Survival Of The Fittest

((Continued from Abre Los Ojos ))

She was still going in and out of consciousness since leaving the hospital. The bus driver said that in a little while they'd stop at McDonalds to get some food before getting on the plane bound for home. Isabel wasn't interested. Ray was sitting with her on the bus. She told him she didn't want to get off the bus and that when it came time, to go on. He seemed to understand. She leaned her head against the window, closed her eyes, and prayed to God that she wouldn't wake up on an island.

Darkness was all around. The place was a void, seemingly endless with nothing in it other than her lying on the floor with a spotlight shining down on her. She lay on her side, staring glassy eyed into the nothing. Out of the dark a hand emerged and lightly ran it's fingers through her hair. She flinched, but didn't move. A small handheld mirror clattered to the ground next to her, reflecting the fact that she was wearing a pink, doll-like dress, but she didn't look at it. Isabel continued to look straight at the empty dark.

"Charlie's mirror," she whispered.

"Little victim," spoke a voice from the same direction of the hand, now running across the frills of her sleeves.

"All my life I've wasted...." she said in a delicate monotone.

"I'll violate you and show you my religion." The speaker seemed amused. The hand twirled a few soft, dark curls into the digits.

Tears collected in the bottom of her eyes. She blinked and they rolled down her cheeks.

"Take my voice, it will never leave you," came from the dark and trailed off into a chuckle. It moved to her face and stroked her cheek gently. The voice sounded far, like it was coming from a PA system. It sounded like announcements.

"You're the Christmas, promising the summer," she whispered.

"You simple girl. Simple girl. You let them die. You failed"

From no where a second hand appeared holding a kitchen knife.

"Dave's knife.....Danya," she said quietly after him. Tears fell steadily down her face.

"That's right." The blade of the knife rested on the fabric at her chest. "Let's find out what little girls are made of."

"No," tumbled just barley out, more exhaled than spoken. A sob escaped her lips




Someone was touching her. Touching and it hurt. Isabel gasped and woke up. She could feel the tears wet on her face and took a shuddering breath, looking at the person who'd woken her.

((Jennifer Perez continued from Liar))

Jennifer jerked back at the gasp, flinching away from the girl who had been crying in her sleep. She'd noticed. It had been impossible not to. They were both in the back of the nearly-empty bus, in the parking lot of McDonald's. Most of their classmates were inside, eating hamburgers and enjoying themselves, as much as they could, at least. Only the hermits and the severely emotionally damaged were staying behind, Jennifer suspected. This was the vessel for the truly fucked up.

She couldn't say exactly what had made her decide to violate this girl's personal space. There was a name there, floating on the edge of her mind. Isabel. That was it. This wasn't some girl. It was Isabel. People were people again, names and faces and hopes and dreams, not just things and potential things, not just breathing corpses.

Maybe it was just that it still hurt to see someone else cry, even if that someone was Isabel, who Jennifer hardly knew, even if she wasn't awake to feel her own pain, even if they'd all cried by now, again and again. The few days of recovery time had been busy. Jennifer had spent a good deal of them delirious or asleep, and a good part of the remainder in therapy. It hadn't done much for her. She'd fucked up, so many times. No amount of kind words and communal crying would help with that. Besides, Jennifer didn't really want much to do with her classmates and their tears. It hurt too much. She wasn't very good at being consoled by strangers. Everyone she'd been close to was dead, and everyone else she cared about was back in Saint Paul.

That was a strange thought, there. All her younger friends, all the juniors and sophomores she hung around with, were still living their normal lives. Maybe they'd cried a little. Maybe they'd even missed her, once or twice. She bet they'd still taken their finals, though. She bet they'd all moved on.

"Hey, um, I'm sorry," she said to Isabel. "I, um, you looked like you were, um, I'm sorry."

She should have learned by now, should have figured out that sometimes people just wanted to be left alone. She should have learned that sometimes it was alright not to interfere. At the end of the day, though, Jennifer was still a selfish person, and watching somebody cry would never stop hurting.

Isabel sniffed and swallowed. She coughed and started trying to wipe away the tears with her good hand. Her other arm was confined to a sling so that it wouldn't move around much. The bruises on her neck had matured into a soft shade of purple. It was too hard for her to get the tears that had slipped under the bandage just bellow her eye.

