She asks her late one night without even knowing if she’s still awake: “Do you think any part of us – the us before the…you know, whole experiment thing – do you think any part of us survived it?”
Toni inhales sharply, so Martha knows she’s still awake, but Toni’s quiet for a long while. It’s okay. Martha anticipated that; it’s a hard question. Martha waits patiently, listens to Toni breathe while Toni thinks it over. Martha wishes Toni wasn’t still sleeping on a mattress beside her bed, wishes she could get a look at Toni’s expression, but it’d be way too obvious if she leaned over now.
It’s only their third night home. They go back to school soon, but Martha can’t shake the feeling that she isn’t herself anymore. That she doesn’t know who she is now. That she doesn’t know who she might want to be. They’d imagined themselves coming home and being celebrities, going on talk shows, having boys lining up to take Martha on dates. Instead they came home and Martha’s mom welcomed them back from their vacation and asked if they had fun. Her own mom doesn’t know what happened to her, and Martha doesn’t know how to tell her.
“I don’t know,” Toni finally answers. “I don’t –” Toni exhales sharply, and Martha can picture her shaking her head. “So much changed. What do you think?”
Martha blinks, stares up at her ceiling blankly. “Honestly? I think it ruined us.”
Toni sits up, but Martha refuses to look at her dead on. She can see Toni in her peripheral vision, can see the concern in her features as Toni asks, “Do you mean us like…us? You and me? Or…”
“All of us,” Martha clarifies. She pulls her covers up to her neck and closes her eyes as Toni continues to study her. “Everyone. I don’t think we’re ever going to get close to being the people we were before this happened, and that’s not a good thing.”
After another extended silence, after Toni lays back down and Martha’s convinced Toni’s asleep, Toni murmurs, “We’ll figure it out. You’ll always have me.”
*
“How much of your personality is fake?”
Kirin instinctively scoffs, but Ivan is dead serious. He cocks an eyebrow at Kirin, crosses his arms over his chest, waits for an answer that won’t come, because Kirin’s mind goes blank. “Excuse me?” Kirin manages to spit out, and Ivan shrugs.
“You heard me. How much of it is fake? I know all that macho bullshit is, in fact, just bullshit, so what’s real?” Ivan’s smile is teasing, and Kirin’s stomach drops, and he hates it, hates himself as Ivan asks, “Who is the real Kirin O’Conner?”
Kirin’s eyes narrow, and he glances around, because even now, he cares about what people might think. But no one else in the hall’s paying attention to the loud-mouthed dick who used to be a star lacrosse player before he was stranded on not one but two islands for a summer. No one’s paying attention to him even though he towers over almost everyone, especially since he hasn’t been very loud since returning to his old life, a life that feels even less like his own than it did before the fake plane crash. No one gives a shit about him even though he feels like they can all see right through him.
“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” Kirin asks.
Ivan balks, clearly not what he expected, and when Kirin tries to walk away, Ivan catches his wrist. Before Kirin can yank free and shove Ivan into the lockers behind him, Ivan says, “Because it’s just you and me here. We’re the only ones that get it, the only ones that know what it’s like, and you – you barely look at me now.” Kirin goes to pull his wrist free, but Ivan lets go at the same time and rolls his eyes. “Forget it,” Ivan mutters. “I was stupid to think we became something like friends out there.”
“Taylor –”
“Forget it!” Ivan calls over his shoulder, and he disappears into the crowd of students that still couldn’t give a shit about Kirin.
*
She spends a lot of time at Dottie’s place now. Her parents don’t have many objections, though Shelby’s not sure they know anything about Dottie or even what Dottie looks like now. Their mental image of Dottie is probably still the little girl who played soccer in a jersey too big for her with her hair in pigtails and a smile that showed her missing front teeth. Shelby has no interest in bringing her parents up to speed. About anything.
Dottie barely resembles the person Shelby knew last summer with her black eyeliner and her pink streaked hair and the way she pairs flannel with a band tee and cargo shorts. She usually reeks of cigarettes, but at least she smokes outside. Her house is sparsely decorated – well, really, not decorated at all. Bare bones. Furniture. A TV that works if you smack it just right. Really the only items in the house that could even come close to being considered decorative are the pictures of Dottie and her dad.
But still. It feels more like home here than at Shelby’s actual home. Here, at least, she’s with someone who knows. Even if they don’t really talk about it, about either of the islands or what happened out there or what happened after, no matter how badly Shelby might want to talk about it. At least Dottie knows.
