Reckless Girls(60)

Nico rubs the back of his neck the way he does when he’s nervous. “Jesus, seriously?”

“He was camping in the jungle,” I go on, still seeing his body lying there, the bottom of that one shoe. “Like I’d thought. Looks like he caught some of those fish out in the lagoon. The really colorful ones?”

“The poisonous ones,” Jake adds. “So yeah. Thus goeth Robbie.”

“Fuck,” Nico says on an exhale. “What are we going to do about it?”

“The ship with the radios gets here in the next week or so,” Jake says, shrugging. “We’ll let them know. I didn’t find any ID in his stuff, and fuck knows where he’s anchored his boat. We’ll let someone else worry about that.”

“Well,” Eliza says, hands on her hips. “I wish I could say I was sorry about it, but the guy was a certified wanker.”

She sounds like she’s mimicking Jake as she says it, her normally crisp inflections sliding into the wider vowels of his Aussie accent for a second.

“How did you two find him?”

Amma is definitely looking at me now, and I make myself meet her gaze.

“We were just checking out the jungle,” I say, willing myself not to blush, for my eyes not to slide guiltily to Eliza.

“A man can only take so much sun and sand before he has to go adventuring,” Jake agrees, nodding, and he’s so casual, so light, giving nothing away.

“God, you poor thing,” Eliza clucks, coming forward to chafe her hands up and down my arms. “That must’ve been awful to see.”

I don’t deserve her sympathy right now, but I take it anyway.

“It was, yeah. But like you said, he wasn’t a good dude, and like Jake said, we’ve … we’ve done all we can do, really.”

“Do you know what we need?” Eliza says, wrapping her arms around me from the back. “We need a party.”

“Because a guy died?” Amma speaks for the first time, and her voice is icy. Eliza shakes her head, her hair brushing over my shoulders.

“Nothing that morbid, love. It’s just that … look, can we all admit it’s been a shitty few days? We’ve all been off in our own little worlds, there’s been all this tension, and we’ve still got a week or so to wait here. We can’t keep going like this. So, I say we loosen up a bit, hmm?”

Leaning forward, she playfully presses a kiss to my cheek. “Lux? Party?”

It feels wrong and macabre, but it’s not like anything else sounds better. Besides, it is really appealing to imagine recreating those first few days on Meroe, before Robbie showed up, before everything got so fucked.

A reset.

“I don’t know that a bonfire and a few bottles of wine can help that much,” Amma says now, still looking over at me.

“Oh darling,” Eliza says, winking at me. “We’ve got something much better than wine.”



* * *



THAT NIGHT, WE BUILD A huge bonfire, so big that as I stand next to it, watching the flames crawl up toward the sky, I’m actually a little afraid.

I imagine an ember, a spark, catching the leaves overhead, fire leaping from branch to branch, all of Meroe Island instantly aflame.

The image is so clear that I can almost see it, which is when I know that I am really fucked up.

I stay away from drugs for the most part, but after a day where my nerves felt like they had been scraped over barbed wire, oblivion had sounded nice. The thick, sweet smell of hash hangs over all of us, and my limbs are heavy with it as I flop onto the sand next to Brittany.

Or who I think is Brittany.

But it’s Amma, her eyes dark and shining in the firelight.

“You,” I say, studying her, and her eyes seem even shinier all of a sudden, like she might start crying.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “About Nico. I … I told you he reminded me of Sterling, and I was telling him about everything, and it just happened, and—”

“Sterling?” I giggle. “Your dead boyfriend was named Sterling?”

I don’t know why that’s suddenly so funny to me, but it is, Amma and Sterling, like something out of a WASP fever dream, and I fall back on the sand, helpless with laughter.

“You clearly have some kind of rich boy fetish,” I tease her, once I catch my breath. She gives a little sheepish laugh and lies down next to me.

“This is weird,” she says, and then raises her voice, shouting, “This is weird!”

That makes me laugh even more, and I look up at the sky, too, the stars tilting and swirling around us. “Everything here is weird!” I yell back, and then I feel like I’m laughing too hard, like at any moment, it will give way to tears.

I don’t want to cry, so I stand up, pulling Amma to her feet, too, our hands sweaty as we clasp each other, turning in a slow circle.

Can’t I forgive her? Haven’t I done the same thing to Eliza? And how can it matter when we’re here in this place where nothing is real?

Across the fire, Nico sits alone, and Jake is sitting there with Eliza, and it’s just like our first night all over again—except I had been with Nico, and Jake was just the cute guy with the nice girlfriend, and how did it all get so fucked up so fast?

Amma pulls away from me, giggling, collapsing onto the sand, and suddenly Eliza is there, too—how did she move so fast? Wasn’t she just sitting with Jake? But no, now Brittany is standing in the shadows, while Nico takes another hit from the joint Jake is holding.