Sugar & Squall (4 page)

“I think I see something,” one of the guys said, pointing back up to the hill.

Sam slinked up to his side. “Where? I can’t see anything.”

“I’m telling you. One of them’s up there.”

Amy shivered. “I think one just walked right through me.”

“We’re going for a walk to the rocks,” Jemma said, pointing to the right of the beach. “That’s where we’ve seen them before.”

The other girls took this as a cue, moving closer to the remaining boys.

“Why don’t you two go for a walk?” Sam was referring to me and one of the guys, Xavier.

“I don’t know,” I said, pushing sand back and forth with my sneaker.

Sam was persistent. “Oh, go on,” she said, throwing seaweed at me.

Xavier stood up. “I’ll behave. I promise. Just come and have a look.”

It was late. Any defense mechanisms I might have had ebbed away with daylight.

“Fine,” I agreed, getting painfully to my feet.

“This way,” Xavier said, a step or three in front of me already, heading off to the sunken section of the beach to the left.

“Have fun,” Sam smirked.

I was most definitely not planning on fun of that sort.

After a short walk, we sat next to a giant boulder. I could only just see the others. They merged together in what sparse light there was. Still, they were there. I’d be able to handle myself, had a few choice choke holds up my sleeve, so it mattered little either way.

Admittedly, Xavier wasn’t too bad. In the moonlight I could see he had high cheekbones and a dusty collection of hair most girls would associate with surfer types. Unfortunately, he was wearing that body mist stuff. Like toilet spray, it did little but merge with the dominant odor underneath.

He didn’t have too much to say, asked me the odd question or two, questions I answered with a single yes/no. I wasn’t about to make it easy for him. I was of the mind guys should work for a girl’s attention and completely against the whole ‘treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen’ BS. What kind of misogynist jerk-off came up with that one?

Silence had fallen over us. Xavier reached over to his bag and pulled out a can of beer, cracking it open. I heard the ‘glug, glug, glug’ of it plunging down his throat.

“Where’d you get the brew?” I inquired, which seemed to pick up his demeanor.

“You want one?”

I was thirsty. The trek out here, the cold and the excitement of it all had seen to that. Beer wasn’t my preferred beverage, but it’d do.

“If you’ve got one.”

“Sure, sure, hang on.”

Now with a purpose, Xavier seemed positively chirpy. He rummaged through the bag. I heard him crack open a can, a bit more messing about before he passed it my way.

I took a swig. It was extremely fizzy, soapy almost. I would remember this detail later.

Xavier was looking directly at me. I could see his eyes flaring with the moonlight in my peripheral vision. I continued to look ahead.

“You’ve got sick eyes,” he said. “They’re sweet.” He put emphasis on the ‘T’ like he was congratulating his mate on a skateboard move. And ‘sick eyes’? He’d have been better off telling me I had a huge ass. I said nothing back. My indifference didn’t stop him.

“You’re not like these other chicks. I can feel it.” If he continued with this ‘you’re special’ muck the only thing he’d be feeling would be my knee in his groin. Thankfully, my non-response saw him back off.

Suddenly, I felt faint. I looked at Xavier. He didn’t seem concerned. There was a quiet calm on his face that started to unnerve me. Just past the rock to the right of us I could see the others, but they’d moved further away, tiny little spots of white, too far to call to.

Everything started to skew sideways. I reached out and grabbed Xavier’s shirt, but lost grip, before slumping over.

I felt sand in my mouth. Xavier was moving around, pulling my sweater up. The button on my jeans popped free, zipper running down, slowly. I felt a hand, cold. I tried to scream, but couldn’t.

The waves were rolling in horizontally, huge, terrifying. They blurred together with the sky in a phantasmagorical soup and then I was out completely, nothing but black.   

3. UNCONSCIOUSNESS

The sun had just broken when I woke. It cast muted orange light over everything. First, I noticed the beach looked entirely worse for wear not cloaked in night.

Large clumps of seaweed were strewn across the sand, sand that was such a somber hue of grey it was like the waves had risen up overnight and washed the color away.

I pushed myself upright off the sand and instantly regretted it. My head felt as if it had been bunking with an impact drill. It was a thick pain. I pressed my hand to my forehead to ward it off.

Beside me I noticed two beer cans and a blue backpack. The night came back in fragmented pieces.

Was there something in the beer? Vodka?
But I’d had vodka, and it didn’t taste like that.
He opened the can himself.
That much I remembered.

I saw a small white baggie flapping under the backpack.

Drugged. Great.

A horrible sinking feeling came over me as I considered darker intentions, but nothing felt out of place, and surely I’d notice
that
.

I reached down to my groin. Apart from the undone button on my jeans and my zipper down, my clothes were intact. My body seemed fine. Nothing. Normal.

