Page 39 of The Compound

“There’s so much that we need,” he said ruefully, “it seems fruitless to even try to begin again.”

Becca didn’t say anything, but she didn’t go, either.

“What’s the reward?” I asked.

“Coffee,” she said.

We got Andrew and Candice, and Becca got Tom.

We brought them to the living room, where the screen loomed.

It was one of the cleaner rooms in the house, as we never went in there anymore.

No one wanted to see the screen. I sat in my usual place on the L-shaped couch, and Sam sat beside me, his arm around my shoulders.

Andrew and Candice sat on the other end, a mirror of us.

Andrew stayed perched at the edge of the couch as though eager to slip away.

I was reminded of Candice’s suggestion that the four of us live together.

She looked at me and smiled, as if she was thinking the same thing.

She was fine with doing a task, but Andrew shook his head.

“Why not?” Becca said.

“I don’t want to.”

Andrew’s unwillingness made my own reluctance return.

It wasn’t like him, but I took it as proof that we had entered a new phase of our time there, where we no longer had to be productive, or work together toward some goal.

I waited for someone else to say let’s just leave it then.

I was tired: I wanted to curl up in my bed for a while, maybe have Candice brush my hair.

“Do it for me,” she said, smiling.

“We’re skipping this one,” he said. “I don’t feel well. I feel sick. Leave me in peace.”

Tom, who had been standing in the corner, said, “I say we do it.”

It had saddened me to see the difference in Candice—her shorter, uneven hair, her tired eyes—but it truly shocked me to see Tom.

The burns he had sustained from both punishments, as well as the beating from Sam, had left his face scarred and puffy.

His hair had grown long, and he had a full and scraggly beard.

I would hardly have recognized him, if not for his enormous bulk.

I suspected that was the part of himself that Tom was unwilling to sacrifice.

Becca, by contrast, looked like a baby seal sitting on the ground, sleek and clean.

“I don’t want to,” Andrew repeated. “Can’t we just live in peace for a few more days? We can do one tomorrow if you feel so strongly about it.”

“We need to keep the house stocked. We’ll run out of supplies without knowing it,” Becca said.

“Becca’s talking a lot of sense,” Tom said. “Maybe you should give up your role of Task Management and Reward Distribution and let Becca do it with me instead.” He was attempting a joke, but no one laughed.

Sam was quiet. I glanced at him, and then at the screen, rereading the instruction.

“Let’s do it,” I said. “We’ll put it to a vote.”

Everyone’s hands went up, except Andrew’s. I noticed that Sam put his hand up last. I was nervous now, clenching my jaw, and gripping the bottom of my dressing gown.

Becca read the instructions, as though we hadn’t all been looking at it for the past several minutes:

Task: Reveal your sexual partners since entering the compound

Reward: Coffee

“I’ll go first,” she continued, her voice low and melodic. “I haven’t slept with anyone since I’ve come to the compound.”

Tom looked out the window as she spoke, his neck flushed red.

“Sam,” I said.

“Lily,” Sam said, and kissed my neck.

“Andrew,” Candice said.

“Candice,” Andrew said.

Tom said, “Mia, Vanessa, and Sarah.”

Candice looked at him with unbridled disgust. He didn’t look at her, though he must have felt her glare.

The screen remained as it was.

“Someone’s lying,” I said. I looked at Becca, her knees underneath her chin as she gazed at the screen.

“It’s obviously Tom,” Candice said.

“And why do you think that?” Tom replied evenly.

“You probably didn’t sleep with anyone,” Candice said. “You’re as innocent as Becca.”

Becca. She was sitting on the ground, running her fingers across the fibers on the rug.

I couldn’t help but recall the morning I’d woken her up to help in the kitchen, and how Sam had said her name, half asleep.

They had shared a bed for far longer than we had.

I glanced at Sam: I couldn’t help it. He was already looking at me.

I don’t know if it was because things worked so differently in the compound, isolated as we were, bound to a small group of people, but at precisely the same moment that I wondered if Sam had been sleeping with someone else, I also wondered if I hadn’t fallen in love with him.

I wasn’t sure if the feeling had been rising in me steadily, or if it came to me in the panic that he might leave me.

He met my eye steadily. Neither of us looked away until we heard Tom’s voice, soft and snakelike, thrashing through the silence.

“Don’t you know who’s lying, Candice?”

Candice looked confused. The expression sat strangely on her face.

We all turned to look at Andrew. He was looking at the ceiling.

“Eloise,” he said, “and Carlos.”

The screen turned green.

Andrew lifted himself from the couch and left. I heard the front door swing shut behind him.

“But that’s not true,” Candice said. “We’ve been together since the beginning.”

“I’m sorry, Candice,” Sam said. She glanced at him, irritated.

“I’m going to sort this out,” she said, and rose from the couch.

She followed after Andrew; I could tell from the distance of their voices that she’d caught up with him by the pool.

After the quiet of the previous weeks, hearing snippets of their conversation, their heated and raised voices, seemed wrong to the point of obscenity.

“Did you know?” I asked Sam.

“I wasn’t sure, but I’d suspected.”

I thought for a moment. “Did you know he was bi?”

“Oh, sure,” Sam said.

