Page 24 of The Compound

Tom, on the other hand, was more practical, and didn’t like small talk. Tom didn’t like most kinds of talk, actually. But he was more reliable than Andrew: if you asked Andrew for help or advice he often spoke a great deal about what could be done, and then got distracted on the way to fixing the problem. Andrew left you motivated but no further along with what you had wanted to achieve. Tom generally tried to solve the problem on the spot, and if he couldn’t do it himself he delegated it to someone else. He was good at that: people generally liked it when Tom came to them and asked for their assistance. He often went to Jacintha, who had a quick mind and could turn her hand to anything. Sam had similar skills to Jacintha, but Tom very rarely went to him to ask for help.

Tom only occasionally delegated jobs to me. I didn’t mind. I didn’t want any more work todo.

That first day after the meeting we had a breakfast of bananas and coffee, and completed our first task quickly and painlessly: in exchange for a shelving unit, we had to swap our clothes with a member of the opposite sex. Because Ryan was so much bigger than me, I swapped with Seb, who, with a hangdog face, took my leggings and T-shirt and gave me his shorts and T-shirt. The shelves were of a decent size, and Andrew and Tom decided to place them in the hallway, by the entrance. Some people put their shoes on the lower shelf, and others put sunscreen and hats and aloe vera on the other shelves. It gave our entrance a homey feel, even if the absence of the door took away from the general effect.

Then we were instructed to compliment each resident of the compound, in exchange for a net for cleaning the pool. We were placed in an assembly line, the boys standing still and the girls moving to the right each time. I moved along, giving and receiving compliments without much thought, eager to get to Ryan.

“You have gorgeous hair,” Ryan said when I reached him.

I had my compliment for him ready to go. “You have the best body of anyone here,” I said.

He smiled widely at that, looking the most pleased I had ever seen him. “I work out,” he said modestly, as if it was something I didn’t know, as if I didn’t see him lifting weights for hours a day and doing press-ups before he came to bed.

Jacintha nudged me, and I moved on to the next person. I wasn’t looking forward to complimenting Sam. I had seen him that morning, on the way to breakfast, and had given him one of my curated, customer-service smiles, but he hadn’t looked at me at all. I didn’t like the way that we’d left things.

When I’d received the necklace from my chute after our conversation, I’d initially felt guilty. But when I checked the brand I saw that it was Dorian, a luxury brand that everyone knew and admired. Already the prizes were becoming valuable and worth the risk. “Thank you so much, Dorian, for this beautiful necklace,” I said to the camera. “It’s perfect. I can wear it with any outfit.” I felt that I had sounded stiff, so I showed it to the girls in the dressing room, making sure to mention the name of the brand. Mia had admired it, fingering the cool metal. “Real gold,” she said. Candice had met my eye in the mirror. “Good girl,” she said.

I decided I would give Sam a nice compliment, and we could smooth things over. But when I reached him, he spoke before I could.

“You have nice skin,” he said, voice so flat and empty that it entirely negated the meaning of the words. And what kind of compliment was that, anyway? At once, my goodwill left me. I stayed standing there for so long that Jacintha had to nudge me again.

“Can’t think of anything?” Sam said, impassive. My compliment that I had prepared for him had been that I liked that he fixed things without anyone asking. Andrew liked to loudly announce that he was getting to work whenever he was presented with a job, and Jacintha sometimes complained that she got stuck with all of the most menial tasks. Sam generally fixed the problem before anyone else had noticed it. But I felt irrationally cheapened by the fact that he had given me such a superficial compliment. I had expected it from Ryan, because I knew that he liked me most of all for my beauty, and that, to me, was okay: my beauty was what I prized the most too, and the only thing about me which I expected to draw a response. But for some reason, from Sam it felt like an insult.

“You’re tall,” I said, and movedon.

We did one more task (we had to reveal our favorite alcoholic beverage in unison in exchange for bleach) and then took a break for lunch.Although we had finished the three Communal Tasks faster than ever thanks to Tom and Andrew, we were disappointed that none of the rewards involved food. The remaining bread was divided into sixteen pieces and drizzled with honey. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it wasn’t filling either. We finished quickly but were reluctant to return to the tasks. We sat in the shade sleepily until Andrew and Tom called us to the front yard.

