Page 17 of The Compound

When I’d received the necklace from my chute after our conversation, I’d initially felt guilty.

But when I checked the brand I saw that it was Dorian, a luxury brand that everyone knew and admired.

Already the prizes were becoming valuable and worth the risk.

“Thank you so much, Dorian, for this beautiful necklace,” I said to the camera.

“It’s perfect. I can wear it with any outfit.

” I felt that I had sounded stiff, so I showed it to the girls in the dressing room, making sure to mention the name of the brand.

Mia had admired it, fingering the cool metal.

“Real gold,” she said. Candice had met my eye in the mirror. “Good girl,” she said.

I decided I would give Sam a nice compliment, and we could smooth things over. But when I reached him, he spoke before I could.

“You have nice skin,” he said, voice so flat and empty that it entirely negated the meaning of the words. And what kind of compliment was that, anyway? At once, my goodwill left me. I stayed standing there for so long that Jacintha had to nudge me again.

“Can’t think of anything?” Sam said, impassive.

My compliment that I had prepared for him had been that I liked that he fixed things without anyone asking.

Andrew liked to loudly announce that he was getting to work whenever he was presented with a job, and Jacintha sometimes complained that she got stuck with all of the most menial tasks.

Sam generally fixed the problem before anyone else had noticed it.

But I felt irrationally cheapened by the fact that he had given me such a superficial compliment.

I had expected it from Ryan, because I knew that he liked me most of all for my beauty, and that, to me, was okay: my beauty was what I prized the most too, and the only thing about me which I expected to draw a response.

But for some reason, from Sam it felt like an insult.

“You’re tall,” I said, and movedon.

We did one more task (we had to reveal our favorite alcoholic beverage in unison in exchange for bleach) and then took a break for lunch.

Although we had finished the three Communal Tasks faster than ever thanks to Tom and Andrew, we were disappointed that none of the rewards involved food.

The remaining bread was divided into sixteen pieces and drizzled with honey.

It wasn’t unpleasant, but it wasn’t filling either.

We finished quickly but were reluctant to return to the tasks.

We sat in the shade sleepily until Andrew and Tom called us to the front yard.

“All right, everyone,” Andrew said. “Two more tasks, and then we can take a break.”

“Two tasks and then we’re done, right?” Sarah asked.

“That’s what I’d like, for sure,” Andrew said. “But we need to get food.”

For our next task, we got a roll of tape in exchange for revealing the names of our grandparents.

For our fifth task, we got an extra pillow for each of us, in exchange for climbing onto the roof of the house.

This one took a while, and Andrew and Tom let us look at our little screens while they arranged the mechanics of us gettingup there.

My Personal Task was to dance in front of at least one other person in exchange for a pair of shoes.

I considered the task, and what they wanted me to do: what the viewers or producers wanted to see.

It might have been that they wanted something sexual, a dance for Ryan, maybe, or something to catch the attention of the other boys, something to mark me as a provocative presence in the compound.

Or it was just as possible that they were trying to present me as a comic figure, and that the viewers would be laughing at me, dancing for a pair of shoes like a jester in the court of a king.

For the first time since I had been there, I considered not doing a task.

At last, it was arranged that the boys would climb on top of the dining chairs, and from there, hoist us girls up.

There would be one person already on the roof, who would pull us up one at a time if necessary.

Tom would take that role; he was by the far the strongest resident, but he wasn’t particularly tall.

Carlos, the tallest, boosted Tom onto the roof, steepling his fingers together as a step.

He grunted when Tom stepped into his hands, and it looked as though it would be too much—but Sam stepped in and helped to push Tom upward.

Carlos then lifted Becca from the ground—she was so tiny even I could have lifted her—and rather than offering the steepled fingers, he simply lifted her toward Tom, who leaned off the roof and plucked her up as though she were a rag doll.

If anyone else noticed how uncomfortable Becca was in Tom’s grasp, no one mentionedit.

