The Complete Private Collection: Private; Invitation Only; Untouchable; Confessions; Inner Circle; Legacy; Ambition; Revelation; Last Christmas; Paradise ... The Book of Spells; Ominous; Vengeance (235 page)

Not my finest moment.

But then, none of the moments on this island had been. Not the hours I had spent trying to use my compact mirror to light a fire, which had never worked. Not the spectacular fall I had taken from the rock ledge while trying to spear those teeny-tiny fish with a branch. Not the many, many, many nervous breakdowns I’d had, crying out for Upton, for my parents, for Josh, for anyone. There was a point last night, when the rain had been pounding down around me and I had been shivering uncontrollably under the darkened branches of a twisted, nightmarish tree that gave less than zero shelter, when I had even wished the kidnappers would come back.

Because clearly I was going to die here. And if they came back, it would at least be quick.

Where were they? Maybe Upton had refused to pay. Maybe they had gone to the person who had hired them, told whoever it was that I was already dead, taken their money and gone. Why not? I was as good as dead. This way, they didn’t have to waste all that gas, not to mention the bullet it would take, to finish the job.

I looked down at my arms, raging red with sunburn, and pressed my lips together against the onslaught of horrifying emotions. Above all, I was disappointed in myself. I had always thought I was a strong person. A survivor. But as it turned out, I was helpless—and hopeless. I hadn’t been able to make fire. Hadn’t been able to find shelter. Hadn’t eaten a thing in five days. In books and movies, when people were thrown into this situation, they always rose to the occasion. They fashioned axes out of sharp rocks and homes out of tree limbs and palm fronds. They learned to catch fish, clean them, cook them, and eat them. They even found ways to entertain themselves, tossing rocks or chasing crabs or exploring caves.

But I was bored. Bored, tired, scared, starving, weak, stupid, useless, friendless, loveless, sunburned, dirty, and done.

I stared at the pile of driftwood I had built for the fire I had been so certain I was going to start. The wood was gnarly and bleached white from the sun. If I looked at it just so, it could have been a pile of bones.

That was what I was going to look like when—if—anyone ever found me.

One big pile of bleached white bones.

Six white lines. Six. Yesterday I had assumed I would never see six white lines. Had assumed I’d be dead before that could happen.

But I woke up this morning. Not dead.

Weird.

It was another beautiful, sunny day in the Caribbean. Not a cloud in sight. Somewhere people were reveling in this fact. They’d picked a good week for vacation, all right! But not me. I would have given up a limb for a cloudy day. My skin was peeling off in long strips. As much as I tried to stay in the shade, it was freezing the moment I stepped—or crawled, usually—from the beach into the tree line. Unbearably so. Freezing inside, scorching out. There was no in between. And so, I was burned. My lips were chapped and blistered. My throat as dry as the sand under my ass.

My ass. I looked down at it now, thinking about it for the first time in days. It actually hurt from all the sitting. Maybe I’d go for a walk
today. Yeah. I was tired of looking at this stretch of ocean. Maybe it looked different from the north. Sure it did. Why not? I got up, leaving my T-shirt on for some sun protection, and started to walk.

Huh. My legs actually worked. Even after five—no, six—days with no food, my muscles still worked. They were a little—whoa there—wobbly, but they worked. I walked along the beach, my feet crossing over each other as I stumbled along trying to keep balance, and looked around, feeling quite proud of myself.

I was still alive. Ha! Take that kidnappers. Still alive. Maybe it was my butt that was feeding me. I always thought it was kind of round. I bet my body was eating up all the fat stores from my butt now. Yeah. See, having a big ass is a good thing. Good, good, good. They should put that in magazines. Why diet? Why stay thin? If you ever get kidnapped and left for dead, your fat ass could save your life!

A light breeze blew my hair across my face and suddenly I felt dizzy. I put my hands out in front of me, but the beach tilted and spun. My sore butt hit the sand hard, radiating pain up my spine. I blinked a few times, trying to get my bearings. Then I laughed.

A breeze had blown me over. Things could not be good if a little breeze could knock me down like that. I rolled over onto my stomach, folded my arms in the sand, and rested my forehead on my forearms. Probably the backs of my legs were a lot whiter than the fronts. Maybe I should just lie here and even out the color.

Red in front, red in back.

