Page 4 of The Compound

“I’m sorry,” Melissa said at last. “I forgot.”

“It didn’t mention a punishment,” Mia said.

“I think it was just a warning,” Candice said. She met Melissa’s eye. “Any one of us might have slipped up. Not to worry, Melissa.”

“Let’s go to bed,” Becca said, her voice soft and flutelike. “When we wake up, the boys will be here.” We helped each other up, and went into the house. I kept glancing behind me, as though I would find the boys staggering in through the thicket.

When we passed by the screen in the living room, I saw that it was still blank. “Why do you think it hasn’t lit up yet?” I asked Jacintha.

“It can’t start until the boys are here,” she said. “It would be an unfair advantage.”

I had already known the answer: it was the same every year. I only asked out of my old habit of prompting people to explain things to me even when I knew the answer. When I was a child, I found that it would make people more likely to want to help me, and it served me just as well as an adult. When we sat at our benches and took off our makeup, Jacintha peeled my eyelashes off and set them gently on my desk. I knew then that we were friends. Some things are that simple, and so it was with Jacintha.

I went to the bed that I had woken up in, and across from me Jacintha took hers, while the others debated over which beds they wanted. I lay down and smelled the air, which was still sweet and fresh, though there was now a slight scent of sand and sweat. The girls murmured around me. Goodnight, we said, our voices soft. Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.

—

In the morningthe boys still hadn’t arrived, and we started to worry.

I opened my eyes—the first to wake, again—and reached for a phone that wasn’t there. I woke up properly then, and looked around at all the other girls sleeping soundly. I couldn’t see them well in the dark, and I seemed to have forgotten most of their names. The small trace of familiarity from the night before had vanished, and I was reminded that they were strangers to me. In that moment I would have given anything to have gone home.

I padded through the house, checking for any changes. In the living area, the screen was still blank. I walked outside, and fancied that I would see the boys waiting for me by the pool. But there was no sign of them.It might have been peaceful outside—all that flat, pale land stretching out into the distance—but I disliked the extreme quiet, and went into the kitchen, where I made coffee while keeping an eye out the window. Then I made a huge pan of scrambled eggs and wolfed down what I judged to be a moderate amount. I thought of how ugly I must look on the cameras, stuffing my face alone in the kitchen, my hair unbrushed, my face not yet washed. I finished eating as quickly as I could.

When I returned to the bedroom, the other girls were awake. They had been talking, but stopped when I walked in. Mia looked at me with wide eyes. “There you are,” she said. “We didn’t know where you had gone.”

“I got coffee,” I said.

“Why did you get up before everyone else, though?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just woke up.”

“Were you just wandering on your own? That’s so weird,” Mia said.

“No,” I said. “I just made breakfast. I made eggs for everyone.”

“Thanks, Lily,” Jacintha said. “That was really thoughtful.” I met her eye, and felt a profound rush of gratitude for her, as though she had stopped me from falling off a cliff.

After we ate, we took our coffees to the outdoor dining area. There were no chairs, and we stood self-consciously, leaning against the wall, hips cocked.

It was difficult to know how to plan our day. We decided to go back to preparing the house in the morning; we could spend the afternoon relaxing and getting to know each other. Cleaning was hard in the heat, particularly in the kitchen, where the temperature was so extreme that we were forced to take frequent breaks, sprinkling our faces and necks with water.

When we were done, we changed into our bikinis and got into the pool. I noted the relative flatness of everyone’s stomachs, and found that, while Sarah had the most toned abs, I was a sure contender for the shapeliest hips.

The pool was enormous; even with the ten of us in at the same time, there was still room left for about fifty refrigerators. We were not as reserved as we had been the day before; we did handstands and splashedeach other. Mia and Eloise raced each other, and I swam as deep as I could, keeping my eyes open under the water and navigating around the blurry shapes of the girls’ legs.

But where were the boys? As we lay in the shade, snacking on tortilla chips and guacamole, I wondered if they had been hurt. Four years ago one of the boys had broken his leg on the way to the compound and had been stranded for twelve hours before the show’s execs got to him. It would have taken less time but he had said, over and over, that he didn’t want anyone to come get him and that he could make it to the compound eventually. He was taken home immediately.

I knew I was going to drive myself mad with thinking, and asked Jacintha if she wanted to play ping-pong. It was tucked around the side of the house, and we played for a while—I think probably an hour. There was a ball but no paddles, so we played with our hands. I thought that Jacintha was a relaxed kind of person, but she became tremendously competitive once we started to play. She liked to do victory laps of the ping-pong table while I crouched on the ground to retrieve the ball.

“What time do you think it is?” I asked her between sets. She pointed above us, at the sun.

“It’s hard to be sure, but I think around three or four. It’s definitely the afternoon.” She came to stand beside me and pointed up, again. “See?” I nodded, but I didn’t understand precisely how she knew. For me, the sun was just the sun. She turned to face me. She wasn’t wearing sunglasses, and only minimal makeup, and her face was clear to me. “Do you think any of the boys will be Black? There’s usually one, but not always.”

“Maybe,” I said. I thought about it, then said, “I’m sure there will.”

“If it’s all white boys, I’m screwed,” she said. “The white boys never go for the Black girl.”

“You’re stunning,” I said. “Any of the boys would be lucky to have you.”

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