I sat there trying to pull shards of memory back together, to make sense of it. It was then I realized I was alone.

I stood up, looking down the beach. The light had improved, even over the
space of a minute. There was no one else in sight.
Surely they wouldn’t have left me here,
I thought. Maybe it was a prank for newbies, hazing.

My watch showed 6:00 a.m. That meant I had about
an hour to get back up to the school. Getting through that door was going to be difficult, though. Hopefully, it just opened from the outside.

My head was thumping, but I’d been through worse. I straightened myself up, patted my sweater down and set foot up the beach.

The walk back to the school seemed infinitely longer in the morning. The natural world was waking all around me, and while normally I wouldn’t have any form of consciousness until a severe caffeine injection, I was unusually buzzed. Plotting murder probably had something to do with it.

I broke out of the
tree line. From this angle, the sun had turned each of the school’s windows into a sheet of gold. I threw my arm up to block out the glare, wishing I had my sunglasses but knowing full well they were not exactly required for illegal night-time excursions.

Petrified some early waker would see me, I ran to the side of the girls’ dormitory as fast as my legs would take me, which, at this hour, was somewhere between the pace of a snail and a slug.

I made my way to the dormitory’s side entrance, fumbling through my pockets for hairpins. Although I knew my chances of picking a lock were slim, it was worth a chance just so I’d be able to strangle my roommates while they were still asleep. What I’d do to Xavier would be far worse.

Give them the benefit of the doubt,
a mousy voice in my head told me.
Friends are a precious commodity. You’re on a God damn island. This might just be how they do it here
.

Commodity or not, I could find little plausible explanation for leaving me all alone drugged and defenseless on a beach, and my temper raged as I rounded the corner.

The side door was open – wide open. There was a large, ragged hole where the lock should have been. It looked like it had been bashed out, or worse. Someone was going to pay dearly for that.

A breeze was pushing what was left of the door itself
gently on its hinges. My watch read 6:25 a.m., much too early for anyone to be out. I eased myself up against the outside wall and snuck a look down the dormitory corridor.

It was quiet. That’
s what I noticed first. Birds, trees – everything outside seemed to be stretching out, finding a voice, but down that corridor there was not a single sound.

I stepped inside, more out of inquisitiveness than anything else, all the while trying to pad my feet to minimize sound.

I’d managed to make it up the stairs to our floor. Still there was no sound except for the building proper moving around me. Unbelievably, the hall itself seemed darker now than it did last night, but there were stray shafts of light running criss-cross down its length. As my eyes adjusted, I noticed every door was, in fact, either wide open or ajar.

I stopped and stared into the second room along. The curtains were closed together, leaving nothing but the silhouettes of large lumps of what I assumed were clothes on the floor. There was an acrid odor. It smelt like urine. I stepped back out into the hall.

Any second I was expecting giggly second-years to come exploding out of an orifice with their PJs on and toiletry bags slung over shoulder, yet the silence remained.

I moved up the staircase to our level. Our room was four doors down. I didn’t stop to look into any more,
fearful time spent lingering would wind me up in trouble. That I did not need. I reached our room and rushed inside.

It was bright. No one had drawn the curtains the night before. Jemma had mentioned something about how letting the sun wake up you up naturally was less abrasive to your body clock than an alarm. I recalled the principal’s daily wake-up call, which could have woken a corpse, and wondered why it mattered.

Jemma wasn’t here, nor the others. Three beds were made as we left them, but empty. The third girl’s was the only one that looked slept in.

I took in things fast. I was awake. Everything had a vividness, a tactility you just don’t get when dreaming. Jemma’s uniform was hanging up next to her bed where she’d left it last night. She had been fussy about that. It was like I was standing there with them ready to dash out into the night. I was here, however, now, and I was alone.

Fresh panic fought its way inside me.
Calm down,
I told myself.
There is
always
an explanation.
They might still be out with the guys. What if they weren’t planning on coming back to the room at all?

I caught myself in a mirror. Something was different. I looked closer. The contact I’d been wearing had come out, probably on the beach last night. Damn.
I’d work out where everyone was first and then come back for another.

I headed back out into the hall. The room next door was just as empty. Here all the beds had been slept in, with covers twisted on top or in heaps on the floor. A bright pink pillow had been split in half. On the floor next to another bed was a sock mon
key, its perpetually smiling face staring at me from under the bed.

I
jogged back into the hallway. This was going to end badly for my credibility. Everyone was probably in the middle building, some impromptu assembly, and I was about to stumble in semi-awake and slurring my speech. Scarred for life or not, I was still going to give Xavier a piece of my mind, foot, whatever came first.

The headache was being edged out by adrenaline. I made it to the dining
room, directly adjacent to the main hall where we had assembled after arriving off the ferry. To access the main hall there were two central doors like what you might expect to see in an auditorium, but I’d also noticed two single doors at either end for access to the wings. I planned to use those and just peek inside. If everyone was there, I’d retreat back to the room.

