Page 12 of The Compound

As we were speaking, the other girls were putting the work in. I saw Becca’s serious little face nodding at whatever Gav was saying, and Vanessa touching Seb’s arm as she spoke. Curiously, I saw Andrew moving around constantly, talking to everyone, boys and girls. Every time I looked up, I saw his dimples flashing, his white teeth gleaming. He talked a lot, and after listening to him speak I realized that he had a habit of using big words incorrectly.

“Look at that view!” I heard him shout. “Isn’t it just extrapolate?” I thought it might be obnoxious in someone else, but it lent a certain guilelessness that was distinctly charming. The girls were working hard because they needed to secure a bedmate in order to avoid banishment; Andrew was working just as hard, I think, because he had the compulsive desire to be liked. He charmed with the energy and desperation of someone who thought that they might be gone by the morning.

The evening had started to draw in, and empty bottles of champagne were rolling along the ground. We moved from the seats in the dining area to the grass near the pool. I sat beside Susie and Evan, and Ryan sat behind me, his arm brushing against my side every now and then. “Isn’t it crazy that the boys only came today?” Susie said to me. “I feel like I’ve known them forever.” Evan was biting his lip and looking at Susie as though she was a fish who could free herself from the hook.

The night became loose and hazy: it seemed to take very little for us to get drunk.

“It’s because we’re dehydrated,” Jacintha said. “We should all drink more water before we go to bed.” Marcus scooped her up and threw her in the pool. We all laughed, and Marcus jumped in after her. Carlos stood by the side and helped her out. Evan jumped in then, and Susie, too, holding her hair on the crown of her head.

On the grass, Mia started to sing. She had a sweet, liquid voice. She sang a song we all knew, and some people sang along. The temperature had dropped and we huddled close, lying on top of each other, limbs pressed against limbs. Mia sat apart, still singing, with a blank face unlike her usual self. She was beautiful, Mia. I felt sure that she would be here in the morning.

Ryan adjusted himself so that I was lying against him. I closed my eyes. His abs were like rocks against my head. “This is perfect,” I said, and he stroked my hair. It was smooth to the touch, still, after the rigorous brushing.

Later, I got into my bed and felt the turnings of the universe in my head. I rolled onto my side and pulled the blanket up to my chin. With the boys milling around in the dark, choosing their bedmates, the room felt enormously full. I was sleepy, but overwhelmingly alert, too.

The bed dipped to my right. I turned, and Ryan was there. We had no light in the bedrooms, but I could distinguish him by the shape of his nose, and that sharp, slashing jawline. There was a brief beat of silence between us, a moment of uncertainty. Then he put his hand on my waist. “Surprised?” he said.

“Not really,” I said.

I knew that I had done well to have the best-looking boy in my bed. I lay on my back, so I could see him from the corner of my eye. I was reminded again that I didn’t know him—didn’t know anyone there. I imagined him rising above me, his hands pinning me down, and myself powerless to stop him. But it was only a passing thought. When I glanced over, I saw that he was tense, his large hands clasped across his stomach. The sight of his nervous posture relaxed me. It took me a long time to fall asleep, but when I did, I slept deeply and dreamlessly.

The following morning, when the sun had risen and the birds were circling in the air, there was an empty bed in the compound, and Melissa was gone.

Three

We slept in the nextmorning. I felt shy around Ryan when I woke up. I worried that I had drunk too much the night before and had come across as silly. The bedroom had a skylight, but otherwise no source of light, and I could only see who was sharing a bed with whom when the sun had fully risen. Andrew was with Candice, Jacintha with Carlos, Susie with Evan, Mia with Marcus, Eloise with Gav, Seb with Sarah, Tom with Vanessa, and Sam with Becca. Despite the fact that I was coupled with the best-looking boy, it felt wrong that Sam should be with anyone other thanme.

The charm of the night before was decidedly gone, and the mess of dishes in the kitchen and abandoned glasses in the garden disgusted me. We had coffee and cleaned up a bit, then lay in the shade and chatted a little. When we were feeling more amenable, we turned our attention to the first Communal Task of the day. Now that the imminent threat of banishment was gone, we had time to focus on improving the compound. We reckoned if we stayed focused we could get three tasks done by midafternoon, with the option to do more later in the day if we felt like it. We all agreed to leave our Personal Tasks until after the Communal Tasks were done; easy enough when the rewards were still of such a low value.

Our first task was so simple that we carried it out in a matter of minutes: we only had to name our favorite actor. For this, we got an enormous crate of bananas, which we ate while sitting in the shade.

The next task took longer, but for it we earned a bug zapper. This pleased Susie in particular who told us all, more than once, that she couldn’t understand why there were so many insects: wasn’t the desert supposed to bedevoidof life? To earn it, we had to recite a poem inunison. We spent the majority of the morning on that task. We weren’t sure, at first, that any of us knew a poem by heart. Carlos knew about ninety percent of a poem by Keats, but couldn’t remember two lines in the second verse, and Mia knew a short poem, but Seb figured if we only managed a three-line poem, we’d get “an unbelievably shitty bug zapper.” I thought that they were probably embarrassed that they didn’t know a poem by heart, and we spent some time walking around and reciting quotes that we could remember, muttering fragments of Wordsworth and Shakespeare, never managing more than a few lines. Only Ryan looked relaxed, lying in the grass, having announced as soon as he had seen the screen that he didn’t know a single poem.

Then Becca, having not spoken for several hours, recited a poem by Rilke, short enough that we could memorize it, and long enough that we felt that we would earn something worthy. We cheered her on, and Susie and I tucked flowers behind her ears; Candice kissed her on the forehead. We had her repeat it any number of times, until we all knew it. It took some time: we had no pen or paper and had to rely on memory alone. I can remember it perfectly—the words, and the way that Becca said them, sitting cross-legged in the grass, her face young and open. “It is life in slow motion,” she recited, and we listened to her in perfect silence, listened to her repeat it again and again until we could say it ourselves.

It is life in slow motion,

it’s the heart in reverse,

it’s a hope-and-a-half:

too much and too little at once.

It’s a train that suddenly

stops with no station around,

and we can hear the cricket,

and, leaning out the carriage

door, we vainly contemplate

a wind we feel that stirs

the blooming meadows, the meadows

made imaginary by this stop.

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