Page 15 of The Compound

Tom didn’t go into the house, but back behind, to the delivery area. By the time Becca and I got out of the pool, his watery footprints had dried under the heat of the sun.

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I didn’t lookat my little screen that day; I had no desire to after the tiring afternoon. Becca neglected to come to the house for several hours, and we abandoned the idea of completing any more Communal Tasks that evening.

The boys were on cooking duty, while the girls stayed outside. Candice, Susie, Jacintha, Mia, and I sat under a tree and chatted.

“Well,” Mia said, settling back on her elbows. “What do we think of the boys?”

“I think Tom’s kind of sexy,” Susie said.

“He nearly drowned Becca,” I said.

“Did he? I still want to get to know him, though.”

“Evan can’t keep his eyes off of you. Stay away from Tom. Stick with Evan,” Candice said.

Susie shrugged and picked up a few strands of my hair, her fingers soft and sweet-smelling, a fine residue of sun cream lingering on them. She plaited my hair with a gentle touch, and I felt myself growing sleepy.

“What do you think of Ryan?” Candice askedme.

“I think I like him,” I said.

“He’s gorgeous,” Candice said, but there was something about the way she said it, like she was comfortingme.

“You two are good together,” Mia said decisively. “And a good win for you, getting the best-looking boy.”

“Ryan’s lucky to have Lily,” Jacintha said tartly. “Not the other way around.”

Casually, I said, “He’s pretty nice, I think. He’s easy to talk to.”

“What do you think his job is?” Candice asked. We were forbidden to discuss our own personal lives outside of the compound, but we were welcome to speculate on anyone else’s.

I thought about it for a moment. “Doctor?”

“He’s not a doctor,” Mia said, so dismissively that I felt foolish for having suggestedit.

“What do you think Andrew is?” Jacintha asked.

“Oh, that’s easy,” I said. “He’s a project manager.”

Candice laughed. “Why do you think so? I thought he might be a lawyer, maybe, or a politician. He’s good at convincing people to do things.”

“Not as good as Tom,” Mia said. Candice smiled tightly at her.

“Andrew’s definitely a project manager. I can see him so clearly, going around the office, making sure everyone’s got everything they need, then asking you to stay late. But, like, he’d make you want to stay late,” I said.

Candice smiled at me in a noticeably more congenial way than she had looked at Mia. I felt warm under her regard. She was wearing sunglasses that she must have won in a task. They were cheap and flimsy, and not particularly stylish, but at this point we couldn’t be picky. “I think you’re probably right.” She looked thoughtful for a moment, and we waited for her to speak. “He’s very enthusiastic,” she said cryptically.

“You mean in bed?” Susie asked.

Candice frowned at Susie disapprovingly. “Of course not. What do you take me for? I mean…I mean that he’s enthusiastic about the compound. About people. He likes to get stuck into things.” I understood what she wasn’t saying: Andrew would commit to her, if she could get him interested.

“Do you think that any of the boys…?” I said, trailing off. I paused, trying to decide what I wanted to say, and whether I should say it. I wanted to ask the girls if they thought that any of the boys had fought in the wars. My father was fighting overseas, and I found it difficult, in the safe, ordinary life that I had, to actually visualize it; I had seen images and videos on the television and online, of course, but they had never felt real to me. I preferred personal accounts: my neighbor had once casually mentioned that when he was fighting he went six weeks without seeing a bar of soap. I found it easier to construct an account of what my father might be doing around the image of the bar of soap. Repeatedly, almostobsessively, I imagined him in a number of different scenarios, at last coming across the soap; I imagined, in some iterations, that the sight of it moved him to tears. My father had been gone long enough that I’d stopped expecting him to come home, but I liked to collect the experiences of other soldiers and pretend that they were his.

The girls waited for me to finish my train of thought. Then I remembered that I didn’t want to think about any of that. I didn’t want to be reminded of the realities of what we’d left behind. I smiled and shook my head to signal to ignore me, and the girls moved on with a speed that made me suspect they knew what I had wanted to ask, and they, too, thought it better to moveon.

“Isn’t Seb so boring?” Mia said. “I’ve never met anyone so dull. He just looks miserable all the time.”

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