I laughed even harder. Laughed until I coughed. Coughed until I was gasping for air. My throat constricted, my lungs burning with
pain. Was this it? Was this dying? I tried to push myself up on my elbows, but my muscles quivered and I face-planted in the sand. Sucked sand into my mouth with the next cough. Gagging. Gagging. Gagging. I rolled onto my side. Heaved. Spit sand everywhere. Convulsing, drawing my knees up toward my chest. Tears streamed down my face into the sand.

Dying. This was me, dying.

“Reed.”

I blinked. Covered my mouth with my hand to try to quiet the cough. Surely I was imagining things. I had not just heard my name.

“Reed.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. I was hallucinating. Dammit. I really was dying. How many times could one person die?

“Reed. Up here. Look up.”

It was Thomas. Son of a bitch. Thomas was here. So maybe I was already dead.

“Come on, New Girl,” he said, his voice teasing. “You can do it.”

I rolled over onto my stomach again and looked up in the direction from which I thought the voice was coming. Looked at the tree line, just a few feet away, and gasped. Blue eyes stared back at me from the darkness of the forest. Thomas’s blue eyes.

Had God sent him here to take me to heaven? Because if I was going to go, that would be a really cool way to go. But wait, Thomas had not, technically, been the most pious do-gooder on earth, what with the drug dealing and the lying and the short-temper problem. Had he even
gone
to heaven? Crap. What if he was here to take me to hell?

“You’re not dead, Reed. Just come here.”

“I can’t,” I said.

My arms were so weak they felt like noodles. There was sand in my mouth, up my nose, in my eyelashes.

“Yes, you can. You can do anything,” Thomas said. “I’ve been watching you, Reed. You have no idea how strong you are.”

“But I—”

“Just come here,” Thomas said, growing impatient. “There’s something I want to show you.”

Well. That was intriguing. My dead ex-boyfriend had something he wanted to show me? I mean, who could turn down an offer like that? I braced my hands under me and pushed as hard as I could, lifting myself up onto my knees. The head rush was excruciating and long. Way too long to be normal. But eventually, my vision cleared and I could make out shapes and colors again. Thomas was still there, his blue eyes peeking out at me now, from under a low bush.

I squinted. How could he be that low to the ground?

Edging forward on my knees, I called out to him. “Thomas? What are you doing? I so don’t have the energy for hide-and-seek.”

I shoved the low, thick leaves of the bush aside and gasped. The blue was not Thomas’s eyes. It was the label on a bottle of Evian water. I grabbed it, fully expecting it to disappear right in front of me, but it didn’t. I was holding an actual bottle of water. A full bottle of water.

But no. It wasn’t possible. This island was deserted. I hadn’t seen a soul, a boat, anything, in six days. This was just another hallucination.
A really horrible one, since I could feel the plastic beneath my fingers.

“This isn’t real,” I told myself.

“Yes, it is.”

Thomas was right beside me now. His voice in my ear.

“No. It’s not.” Tears coursed down my face. “And you’re not either. I’m going insane.”

“You’re not. Just open it. Drink it,” Thomas said. “But take sips. You don’t want to throw up again.”

My hands trembling, I opened the bottle. Heard the click as the cap released from its plastic band. I had never wanted anything so badly in my life, but I was afraid. Afraid that I would lift the bottle to my lips and the whole thing would vanish.

“Here. I’ll help you,” Thomas said.

He lifted the bottle to my lips. Tipped it toward my mouth.

Cool water ran over my cracked lips and down my throat. The relief was instantaneous. I wanted to gulp the whole thing down, but remembered what Thomas had said and stopped. I didn’t want to retch it up. Not only that, but I had to conserve it. Make it last as long as possible. I lowered the bottle and took a breath. Then I allowed myself one more gulp. My tears turned to tears of joy. Relief.

Thank God for people who littered.

People who littered. People.

This meant someone had been here before. It meant people did, occasionally, come to this island. Someone knew it was here. And if someone knew it was here, it was possible they were coming back.
It was possible that even if the kidnappers had left me for dead and Upton had forsaken me and Noelle had given up on me, I could still be saved.

I looked at Thomas, wanting to share the good news, but he was gone.

Of course he was. He was never there.

I looked down at the bottle and cap clutched in my ragged, dirty hands. But if he was never there, how did I find this?

I felt a chill and looked around. “Thanks,” I said, just in case. “I’m glad you’re watching over me.”

