July 14, 2018
"If he survives this—if—knock him down a peg," Alton said, breaking the rather uncomfortable silence that had descended over the room.
On the screen, Lorenzo Tavares squared off against Tyrell Lahti, each boy armed with a vicious melee implement. They clashed, locked their weapons.
"Even if he wins?" Carlos asked. Then he considered and added, "Even if it's clean?"
"No matter what," Alton said. Carlos wore an expression of confusion as clear as the orange starburst patterns on his shirt, so Alton elaborated: "It's not about the fight."
Mr. White was biting her lip. While the boys clustered around the coffee table, she'd retreated to her bed, and was scrunched up on its edge, arms wrapped around her knees. For the few minutes she'd held this position, her posture had been lazy, but ever since Tyrell's accusation her focus had been clear and keen.
"You think he really did it?" she asked Alton.
"Oh, certainly." His tone was, he hoped, nice and casual, free of the disturbance he felt. He didn't want to explain it, and he didn't particularly want to lie. Better and easier to come off as unperturbed.
The truth was, the most unsettling part of the accusation was that Ty had known and Alton hadn't. Yes, it was a short turnaround between prom and the trip, and this was the sort of thing where its making the rounds on social media was a coin toss or worse. Perhaps Alton would've been on top of things had he been there in DC, though of course nobody would've benefited for his greater knowledge, as he would've ended up on that island with the rest of them. But he still couldn't help feeling excluded somehow. Ty and Lorenzo had been friends, he told himself. Maybe that was the vector the information had spread through, a direct confession. But the three of them in the hotel room had just recently heard Erika allude to something about Lorenzo being an awful person, and while it was easy to see how she'd be aware if Ty knew, that had further implications. Once shared, a secret tended to spread like a disease.
"Look at it this way:" Alton continued, "you've just been accused of something horrible by a supposed friend, in front of others, with a whole bunch of weapons. If you're innocent, what do you do?"
He didn't wait for an answer; the question was obviously rhetorical. On the screen, the boys brawled bare-handed now.
"You deny it. Even if you are guilty, if you have any sense, you deny it. You call the other guy a liar and sow just enough doubt. If you don't do that, the only reason is that you're caught off-guard that he actually said it, and can't improvise fast enough because it's true."
He left it there, and for a while the room was silent. They watched Lorenzo fall, watched Violet's shot go wide.
"Okay," Carlos said, sounding more than a little pained to even be touching on the topic, "but, okay, hear me out, but why does being a rapist affect his chances?"
"It doesn't," Alton said. "Being a known rapist does."
He shrugged.
"Be real. Nobody wants to admit it, but statistically he's almost certainly not the only one on that island. A lot of my classmates had awful consent practices. As far as I know, though, he's the only one dumb enough to get caught out for it. Unless you count Wyatt, and that didn't stick to him."
Alton waved his left hand to dismiss that particular topic; he'd mentioned the brawl in the hall in passing before, had touched on what Sierra had said and how everyone had responded, or hadn't. There might be time to come back to it later, if it was relevant, but they were on a deadline here.
Mr. White, however, was eyeing him intently now. Alton could almost feel her gaze, as he watched her watch him from his peripheral vision while watching Carlos watch Lorenzo slink away. If the topic at hand was anything else, he would've probably ignored her until she worked herself up to broaching the subject or let it lie. Here, though, the stakes were too high.
"What?" he asked, turning to meet her gaze.
She leaned back a little, and he watched her teeth tighten on her lip. It looked mildly painful. He didn't think she'd been expecting to get caught.
"Nothing," she said, and then, to her credit, she spilled anyways. "Just, I'm surprised you care so much about consent practices." A pause, and while she didn't show blushes easily, he could tell one was spreading. "I mean, not like that, you know I know you'd never, I mean—"
Alton flapped his left hand back and forth, more casually than the wave. Carlos was watching him too, now, and he did not want to be having this conversation, but had to kill it tactfully, if not gently.
"I believe in people's right to autonomy," he said, "and I believe in good communication. Especially with lovers."
Before anyone could say anything else, he slipped in one last piece, to seal the deal.
"My father was not, to my knowledge, a rapist, but he was not a good communicator."
Facing Mr. White, so Carlos couldn't see his lips move, he mouthed to her, "Tell you later."
