“I think what Hope means,” I say, taking care to keep sharp edges out of my tone, “is, like, did you step in anything, or touch anything?” My thighs are still on fire, but I can’t think of anything other than the mosquito that might have caused it. It’s not like I’ve been lying on the beach like Alexa, inviting ultraviolet rays to ravish me.
“Are you kidding? You guys would have killed me if I’d slowed your precious pace,” Alexa says, practically spitting her words. “I’ve literally been stepping in everything you’ve been stepping in. I haven’t sat down in hours, not since those rocks.”
“Would you calm down?” Hope says, on the verge of needing to take her own advice. “We’re not accusing you of anything.”
I contort, painfully, trying to get a good look at the backs of my legs. “Hope, you never sat down on the rocks, did you? Did you touch them at all?” Her skin looks every bit as pale as before, except for a slight flush in her cheeks.
“Only enough to know I didn’t want to sit down. I don’t do moss.”
Even as she’s speaking, I know that has to be it: she holds both hands up, and her right fingertips are tinted pink. I also see, on her forearm, three mosquito bites.
“Guys, I think it was the moss—the longer we were in contact with it, the worse it affects us, maybe? Maybe it’s some kind of poison ivy?”
“Great,” Alexa says. “How do you fix that?”
“Soap and water? For poison ivy, anyway,” I say. “No clue if that would work for us.”
“Do we have soap?” Hope asks.
“Well . . . no. Maybe water will be enough?”
Alexa snorts. “So we went through everything only to arrive at a deserted island where girls just vanish in the night without a trace—and we hear water but can’t see it—and now it has poisonous moss. Excellent.” She walks past us and winces when a long, thin leaf barely brushes against her calf. “Congratulations,” she says, not bothering to look back. “I am now officially motivated to find water.” As if a nearly dry Havenwater bottle wasn’t motivation enough.
This time, it’s Hope who is slow to follow.
“What?” I ask, trying desperately to ignore the burn on the backs of my legs. For once, Alexa is eager—and I am eager for the same reasons—but Hope doesn’t budge.
“It’s weird, right?” Hope’s voice has such presence for being so quiet. “She would have turned back to look for us, I think.”
Finnley.
She is an invisible force among us, the reason we ventured into the jungle in the first place. And yet, she is a viper in the trees, a black widow in the leaves: a truth we are reluctant to face.
I don’t know how to respond.
Hope already knows there’s a lot more to the island than what we’ve seen. She knows Finnley could have taken any number of routes, for any number of reasons. That even if she’d turned back to look for us, the point was, it was unlikely we’d find one another before nightfall.
And I think she knows, on some level—because she knows Finnley better than the rest of us—that Finnley wouldn’t have gone off by herself in the first place.
That’s just something we’ve all been pretending to believe to make one another feel better.
I slap another mosquito, flick it to the jungle floor, and try not to think about how quickly life can end when someone with more size and strength simply wants to be a little more comfortable.
“Yeah,” I admit, to myself as much as anyone. Nothing in the field guide prepared me for this. “It’s weird.”
NINETEEN
I’M NOT SURE there’s a living soul left on the earth who’d be able to pick the real me out of a lineup of look-alikes. Whatever has become of Finnley, at least she has that: someone who knows her. Someone who knows her well.
The day before Zero was full of all the things I never knew I’d miss.
Live-tweeting the Kiera Holloway movie marathon with Emma, who’d been my best friend since kindergarten—how frustrated we were that our apps kept freezing from service outages. We’d stuffed our faces with the s’mores Dad made, with the too-hot marshmallows that oozed like lava when we bit into them.
And then, after the marathon ended, I met up with Birch to watch the surfers ride their waves. It was unseasonably cold out for a Sunday in September, especially after the sun fell below the horizon at our backs. He’d stripped down a layer so I could warm up. If I try, I can still remember how soft his flannel shirtsleeves felt against my skin, how the fabric was warm like him, how it smelled like spearmint shower gel and the coffee we’d picked up on the way.
It’s the little things I miss, really.
Like with Emma: even before I saw her at school the next morning, I knew she’d have her hair braided like Kiera’s in the movie, a deliberately messy fishtail with shimmery gold thread woven in.
And Dad: when he brought us hot cocoa to go with our s’mores, he’d stuffed each of our favorite mugs with marshmallows, and even remembered to sprinkle cinnamon and cayenne pepper and sea salt on top of Emma’s. She’d preferred it that way since we were six.
I miss everything about Birch. But when I try to remember him, it’s not his face I see, or the ten shades of blue in his eyes, or the calluses he had on his hands from playing his beat-up guitar. Instead, I see the frayed edges of his flip-flops, loose threads and broken stitches. I see the pineapple air freshener that hung from his rearview mirror, smell its faux-fruit sweetness mixed with dust from his air-conditioning vents. I remember that flannel shirt, the one blue button he sewed on when he lost the original red one, the way he always rolled up his sleeves, no matter the season. How he had more than enough money to buy new things, but loved the comfort and predictability of spending his life with the things he knew. Perhaps that’s why he spent so much time with me.
Those are the irreplaceable things.
Even if we get our movies back, and our shimmery gold threads, and our starlets and screenplays and glossy magazine covers—even if we get our marshmallows, our chocolate, our mugs with rainbow handles and clouds on them—even if we get our surfboards, our sandcastles, our soft summer nights—
It isn’t the same as knowing someone as well as you know yourself.
It isn’t the same as being known.
TWENTY
ON OUR THIRD pass through this stretch of trees, we skirt the edges of the main path, even venture into the wild overgrowth—we are relatively certain now that no fangs or forked tongues await us. Still, we’re careful to push leaves aside with our stakes, mostly to avoid contact with the plants. The fiery stinging of the poisonous moss hasn’t let up at all; we’re not eager to meet more.
“You guys!” Alexa calls, from a shadowy area on the far side of the path. “I think I found something!” She bends down, disappears behind a fern. When she stands again, she holds up her stake: the end of it is slick with mud. “There’s a ton of it over here—and it gets soupier this way—”
Alexa cuts herself off, glances at us only briefly before taking off. She darts deep into the jungle, far from the path. Hope and I run after her, careful to avoid the mud so we don’t get stuck in it.