We all went, one at a time, first the girls, and then the boys, until only Evan remained. I wondered at first if it was wise, but Evan was lithe and agile, and launched himself from the chair to the waiting hands of Carlos and Tom.

Once we all were up there, we got as comfortable as we could and looked at the view before us.

It was beautiful, in its own way. Beyond the compound, there were great stretches of desert plain, but far, far beyond was a blur of vegetation, trees, and bushes.

I thought that there was some red plant growing there, and said so, but Carlos, who was sitting beside me, looked at me in confusion and said, “Those are bushfires.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It’s the heat,” he said. “They might have been burning for hours, or even days. They won’t reach us, though.”

We stayed up there for longer than we should have, our voices overlapping, chatting about nothing in particular.

It was easier now, to talk without revealing personal information.

It limited your conversation, but if you just emptied your brain and said whatever came to mind, it was enjoyable in its own way.

At some point, Vanessa and Sarah went down and stacked the dining chairs on top of each other as a makeshift ladder.

They brought the chocolate we had been saving, dividing it among us with benevolent expressions, like nuns bestowing blessings.

I had eaten that exact brand of chocolate a thousand times, but it tasted better than I ever could recall.

The sun was setting, and it, too, was as I had never seen it before: a fantastical dusty purple sky, splashes of rich oranges, all pressing against that endless stretch of flat plain. There were mountains to the southeast, cast in a rich indigo glow.

Candice and Carlos scrambled down and brought our dinner up to us, too: a selection of potatoes, cooked as many ways as they could manage.

There was salt and some butter, and some people drizzled honey on theirs, though I didn’t try it myself.

Sitting together on the roof was the nicest time we’d had since coming to the compound, I think because we were somewhere familiar but different: we had by now explored everything within the perimeter, and there was a novelty in being on the roof that was, in some small, vital way, intoxicating.

It was easier to come down off the roof, but the boys made a fuss of depositing us individually.

It was dark, and we were still in a fine humor.

Ryan had his arm around my shoulders, and on my other side Evan was chattering in my ear.

The others walked toward the house, but I walked over to the pool, which was now a silvery blue, lit by lights I hadn’t realized were there.

The light rippled and refracted with the slight movement of the water.

“Jacintha,” I called softly. She was nearby, talking to Marcus.

It was obvious that he liked her from the way that he was smiling at her.

Carlos was talking to Evan, but was glancing frequently at Marcus and Jacintha.

I was glad that Marcus and Carlos were fighting over her: it made a mockery of her being placed sixth in the attractiveness ranking.

Jacintha had told me that she’d put the ranking out of her head, but I thought about it all the time.

She came over, and I said, “Dance with me.” She laughed, her teeth flashing white, and put her arms around me.

I moved without any insecurity, and without thought.

I was a good dancer, and I knew it. I twirled her around, and we both were laughing, dancing without inhibition.

After a minute or so, we stopped laughing and became serious, our dancing growing wilder, our limbs thrashing through the air.

She gripped my hands and I gripped hers, and we spun each other around, and I knew that if one of us let go suddenly the other would go careening into the pool; but I knew, with a surety that was like balm on a burn, that neither of us would do that.

When we slowed, we leaned against each other, panting. I felt giddy and dizzy, my mind blissfully empty: I had forgotten where we were, what was going on around us and beyond us; I had forgotten, even, that it was all for a task. I sensed movement behind me, and heard a voice call, “Don’t look!”

Of course, I turned, as did Jacintha, and saw Susie a few feet away, squatting above the ground, her skirt lifted. “Don’t look at me,” she wailed.

It was cold, as it always was at night in the desert, and there was steam rising from below her. Susie was shitting on the concrete. I knew it must have been for a Personal Task, but it didn’t make it any easier to see.

Before we went to bed, we checked the screen one last time. It said:

Task: Banish one person from the compound

Reward: Pasta