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“Nervous?” I ask. Neil is always goofy and charming and extroverted. I’ve never seen him look even remotely nervous.
“Yeah,” he says with a chuckle. “You make me nervous.”
I wrap my hand around my coffee mug, fixating on the small bubbles forming on the surface, trying to ignore the heat rising in my cheeks.
“You know, I was looking for you at the Full Moon Party the other night. I thought maybe we could…spend some time together,” he says.
“Me too,” I say quietly, meaning it.
“So you weren’t feeling well, huh? Based on what you said to the group last night?”
“Yeah,” I say, looking back down at my coffee. “I don’t know what happened, but I just felt off.”
He nods, and when I don’t elaborate, we lapse into a few seconds of comfortable silence.
After a while, Neil’s smile fades, a look of concern shading his face.
“Look, I know the last few days have been a lot. And I know you’ve probably noticed how strangely everyone is acting over what happened to Lucy and Daniel.” He stares off at the water, his face growing uncharacteristically stony, before returning his gaze to me. “You’ve got to understand, my life before I came here was pretty bleak. I’ve never told anyone this, not even Doug or the others. Something about you just makes me want to open up, I guess…” He sighs, trailing off. It’s not at all what I expected him to say, and as his pause extends, I worry I’ve lost him, but he starts again hesitantly. “I tried to end it a few times.”
“End what?”
“My life, Brooke,” he says more forcefully. “Once with pills and once with smack. Neither time took, just landed me in hospital. Looking back, I guess I just didn’t want to die enough. If I did, I would have found a way to make it stick. But back then, it was like I couldn’t even kill myself right.”
The news strikes me hard. I can’t reconcile the man in front of me: Neil—silly, pink-cocktail-drinking Neil—with someone who would ever even consider taking his own life. But I’m sure that’s what people have said about me. Without thinking, I place my hand over his. He lifts his head and locks his eyes on mine.
“When I finally got out of England, it was like I’d started a different life. I came here, and I could actually imagine a future. A world away from the hell that I had lived in for twenty years. I was happy for—well—the first time. I found the ocean. I made friends. I had spent my life looking at people from the outside, jealous of their ability to simply carry on. Once I started building a life here, I felt like I’d finally been let into that club, like I actually deserved to be one of those people who could be happy.”
He pauses, nostalgia glittering in his eyes. “They brought me back, you know,” he continues. “The Permanents. As soon as I met them, I felt like I finally found my family. My real family. People who would do anything for me, who would love me no matter what shit I got myself into.”
I feel that same crack cut through my heart as I did at Frangipani. A crevasse of longing that has yet to be filled.
I take a deep breath, wondering if I should really do this. If I should finally share why I ran away from everything I knew back in Kentucky. I contemplate whether it’s time to actually open up, to let someone else in.
“Sorry, that was a lot,” Neil says, pulling his hand back with a laugh devoid of humor, mistaking my silence for rejection.
“No, it’s not that.” I pause. “I did too.”
He looks at me curiously, and I realize I’m not making any sense.
“I tried to end it too.” I’m fiddling with my bracelets again. I can feel him lean forward, our coffees long forgotten, but I can’t bring myself to meet his eye. “In college, I—something happened. Something I had a hard time coming back from. So I, uh, coped the only way I knew how.”
“Brooke, I’m so sorry.” His hand is back on mine, but I turn my head so he can’t see the tears forming.
I don’t tell him the rest of it. First, the stay in the hospital, the physical recovery. And then, just when I thought I was going home, back to my mom’s filthy trailer, the subsequent surprise. The transfer to the hospital next door. “I just don’t know what to do with you,” my mother had said. “What if you try something like this again? I won’t survive it.”
She said this as if she couldn’t see the irony in her words. I shouldn’t have been surprised. She hadn’t been there for me before that; why should she start then? So I stayed for weeks in that hospital, with its gray walls and gray floors and gray patients. I drifted off to sleep every night to the screams ricocheting throughout the building. I spent my days on that horrible bed, the mattress springs poking at my spine, and I thought of the person who had landed me there. Not my mother but the person who was really responsible. And I swallowed spoonful upon spoonful of anger, the rage eventually growing in my stomach, turning me into a person I no longer recognized. I lay there and waited, counting the seconds until I gotout. Planning how I would get as far away as I could from that place, from my mother, from all of it. And then, when I got out, I made good on my plan. I got as far away as I could.
“I think most of us here have gone through something similar.” Neil’s voice jars me back to the present. “There aren’t too many well-adjusted adults running away to live on a remote party island. But it’s worked for us. Koh Sang is kind of our safe haven. A place where we can finally fit in, start over.”
I nod.
“Everyone’s just worried that if news gets out about all this, the island will be finished. And we have nothing else. Nowhere to go.”
He puts his head in his hands, his elbows resting on the table, and my heart breaks for him. I get it. I know how it feels not to have a home to return to. I rest my hand against the side of his face, and he raises his eyes to look at me. For the first time in as long as I can remember, the feel of someone else’s skin seems right.
I hate having to ruin this moment, but I have no choice.
“Neil. I think I might know who killed Lucy.”
