“Oh shit, no way. Someone died?” one of the guys asked, stopping midway to the water with his board under his arm.
“Yeah, I think his name was Ryan LeHane,” Edie said.
“You’re probably thinking of someone else,” the boarder said.
“No, I’m pretty sure that was it,” Edie said. Years of men trying to prove her wrong put a certain confident edge to her words, while still maintaining a palatable sweetness that wouldn’t shut down the conversation. Rose lacked this sweetness, so it was up to Edie to maintain the peace with people.
“Ryan LeHane’s alive. He was posting this morning,” the boarder said and grabbed his phone out of the sand to show Edie a video. It was an Instagram story, and the timestamp indicated it was only 45 minutes old.
“Good morning. I’m hungover,” Ryan said, looking around himself beyond the camera. “It’s day two of the Island Xperience, and I’m about to go get drunk again and puke in the sand.”
Comments scrolled quickly on the screen, while heart emojis and laughing emojis filled the right side of the screen like a geyser of balloons that floated quickly to the top of the video and disappeared.
“How was the show last night? Uh, honestly, I don’t remember,” he laughed. Comments kept scrolling. Several people asked if he was okay, and they heard he died, but he didn’t seem to see those.
“What is the island like? It’s hot. And there are a bunch of hot chicks here but none of them want to talk to me. Am I going to the show tonight? Yeah, probably.”
Ryan continued to talk at the camera for another minute while Edie watched in stunned silence. Finally, the guy turned off his screen and tossed the phone back in the sand. “You sure someone died, though? That’s fucked up.”
“I don’t think anyone died,” the instructor said. “I haven’t heard anything about it. Probably just a rumor.”
“Yeah,” Edie agreed, head spinning as she followed the guy to the ocean.
The refreshing coolness of the mild waves washed against her ankles as she pushed the board into the water and settled atop it with knees bent beneath her. The sun beat down hot on the water and the smell of bacon and coffee drifted on the air. All of it was undeniably real and not a dream, which meant last night was a nightmare.
Edie stood to follow Rose, but rather than rowing forward with her oar, she allowed it to slice lazily through the water.
“What the fuck is going on?” she asked, as her confusion and fear came together inside her like stormy waves crashing against an unyielding beach, and she was merely at the mercy of both.
Backatthevilla,Cassidy sat in shock as Apricot paced through the living room, pressing her phone to her ear.
He came to the island to have a good time, and he died because those shadows …
Cassidy shook the thought away, but it wouldn’t leave.
He was just trying to live life to the fullest and he died. And he was so young, not much younger than me.
She chewed on her lip. That had been her before she’d stopped drinking, and yet she couldn’t revel in that decision. All she could do was imagine Ryan’s body, falling over the edge again and again …
That thing pushed him and now he’s gone and shattered on those rocks. It all happened so quickly and now he’s dead. It could have been any of us. It could be me. That thing was in our villa. What if I die on this island?
Newspapers don't give the full story. The media will say things like "fall from a rocky cliff" and people think that they understand what a death like that looks like. They imagine some shot from a movie where an actor is very much alive atop jagged rocks at the bottom of a pit with blood streaming gently from their head and mouth. Even if they can bring themselves to imagine something more gory and supposedly true-to-life, they still can't quite imagine what it's like to actually see a person alive and falling, and stopping suddenly, the contours of their body distorted by the unforgiving rocks and sand. They can't imagine the sounds of a body hitting the rocks. The movies don't really convey how bodies are just made of meat and bones and don't stand a chance against gravity and stone. They don't show how a person's skull can explode upon impact at the right angle and their brain is a bloody mass that used to be thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams. Maybe they'll understand, conceptually, but they can't know.
“Where the fuck is Daisy?” Apricot cried and tossed her phone into the cushions of the couch. She sounded like a frayed nerve, which was exactly how Cassidy felt. She ran her hands through over her braids again and again and then turned to Cassidy. “Are you sure you saw what you said you saw?”
Cassidy nodded. “I’m positive there was someone else up there with him, but I couldn’t see who it was in the dark. They just looked like a shadow.”
“Okay, but that doesn’t make any sense,” Apricot said, continuing to pace. “How can you see a shadow in the dark?”
“It’s like they were darker than darkness … like that thing that we saw—”
“Don’t say it,” Apricot said, and then the tears did come. “Don’t say it.”
It’s like that thing that was in our villa.
“What are we going to do, A?” Cassidy asked instead.
Apricot shook her head, her hands still locked on her braids. “I dunno. I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to find Daisy and just go home.”