"N-No. It's fine. Really. Thank you. Thanks for waking me up. I was just....having a bad dream."


Isabel counted to ten and took a deep breath. She was calm. Count and breath in.

She turned and took a good look at the girl. Jen.....Jennifer? Right. She was fairly certain that was it.

Isabel looked outside at the McDonalds, complete with Play Place. If she'd been in better shape, she would have been tempted to go into the ball pit. Height restrictions be damned.

"Aren't you hungry?" she asked the girl.

She sighed and looked out at the restaurant again. "How strange is it? To be near a restaurant? It feels so weird to be some place where there's just......food. There's as much food as you want, whenever you want. It seems so easy. Feels weird."

It seemed everything was okay, then, Isabel dried her tears, and she spoke, and she wasn't angry. She was thankful, or at least pretending to be. Jennifer could almost believe she hadn't fucked up too badly. This was going to be okay. She could make it through her first real, unsupervised social interaction with a classmate without breaking down. She just had to remember how to be normal, how to be socialized.

What she remembered was that strange little movement of her wrist that had shattered the branch Jimmy Brennan had used to beat Phil's head in with. She'd never known that her reflexes were any good until that moment. Her wrist had sting afterwards. The movement had been slightly wrong. She suspected she could do it right if she tried again.

"I, um, uh, no, I'm not hungry," she said, snapping back to the moment in time to answer Isabel's question. "And, um, and yeah, it's pretty, um, pretty weird. I had gummy bears in my bag the whole time, you know that? The whole time and, um, and I didn't even know. I, um, I ate some pine needles, and I had gummy bears in my backpack."

Fucking rambling. Was she this far gone? Had she lost control of herself this badly, or was it just that someone was actually talking about everything in a frank manner? In a way, it was a relief to be dealing with someone else who was so obviously hurting. Isabel was messed up in a physical way as well as an emotional one, which was a bit of distancing factor, since all Jennifer had to show for her time on the island was a bottle of nasty syrup and some band aids and anti-fungal cream for her feet, but the physical side of things wasn't what mattered. Everyone's cuts and bruises and scrapes would heal, except maybe that girl who'd been shot in the back and the boy with the shot to the leg. Jennifer didn't know either of them. In some way, she couldn't care about them. They weren't real yet. Maybe they never would be.

"I'm sorry," she said again.

"Pine needles....I never thought of that. I ran out of food like an idiot and I passed out. I passed out looking for my friends. We got separated and then I never saw them again."

Isabel grew quiet. Then Jennifer said she was sorry. Isabel looked up with new tears threatening to spill over.

"Me too. I'm sorry. You're sorry. The whole world is sorry."

She shook her head and wiped her face again, laughing a bit.

"No, I mean, no. I shouldn't do that anymore," a deep breath, "I'm not crazy, I promise. It's just been.....a long day. Tears don't do a thing and they wouldn't want me to cry. Except maybe Dave, but he was kind of an ass."

Isabel cleared her throat and smiled. "Did you....wanna share gummy bears?"

Isabel was right. Everyone was sorry.

She said she shouldn't cry anymore. Jennifer was torn between agreeing for her own comfort, just so she wouldn't have to watch, and telling Isabel that it was fine, it was alright, it was natural to cry. That was the right choice, but she didn't have time to get it out before Isabel had moved on. The suggestion was a good one, a great one, even. Jennifer could smile, just a little, as she said, "Sure."

She dug into her backpack, shuffling through the clothes. Most of them were dirty now, worn during her time in the hospital. She'd had clean clothes, her own clothes. It was a blessing to have her own backpack, full of all the things she had loved enough to bring with her on her camping trip. During the past few days, she had felt a little bit guilty for having more than some of her classmates, like she was a rich girl in a refugee camp. Right now, though, she felt like Santa Claus.

The bags of gummy bears were crushed at the bottom, a little bit melted, but she was able to get them out and open without too much effort. Her hands were shaking a little, her own eyes getting a bit damp, but she wasn't going to cry, not now. She was done crying. She was done letting things carry her away, done justifying all her poor decisions to herself. This wasn't the island anymore. Right and wrong held meaning again. KShe could finally say, with certainty, that klling was immoral.

