I imagine too much, I know this.
“Uh,” Cameron says, looking behind me at the glass shower, not unlike the one in my room. The glass here is clear but distorted, as if there’s a film obscuring it. “Hot shower. Take one. You can’t get the stitches wet after, and I want to try to prevent infection as much as possible … and, no offense, but you reek.” He wrinkles his nose again. “Also, you don’t look so good.”
He turns on the water for me, and the pipes groan. Cameron shifts nervously on his feet as I attempt to peel the shirt over my head. “I’m sorry,” he says, turning around. “I’m not allowed to leave you alone.”
But I don’t care at all. I want in the hot shower, and I’m already mostly undressed. “I’m used to it,” I say. He acts as if I’m not used to people watching me all the time. I barely even notice him as I step under the hot stream of water, his outline hazy on the other side of the glass.
There’s a bar of soap, and I use it on my knotted hair, on my grimy skin, under my brittle nails. I clean around the wound as best I can, though it makes me wince. The hot water stings my scalp, and nothing has ever felt so good. I brace myself against the walls of the shower and let my entire body relax. I let myself breathe. I am out. I am out.
I can see Cameron, blurry through the glass, still facing away. “You okay?” he asks.
“Yes.”
I see his leg bouncing, but I don’t want to leave the water yet. “So …,” he says, “how do you know Dom?”
I wait a moment before I speak. “How do you know Dom?” I respond.
And I’m surprised when he answers. “I don’t. I didn’t. Casey did. I’m here to help Casey.” It’s like he needs to tell me that he is not my ally here. I appreciate the honesty, but I already understood that.
“He was a guard,” I say, giving him a piece of information for the piece he has given me.
“Yeah, I know. But it seems like you know him better than that,” he says, like he’s accusing me, though I can’t be sure why he is or why I care.
It’s embarrassing, is what it is. It’s embarrassing to admit how I know him. That I was naive. That I wasn’t thinking. That I trusted so easily. “I don’t know why he’d want to rescue me,” is all I say, because it’s true.
“Guess you made an impression,” he says, and I turn off the water.
I laugh, and it sounds fake, like how I’d laugh back on the island. For a purpose. For a reaction. I grab a towel off the rack, wrap it around myself, and stand in front of Cameron. His head is tilted to the side, and his brown eyes are looking into mine, as if he can see through them. I close my eyes and look away.
“He pretended to be my friend,” I say. And I decide to tell him. I’ll tell him so he knows that I will not fall for it again.
“He used to leave me secret messages,” I say. I had my head in a book when he passed me a note on the first day, a slip of paper taped to the inside of my cup when he set it before me, so only I could see. I saw the paper before I saw him, and so I liked him even before I set eyes upon him. The paper said: I’m Ellis. I looked up at him then, and he was looking right at me, right into me, with half a smile—so unlike anyone who had ever worked there before. When everything is the same, the different can blindside you. And then another guard said to him, “Mark, take out the trash.” And it felt like a secret, a code, that he was giving just to me.
“And?” Cameron says. He looks away again, I guess because I’m standing in nothing but a towel. “You had a fight because you found out he was pretending?”
A fight? Oh, if only. When I don’t respond, he looks at me again. I smile at him the same way he looked at me over his shoulder when we walked into this place—like I know something more than he does.
He notices. “How did you find out?” he asks, trying a different approach.
“He gave himself away,” I say. The notes had continued, every day, same as his smile. They’d say things like, Where’s the junk food? And I knew he could’ve just asked anyone, but it was like a game, or a test, maybe. So I’d go to the cabinet and grab the chips, eat half the bag, and then leave them out in the middle of the table when I left the room. We were communicating in code. Establishing trust.
I’d hide the notes in my pockets, flush them when I was back in the privacy of my bathroom, something wild and hopeful running through my veins.
“I found out,” I say, “when I caught him in my room a few days before the end of his assignment.”
“Aren’t there cameras?” Cameron asks.
“How did you get in?” I ask. “Same way, I assume.”
Ellis—no, Dominic—acted surprised when I opened the door, with his hands still hovering over the keyboard of my computer. He froze. Then he hit a few buttons, turning the monitor to black. He put his hands in his pockets, and he smiled.
It was the same way he smiled at me the first day—crooked and personal, as if he were talking to me without making a sound. It was the way he looked at me, like I was a girl he saw walking by, not an assignment. But that was the moment I knew that he was pretending—that he had always been pretending. I guess maybe I had been pretending, too.
“Do you ever think of getting out of here?” Dominic had asked, looking anywhere but at my computer. It’s not like the guards never go through my things. They do, all the time, but they don’t hide it. This was the first time I realized that maybe computer searches weren’t private. And I was thinking about the things I’d been researching.
“No point,” I’d said. I thought about it every second of every day. I thought about it as I looked at the sky, at the sea, at the blackness behind my eyelids, but I made a point never to say the things that were merely hope, things that might burst if I gave voice to them, stranded out in the air by themselves.
“You don’t want to?”
I didn’t understand at first. I thought I did, I thought he was going to help. And then his eyes shifted from one electronic device to the next: the computer, the printer, the light fixture, the clock.
I felt the truth seep into my bones, like acid.
“Are there cameras in here?” I asked, turning away so I could mask my expression. Turn it to calm. How else would he know?
“No,” he said, “and you know that.” It’s true. The humanitarian groups are allowed to screen this island twice a year, to make sure I am treated humanely. Like an animal. You can keep her forever, just give her the decency of some privacy. What a joke.
I had been researching what I could make with batteries, with the pieces of the electronics I’d taken apart and put back together. If I could make a radio. A phone. Or a bomb.
How to start a fire.
And he knew.
How did it not occur to me that computers were monitored? That just because it was in my room didn’t make it mine? Of course later I found out about search histories and remote access, but I didn’t know as much about computers when he was a guard eight months ago. Just that I had one and it was full of information. Lots of information. Information is free to me, I just can’t send it out. Just like in a prison.
I felt my anger grow, and I buried it under my indifferent expression.
At first.
“Do you ever get messages from the outside?” he asked.
June. Like everyone else, he was looking for June.
I set my jaw, set my resolve. “Yes,” I’d told him, “but you can’t tell.” I gave him a small smile. “And not through the computer.”