“All right, everyone,” Andrew said. “Two more tasks, and then we can take a break.”

“Two tasks and then we’re done, right?” Sarah asked.

“That’s what I’d like, for sure,” Andrew said. “But we need to get food.”

For our next task, we got a roll of tape in exchange for revealing the names of our grandparents. For our fifth task, we got an extra pillow for each of us, in exchange for climbing onto the roof of the house. This one took a while, and Andrew and Tom let us look at our little screens while they arranged the mechanics of us gettingup there.

My Personal Task was to dance in front of at least one other person in exchange for a pair of shoes. I considered the task, and what they wanted me to do: what the viewers or producers wanted to see. It might have been that they wanted something sexual, a dance for Ryan, maybe, or something to catch the attention of the other boys, something to mark me as a provocative presence in the compound. Or it was just as possible that they were trying to present me as a comic figure, and that the viewers would be laughing at me, dancing for a pair of shoes like a jester in the court of a king. For the first time since I had been there, I considered not doing a task.

At last, it was arranged that the boys would climb on top of the dining chairs, and from there, hoist us girls up. There would be one person already on the roof, who would pull us up one at a time if necessary. Tom would take that role; he was by the far the strongest resident, but he wasn’t particularly tall. Carlos, the tallest, boosted Tom onto the roof, steepling his fingers together as a step. He grunted when Tom stepped into his hands, and it looked as though it would be too much—but Sam stepped in and helped to push Tom upward. Carlos then lifted Becca from the ground—she was so tiny even I could have lifted her—andrather than offering the steepled fingers, he simply lifted her toward Tom, who leaned off the roof and plucked her up as though she were a rag doll. If anyone else noticed how uncomfortable Becca was in Tom’s grasp, no one mentionedit.

We all went, one at a time, first the girls, and then the boys, until only Evan remained. I wondered at first if it was wise, but Evan was lithe and agile, and launched himself from the chair to the waiting hands of Carlos and Tom.

Once we all were up there, we got as comfortable as we could and looked at the view before us. It was beautiful, in its own way. Beyond the compound, there were great stretches of desert plain, but far, far beyond was a blur of vegetation, trees, and bushes. I thought that there was some red plant growing there, and said so, but Carlos, who was sitting beside me, looked at me in confusion and said, “Those are bushfires.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It’s the heat,” he said. “They might have been burning for hours, or even days. They won’t reach us, though.”

We stayed up there for longer than we should have, our voices overlapping, chatting about nothing in particular. It was easier now, to talk without revealing personal information. It limited your conversation, but if you just emptied your brain and said whatever came to mind, it was enjoyable in its own way.

At some point, Vanessa and Sarah went down and stacked the dining chairs on top of each other as a makeshift ladder. They brought the chocolate we had been saving, dividing it among us with benevolent expressions, like nuns bestowing blessings. I had eaten that exact brand of chocolate a thousand times, but it tasted better than I ever could recall.

The sun was setting, and it, too, was as I had never seen it before: a fantastical dusty purple sky, splashes of rich oranges, all pressing against that endless stretch of flat plain. There were mountains to the southeast, cast in a rich indigo glow.

Candice and Carlos scrambled down and brought our dinner up to us, too: a selection of potatoes, cooked as many ways as they could manage. There was salt and some butter, and some people drizzled honey on theirs, though I didn’t try it myself. Sitting together on the roof was thenicest time we’d had since coming to the compound, I think because we were somewhere familiar but different: we had by now explored everything within the perimeter, and there was a novelty in being on the roof that was, in some small, vital way, intoxicating.

It was easier to come down off the roof, but the boys made a fuss of depositing us individually. It was dark, and we were still in a fine humor. Ryan had his arm around my shoulders, and on my other side Evan was chattering in my ear. The others walked toward the house, but I walked over to the pool, which was now a silvery blue, lit by lights I hadn’t realized were there. The light rippled and refracted with the slight movement of the water.

“Jacintha,” I called softly. She was nearby, talking to Marcus. It was obvious that he liked her from the way that he was smiling at her. Carlos was talking to Evan, but was glancing frequently at Marcus and Jacintha. I was glad that Marcus and Carlos were fighting over her: it made a mockery of her being placed sixth in the attractiveness ranking. Jacintha had told me that she’d put the ranking out of her head, but I thought about it all the time.

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