"Oh," she said. "Right, okay, I—"
"He's not dead," Carlos said, gesturing at the screen, where Violet had just brought the butt of her gun down on Camila Cañizares' shoulder. Alton hoped someone would die, just to make sure they'd have something else to talk about.
"Let's get a capsule and move on," Carlos said.
"Alright." Alton took a breath. "The only reason Lorenzo hasn't shot straight to the bottom tier is that his secret's spread is obviously fairly limited, given that I didn't know about it before Ty outed him. He'll stay around a while, but he's not coming home. Don't put money on him as winner."
"Got it," Carlos said. "Fuck, man, let's watch someone else."
"Fine by me." Mr. White nodded.
Alton nodded too.
Inside, though, he was already laying out the conversation that would come later, trying to figure out how to put into words something that was uncommonly intuitive to him, one of those rare somethings he'd felt little need to ever consciously challenge.
It was part of the fun, he thought. No, more than that: being wanted, that was most of the fun. The physical aspect of sex was what it was, pleasant surely, but to have someone else want that sort of connection with you, want it desperately, sometimes even when it would make their life more complicated later, when it was a want competing with other, more logical wants—that was really something. There wasn't anything quite like it. Did that sound terrible? He usually gave this sort of conversation a wide berth indeed; there was so much to lose and so little to gain.
And of course, to take by force, that was about control, but it was a repulsive form of it, not to mention a tactically insipid one. So many people needed to be known and fawned over or cowered before to feel properly sated. Alton believed in payback from afar, took satisfaction in knowing someone's downfall, not being known as its author.
He shook his head, a sudden, jerky motion that drew Mr. White's gaze instantly. The other two had been talking and he'd missed a sentence or two. He scratched at his hair.
"Itch," he said.
Nobody questioned him.
Alton clapped his hands, once, the loud noise cutting through the room. Like that, the spell was broken, and Mr. White burst out laughing. Carlos was grinning too. On the smaller screen of a laptop on the desk, Beryl Mahelona's body was being wrapped up, but the bigger screen was devoted to Abraham Watanabe as he scrambled through the woods, two bags now in his possession.
"Well played indeed with that swap," Alton said, referring to a piece of context they'd watched a few minutes prior, an unauthorized trade with an unconscious Nona Hart. "Well played again with the perfectly-timed cut and run. If Abe keeps up this initiative, expect him to rise above this spot."
"That your verdict?" Carlos said.
"Yeah. And 'this spot' is one point above whatever he's at now," Alton said. He frowned for a moment. "I think he's at Unfavored. Damn."
"Wanna bump him two?"
"Not just yet. Maybe another tomorrow."
In a fairly gloomy and somber moment, Abe had come through with something so unexpected yet also so obvious that Alton had a hard time believing it. He'd had a slightly difficult time parsing a lot of what he'd seen, truth be told; watching Beryl gurgle and burble through a hole in her chest seemed like it should probably provoke more of an emotional response than mild curiosity coupled with moderate irritation at losing someone whose prospects he'd vouched for in rather nebulous terms.
Then again, it wasn't like Beryl had just now died. By this point, she'd been dead for nearly a month, had been breathing her last before Alton had entered Sweet Bay Coffee for his first meeting with Mr. White. They were seeing it now, but he'd known the whole time, so this was just confirmation of fact, much in the way that dropping a pencil confirmed the force of gravity still functioned as expected. In that light, why should he be feeling much? The gore? They showed surgery on television. That the end result was death? There was a famous picture from the Vietnam War depicting the summary execution of a Viet Cong officer. Alton had been fascinated when he first came across it, and it was everywhere, iconic to the point it was intercut into memes that most people seemed to consider fairly innocuous. Perhaps for most people, the recording of an execution became socially acceptable somehow once it won a Pulitzer Prize, but Alton didn't really see how that made it any different.
"So," Mr. White said, having recovered from her fit of giggles, "ready to admit you were wrong?"
"I did what I could with the information I had," Alton said. "And besides, we don't know for sure how he'll do. Maybe he dies tomorrow."
"You think I shouldn't bump him?" Carlos asked.
Alton glanced at the boy, and the smile on his face said everything there was to say. He was in on the joke, ganging up with Mr. White to roast Alton on his calls on Abe, and while there was a mild sting to his pride, he could shuffle it to the side in favor of the degree to which he was genuinely impressed by Abe's initiative and cleverness. Alton held his hands up, palms face out, as if to ward off or calm down the others. He paired the gesture with an overblown, melodramatic sigh.