"Um," she said, holding the bag out. "Here. The white ones are the best."

It should have been Melissa. It should have been back at the hall of mirrors, where Jennifer's earrings were still lying amidst the debris. She felt like she'd left more of herself there than just a little piece of jewelery. She felt like she'd never climbed down from the roof of the groundskeeper's hut, like if she closed her eyes she could feel the breeze on her face and hear the distant sounds of gunfire and screaming and feel Melissa beside her.

It was nearly comforting.

She didn't close her eyes.

"And, um, don't worry," she said. "I don't think you're crazy. And, um, I'm pretty sure I'm not crazy anymore either."

Great. She couldn't think of anything more fucking awkward to say. Quickly, she tried to cover up, hoping she wasn't doing more damage in the process.

"I, um, I even had magazines and a CD player. I never even opened my backpack, but I, um, I kept it with me the whole time. I threw the other bag away."

"Not crazy anymore," she repeated, somewhat amused.

"Who am I kidding? I won't lie, I was crazy to begin with. I'm still crazy. I'll be crazy until I die."

Isabel shrugged and took a red gummy bear. It still hurt to swallow a bit. The sweet taste was sharp on her tongue. Most of her hospital nourishment had been fed to her through the tubes in her arms considering she'd been unconscious until very recently. In retrospect, that was really her own fault. She tried to get at Mizore, she tried to run. When she was awake enough to eat, hospital food was mostly bland. It was like they didn't want to startle her too much by introducing flavor too early.


Isabel looked down at her arm. In the crook of her elbow there were puncture marks now. She wondered when they'd go away.

"Red ones and the white ones. Those are the best. Red is obviously cherry or something but I'm not sure what flavor 'clear' is supposed to be."

She normally felt a little selfish picking through the gummy bears for the red and white ones, but today she figured she could do just as she pleased. Isabel looked at Jennifer while trying to swallow a gummy bear.

"That's.....cool I guess. Its nice to have things of your own in an unfamiliar place. I didn't keep anything. I lost everything on the island. Well, almost everything."

By the time she'd been picked up all her bag had in it was the letters she was carrying, some empty water bottles, a large piece of mirror from the house of mirrors and her trumpet. The hospital staff took the jagged mirror shard, but they let her keep the outfit she'd worn the whole way through on the island. She was currently wearing an over-sized sweatshirt that said "Victoria B.C." on it and some jeans the hospital had given her, but inside her bag was the ripped and torn mini skirt and her father's white button up shirt, now coated in dry blood and hardened mud. There was also one other thing.

"They let me keep my assigned weapon," she said with a bit of a smile. "Its a trumpet."

It was silly, but she'd grown rather attached to the thing. It was dented in the side from where she'd clocked Roland and it was covered in it's fair share of grime, but it was kind of like a friend.

"I didn't think I'd be here. I thought I'd be half way to Vegas by now. I wasn't going to go back to St. Paul. I'm still not sure. Ray saved my life and he convinced me to go back. I told myself it was because it was safer if I disappeared but it turns out I was just afraid to go back and face reality. Reality is scary. I never asked this on the island because I thought it was a pipe dream and not worth asking but now, now that we're going back, I guess I can ask......

What are you going to do when you get home?"

She wasn't sure why she was saying all this to Jennifer. She knew Ray and Allen and Jay and Felicia, if only in passing. Maybe it was because aside from Ray she really hadn't spoken to anyone since she woke up. Maybe she needed another girl to talk to. Maybe it was because sometimes strangers make the best confidants.

Isabel, despite her words, didn't seem all that crazy. It was nice, though, to have someone else acknowledge that things were fucked up. It was great to have someone else to talk to. Jennifer's nervousness was rapidly dissipating, replaced with a sort of apprehensive eagerness. It didn't matter that they'd probably just end up bringing painful memories back to the forefront of their minds. It was wonderful to be able to just relate to someone, to tell stories again.

