again without seeing blood. Even now, she can’t get it off her cuticles, from under her fingernails.
Long after the meal has ended, Hayley sits listlessly against the trunk of one of the palm trees, watching the fire die slowly down to a red glow, matching the first tendrils of crimson starting to leak into the sky from the edge of the horizon. She tries again and again to mentally reconstruct the scene near the camp earlier that day, trying to figure out who might have come out of the trees behind May, whom she might have been accusing. But it’s hopeless. It’s all just a blur. May seems subdued, building a pile of broken shells in the sand, the usual cloud of music that surrounds her noticeably absent. She’s not even humming. Whatever the reason, she doesn’t want everyone else to find out what she knows.
They examine Brian’s leg in the warm light of the early evening, the edges of the wound curling horribly like a snarl. The blood is beginning to clot, but the gash still gapes, trickles still escaping at the bottom and turning his gym sock scarlet.
“We should sterilize it,” Shannon points out, gesturing to the remaining bottles of alcohol from the plane.
“I think it needs stitching,” Jessa says, grimacing apologetically at Brian. “You can’t leave a wound that big open, it won’t heal.”
“What are you gonna stitch it with?” Brian asks through gritted teeth. And Jessa disappears to rummage through the jumble of supplies in the overhead bin and returns apprehensively with one of those miniature courtesy sewing kits from the hotel.
“No. No way. You have got to be kidding me.”
“She’s right, Brian.” Elliot peeks again beneath the T-shirt swathing his leg. “If we leave it open like that, it’ll be infected within days.” And nobody says it, but they’re all thinking about Brian’s stupid joke about how it’ll be an infection that will kill one of them.
“The good thing is that the cut is quite clean, like it slashed you instead of chomping down. The edges look like they could be brought together fairly easily.”
Brian swallows heavily, turns his head away. But there’s nowhere to go, no escape from this. “Okay.” He grunts and lies back on the sand.
“Who’s going to do it?” Jessa holds out the sewing kit and they all stare at it, trembling slightly in her fingers. “Who knows how to sew?”
“Well, I’m out, obviously.” Jason shrugs.
“May makes her own clothes,” Shannon whispers.
May shudders. “Yeah, with a sewing machine. I only do the buttons by hand.”
“That’s still more sewing experience than the rest of us put together,” Jason points out, and they all turn to stare at her as she stands there, crowned with the soft rose of the evening sun, opening and closing her mouth. She reaches out reluctantly to take the needle, as if she’s in some kind of dream.
“Wait, put it in here first.” Shannon holds out one of the tiny liquor bottles, and they stuff the needle and thread in together, and Shannon puts the cap back on and shakes it for good measure. May takes another bottle and pours it all over her hands, scrubbing them together.
“Here.” Elliot hands two more bottles to Brian, who takes them without hesitation and gulps them both down. “This is going to hurt.” Elliot takes the last bottle and carefully empties it into the wound, sprinkling it over each section as if he’s seasoning some grotesque cut of meat. Brian gasps, his face contorted in pain, and Jason and Elliot sit on either side of him, placing their hands on his shoulders and his thighs, ready to keep him still.
“I’ll be as quick as I can,” May tells him. “Move out of the light,” she snaps at the others. “We’ve got to get this done before the sun goes down.”
But then she stops, needle poised above the glistening edge of the flesh, and Hayley sees her throat move as she swallows over and over.
“You can do this.” Jessa is beside her, her voice low and steady. “You are the strongest person I know. You can do this.”
And before she can change her mind, May has plunged the needle through the first slab of skin and into the other side, her fingers pinching the two pieces together, and pulled the thread tight.
Brian’s screams are guttural and ragged, quickly giving way to wet, heaving sobs. It’s not until he finally, mercifully passes out from the pain after the third or fourth stitch that Hayley takes a breath and realizes she has been biting the inside of her cheek so hard that she can taste blood.
It’s not pretty. But when May’s finished, the lips of the wound are tightly drawn together, puckered and lumpy. There is a horrible purple bruise blossoming across Brian’s calf, but it’s no longer bleeding, at least. They wrap it tightly in the cleanest T-shirts they can find and elevate it on a pile of stones in an attempt to prevent swelling and keep the wound out of the reach of sand and insects.
And it isn’t until Hayley’s in bed that night that she hears a sound she never thought she would hear: the quiet, shuddering noise of May crying into the night.