Page 30 of The Compound

I found him by the back of the house. He was mending a part of the fence that was broken. Outdoor maintenance was technically Ryan’s jurisdiction, but when something went wrong people usually asked Sam or Jacintha to fix it. When I got to him I was panting. He turned and sawme.

“What is it?” he said. “Are you okay?”

“Did Becca find you? Did she tell you?”

“Tell me what? What’s happened?”

Silently, I cursed her. “They’re going to vote me out,” I said.

“The boys are going to get rid of me. I don’t want to go.

Please, Sam. I don’t want to go back.” Without warning, I burst into tears.

He pulled me into his arms at once, my head tucked under his chin, and I let him murmur soothing words in my ear.

I might have stayed where I was, but the sun was moving, and the shadows grew longer.

I pulled away and looked up into his face.

“It’s okay, Lily,” he said, and wiped the tears from my face. “Of course. I’ll vote for Ryan; of course I will.” He pressed his lips against my forehead. “You have no idea how glad I’ll be to see him gone.”

There was more I wanted to say to him, and more, I think, that he wanted to say to me, but the whistle shrilled, and I jumped.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I promise.” I felt relief, but also a sense of vindication, of triumph: he wanted me there. It meant something; it had to mean something.

We went to the northern circle together, and Ryan looked at us and shook his head, as though I had done something disgusting.

“All right,” Tom said. “We all know how this works. We’ll make it quick and painless.”

“We don’t want to say goodbye to anyone. But we have to be practical here,” Andrew said. “We have to consider the value we can bring to this place—and our lives here—by doing tasks.”

We went to the barren, dusty plain to cast our votes.

I looked at everyone scratching the initial on their rock, my eyes settling on Becca, whose head was bent, working away at her rock.

I had been a fool to kiss Sam like I had yesterday; I hadn’t thought of Becca, watching on. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

We placed our stones in the pile. Crouching down, with a rock labeled R in my hand, I prayed that there were enough people there who liked me enough to keepme.

Andrew and Tom bent down and read the initials on the rocks. After counting, Andrew lookedup.

“Ryan,” he said.

Beside me, Candice squeezed my hand—not a supportive squeeze, or a gentle caress: she took my hand in victory.

I hated Ryan for what he had done to me, but when I saw the look on his face, it didn’t please me as much as I thought that it might.

I saw Tom looking over the stones again, double-checking.

The boys all looked at each other. I knew that Ryan must have asked them all to vote for me, and probably Vanessa too.

I wondered if he’d thought to ask the other girls.

I knew what they were thinking: which of the boys had turned on Ryan, and why?

We all went forward to look at the stones: six Rs, and four Ls.

I saw Becca look at the stones, then walk away from the group, keeping her back tous.

Ryan was staring at the pile, unmoving.

“Better get going before it gets dark, Ryan,” Candice said. She walked past him and into the house.

We usually gave the person space to gather their things in private, but when we reached the house, Ryan said, “Lily, can I talk to you?”

I went into the bedroom with him, but he just stood there and looked at me, and I began to gather up his things.

The boys’ dressing room was to the left of the bedroom, and I had been in only once, before the boys had arrived.

It was disgusting now, with clothes all over the floor, shaving cream and toothpaste on the sink.

I opened Ryan’s wardrobe and started to cram everything into a bag, the same one he had come with, that he had traveled with across the desert. He appeared besideme.

“Please,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

“Would you still want to talk if I had lost the vote? You’d be watching me go out into the desert without a word.”

“That’s not true,” he said. “It’s not. It’s not true.”

I looked at him. He was incredibly, undeniably gorgeous. I could see why I had gravitated toward him at the beginning—I liked beautiful things—but there was a part of me that was ashamed by the shallowness I had shown in betting on him with so little thought.

“Wrap up,” I said. “The desert is cold at night.”

Only the boys went to see him off. Jacintha, Becca, Candice, and I went to our dressing room and burned a candle to clear the negative energy. “Justice,” Candice said, over the flickering flame.

I didn’t know where Vanessa was, only that she wasn’t with the boys, nor withus.

When the boys arrived back, Candice blew out the candle. “Did you talk to Tom?”

“Not properly,” I said.