Isabel shared that she'd lost almost everything. She still had her weapon, though, the thing she'd found in her daypack at the start of the whole mess. It was a trumpet. That was pretty funny. It seemed like Jennifer had actually ended up with a pretty good draw when it came to her icepick. It was enough to get her wondering again, about different paths, what-ifs, possible fates. She'd been lucky, so very lucky, to get through in one piece. She'd been lucky to have friends with her, lucky not to share their fate. The fact that she was breathing now was a minor miracle. After all, what had she known, if not that she stood no chance of "winning"? She hadn't done anything to deserve her place in the boat. All she'd managed was to avoid killing anybody. She hadn't saved anyone, hadn't stopped anyone from dying, or at least not in a permanent fashion. In the grand scheme of things, she probably could have stayed home and netted the same results, down to the guilt gripping her for being spared by a pointless whim of fate.

That didn't matter. Isabel was saying that she thought she'd have ended up somewhere else, that she'd planned to go somewhere new and start a new life. She was saying she'd been scared, scared of going back to everything. She was saying someone had saved her, a guy called Ray. Ray sounded familiar, like maybe he was someone else who had survived, so that was good. Jennifer was ready to talk about a lot of things, but she didn't know if she was up to trading stories about the dead yet.

And then, Isabel asked the question, the one she'd never asked on the island. It hit Jennifer hard, in part because she had asked, or maybe it had just been volunteered. Somehow, though, she and Melissa had talked, not about what they would do at their triumphant homecoming, but about what they would do at home all the same, about what they had thought they could make out of their futures. Melissa had said she'd be a teacher, and Jennifer had said she'd be a counselor, and they'd laughed and said they'd both be terrible at their chosen vocations.

None of that mattered now.

Jennifer managed to smile a little.

"I, um, I don't know," she said. "I, um, I have to go home to see my family, at least one last time. I, um, I don't know if they'll, uh, want me around much anymore. I did some bad stuff. Um, not killing, I mean, just, um, I wish I hadn't done some things I did and they might be mad."

It was a fear she had never vocalized before, especially not in the therapy sessions, though it had permeated her consciousness pretty much nonstop since she'd boarded the boats. This was something a little too personal for her to share with most of her classmates. She knew she was in better shape than some of them. She'd recognized faces that she could match to names that she could pair with announcements. Maybe a third of the survivors had killed, had robbed someone else of their chance to be here. That made Jennifer feel a little guilty for feeling bad, and a little smug for having kept herself together, and very guilty for feeling at all smug.

She still wasn't sure she'd get to go home. She wasn't sure her family would open the door. Maybe her father would take her if her mother wouldn't, but she wasn't sure she could handle any rejection at this point. On some level, it was part of why she had wished she was back on the island. It wasn't all about saving people. Sh ewsn't that selfless. She was scared, and she didn't want to be hurt anymore.

This was not something to bring up. She kept talking.

"I think, um, I think I'm going to go and see them and talk to them, though," she said. "And, um, and I don't know what comes next. I guess I'm going to get something good to eat, maybe, and, um, and I think I'll go see a movie."

The idea hadn't even fully formed until she vocalized it. Jennifer didn't really like movies very much. She got bored watching the screen for so long, and they were too loud, but it was something she'd never thought she'd be able to do again. It seemed like a quiet enough celebration, a little personal affirmation that, whatever happened with her family and her friends, she was still alive.

"And, um, and you?"

Isabel wasn't sure whether or not to press the girl for more. She studied her.

"You sound a lot like me. That's how I sounded back on the island. 'Go see them one last time.' I told STAR to tell everyone I was dead as a condition of getting on the boat. Well, Ray tossed my ass on the boat and I woke up in Canada."


Had Isabel actually become more self-aware since being on the island? She felt as though she was strangely clear headed for someone who'd tried to escape a hospital a few days ago.

"I can't know if what you say is true or not, but you seem like a nice girl. I mean, you shared gummy bears with me and didn't even care that I took the good ones. If they don't want you, well, I'll be happy to go with you to the movies. I know that's a poor replacement for a family, but it couldn't hurt."


It was unusually personable of Isabel. Three weeks ago she'd never have been this open with a classmate.


"Me? My family didn't want me before I went to the island. I can't imagine it's possible for them to want me any less. I was a burden to my mom and we were distant. My dad ran off four years ago. But I think.....I think he's in St. Paul right now. I think he's waiting. I'd rather go up against Raidon again than talk to them, but....I have to. I have to or it'll never be okay for me because it'll bug me forever. Then I'll know and then I can go forward."