“Hey,” Dottie calls, front door slamming behind her. Shelby sits up from the couch, turning the volume down as Dottie smirks at her and holds up a disheveled looking envelope. “Got a little mangled in the mail, but guess who it’s from?” Dottie teases. She waves it around, chuckling as Shelby snatches it away and feels her face redden.
The return address, written in a crappy scrawl that Shelby finds endearing, is in Minnesota.
*
They see each other in the halls. Usually, they don’t make eye contact. Usually, Raf ignores Josh and Josh ignores Raf. To be fair, Josh started it. Raf wouldn’t ignore him if Josh didn’t always so pointedly look away whenever their paths cross. If Josh looked up and smiled, Raf would, too. Hell, maybe Raf would even strike up a conversation, ask Josh how he’s been, ask him if he’s heard from Kirin.
He probably hasn’t. Kirin deactivated all his social media right before they all went back to school, and honestly, Raf can’t think of anything else to talk about with Josh besides what they went through, besides what happened on those islands. Because Raf knows more about Josh than anyone else in this building, that’s for sure, but they might as well be total strangers.
Josh shaved his head. Raf isn’t sure when it happened. Sometime after they got back but before school started. Raf wants to say something to Josh, it turns out. He could probably just start with hey, nice haircut, but really he wants to say kind of crazy that we’re back in high school even though we spent the summer fighting to survive on an island and nothing happened, right? Kind of crazy how the world just keeps moving forward no matter what happens to us, right?
He can’t say that now. If he was going to say that, he should’ve said it on the first day, not waited until spring semester when they’ve interacted exactly zero times, when they won’t even look at each other. Raf feels guilty sometimes, but it’s not like Josh is trying to be his friend.
On the last day of school, someone bumps into Raf while he’s at his locker, packing up the last of his things. When Raf turns to tell them to watch out, he makes eye contact with Josh, and the words die in his throat. Josh doesn’t scamper off, and the only thing that comes to mind for Raf to say is, “Nice haircut.”
*
She’ll never really understand why Nora agreed to be part of the experiment. She’ll never really recover from everything that happened out there, even with Nora alive and well, even with all the explaining and analyzing they’ve done together since getting home. She’ll never see justice, because Gretchen is dead, and Daniel Faber disappeared off the face of the Earth, and the FBI hasn’t done shit in the year since they returned.
“We should tell them,” Nora says, literally the night before they’re leaving for NYU together. “We should tell them we weren’t really at summer camp. We should tell them what happened out there.”
“No,” Rachel snaps. “We absolutely should not tell them.” She zips her bag shut and looks down at her arm, looks down where she used to have a hand. She looks at the reminder of that awful summer that she’ll have forever, and she’s done blaming Nora for that. Instead, she’ll blame a dead woman, and she’ll keep their parents in the dark for as long as she can.
“Rachel – they should know.”
“Why? Why do you want them to know you dragged us into a highly illegal experiment that caused all of us irreparable damage when there’s nothing that can be done about it?” Rachel demands. She shakes her head and hauls her bag off the bed. “It’s best that they think I lost my hand in a tragic boating accident at summer camp.”
Nora bites down on her lip, and Rachel looks away as Nora says, “Fatin’s parents know.”
“Fatin’s parents did this to us.”
“That’s not entirely accurate –”
“Let it go, Nora. Please,” Rachel says. “If you want NYU to work out, if you want to move forward and be normal again, please just let it all go and leave Mom and Dad out of it.”
Nora watches Rachel pack up the last of her things in silence, until Rachel yanks the door open. “I don’t think we can ever be normal again,” Nora says. “If we were ever normal in the first place.” Nora hesitates, and their eyes lock. “We’re good, right? And we’re gonna be okay?”
Rachel inhales deeply, manages to nod and smile at her twin. “Yes.”
*
Scotty understands why Bo is so desperate to leave Florida, but Scotty can’t go with him. Going to school in California, scholarship or not, is insane. Maybe not as insane as leaving your best friend behind, but insane nevertheless. Still, they’re best friends, and they always have been, so Scotty helps Bo move across the country to escape his father instead of helping Bo move into a shared dorm at a college in Florida. And Scotty doesn’t tell Bo that San Diego State probably won’t work out and Bo will end up coming home anyway, but Scotty is confident that he’ll get his best friend back by the end of the first year.