I paced over to the left-side door that ran into the main hall and gently pushed it open. It made a horrible groan. If anyone was in there they would have heard it, but as the hall came into view there was not a single soul, just seats lined up like plastic soldiers.

Running now, the silence was suffocating. There had to be an explanation, something I hadn’t read or heard the day before, some little insignificant detail.

Down the dormitory halls, past the open doors and I was outside. The only other place I imagined everyone could be was down towards the pier. I could see it from the raised vantage point of the school. While it was hard to discern from this distance, it too looked deserted.

I waited for everyone to jump out. Someone would leap from a shrub and start laughing, surely, but while outside in the fresh air there was the embrace of sound and nature, I still had a numbing feeling I was by myself.

It took me a good twenty minutes to reach the pier. The path was cobblestone and completely in the open. You could have seen me from practically any window in the school. Maybe I’d turn around and catch somebody swinging out the window or waving, some kind of proof there was another person around. Only stones and shadows watched over.

I noticed a strip of material, torn, on the ground in front of me. I picked it up. It was flannelette, little hearts printed onto the fabric. Maybe we weren’t the only ones out last night. I let it flutter to the ground and continued on.

The pier was long and narrow. It was sheltered by a mean series of rocks to the left, creating reasonably placid water compared to what I remembered from the beach.

God, last night.

There was no sign of life here bar two seagulls on the nearby railing engaged in particularly animated converse.

Weathered wooden boards made up the decking. With the sun breaking free of the horizon it looked like the pier stretched to infinity. The railings either side were rusted almost beyond recognition, glistening with salt. Everything had that sea smell, a pungent freshness.

When there’s nothing sta
nding between you and the water, something primal always tells you to jump. Then something deeper says stand still. That’s just what I did. I stood there at the start of it, gathering my thoughts.

Don’t freak out. That’s probably what they want.

The ferry could have returned and picked everyone up, but it would have needed to make multiple trips, and at night? Besides, it only came on weekends. Was everyone at the old chapel on the other side of the island?
Yeah, the condemned one, jackass.

Aliens? Yeah, that would be my luck. Everyone beamed up to space bar me, left here to rot away on an island with seagulls to console me.

I leaned up against the railing and watched the water swish and circle about through the slits between the boards. I looked back up the hill to the school and it was as if I’d just stepped off the ferry.

The scale of the place impressed me from here. It
was
big. Who knew how many hidey-holes or secret passages were stuffed inside? I hadn’t really explored all of it. No, I’d just gone inside, panicked, run down to the main hall and back out here. I hadn’t even been over to the boys’ dorm or gone higher up into the main building.

It was 7:30am. There was still time before classes started. I took a deep breath
, steadied myself and began walking back towards the school.

#

I went bang-smack into the middle building this time. Just inside was a foyer. There was an honor board on the right wall, a trophy case below it. Twin staircases curved up either side to the upper levels. A small sign with an arrow pointing up stated ‘Administration’ at the base of the right one. Dead ahead was another set of doors. I pressed through them and into the dining hall.

It was just as silent as before, but I made no effort to quell my steps or steady my breathing, which now came rushed and ragged from racing around the countryside. I was starting to lose interest in maintaining social status. I just wanted to maintain my sanity.

A table was upturned in the corner, broken plates spilling out onto the floor. Worry returned.

I entered the main hall again. I hadn’t noticed the lights along the wall. It was like a theatre just before the movie starts playing. There were heavy velvet curtains drawn up the front. They made no effort to move, unaided or otherwise.

I paced down the centre aisle, a funeral march. To the right of the stage was a door labeled ‘Backstage/Boys’ Dormitories’ in bold gold copperplate. I pushed against it, noting it was heavy.

There was a sense of taboo about heading towards the boys’ dorms. It was like the weight of the door was trying to will me away from going any further.

I was in a corridor. There were no windows in this small passage. The stone pressed in. My pulse quickened with what might lie beyond that corner. Possibilities streamed into my head. All I could do to stop them was carry on, faster now.

I tripped on something and fell hard. It was a shoe, solitary, a slipper to be precise. I left it there and picked myself up. Time was wasting.

I edged through the archway, around the corner and came into another hall the exact mirror-image of the one in the girls’ dorm.

Random doors were open, others only just, along its length. I walked on.

There was no doubting this was where the guys lived. I found it hard to imagine after only a single day there should be any kind of scent that differed so much to the girls’ dorm, but it was there all right, and disgusting.

There were one or two art
icles of clothing on the floor. The room to my immediate right looked like a teacher’s. It was hard to believe anyone lived in there at all it was so sparse, but there were rows of technical-looking manuals on wall-mounted shelves and a desk hard against the wall with the lamp still on.