Daze exhaled deeply. “Cool. Card tricks and edited videos that make little kids do stupid shit with their parents’ stuff.”
“Uh, no,” James corrected, taken off guard.
“Daisy!” Tattoos snapped. “I’m sorry, ignore her. Are you here with anyone?”
“I was supposed to be here with a friend,” he said, feeling the shame of admitted to an embarrassing secret. “But no. I’m by myself.”
“Do you want to hang out with us? I think we’re pretty much done with the beach for now,” she said, looking over her shoulder at Ryan and his friends still struggling to find the phone in the water. “But I think we’re probably going to get some dinner before the show starts.”
James also didn’t think he wanted to stay on the beach anymore. With any luck, he’d be able to go the rest of the week without seeing Ryan LeHane again, but he also knew that Ryan had a way of making himself seen. He shrugged and nodded.
“Yeah, sure.”
“I’m Cassidy, by the way,” Tattoos said. “This is Apricot, and Daisy.”
“I’m James. Nice to meet you all,” he said, but didn’t look at Daisy. The pleasantry did not extend to her.
They collected their things, shaking as much sand out of them as they could. Once they were a few yards down the beach they rinsed off in the ocean while James waited with their belongings.
“Who was that fucking douchebag, anyhow?” Daisy asked James after she pulled her T-shirt over her head. The water immediately soaked into the fabric of the shirt, and it clung to Daisy’s chest and shoulders as she wrangled dripping hair into a bun on top of her head.
“His name is Ryan LeHane. He’s another YouTuber. His videos are mostly him pulling pranks on people like that,” James said. He didn’t want to admit to the women that LeHane actually did have some talent because he had some videos where he played piano and sang original songs that were both catchy and cleverly satirical.
“How is that even a prank? Like, he wasn’t being smart or tricking us. He was just being stupid,” Cassidy said.
The women quickly dried with the sun beating down on the group as they walked to the nearest restaurant. All the buildings on the island were almost completely identical to one another.
And,James thought with a cold chill he couldn’t explain,they look nothing like the structures I saw that creature beneath.
The villas and dormitories had a clean, prefab look to them that back on any mainland would be denigrated as gentrification, but the bars, restaurants, and rental huts all had the same kitschy tiki bar aesthetic and were only identified by the handwritten signs outside them. This restaurant had the uninspired name of The Smoke Shack.
A bit too on the nose, James thought as he watched smoke billow out from behind the counter. The woody smell of sweet smoked meat carried on the air and made his stomach grumble, stupid moniker or not.
The four of them got a table inside, where the air remained hot but at least they had some shelter from the sun. A server with a high ponytail and a close-fitting Hawaiian T-shirt took their drink orders and disappeared into the back for their waters and sodas.At least these hired models weren’t going to be handling pork,James thought. He didn’t trust them with anything beyond bartending duties.
As he tried to get a look into the workings of the back of the house through the oscillations of the swinging door just to be sure there were real cooks back there, he thought he caught a glimpse of someone that he saw on Iron Chef America recently, but he wasn’t sure. In this place, nothing could surprise him.
“Do you think this place has anything vegan?” Apricot asked, tapping through the menu on her phone that everyone pulled up from the QR code taped to the table.
“For real, Apricot? You’re going to keep on with that shithere?” Daisy asked.
“It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle,” Apricot said. “And they said they could accommodate all dietary restrictions when we made the reservation.”
James almost said that not all the restaurants were suitable for all diets but that they could find the ones that adhered to their specific needs on the app, which he learned by reading and rereading all the festival information on his lonely flight in.
“See, I told you I could find something. They have fish here,” she said. James paused with his mouth open, but he swallowed his thoughts on the matter and said nothing.
“How are you liking the island so far, James?” Cassidy asked after the servers placed their respective plates down.
“I’m enjoying myself. I went jet skiing a bit and that was fun.”
“Where are you staying?” Apricot asked. The question sounded vaguely aggressive, and James immediately felt on guard.
“In the dorms,” James admitted. Apricot’s eyebrows went up.
“Really? Are they… nice?”
James didn’t like the way she said that, either.
