Page 44 of Here for a Good Time

SIXTEEN

Instantly, and despite being a non-religious person, my first thought is, God?

My wobbly legs give in, but I don’t fall. Instead, each of my arms are hung around two different figures on either side.

“Hold tight, we have to go,” Garima says. She’s soaked, her T-shirt sticking to her body like it was spray-painted on. The same goes for Faith, who’s propping me up on the right. Garima is at least a foot taller than Faith, which puts me in a somewhat lopsided stance, but I’m not going to complain.

“What—” I blink rapidly to make sure I’m not hallucinating them. “You’re… What are you doing here?” Fear grips me as I think that maybe they came back to shoot us and make sure we died.

“What does it look like? We’re saving you,” Garima says.

The smell of gasoline and flames has still got me groggy, and I’m not certain I heard her right. “You… are?” I ask.

She gestures down at the fact that she’s propping me up. “What else does it look like we’re doing?” she asks, then nods over to the side.

When I look at Zwe, two other figures—also drenched—are knelt down in front of him, one with a pair of green garden shears. On instinct, I want to reach over and shield him, my mind jumping to the worst conclusion. I breathe when I see that they’re using them on the rope, not on him.

“You’re doing it wrong!” Leila yells.

“How the fuck would you know, you haven’t even given me a chance to start!” Nita shoots back.

“Are those shears even sharp enough?” Leila asks.

Nita widens her eyes. “They were the only ones left out in the garden! What did you want me to do, locate the toolbox in the shed and examine each gardening tool first before deciding on the optimal—”

“Oh my god!” Faith yells. “You have a whole boat ride for arguing! Can you please just free him so we can get out of this alive?!”

I’m giving myself whiplash by the speed at which I’m looking around, trying to keep track of who’s talking. Part of me is still doubtful that they’re really here to save us and that they don’t have a much more sinister plan up their sleeves, but I don’t have any choice but to trust them right now.

“Who the hell tied this?” Leila yells, then, remembering the answer is right in front of her, she glares up at Garima. “How did you even know how to do this? Was it in a TikTok?”

“Just cut him out!” Garima barks.

It’s an oddly endearing scene, all the more so given the life-or-death stakes.

This kind of bickering is the exact sort of situation you get when you put me, Zwe, his brother, and all of our cousins in the same room at Thingyan or any other stressful holiday.

You only get this level of multi-conversational yelling when you know you have a family who will always have your back.

“What if we lift him and carry him out?” Garima suggests.

Silently, we all eye Zwe, gauging if that’s a realistic possibility.

Faith shakes her head. “Probably, if it were only him, and all five of us could pitch in.” She lifts the shoulder that’s propping up my underarm. “But we need to get Poe, too.”

“What if we take her outside, somewhere far enough that she’s safe, and then come back for him?” Garima asks.

“We don’t have that much time,” Leila says after another beat of consideration. “The fire is right on our heels. We barely have enough time now, which is why it would be great if we could set off the sprinkler system, ” she finishes with loud, unbridled sarcasm.

“Hey, sis, if you want to take over, be my guest,” comes the reply, and for the first time, I realize Andrea’s in the room, too. She’d straightened the chair I’d been tied to so she can place her laptop on it, and is crouched on her knees, face mere inches away from the screen.

They all came back.

“I don’t get why it was so easy to turn it off in the first place—” Leila gestures upward. I look to where she’s pointing, and for the first time, notice several water sprinklers hanging from the ceiling. “—but it’s taking a lifetime to turn it back on.”

“Because, my brilliant cousin,” Andrea yells, “would you believe that people have found out there’s something going on here?

And would you also believe that those same people have probably alerted the resort management and security teams, who, having realized that their system was hacked, have since placed numerous obstacles to significantly strengthen said system?

I’m working as quickly as I can.” Sparing one second, she looks up and widens her eyes around the room.

“Surely there must be other things in this room that can help cut through rope, or, I dunno, create some sort of trolley to wheel him out on,” she points out before gluing her eyes back to the screen.

“I’m going to get this, I just need some peace and quiet. ”

“We could drag him?” Leila offers.

“I don’t know about you all—” Nita huffs between every couple of words.

The shears are either the dullest shears on the planet, or the rope is too thick.