"No, no," he said, "bump him up. You got me. I was wrong."
Carlos smirked, and that could've been the end of it, but Mr. White wasn't letting up so easily.
"It's because he's a stoner, right?" she asked.
Alton didn't turn to look at Carlos, not even from the edge of his vision. In one sentence, this had become a whole lot messier.
"Not at all," he said. He'd always been a good liar, but he didn't think he was going to slip this one past her. Then again, he didn't need to, just to rain check it. "It's because he's an acerbic asshole who stabs his friends in the back."
He gave Mr. White a raised eyebrow. She was on the floor, now, closer to him, and she reached out and pushed him lightly.
"Seems to be working out for him so far," she said.
Alton let himself be jostled, then reached back, trailed his fingers gently across her smooth shoulder, and abruptly shoved her back, hard. She started to go sprawling but caught herself halfway.
"Hey," she said, and tensed to launch herself back at him, when Carlos loudly cleared his throat.
"Save it for later, kids," he said, his tone riding the line where it was clear he was joking and just as clear he really was a little pissed off. "We have work to do."
He gestured at the screen.
"He's ditching the ammo."
Mr. White scooted up to sit closer to Alton, and squinted at the screen.
"I suppose it's an alright move," Alton said. "Might be better to bury it or throw it in a stream or something. Jonah won't be thrilled if he catches up with him anyways, so why not make sure he won't have any extra bullets?"
"Maybe he's just trying to be decent?" Mr. White said. She quickly corrected herself. "Kind of decent. Half decent. Maybe a quarter."
"Well," Alton said, "if that's the case, maybe you'll be owing me an apology by the end of this."
"She had good enough instincts to control a tense situation she found herself in," Alton said, "and a level enough head not to totally discard a potential ally. Good signs, all around, but not enough on their own."
"That's all well and good," Mr. White said, as Carlos furiously transcribed, "but what about the dead sister?"
"Right," Carlos said, looking down at Alton. His eyes were starting to grow bleary, and he'd taken two breaks to smoke on the patio in the last hour. The odor of cigarette clung to him unpleasantly, permeating the room.
"That's part of why she stays where she is," Alton said. "Overall, though, I think Yuka will be shaken by it but hold up. Or, at least better than Yuki."
They had reached the part of the evening where the day's most major events had been tallied and annotated, and now they were going through and checking up on some of the students who'd had quieter times in the first leg of their journey. It made it a little harder to focus, and Alton wondered whether there might not be a more efficient way to proceed, to better conserve attention. Then again, the less that happened to someone, the less cause he could see to adjust his analysis.
"I still can't believe they have matching names," Mr. White said. "I think if I had two... twins?"
"Triplets," Carlos offered.
"Whatever. I think if I had two sisters with theme names, I'd kill myself," Mr. White continued.
She was sprawled, now, on Alton's bed, and as she spoke she shifted so that her head and upper torso hung off it, upside-down. She pulled a face, contorting her features in what might have been a facsimile of painful death.
"That's probably why they all went into such different things," Alton said.
He didn't say it might be why they felt, at times, so detached from one another. He didn't recount the day in the library, when Yuki hadn't been sure what her sisters even planned to do after graduation, but now that he thought about it, that interaction made just a little more sense. He couldn't imagine being anything other than unique. Or, no, he sort of could, but it made his skin crawl. What he couldn't understand was the ambivalence, the mixture of need for differentiation and a deep and abiding love. Maybe the latter was a lie they learned to live and feel, conditioning forced on them by society. Maybe the remaining two Hayshibaras would celebrate the passing of their taller sister, at least in the privacy of their own minds.
Alton doubted it.
"Is that all?" Carlos' almost sounded like he was pleading for it to be. They still had a few dozen names to check in on.
"I mean, pretty much," Alton said. "She played the bluff with the gun well, and we know now that Quinn was an actual threat. Manuel's an okay pick-up. Sal's a good one. We'll know a lot more when the announcement hits."
"When we get to start this all over again," Mr. White added. Her face was turning slightly purple, her ponytail brushing the carpet. "I think I need more caffeine. Or some speed."
"Shouldn't be more than another two weeks," Carlos said. Mr. White groaned.
"Well," Alton said, "let's keep going, wrap it up so we can get at least a little sleep.
"
Who do we have left?"
