When I got to the bathroom, Ryan was just pulling back the sheet, steam billowing behind him. There was a towel wrapped around his waist—we had recently earned a luxury towel each with our names embroidered along the edge. He looked surprised to see me, and I realized—too late—that I must have looked strange, waiting for him outside the bathroom.
“This is a nice surprise,” he said. “Were you planning to accost me in the shower?”
“No,” I said, though my cheeks heated. He laughed at the look on my face. “What’s up?”
“Nothing. I just was wondering where you were.”
“You’re not worried about tonight, are you?”
I looked up at him. There was no point in lying. “Of course I am.”
“You have nothing to worry about, as long as I’m here,” he said, and kissed me on the forehead. He smelled of the body wash that we all used, a giant container of it left behind by other residents, mild and grapefruit-scented. He had smelled differently last night, when I was curled aroundhim. I wanted that: I wanted to be close to him.
“Kiss me,” I said. He put his hand on my back and pulled me close, and as his lips touched mine, I felt an immense sweep of relief: not because it was a particularly special kiss, or because I wanted him, but because I knew that he wanted me. As long as Ryan wanted me, I was safe. I only had to keep a firm hold of him until the final five, when couples no longer mattered, and no one was banished if they slept alone. But it could be a long time until then, weeks or months, and I needed to be sure that I had someone who would stick byme.
Ryan changed into his swim trunks, and took my hand and walked around the compound with me. Everyone was busy, even if it looked as though they were idle. In previous seasons of the show some people had stayed with the same person from the first night, and others changed, looking for the right person, whether as a strategic choice or out of genuine interest. Strategic pairings rarely lasted long. Sharing a bed was not simple, even if you only slept. I liked Ryan: I liked sleeping next to him. But still, there had been a couple of times I had woken up in confusion to find a mouth breathing next to my ear. When I thought of having to share with Seb or Evan I felt vaguely disgusted. There was nothing wrong with them; I just didn’t want them.
There was something sad about seeing some of the girls trying to keep their place in the compound. Tom, peeling an orange and sitting in the grass, didn’t even look at Susie as she told him about her favorite brands of perfume. When he had finished his fruit, he got to his feet and left. The sight of her sitting alone might have been terrible, except that Evan came to her side almost immediately. He took her to the trampoline, lifting her up in a gentlemanly fashion. He bounced with great enthusiasm and some skill, performing tumbles in the air, artistic backflips and ambitious triple bounces. Susie bounced lethargically beside him, arms limp by her side.
The sight of them reminded me of how desperately I had wanted a trampoline as a child. We lived in a densely populated area where I could see trampolines dotted across neighboring gardens. Seized by an envy which nearly overcame me, I spent weeks pooling all of my money, every coin I had, given to me by a kindly relative or left over from my lastbirthday. I gathered all of it, and presented it to my mother triumphantly. She opened a toy catalogue that had been my personal bible, particularly around birthdays and Christmas. She showed me the price of a trampoline, and then told me how much I had. “Do you see?” she had said. “Do you see how you’re not even close?” The fact that the trampoline seemed so out of reach only increased my desire for it. I hated to go outside and see my neighbors happily bouncing through the air. I abhorred their spinning and tumbling.
Then, a few months later, for my birthday, there it was, outside, on our ordinary, plain little patch of grass. I screamed. I remember it so clearly: I stood in the doorway and shrieked with excitement. I bounced for hours that night and for every night that week, until the top of my head ached and dew started to coat the nylon. I ran around its circumference, my feet so quick, so light, and catapulted through the air: backflips, tumbles, belly flops—all of these fantastical contortions that had been previously unavailabletome.
But after about three weeks I lost interest. I didn’t particularly want to go on the trampoline anymore. Since I knew exactly how much it had cost—the number rattled around constantly in my head—I felt an immense sense of guilt that I had tired of it so quickly. I made a point to go out a couple of times a week, but it felt, more than anything, like work. More time passed, and my mother asked me nearly daily, with a sort of savagery, if I had been out on the trampoline that day. I’d tell her that I was going out, definitely. “You’d better,” she’d reply.
The dreariness of it, then. The tumbles and the flips felt like a tax I had to pay. I regarded my bouncing neighbors with disinterest. Within a year, I no longer played on it at all, and within a few years the springs became rusted, and my mother threw it out when a skip appeared on the street. I was glad to see it go: there was something about it that made me weary—how fiercely I had wanted it, and how quickly I tired of it. I wanted to recount this memory to Ryan, but it wasn’t allowed, and besides I don’t think it would have meant anything to him.
When we passed by the ping-pong tables I saw Candice talking to Carlos, but by the time we had circled back around the compound she was sitting with Andrew, under his arm. He was stroking her hair, hereyes closed.
Ryan made a point of saying hi to the others. I knew that he was showing everyone—myself included—that we would be sharing a bed together that night. In previous years, fights had occasionally broken out in the middle of the night as a boy tried to usurp the place of someone else. I didn’t generally like possessiveness, but you had to be definitive about your choice on the show. People changed their minds quickly, and if you got too relaxed someone might swoop in and steal your bedmate. I knew that Ryan was being primitive, in a way, but I can’t say that it didn’t pleaseme.