She’s changed her techniques so that instead of cutting into them, she’s making a seesawing motion with just the top blade to saw through.

“—but I don’t have the energy to drag out a fully grown adult man.

Especially when the building is on fire. ”

“You came back,” I blurt out, still stunned.

Faith, Leila, and Garima all fix me with dumbfounded expressions, as though to say, What nap did you just wake up from?

“We did,” Garima says. “We were already three-quarters of the way to the boat, too.”

“You have Andrea to thank.” Leila nods in her cousin’s direction, who, without lifting her eyes from the computer, holds up a peace sign. “She wouldn’t let it go. She’s good at that, you know.”

“What, having a moral compass?” Andrea asks.

“Being annoying, like a puppy who won’t stop asking for your food,” Leila answers loudly.

“Yapping on and on about how this wasn’t the plan, and we were never supposed to hurt anyone, and you two seemed like good people, and how could we insist that we were in the right if we had this on our conscience for the rest of our lives. ”

“And which wonderful, brilliant, kind cousin of mine taught me the importance of treating people with kindness?” Andrea shoots back.

Leila rolls her eyes, but I see a soft smile.

Then, she looks us straight in the eye. “I’m sorry.

To be frank, I hated you guys before you even arrived because I thought you were just like every other rich fuck we’ve had.

But you’re actually nice people.” She tilts her head at her cousins.

“I have to protect them, you know. I’m the oldest, that’s my job. ”

“We’re all sorry,” Nita says with a sigh. “I was so scared you were going to escape and describe my face to a sketch artist.”

“We really didn’t want to hurt anyone,” Garima tells me, looking as sheepish as the rest of them. “We specifically came when there were no guests because we didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

Leila gets to her feet. Despite their apologies, my instinct is to back away, but I physically can’t.

“Don’t blame them. I know you’re going to go to the police, but when you do, please…

say that it was me.” Beside me, Soraya and Garima gasp and start to protest, but Leila gives a firm shake of her head, pressing on before they can interject.

“It was me who came up with this plan. I was just so angry, watching these rich assholes take more and more from our family, our land. Watching guests traipse around our island without a single ounce of respect for it. This stupid pile of imported wood and marble—” With a scoff, she gestures at the mess around us.

“—kept getting bigger and bigger, pushing my family out of our homes . But I was the one who told my cousins what to do, including to tie you and leave you here. Please tell the police you have no idea who the other people were, and that all you know is that I was the inside man who orchestrated the entire thing.”

“I—”

A dancing amalgamation of light catches the corner of my eye.

The three of them and Zwe follow my gaze, Nita and Andrea still too preoccupied with freeing Zwe to recognize what’s happening.

“Fire,” Faith whispers.

As though on cue, there’s a small explosion of flames. “Shit!” Nita curses, moving the blade even quicker. “It’s not cutting through!”

As if a collective switch has been flipped, everyone starts yelling at the same time, making half a movement in one direction only to stop and consider going in the opposite one, like our brains are both not working and also overworking.

“Just go!” Zwe is shouting. “Take Poe and go!”

“What do we do?” Garima yells across my face and at Nita.

“I don’t know! Do we go?” Nita replies, helplessly looking around at her cousins. “We can’t leave them here!”

“No, we’re not going anywhere!” yells a voice that sounds like mine after it’s been scraped across rocks.

Leila is on her knees again beside Nita, tugging at the bottom of the rope.

“Move! I might cut your finger!” Nita yells.

“I don’t care!” Leila cries. “We need to free him!”

“Let’s just drag him out!” Nita says, gripping and sawing the shears with so much force that her fingertips are red. “You and me, let’s just drag him out sideways if we need to.”

“We’ll have to jump through the flames at this point,” Leila points out. “There’s no way to drag him out.”

I start thrashing around, trying to pull away from Garima and Nita so I can go over and help untie Zwe. “What are you—” Nita starts, then, following my gaze, tightens her grip on my hand. “No, you can’t go there. If it comes to it, we have to run.”

“I’m not leaving without him!” I cry. “You all go! I’m not leaving!”

The fire has entered the room by this point, all the wooden furniture in here acting as oversized tinder. Heat pricks every ounce of my exposed skin, and my body screams for a large body of water to dive into.