“You need to find him now,” Jacintha said. She glanced outside. We would be going to bed soon.

I didn’t want to speak to him in the house—I wasn’t sure how our conversation might go, but I knew that I didn’t want an audience.

I can’t say how, but I felt certain that if I waited alone by the pool, Tom would show up.

I was right: I was there for only the length of a brief birdsong before I saw a movement to my left.

He had, incredibly, a cigarette, which he smoked with clear relish.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

“Personal challenge.”

“What on earth did you have to do to get it?”

He gave me a look. It was silly to even ask, I knew. I tried to think of something else to say, to get him relaxed, to make him trust me a bit more, but I couldn’t come up with anything. I grappled for a few moments with my own uselessness.

“That was a clever thing that you did,” he said. “Ryan walked right into that one.”

“You would have done it, too.”

He nodded and pulled from his cigarette. “I didn’t think that you were that cold, though. He was your man from day one.”

“Don’t you know why I did it?” I said.

“That’s your own business.”

“I did it because he cheated on me. With Vanessa.”

He looked at me, his face blue under the lights of the pool. “That’s not true.”

“It is.”

“Liar.”

“I’m sorry, Tom. I saw them. Just yesterday.”

He was quiet, thinking, piecing things together. I didn’t feel sorry for him; he had done the same, and worse.

“It was in the shower, out the back. He had her pressed against the bricks, and he was biting her neck.”

“Be quiet.”

“She had her legs wrapped around his back. She has such lovely, long legs. Probably the longest of anyone here, I’d say.

I kept thinking that her back must be sore, the way she kept moving against the wall.

” There was a terrible, vindictive thrill to finding myself capable of rattling Tom, but I still had to quell the fear that I would push him too far.

“Be quiet, I said.”

“Did you notice scrapes across her back? Or maybe a bruise on her neck?”

He stepped toward me, and I glanced toward the house. There would be someone nearby to hear me shout, surely. But he only threw his cigarette on the ground and looked at me. We were very nearly nose to nose. He was not tall; we were almost the same height.

“Tom,” I said. “I don’t want to be the one to go tonight. I’ve been faithful.”

He stared at me a while longer. The pool lapped lightly beside us. I thought of Becca, on that day weeks ago, maybe months ago, when he held her under the water.

“Will you help me?”

He continued to look at me in silence, and then said, “Say please.”

“No,” I said. “I won’t beg. I’m only asking you to help me, just this once.”

He nodded, a brief bob of his head. “I think that you have this idea that I don’t like you. But I was one of the six who voted to get rid of Ryan. I kept you in.”

“What?”

“Ryan was bad news,” he said. “He had no drive. I think in a day or two people will have forgotten that he was even here.” He picked up his cigarette and went inside. I saw him pause outside the door to put his cigarette in the bin.

—

The girls waited in our dressing room for Vanessa to go to bed, before Jacintha said, “Well?”

“He’ll do it,” I said.

“Don’t worry if you’re on your own at first,” Candice said. “The banishment isn’t decided until sunrise. A lot can happen in a night here. The dark will help.”

I went into the room, guided by the dim light filtering through the open door.

When the others came in and closed the door the light was gone, and it was with great trepidation and terrible loneliness that I went to my bed, now empty.

I lay down, and felt my heart thumping against the mattress, so loud that I thought the others must have been able to hearit.

I looked around and saw the faint outline of the other four couples in their beds. No one said goodbye to me, but no one ever did as nothing was certain until the night was finished. And it was easier, too, in the night, to pretend not to know what was happening. You slept, and forgot.

I wished I could see properly. I sat up and looked at Tom’s bed until my eyes adjusted to the dark.

Vanessa was there, lying on her side. Tom sat up too: I could make out his bulky figure well enough.

He raised a hand, palm facing toward me.

Wait, I think he meant. Or was he waving, in a mockery of a farewell?

I looked to the other beds. I thought of what Candice had said. A lot can happen in a night here.

I looked to her bed, and though I couldn’t see anything but a mass of bedclothes, I could hear faint whisperings and noises that a man and woman make in the night. I thought that Jacintha and Carlos were talking, or maybe they were asleep. I couldn’t see anything from Sam and Becca’s bed.