Reckless Girls(59)

“The fish,” I say, and Jake walks over, kicking at the ash and bones.

“Oh, that stupid fucker.” He sighs. “We told him, didn’t we? Bloody well told him.”

It seems clear now. Robbie was always trying to catch fish, and he finally had, but the wrong ones. It’s easy to imagine him, sick, poisoned, crawling over to that pool, drinking the brackish water in desperation—so weak he’d fallen facedown into the water, unable to lift his head.

An accident. A stupid, shitty accident.

But a reminder of how quickly this place turns on people.

How it eats them up.

“We have to tell someone,” I say, and Jake nods.

“Right, we’ll let the others know we found him.”

“Not just them,” I reply, frowning. “Like. We have to let … I don’t know, the coast guard or something know? People might be looking for him.”

“Lux, no one is looking for this sad bastard, I promise you that. Not our problem.”

The words are so cold that I almost take a step back. “We can’t just leave him here.” Jake sighs, reaching up to rub the back of his neck as he looks around. “Well, I’m not carrying him back to our beach, are you?”

“Don’t be a dick,” I snap, and he holds both hands out, walking toward me.

“Hey,” he says softly. “I’m sorry. But…”

He holds my shoulders, looking down into my eyes. “Lux, the guy was a creep, and possibly dangerous. You were right to worry he wasn’t really gone. But it’s not our fault he went and poisoned himself, and I’d be lying if I said we weren’t almost certainly better off for it. Surely you can see that.”

Part of me wants to recoil at Jake’s words, but the thing is … he’s right.

In a way, hadn’t this been what I wanted? That first morning after Robbie disappeared, when Jake had joked about getting a “hunting party” together, hadn’t something about that idea appealed to me, made me feel safer?

I feel myself nodding in agreement and let Jake pull me in, hugging me close.

“We’ll tell the others,” he repeats, “and when the ship gets here with the radios, we’ll let them know. There’s really nothing more we can do until then. Nothing more we should do.”

He’s right, and I know it.

“And the ship gets here when?” I ask. “Like, just a few more days now, right? A week?”

Jake still smells like salt and sea and me, and he rests his chin on the top of my head. “No more than a week. Maybe a couple of days longer, depending on how their sail goes, but soon.”

Soon.

Soon, there will be other people here. Soon, we can leave. Soon, Meroe Island will just be a memory, a weird story from my crazy twenties that I can tell at bars and around campfires.

I know I’ll never tell this part, though. Not me and Jake and this stolen afternoon, and not Robbie, lying on the jungle floor, my eyes drawn to his body over and over again as we turn to leave, watching until the jungle closes back around him.





TWENTY-FOUR





Brittany and Eliza are on the beach when we get back, and seeing Eliza makes my stomach churn with guilt. After finding Robbie’s body, I’d almost forgotten the shame I’d felt about Jake, and now, as she smiles brightly and waves, it all comes crashing back.

I’ve never been the kind of girl who went after someone else’s boyfriend. I’ve never cheated in my life. And I like Eliza. A lot.

“There you two are!” she calls out. “Brittany and I were about to go searching.”

Jesus, what if they had? What if they’d come across us when we were …

The idea makes my mouth go dry, my knees suddenly watery. How fucking stupid and selfish I’d been. How reckless.

“Where are Nico and Amma?” Jake asks, and Brittany sits up, sand clinging to her bare back.

“What’s going on?”

“Need to have something of a group meeting,” Jake replies, and Eliza stands, her smile fading.

“Jake, what’s happened?”

“Robbie,” is all he says, and then, thank god, Nico and Amma wander up before we have to go looking for them.

“Something up?” Nico asks, his eyes darting over to me.

We haven’t talked in days, and I honestly thought I’d miss him more, even though he’d hurt me. But the longer we’ve gone without speaking, the more I’ve begun to realize that Nico and I never really talked that much in the first place. Not about important things, or stuff that really mattered. Everything was vague, these rosy-tinted dreams with no concrete details that allowed us to project whatever we wanted onto each other, without ever needing to confront who we actually were, as a couple. Turns out, we weren’t right for one another. We never had been.

Amma is just behind him, her face hidden by her huge sunglasses, her lower lip caught between her teeth as she crosses her arms tightly over her torso. I can’t see her eyes, but I know she’s looking at me.

“Robbie’s dead,” I say, the words falling out of my mouth like stones.

Jake glances over at me, eyebrows raised. “No beating around the bush for Miss McAllister,” he says, even as Brittany says, “What?” and Eliza sucks in a breath.