Becca smiled at me from her spot on the floor. It wasn’t a particularly nice smile. “Did you think that everyone here was straight, Lily? We’re all here living the perfect, hetero life?”

“Easy, Becca,” Sam said. I threw her a dirty glance, but didn’t say anything. Since we weren’t yet in the bottom five, I couldn’t reveal personal information without punishment, so I couldn’t say that I was queer, too. In retrospect, I fancied Candice nearly as much as I had Ryan.

Tom was looking at Becca too, frowning slightly, either because he was surprised by her comment, or because he was considering the possibility that she wasn’t straight, either.

Sam stood, pulled me up with him and led me to the shower.

We unpeeled our clothes and stood under the spray.

It felt good. I closed my eyes and imagined that we were standing in a rain shower outside my house.

I could see the red door, could imagine the curtain twitching at the window and my mother peeking out.

When we were ready, we could open the door and go inside.

Sam asked me what I was thinking about, and I lied and said I was thinking about how tomorrow I would make an effort to clear away some of the mess in the front yard.

—

Candice woke me in the middle of the night.

I jerked at the touch on my elbow, and Sam stirred beside me.

She lifted a finger to her lips. I nodded, gently lifted Sam’s arm off me and followed her out of the room.

She brought me to the dressing room, where one of the lighted mirrors had been left on.

The room was otherwise dark. She sat at the bench, and I sat beside her.

“Candice,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

She began to weep. I put my arms around her and hugged her tightly, stroking her hair, murmuring kind words.

She pulled away after a few minutes and wiped the tears from her eyes.

Despite the tears, despite the questionable haircut, she was still the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get to know you better, Lily,” she said.

“I know you, Candice,” I said. “I know you well.”

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said, and laughed, still a little tearful.

“I spent too much time with Andrew. I spent a long time making sure that he chose me, and then longer still making sure he kept me. Well, it’s all a joke now, isn’t it?

I’m sure that’s what everyone’s thinking now. Candice, the joke!”

“You’re the best of us,” I said. “You’re the best of us, and he knows it. Everyone knows it.”

“How did I let myself become so pathetic? When the jobs were assigned, I didn’t mind that I’d be doing the dinners.

At the time food was scarce, and I thought I was the right person for the job; I’m crafty, and—well, I can say it now.

Everyone knows that there’s power in being in charge of a scarce resource. ”

I said nothing, and she picked up a bottle of nail varnish that I had left on the bench. It was a siren-red color, loud and brassy. She examined the color and put it down.

“But then I looked at myself, as though I had woken from a dream. What was I doing, cooking dinners while Andrew decided what we do and how we do it? And what did he know about anything? You know that in bed he would talk with me for hours, under the blankets, asking for advice? There was nothing he could do without talking it through, or looking for advice or reassurance. I liked it, to tell you the truth. It made me feel as though I was pulling the strings. But in actual fact he was creeping out as soon as I’d fallen asleep, and into someone else’s bed. ”

“I know how you feel,” I said. “With Ryan, I thought I would kill him when I found out.”

She took my hand and gripped it, hard. “I know you did, Lily. I know you did. The best thing we did was banishing that bastard. The worst part of it all is that I know that if I wanted to, I could banish Andrew—Icould ask him to go, and he’d leave without a word.

But I can’t—I won’t do that to him. Isn’t that absurd?

Isn’t that ridiculous? I’ve loved him now for months—from the very beginning! ”

“Candice,” I said, and squeezed her hand. “He loves you, too.”

She looked at me for a moment, and kissed me softly, briefly, on the lips. “Go back to bed, Lily,” she said. “It’s very late.”

I rose, but didn’t want to leave her. “Make sure to come back before sunrise,” I said.

“I’ll remember,” she said.

I wasn’t surprised, in the morning, to find that Candice had taken her things and left, though it hurt like a knife to the guts.

I knew that she would go, because I knew that Candice would rather not participate at all than be the person who people would laugh at.

I even wondered—for a second, just a second—if the compound was worth staying in without her.

I missed her, not just because I liked and admired her, but because when she left she shattered some illusion that I had held on to from my time as a viewer: that the show was, in fact, about love—or, at least, about finding someone who you could live with.

I had been comforted by the thought that Andrew and Candice were “the real thing.” Somewhere along the way I had let myself forget the most obvious thing—that it was a game.

There were now five of us left: me, Sam, Tom, Becca, Andrew.

It was a big deal, to make it to the last five.

You were more or less guaranteed fame. Things got competitive in the final ten, but they often turned brutal in the final five, when all rules lifted.

Some of the rules that had been in place were a nuisance, such as not being able to discuss Personal Tasks, but some of the rules had protected us, like the no-fighting rule.

More than once in the past, physical fights had broken out almost instantly once the sixth person left.

The producers only stepped in if they thought that someone was in serious danger.

I wondered if Becca had known that Andrew had slept around, and if that was why she had encouraged us to do the task.

In Candice’s absence the compound became a different place to us.

While we had been despondent after the fire, we were worse after she left.

Andrew became useless, hiding in the bedroom, lying in bed, speaking to no one.

When he withdrew, I realized how much we depended on him; even if he wasn’t particularly useful, he was always an encouraging and enthusiastic presence.

When he did come out of the bedroom, it was mostly to talk about Candice; how much he had loved her, and how he loved her still.