Isabel became silent. Her face was serious. She looked down at her hands for a moment and then out the window.

"This....experience, this has undermined my whole being. It's taken me to the absolute depths of fear and anguish. However.....I've also seen people do more good than I ever thought possible from the regular kids at Bayview. At the end, it has to be about trying to find.......joy. If you don't at least try to find happiness, you dishonor their memory. Ya know?"

Apparently, poor self esteem was their common ground. It wasn't something Jennifer was used to, but it was comforting, in a way, to know that she wasn't the only one with doubts. It almost diminished her fears. Isabel seemed pretty tough. If she could be hopeful, so could Jennifer. Isabel was cool, too. She was friendly and warm and not mad, not holding anything against Jennifer. It made Jennifer wonder what had happened to her on the island, how she could have been hurt badly enough to need a sling but still be able to smile and offer to tag along to the theater.

Isabel also shared what had happened with her own family, saying they'd never cared much for her even before the game. That was a slap of reality. Jennifer's family wasn't perfect, but it sure wasn't totally awful. They fought a lot, especially her mom and her brother, but they all had loved each other. They'd always been there for each other. It was something simple, something she took for granted. The thought that other people hadn't known that was a little hard to wrap her head around. Arguments weren't supposed to last for a long time. Families were at least supposed to have some common ground, even if that common ground was nothing but a trio of kids serving as a relic of a dead marriage.

And Isabel was managing a nearly-positive attitude about the whole thing. She was saying that she'd seen more good than she had imagined she could, that they had to try to find happiness, because that was all that would make it worthwhile. She said doing otherwise would be dishonoring their memory. Jennifer wasn't sure how she felt about that, but she wasn't about to disagree. Instead, she took a deep breath and then spoke.

"You'll do fine with your family," she said. "I, um, I'm sure of it. And, um, and you're right, you know? They, um, I, um, I think they were all good. Even, um, even Raidon."

That wasn't what she'd meant to say. This wasn't where the conversation was supposed to be going. She'd fucked up badly.

"Um, I mean, um, I didn't meet him, only, um, only I spent a lot of, um, a lot of time with Nick Reid, and, um, and he was, um, I think he was, um, he was a good person."

Fuck.

Isabel stopped looking through the sweets and looked down. Her hair came forward making a dark, curtain of curls to hide her face. Her right hand, free of the sling curled into itself.

She took a deep breath. It was exactly like when she'd told Ray that she would have killed Liz herself. Flashbacks to sitting on the couch in a house on the island as she told Ray that it was a mistake and how he looked at her, shocked.

"I.....I'm not ready to think of Raidon. I don't know anything about Nick, but I know about Raidon."

She exhaled.

"Thanks for the confidence. Imma need it. Good luck to you too, you're gonna make it just fine. Worse come to worse..."

Isabel cheered. She tilted her head and smiled just a little. The kids would be coming back to the bus any minute.

"....we've got a movie date."

((Isabel Guerra completed in That Which Survives ))

Isabel was very frank about not being ready to discuss Raidon, and for a second Jennifer was sure she'd fucked up all the progress she'd made. She was ready to apologize and bury her face in one of her magazines and just pretend that she'd never opened her mouth in the first place, but Isabel kept talking, and it seemed like things were actually going to be alright. Within seconds, Jennifer was smiling again, just a little smile, but something nonetheless. Alright. This was going to be okay. She could stop worrying so much.

"Thanks," she said. "And, um, and you can come even if, um, even if everything goes well."

There wasn't much more to say. Everyone else would be back soon, and then she would be facing the trip to the airport, the flight to Saint Paul, and whatever came next. It was terrifying. It was something she felt she could maybe, just maybe, discuss with Isabel, but there was no way she was going to open her mouth with the entire group of them. Privacy was something Jennifer had always valued, and it was something she needed now. The close proximity to everyone else was not so great for her emotional state at the moment. More than anything, she just wanted to take a walk. It didn't matter that her legs were still achy, that her strength was still minimal. She wanted to be moving, to be doing something.

Before too long, she'd be able to. She just had to cope until then.

"Thanks again," she said. Then she leaned back, closed her eyes, and just waited. For better or worse, they were going to be home soon.

((Jennifer Perez continued in Going Home))