Page 79 of The Compound

“I have a knife,” Tom said. “If you get out of bed suddenly, I will use it.”

I stared at the ceiling and thought of home. It seemed a hazy thing to me now. Was it better than this, or worse? I wondered if Sam was watching. I wondered what he thought of me now.

“I think,” Tom said, after a long stretch of silence, “we could live together, for a while. We could keep to ourselves. We wouldn’t have to see each other.”

I wasn’t sure if Tom actually meant this, or if he wanted to lull me into a false sense of security. I thought uneasily of Becca, how he liked to have her around, even when she openly despised him. I wondered if Tom felt better about himself if there was a girl always on the periphery, asking him for help and telling him he was capable and strong. “Tom,” I said. “I fucking loathe you. You’re a psychopath. I don’t want to live with you. As soon as Andrew’s back, we’re going to banish you.”

Tom didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “Do you think Andrew would choose you over me?”

“Didn’t you and Andrew have a fight in the desert? Over who would be the one in charge?”

“You don’t understand the laws of men. It’s easier to sort it out in the desert, where a man can be a man, rather than in here.”

“I heard you were like a pair of animals. You don’t actually think you could live with Andrew?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t. I’d make sure he was banished, soon.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “The laws of men, right?”

“When you went into the pool naked all those weeks ago, did you do it for me?”

I turned to him. In the dark, I could only see his enormous outline. He was looking up at the ceiling, I thought, but I couldn’t make out the expression on his face. I felt a brief, terrible sense of pity for him, along with revulsion.

“No,” I said. “It was for a personal challenge. I didn’t realize you were there.”

He was quiet for a moment. “I don’t like you, Lily. But I had wondered. I thought that maybe…the skinny-dipping, the parading around in your tiny shorts and bikinis…And when you broke my record player, I was angry, but I wondered if you did it to get my attention, like a girl in the schoolyard. You are very girlish, you know. I think that’s why so many of the boys looked out for you. Well, I’m glad that you don’t like me, that you weren’t attracted to me, because I never liked you like that. The truth is, I don’t really like girls generally—not to be around, at least. I like them in my bed: I liked Vanessa in my bed. Becca was a good girl, I thought, but I was wrong about her. You never are good girls, are you?”

I rolled away so I wouldn’t have to look at him.

How was Tom still here? A couple of seasons ago, there had been a girl on the show who was a pathological liar, and we, the viewers, all hated her; there was enough public response that the producers listened. Sure enough, there were challenges designed to out her secrets, to expose her, and she was quickly banished. Another year, there was a boy who was so obnoxious and so boring that we said over and over that we wanted him gone, and then, the following week, he was banished, too. Mostly the residents had control, but sometimes if the public disliked someone enough, the producers would figure out a way to nudge them out. Thinking of Candice, how she left almost immediately after the challenge that revealed that Andrew was cheating, I wondered if the public didn’t like her—if the challenge had been orchestrated to banish her.

But why was Tom still here? There was likely a group of viewers who disliked him—but there must have been another group of people who wanted him to stay; people who agreed with him, who saw something in him that they liked.

Why was I still here, then? Pretty and guileless: no one to even do makeup for anymore.

I woke up the next morning, the sun at a low angle through the skylight, Tom still snoring, and I knew what to do: a plan already perfectly formed in my head, dropping from nowhere, like a reward.

—

We kept to ourselvesfor most of the morning, Tom in the gray room and me loitering outside. I was bringing things into the house as covertly as I could, glancing at the door to the gray room in trepidation. In the afternoon, I knocked onit.

“Enter,” he said.

He had taken the rug from the living room and put it in the gray room, his room. The nice lamp that had been in the boys’ dressing room was in there too, black and brass. It clashed with everything else he kept there, but I could see why he wanted it: it was the nicest light in the house by far. He had found accoutrements to put on his desk to disguise the fact that the desk had no purpose: he had no laptop or writing materials or books, but he had a map of a distant territory. With some bitterness I reflected that Tom, like Mia, would be bringing home with him not just his own rewards, but things we had gotten from Communal Tasks. He was strong enough, too: he would be able to carry twice as much as I could, maybe more.

He looked at me expectantly.

“If I cook dinner,” I said, “will you fix the window that Sam broke?” Sam had covered it with a tarp, but it needed to be properly fixed.

“I don’t have the right materials. There’s no glass to replace it,” he said. I waited, shifting my weight from left foot to right foot. “But, I suppose I could board it up,” he said. “It wouldn’t look great, but it’d be better than nothing.” He threw an irritated look out the window. “All of my Personal Tasks recently have been related to renovation or construction. It’s starting to annoy me.”

That surprised me a little. Tom wasn’t particularly good at construction. Nearly all of my Personal Tasks had involved me speaking to someone, and generally making a fool of myself, or doing silly things that I didn’t want to do. I wondered if people wanted to see Tom at work, and to see me humiliated.

He thought for a few more moments. “What will you make?”

“Steak,” I said. “You can have it when you’re done.”

—

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