Page 5 of The Compound

“You think?” she said, and twisted her earrings around. “Well, you have nothing to worry about anyway. Is that your natural hair color?”

I laughed. “What do you think?”

We went back to the lawn, where the majority of the girls were sunbathing. “Where were you?” Mia asked. “Why are you always disappearing?”

“We were playing ping-pong,” I said. She looked like she didn’t believe me. What could I say? We were playing ping-pong.

Jacintha and I took a seat a little bit away from her, and Candice came over and sat cross-legged on a cushion beside us. Candice had changed out of her swimsuit and into a crochet dress patterned with pretty greens and blues. She wore her long, thick hair in a high ponytail. I could see the beads of sweat on her neck. “Don’t worry about Mia,” she said. “She’ll lighten up once the boys get here.”

Some of the girls had decided that they would make dinner for everyone. They went inside, intent on their task, and I felt impressed by their industriousness. All I could think of doing was getting cool. Eventually lying about got boring too, and Jacintha asked me to help her sort out some kind of makeshift door for the bathroom.

I’ve always been useless in these kinds of situations: I don’t have any sort of mechanical understanding. I’ve never assembled furniture myself, and I’ve never voluntarily looked inside the bonnet of a car. But Jacintha seemed to know what she was doing, and I encouraged her and made affirmative noises. In the end, she just hung a sheet over the doorframe. It was easy to move and provided a degree of privacy that we could live with, for now.

When dinner was ready, we ate tacos outside and covered our mouths as we spoke. I got the impression that everyone was saving their more interesting talking points for when the boys came; I know I was. Jacintha sat next to me, and I was glad that we were becoming friends. She was nice, and smart, too. Already the ten girls had split into two cliques: throughout the day, Vanessa, Sarah, Melissa, Becca, and Eloise had kept to themselves, cleaning upstairs and eating lunch by the swings, and at dinner they sat a little apart too. Privately, I thought that the second group—comprising Candice, Susie, Jacintha, Mia, and myself—was the better one. The other girls were boring and had nothing much to add to a discussion. Mia, glancing at them, remarked, “Vanessa’s the only one of them who’s pretty, anyway.”

We were slightly more tense that night, and some of the girls were impatient with each other, interrupting or rolling their eyes. We drank more than we had the first night, too, and struggled to find things to talkabout. Only Susie remained enthusiastic; I don’t think the fact that there was a sort of gag placed on our conversation topics bothered her at all. Susie could talk about anything. “I don’t even want the boys to come,” she said. “We’re having so much fun without them.”

We went inside eventually, to shower and to tend to the burns that we had accumulated. I had a long, red burn running up the length of my arm from when I had fallen asleep in the sun. We lathered aloe vera on each other, until the room smelled sharp and sweet, and we walked around with slow, hesitant steps. I slept poorly, waking constantly. I kept curling my arms under my chin in my sleep, and then wincing myself awake. Eventually I lay like a starfish on my back, listening to the cool rush of the air conditioning and the even breathing of the other girls.

The following morning, the boys arrived.

Two

They had come from thehills behind the compound, south of the tennis court, slipping through a gap in the fence in the early morning. If we’d have thought to go around to the back of the house we might have seen them yesterday, slowly, slowly crossing the terrain and making their way towardus.

They were clearly exhausted: even the ones who were in good shape had cracked lips, were sunburned and covered in brown-gold desert sand. Some of them looked worse: there were three or four who had scrapes and bruises across their faces and arms. One of them, huge and hulking, had scrapes all across his chest, a gash on his leg, and an impressive black eye. I wondered if any of the boys had fought in the wars.

It was with some embarrassment that we led them to the grass to sit—they seemed a little surprised that there were no seats, but they didn’t complain. We brought them endless jugs of water and had some food ready to give them: toast with jam, bacon, eggs, bowls of baked beans. One of them lifted the bowl of beans to his face and poured it into his mouth like it was the final dribbles of milk in a cereal bowl. They’d had some supplies with them, they told us, but it wasn’t the same as real home-cooked food. It felt almost indecent, we girls rested and showered, gazing at the boys, dirty and exhausted, their eyes darting around the compound, and traveling inexorably back to us. I thought that the oldest might have been in his early thirties, while the youngest was surely no older than twenty. Even after three days in the desert they were beautiful. But we were beautiful too, and we sat straight and let them look.

“How many of you are there?” I asked, though I had counted already. I had to ask, because it was the most important question.

“Nine,” one of the boys said. He had neatly trimmed brown hair and warm brown eyes, and sunburn across his neck and his collarbones.

One of the boys who had scrapes across his chest, who had introduced himself as Andrew, said, “One of the boys got lost. He won’t be coming.”

Yet another said, “How many of you are there?”

“Ten,” Mia said, and we all fell quiet as the boys looked at the girls, and the girls looked at the boys.

“We’ll show you around,” Candice said, getting suddenly to her feet.

I knew what had motivated her into action; we all did. This was the rule of staying in the compound. It was what made people watch the show, day after day, and what people talked about during the ad breaks: you stayed in the compound only if you woke in the morning next to someone of the opposite sex. If you slept alone, you would be gone by sunrise. There were usually ten girls and ten boys to start with, but now, as the girls outnumbered the boys, one of us would be gone by tomorrow.

“It’s too big a group to show around,” Mia said. “Candice, you take four and I’ll take five.”

If this plan was disagreeable to Candice she didn’t show it. I went with Candice, as did Jacintha. Eloise and Susie went with Mia. Becca and some of the other girls cleared the boys’ plates and brought them into the kitchen to cleanup.

Candice took us to the west, the prettier side of the compound, where the maze lay, and the gardens and pond. Of the four boys in our group, I remembered only a few of their names. Candice walked slowly, keeping in mind the boys’ exhaustion, though they had perked up considerably, and were looking around with interest. We were showing them around like we were showing off our own property, and they were viewing it as though they had never seen it before.

“Was it terrible out there?” Candice asked. “I wouldn’t like to have done it myself.”

Andrew said, “It was an interesting experience, for sure. We got to know each other pretty well. No, it wasn’t terrible, but we were certainly glad to see you all.” I glanced again at the marks on his chest and face. I thought they made him look more handsome. He was of an average height and build, with light, curly hair. When he smiled, dimples emergeddeep within his cheeks, softening his appearance and lending him a certain boyishness. There was something about him, though, an ease of movement and a way of holding your gaze that set him apart. Candice walked alongside him, glancing at him now and then. Of all the boys, he seemed the most approachable.

“You got a few scrapes, there,” I said. “What happened?”

“There were some issues,” he said. “But we worked them out.” He smiled at me. “It’s good to be around women and be civilized again.”

The rest of the boys stayed silent. Whatever had happened, they weren’t going to tellus.

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