Except he doesn’t. Except San Diego State does work out for Bo. In fact, he reconnects with Raf and Josh, and he makes new friends, and – get this – Bo finds a girlfriend. He’s never had a girlfriend before, and he spends three months out there and meets a girl that’s apparently perfect, and –
Scotty reaches out less. He works his ass off in school to keep his grades up and he works on developing his business; he keeps himself busy so he can’t think about how he’s losing his best friend and how he’s lonely and he won’t even try to fix it. And he blames those stupid islands and that bitch that did this to them, because that’s where everything really went off the rails. That summer ruined his life and ruined his relationship with the most important person in his life.
“You should come out here,” Bo says during one of the rare occasions they speak on the phone. “You know, take a break. I’ll show you around, and Raf and Josh –”
“I’m too busy,” Scotty cuts in. “Sorry.”
But the thing is, it’s hard to blame the experiment. Their friendship survived that fucked up experiment. Sure, they had their rough patches, but they came home together, still best friends. And the thing that tears it all apart might be college? How is that even fair?
That first year of college shows Scotty that he isn’t sure who he is without his best friend. And maybe it’s time to find out.
*
Fatin moves out the day after they get back, the day after Young gets them off the second island and promises the FBI will do something – they don’t, or they haven’t, and it’s been over a year, and Gretchen is dead anyway because she saw her experiment crashing down around her. The point is, Fatin moves out because her parents tell her they knew where she was and what was happening, and they helped fund Gretchen’s work, and the sound of pebbles clattering against Leah’s window in the middle of the night starts something new.
“Can I sleep here? I can’t be at home,” Fatin says, and she won’t elaborate, and she won’t stop crying, even when Leah forces her to take the other side of her bed, even when Leah sucks up her insecurities and wraps Fatin in her arms. Fatin cries on and off, and Leah stays awake, and something between them shifts for real this time.
Because it almost shifted over the summer. On the islands. But Leah was too afraid to do anything about it, and Fatin probably thought Leah was too fragile and wouldn’t take the chance, and now they’re in Leah’s bed, but Fatin’s devastated, and nothing should happen, is the thing. And it wouldn’t, if it’d been solely up to Leah, because now isn’t the time to make a move on her emotionally vulnerable friend.
Fatin’s crying stops for real sometime around three a.m. and she gets up to splash water on her face and finally swaps her cropped shirt for the baggy Golden State Warriors T-shirt Leah offers her from her closet. Fatin throws herself back down on Leah’s bed, rolls her eyes at herself and huffs, “This is so fucking embarrassing for me. I know, I look like a complete mess.”
“You look beautiful,” slips out, and Leah’s eyes widen as she mentally curses herself for not catching that before it left her mouth.
Before Leah can stutter in her attempt to backtrack, Fatin smiles and whispers, “I totally knew you were into me.”
And, well, considering they end up sharing an apartment and attending Berkeley together a year later, Leah’s grateful for that little slip up.
*
He lives in his house, and Henry can’t take it anymore. They aren’t brothers, even if their parents are married. The islands changed all of that. Seth will never be his brother, will never be his family. And Seth may think he’s gotten away with what he did on those islands – what he did to Josh, what he did to all of them while willingly participating in the experiment – but Henry will make sure he doesn’t get away with any of it. Henry will do whatever it takes.
He really believed the FBI would handle it, even after Gretchen’s unfortunately timed suicide. Henry really thought the FBI would help them, starting with arresting Seth and rounding up the remainder of Gretchen’s team, seizing her assets and really investigating, but it looks like the FBI shoves everything aside. More pressing issues, probably. It doesn’t matter that people died. It doesn’t matter that Seth committed crimes, because Gretchen was in charge of the whole thing, and she’s dead, so case closed.
“He almost killed me,” Henry tells his mom. Not right away, not when they first return and Seth goes on about how great summer camp was, and how they had such a good time and did so much bonding. Seth puts his arm around Henry’s shoulders and smiles, and Henry stiffens, and it takes all of his willpower not to snap Seth’s arm in half, not to beat his face in the way Raf had.
Henry wishes Raf had killed him, selfishly, perhaps, because it probably would’ve broken Raf’s spirit if Seth hadn’t survived. It takes time – months – but Henry tells his mom about how Seth held him underwater, tells his mom as vaguely as he can about how Seth hurt Josh, how Seth terrorized them on the second island.
But his mom shakes her head and says, “I can’t believe you’d go to these lengths to try to wreck our family, Henry. Making up a whole story about being stranded – I can’t with you right now.”
He gets in contact with the FBI, but he can’t find anything out. They don’t comment on ongoing investigations, but Henry’s not even sure there’s ever been an investigation to begin with. Maybe Gretchen has contacts in the FBI.
