The next morning, while the rest of them slept off the night before, I went for a walk through the nearby fields, looking with the eye of a forager as I went: gooseberries, horseradish, and then a huge field of mushrooms. I knelt down and inspected them; they were field mushrooms, I’d know them anywhere. I collected them up in my sun hat and took them back to camp.
The others weren’t very keen when I first showed them what I had, so I took one, raw, rinsed it off and ate it, right there in front of them.
There were gasps and a whisper of “suicide,” but they needn’t have got their hopes up. I had one moment of hesitation, just before I swallowed it, wondering if I had somehow missed a telltale speckling of a death cap stem or the gills and skirt of an early destroying angel, but I hadn’t. I knew I hadn’t.
I swallowed it and the others stood in silence, waiting for me to collapse, clutching my throat, or my heart, or my stomach. I stared back at them.
“The poison from a mushroom takes hours to work,” Maisie Brookes said in the end. She was top of the class at science and planning to become a doctor. “It has to get to your liver first. Nothing to see here.”
With a palpable air of disappointment, they set to work gettingbreakfast—without mushrooms—ready. I looked for a pan for my fungal treats, but they said there was nothing to spare.
Then Katie stepped up and said she had eaten mushrooms picked by me or my mum and she would like some too. Katie’s word, it seemed, was good enough and it turned out there was a frying pan available, after all, although in the end only Katie and I ate them.
The rest of the day passed peacefully, with just occasional glances over to see if either of us was about to bite the dust and, the following morning, I was woken by someone poking me in the eye to see if I was still alive. But yes, I was alive, so was Katie, and we were not just alive, but well.
I began foraging each morning for the bits and pieces you could find to eat in June, the others ate what I found, and it seemed that the week was going to pass peacefully. Suspiciously peacefully.
On the final evening, it began. Samantha asked us all, “Who wants to play Truth or Dare?”
I sighed. Who, in their right mind, would want to play Truth or Dare? It was a horrible game. Yet, predictably, I was in the minority on that one.
I offered to spend the time tidying up the camp, so that it was all shipshape and easy to pack up the next morning, but they wouldn’t hear of it.
“Come and have some fun!” But one girl’s fun is another girl’s nightmare.
I tried saying that, simply, I didn’t want to play, but Euan said, “Come on, we’ve brought you all this way; just join in, for god’s sake.” And that was the end of my fight. A few minutes later, I was part of a circle, ready for the first round of Truth or Dare. At least Katie wasto my right, so I knew the questions wouldn’t be too bad. As soon as Euan had finished handing out lagers, we began.
Samantha started by asking Lauren, “When’s the last time you cried?”
“The last day of school,” Lauren replied—for god’s sake!—and turned to Maisie. “Have you ever stolen something?”
“No,” Maisie said and turned to Philip Whitaker, on her left. “Would you sell your pet for a million pounds?”
“No,” he said and turned to Euan. “Would you sell your brother for a million pounds?”
“Yes,” Euan said and turned to Katie. “How would you rate your looks on a scale of one to ten?”
Slightly embarrassed, Katie gave herself a modest five and asked me, “Who would you choose to help you hide a body?”
Unwittingly, I got the answer wrong when I said, “You.” Although I didn’t exactlychooseto hide a body with James. I turned to my left and asked Tyler Carson if he had ever cheated on a test. He hadn’t, apparently.
Soon after that we had our first dare when Philip Whitaker was asked if anyone had ever walked in on him pleasuring himself. He chose a dare—why didn’t he just lie?—and was sent to shout “Geronimo!” into the neighboring camp.
The next dare saw Lauren going to the campsite office to tell the site manager she loved him and soon after that, Katie had to swallow a teaspoonful of pepper.
We returned to truths, until Samantha announced that the game was boring, which it was, and we should mix it up a bit. She fetched an empty bottle and put it in the middle of the circle.
“We’ll do it like Spin the Bottle,” she said and spun. As it cameto a stop, it pointed at me. The circle went quiet. Samantha smiled. “Daisy,” she said. “Who’s your dad?”
No one spoke. The summer breeze suddenly sounded loud in the trees; by my knee, an ant scaled a blade of grass.
“You have ten seconds to answer,” Samantha said. “Or it will be a dare.”
“Dare,” I said.
Samantha and Lauren leaped to their feet. “What shall we tell her to do?” Lauren asked, but Samantha already had an answer.
“Do a striptease.” Some of the others laughed, some of them groaned. I said nothing.