—
Later, in bed,I could hear the sounds of movement long into the night. Someone would be banished at sunrise, and not a minute before. I didn’t know if the sounds were caused by people finding comfort in each other, swapping of beds, or if there were girls begging quietly to not be left alone. Whatever it was, the following morning Eloise was gone, and the numbers were even again.
Five
The next day we realizedthat we were running out of food. When we had arrived we had roughly estimated that the kitchen’s contents would last us two weeks, but we had vastly underestimated just how much the boys ate in a day. We now had only two loaves of bread, both of which were hard but still edible, a couple dozen bananas, some vegetables, a bottle of honey, and a large bar of chocolate. It was unclear how things had dwindled so quickly. I secretly suspected that someone had been getting up in the night to eat.
The lack of food worried us and led to the calling of a meeting. It was Andrew who gathered us all together. He was wearing a shirt and trousers, a little too overdressed for the heat, and I wondered if he had changed for the occasion.
“First of all, thank you to Sarah and Vanessa for alerting us to the dwindling food supplies. The most important thing that happens in the compound is cooperation, so we’re all going to have to pitch in to make it through the next day or so, and to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.
“Vanessa and Sarah, I’m going to put you in charge of food. This will involve divvying up the portions to last us until tomorrow. We’re going to have to do as many tasks as we possibly can today in the hopes that one of the rewards will be food. Even then, we’re going to have to be careful. Going forward, Vanessa and Sarah will be in charge of inventorying the food and dividing the portions.” At this, Sarah looked around, as though daring us to argue. We all stayed quiet, waiting to hear what our roles wouldbe.
“While we’re sorting this out, we need to establish a better way of maintaining the compound. The place is getting dirty and disorganized. At present, there’s sixteen people living here. I’m dividing the jobs into eight categories, and I’m going to need volunteers for each group. Let’s call them departments, for the sake of clarity. Raise your hand if you’d like to volunteer for a department.”
Generally, in seasons past, everyone fended for themselves, pitching in as they could, although inevitably some people pulled their weight more than others. While I didn’t relish the idea of having an assigned job (hadn’t we come here for a break from all of that?), I was slightly smug at how organized and competent we all must have appeared. I thought of the contestants from five years ago, who the media had called the Sloppy Seven. When they first arrived, they had been moderately untidy, but grew progressively worse as they fell out with each other. Then there were only seven residents left, but none of them seemed to like each other, and, in a breathtaking display of mutual passive aggression, they all stopped cleaning entirely to try to smoke each other out. They lived in genuine filth—overflowing toilets, maggots on the counters, mice in the beds—until one day they collectively decided to leave rather than to fix the mess they had made. When the next set of contestants arrived and saw the place they had cried. Two of them left immediately. It was a real hoot.
I don’t know if the others were thinking of the Sloppy Seven, too, or if they just agreed with the familiar structure of industry, but no one protested against Andrew’s proposed departments. As Andrew was speaking Tom stood quietly beside him, once or twice jumping in when Andrew had lost track of who had what job, and I suspected that Tom was likely responsible for thinking up the division of labor. I wondered, had it been Tom who proposed the idea, in his stoic, serious way, if we would have questioned it; Andrew had presented the idea with such enthusiasm and confidence that it felt like we were all collaborating on a fun project rather than being instructed to carry out manual labor.
The departments were as follows: Food Organization and Preservation: Vanessa and Sarah; Food Preparation: Candice and Carlos; Cleaning (Kitchen and Living Room): Becca and me; Cleaning (Bathroom andBedroom): Mia and Seb; Communal Task Managers and Reward Distribution: Tom and Andrew; Yard and Pool Maintenance: Ryan and Marcus; Safety and Well-Being: Susie and Evan; Repairs and Construction: Jacintha and Sam.
Andrew and Tom’s roles placed them in a leadership position, a decision which no one questioned. It made sense to me at the time: Andrew presented a compelling argument, and Tom the gravitas to make it seem like he knew what he was doing. I thought that Candice looked a little put out, and the truth was that if I had to vote for someone to lead operations at the compound, it would have been her. But she hadn’t volunteered for the role, so I kept quiet.
With the responsibilities thus divided, our home became infinitely more livable. I hadn’t really noticed how run-down the place had been getting until we began living in a structured manner. It meant we didn’t have as much leisure time, but Tom and Andrew organized a schedule so that we would always, without fail, finish a minimum of five Communal Tasks, with an aim of finishing seven if time allowed. They took to their new roles with a committed zeal that encouraged the rest of us to take our own roles seriously. If I was in the kitchen and someone else was there, I tried to always have a sponge at hand so that I looked busy.
Andrew was boundlessly enthusiastic and liked to give pep talks before tasks. “Just think about all the things we could achieve,” he liked to say, gesturing around him. Even when he wasn’t organizing a task, he was always “on,” walking around the compound, checking on everyone. “Everyone okay?” I often heard him call, his upbeat voice echoing across the grounds. “Having a good time? Yes? Excellent.” He was easy to like. There was a boyishness to him; running alongside his earnest desire to help others was his love of games, jokes, and general fun. There was a part of his charm that sometimes veered into ridiculousness, but we mostly chose to ignore it to preserve the peace. Over dinner one night, he said that potatoes were so much more expository with butter. I’m not sure what precisely he had meant to say, but the people sitting beside him nodded, and I nodded too. The word wasn’t right, but there was hardly any point correcting him when we all knew what he meant. Potatoes were better with butter.