Everyone took the chance to introduce themselves. I tried to remember them all, but I’d never been good with names. I knew I’d remember Poppy, Richard and Cormack. And probably Ruth. After ten minutes, I could recall only a few others. Louelle, an older American woman who liked country music. Mei, a petite Chinese girl with a severe gambling habit. Eugene, a chubby businessman from the Ukraine. Thomas, a teenager from Ireland who told the corniest jokes. Yolanda, Greta and Roxy—the three women who’d been sunbathing earlier.
When night fell in the garden, it felt like a thick crush of velvet, unlike any night I’d known before. Beautiful and dream-like and strangely suffocating all at once, lulling me with the heady scent of fruit ripening on the vines and trees.
In the refectory, we sat and ate a dinner of hot, fresh bread and soup.
Internally, I felt parts of myself relaxing, parts that had been wound up for so long they’d rusted tight. The daily grind of dressing and feeding young children, of trying to stretch the budget to buy enough groceries for the week, all the laundry and cleaning and worry. All the endless squabbles between the girls.
It felt as if drops of unseen oil were unspooling all the overwound parts of me.
Here, I was being fed, looked after, no one to worry about but myself. I was with people who were trying to help me, not judge me. That was the biggest thing. The not judging. Back when I’d found out I was pregnant with Willow, I’d been a smoker. The people who’d primly told me that a pregnant woman smoking was disgusting didn’t help me at all. Cue my mother. Even Marla told me that women who smoke during pregnancy should be charged as criminals. It was Gray who helped me quit. He quit with me, and he was with me every step of the way. Gray didn’t tell me when he lapsed and started smoking again. Not wanting to tempt me, he kept it well away from the house. He tried to quit two more times after that before giving up for good a few months back.
I grew nervous again as the bells signalled it was time to head to the dormitories.
Poppy squeezed my arm as we walked along the hall. “This is it. The first night of the challenges.”
“I feel sick,” I said in reply.
“Me too. But we just have to see it as getting one step closer to the prize, right?”
Kara knocked past me and was first to enter the women’s bathroom. I glimpsed her staring straight ahead into the mirror as she brushed her teeth, her eyes fierce in the dim light.
Had something happened to her between when I saw her at the casino and now? I hoped she’d relax enough to talk to me.
She was already in bed and turned away from me when I filed into the dorm behind Poppy.
Poppy hugged me. “Good night. Sleep well, and good luck!”
Ruth rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “It’s not luck if you know what you’re doing.”
The lights snapped off.
When the church bells rang through the room’s loudspeakers at midnight, I startled from sleep, thinking I was at home and it was the fire alarm.
Lilly. Willow. Gray. In that order—smallest to biggest—thoughts of them flashed through my mind.
In a breathless panic, my eyes sprang open.
This was no fire alarm. It was bells.
Dimly lit lamps had automatically sprung on in the room.
I pulled out my arm from where it was folded underneath my side, a wave of pins and needles coursing through it. On the wristband, the digital display was flashing a green number one. I gasped a quick breath. I was in the first group to go out tonight.
From the other side of the room, Poppy held her bracelet up high. “One!”
Everyone pulled themselves to a seated position, checking their bracelets, looking halfway between sleepy and confused in the orange-hued glow of the overhead lamps.
Ruth held up her flashing bracelet, eyeing Poppy and me. “How in the name of all that’s holy did I get in with you two?” She jumped from her bed. “Move it, people! The rest of the group must be from the men’s dorm.”
Poppy and I rushed to the door after Ruth.
Ruth rattled the lock, which was one of those panic exit devices—a horizontal bar that extended the width of the door. She swore when it didn’t open. “How are we supposed to—？”
Then a loud click announced that the door had unlocked itself.
They locked us in at night? I didn’t know that.
With cheers and claps echoing behind us, we ran out into the hall. The door shut automatically behind us.
Simultaneously, Richard and three other men raced out from the dorm next door.
I hadn’t spoken to the men apart from Richard, all of whom appeared to be in their thirties or forties.