Living with Seth makes him feel like he’s going crazy. It’s classic gaslighting, but damn it, it works.
He lasts until the end of freshman year of college, and then he has the idea. The reunion. It’s his idea.
*
It shouldn’t work. Schedules should conflict. Getting to Texas should be a problem for someone. Anyone. But Dot agrees to host since she has her own place and it’s larger than Leah and Fatin’s apartment, definitely larger than Bo’s dorm or Rachel and Nora’s dorm, and everyone manages to carve out the time in their schedules. Leah wishes it wouldn’t have come together, but Fatin makes her go, Fatin makes her get on the plane. And from the looks of it, Martha made Toni go, and Dot made Shelby show up, and Nora made Rachel go, Ivan made Kirin go, and Raf made Josh go, and Bo made Scotty go.
And it was all Henry’s idea, and it came together perfectly. All fifteen of them show up. Fifteen, because Henry didn’t tip off Seth, and he made everyone else swear not to. It’s over a year after the last time they were all in the same room together, when they were still on that second island. Leah’s eyes wander around the room, hand clasped tightly in Fatin’s, and she tries to make sense of who these people are now. So she watches them for a bit.
Leah’s always been a little too observant.
Shelby’s hair is still short, and Leah watches Shelby snatch an unlit cigarette out of Dot’s mouth, and she hugs Toni stiffly but smiles at Toni like she’s the entire universe. Dot’s hair is tied back messily, longer than Leah’s ever seen it before, and there are bags under her eyes and her voice sounds rough, but she clings to Fatin and even hugs Leah, grudgingly admits she misses them both. Apologizes for not reaching out more often.
“Have you been doing alright?” Fatin asks, studying Dot intently, and she doesn’t let Dot off the hook when Dot tries to dismiss Fatin’s concern. Leah starts to drift away from them, overhearing part of Toni’s conversation with Shelby about how she’s joined her college’s basketball team, and she hasn’t been suspended yet. There’s something more relaxed about Martha, and Leah doesn’t know how much of that to attribute to the boyfriend she brought along with her, a tall guy with gentle eyes who goes by his middle name, Mark. It should be funny that his name is Mark, except for some reason it’s not.
“Leah!”
Leah lets herself get pulled aside by Rachel and even manages to smile when Nora smiles at her tentatively. Rachel’s arm is unwrapped, fully healed, and she seems more comfortable with both her arm and with being around Nora. It was hard at first, when Nora showed up on their second island, but they seem like they’re doing okay, and that makes something in Leah’s chest ache.
“Why are we here?” Rachel asks.
Leah makes a noncommittal sound and shrugs, says, “Fatin made me come.”
“It’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?” Nora says.
Nora folds her arms over her chest, eyes darting around the room. Leah follows Nora’s gaze to Kirin and Ivan, standing in the corner away from everyone else, whispering about something, Ivan gesturing too much with his hands. Kirin’s head is shaved but his face is not, and he looks bigger than Leah remembers while Ivan’s face lacks the annoyance that was always so typical when he was around Kirin on the second island.
These guys are barely recognizable to Leah. Bo and Scotty are on opposite sides of the room, Bo talking with his girlfriend and Scotty being way too obvious about how he’s trying not to look in Bo’s direction. Josh, too, has shaved his head, and Henry has lost all the jewelry Leah remembers him wearing, isn’t wearing any eyeliner, either.
It dawns on Leah what exactly seems to have changed so much. They’d all looked like kids on the island, and now – even Fatin, who Leah has spent nearly every day with since returning, looks more like an adult than before, and that’s not because of her short hair or the tattoos lining her arms or anything physical.
It's about what the island did to them.
“We’re here to do something about it,” Leah answers, startling Rachel.
“What?” Rachel says, and Leah returns her eyes to Rachel and Nora.
“Henry called us here to make a plan,” Leah says. “The FBI hasn’t done shit. Henry’s living with an inescapable reminder of the horrible shit that happened to us out there. So we’re all here now to do something about it. Right?”
Nora nods. “That makes the most sense to me.”
And that’s when the final person arrives. The sound of the door opening and closing isn’t loud, but every voice in Dot’s living room dies. He’s the one person that looks exactly like Leah remembers, wearing a dark suit in spite of the Texas heat.
“Thanks for inviting me,” Dean Young says. No one moves. “It’s good to see you all together again. Let’s see what we can do to get you some well-deserved justice.”