Then I capped the bottle, got up, and set off to find some food already. I was not going to end up like Thomas. I wasn’t going to let some sadistic psycho remove me from this earth before I was ready. I was going to find a way off this island. And if I died in the process, at least it would be on my terms.

I walked north on the beach, farther than I had walked on any of the previous days. If someone had dropped a water bottle, who knew what else they had dropped? Maybe they were even still here somewhere. Maybe I was about to stumble upon a group of college students camping out on the beach. And they would have food. And more water. And a boat.

A girl could dream.

As I strode along, ignoring the weakness in my limbs, the shakiness of my knees, I kept one eye on the beach up ahead and another on the tree line, looking for more lost goodies. A can of Pringles would be nice. Or maybe a McDonald’s bag with an Egg McMuffin inside?

Up ahead, a long branch hung out over the beach in an arc. As I approached I realized why. It was heavy with fruit.
Laden
with little green apples. My heart leapt as I dropped my bottle of water in the sand and ran forward. Overjoyed and cursing myself at once, I pulled
the branch toward me. If only I had come this far a few days ago. I could have been feasting on fruit all this time.

I yanked an apple down. My stomach grumbled in anticipation as I brought it to my lips. In that split second I imagined the sugary sweetness. The juice running down my throat. My mouth actually began to water. God, this was going to feel so . . . so . . . good. I opened my lips and was about to bite into the apple, when my eyes fell on the tree’s trunk and I froze. My mind flashed on the manchineel tree in the Ryans’ garden—the gray bark, the shiny green leaves, the yellowish-green fruit—and the apple dropped from my fingers. This was the same type of tree. I turned around and sprinted for the ocean. Dropping to my knees, I shoved my hands under the water and scrubbed them together. Mrs. Ryan had said that just touching the sap could be deadly.

I had just come
this close
to eating an actual poisoned apple.

Who was I? Snow White?

Shaking violently, I lifted my hands in front of my eyes and stared at my fingers. They looked okay. Burned and cracked, but okay. My flesh wasn’t melting from my body or anything. The waves crashed around me, soaking the hem of my T-shirt and the dress underneath, but for a long moment I didn’t move. I took a deep breath and allowed my pulse to calm.

I was okay. Still stranded, still starving, but okay.

Slowly, I stood up and turned around. A thought ever so languidly formed itself in the back of my addled mind. Maybe I couldn’t eat the apples, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t use them.

I walked back up the beach and slipped the bandana off my head. Tying the two free corners together, I fashioned a little sack. Then I untied my blindfold from my wrist and used it to protect my hand as I picked as many apples as I could load into the sack. I grabbed my water bottle up from the sand as I walked by and headed back for my little stretch of beach.

If those guys did come back, I was going to be ready.

The sun was starting to go down. I sat atop the rock jetty, the one that was home to the barnacles I had used to fray the twine from my wrists that first day, and watched as hundreds of brilliant colors lit the horizon. I ran my fingers over the six lines in my piece of drift. I had so hoped there would never be a seventh, but if I made it through this night, it seemed as though there would be.

Pulling my knees up under my chin, I yanked the hem of the T-shirt down over my legs to my ankles, affording myself the slightest bit of warmth. Next to me on the rocks was my bottle of water, still almost full, my pile of manchineel apples, my purse, and my one shoe. I don’t know why I felt the need to keep these things near me at all times, but I did. Having them near me made me feel more secure.

As the sun dipped toward the ocean, painting the sky with bright pinks, purples, peaches, and yellows, I took a deep breath and tried to fend off a niggling feeling of fear and desperation. Another day was
ending. Another night about to begin. How long could I make it without food? I wanted to survive. Wanted so badly to get off this island and see my family and my friends again. But just wanting it wasn’t going to make it happen.

Behind me, the palm trees danced in the wind, their fronds click-clacking against one another. It sounded like a thousand mini-stilettos crossing a marble floor. I closed my eyes and pretended I was at a fancy Billings function. That I could hear the sound of my friends’ laughter and conversation. The sounds of champagne corks popping and glasses clinking and cell phones trilling. A smile twitched at my lips. What were London and Vienna doing right now? Were Kiki and Constance still hanging out in New York? I bet Astrid was going balls-out crazy in London, doing whatever she could to piss off her parents. I rested my cheek on my folded arms and sighed, wishing I was with them. Any of them. All of them. Wishing I was anywhere but here.