Survival Of The Fittest

The bleachers feel cold, even though it's a warm day. It seeps in through her jeans, spreading up and out and all through her body, and she's fidgeting and shivering a little bit, even though she's wearing a sweater. Two of them, actually. Her Worship and Prayers sweater, bearing its unfortunate acronym, is hidden underneath a larger black one. She always remembers this detail, every time she has this dream.

Everybody's on the field, for practice. The whole lacrosse team. It'd be "the whole lacrosse team, except for her," but she's not on the lacrosse team anymore. Not really. She hasn't been kicked off, but she might as well have been. The players are doing drills of some kind, weaving in and out of cones. Legs bending, ankles twisting, planting and pivoting and pushing off in new directions. Just like she used to do.

She still remembers the pop. Pain blotted out the rest of the scene - the score, the crowd, the feel of the grass as she fell - but it hadn't erased the sound. The sound was burnt into her memory, because it was just so sick and so sharp and so wrong. It hadn't entered her ears, not in the way that sounds were supposed to. It had originated inside her, meaty and muffled, reverberating up her leg and through her hip and up her spine, so the sound became a feeling just as much as it was a noise. And then it deposited itself in her eardrums from the inside, and the only sound in the world was pop. Like God had snapped his fingers and let the shockwave blow her knee apart.

She wants to scream at the players on the field. She wants to tell them to be careful. Tell them that all it takes it one bad twist, one bad landing, one slick patch of grass, and they'll hear the pop too, and they'll never unhear it. But she also wants to scream at them because, even at this distance, she can see their faces. Because she can see how they look tired and they look bored and they look unfocused. Because they don't know how much she'd give to be in line with them, to be darting back and forth and feeling her stick's netting sing through the air. Because it doesn't matter to them and it mattered to her and it should be them shivering on these stupid bleachers instead of her.

So she reaches out and she snaps her fingers. And she wishes that they'd all hear the pop.

This is the part where she usually wakes up, hating herself and groping for the pill bottle on her nightstand.

But not this time. This time, when she snaps her fingers, everybody on the field falls down. All of them, like marionettes with their strings cut. Players, coaches, even the cheerleaders at the other end of the field. Not a single person is left standing, as far as her eye can see. They all just fall into the grass, and they're dead. They're all dead. She knows it, without having to check. She's still alive, and they're all dead. She looks at her fingers and they're smeared with blood, dark and red and viscous, seeping into the whorls and cracks of her fingertips.

Someone behind her asks, "Juanita... what did you do?"

--

Her eyes snapped open. She was wide awake, fully alert. From snoozer to sentinel in no time flat.

She sat up. Her skin was crawling, her muscles taut. Tense. On edge, waiting. Listening.

Nothing happened. Nothing moved. All she heard was the steady hum and beep of something medical. But it wasn't right. Something was wrong. Something was missing. Something important. No, it wasn't missing. That wasn't the right word for it. It was... something wasn't happening. Yeah. Something wasn't happening, but it was supposed to happen. And until it happened, she needed to be very, very afraid.

The machine beeped again.

Oh.

She was still listening for the daily announcement.

Beatrice hadn't made it.

She'd picked at one of the soldiers' sleeves, told him that her friend might be out there still, might still be alive somewhere. She'd given a brief physical description, a hazy account of where Beatrice might have been. But as time dragged on and the last few survivors straggled in, Beatrice's distinctive form hadn't been among them.

It was like the island had wanted to inflict a parting shot. One last wound on the way out, just in case she thought the hits were gonna stop coming after the collars came off. Congrats on surviving. Here's one more name to feel guilty for, one more friend you abandoned. Go on, take it. For the road.

The search was probably ongoing. But nobody seemed hopeful that they'd find any more survivors.

As the dinghy had cast off into the choppy waters, she'd looked around, at thirteen haggard faces. She'd seen an array of expressions, ranging between fear and hatred, scornful recognizance and shell-shocked indifference. One of them had almost certainly killed Beatrice. Maybe if she'd been there, she could have prevented it. Maybe if she'd been there, she'd be wherever Beatrice was.

No, scratch that. Maybe if she'd been there, she'd be wherever Beatrice's body was. It was a fair bet that Juanita wasn't going to end up in whatever afterlife Beatrice had made it to. Beatrice had been good. She'd been innocent, and principled in a way that Juanita would have wanted to believe she was, back before this all started. Even if that innocence wasn't enough to get Beatrice into Heaven, it certainly wasn't going to get her sent to the same circle of Hell reserved for Juanita.

Fourteen kids survived.

Out of those fourteen, Juanita had been the first one to get her collar off and leave the game.

So, did that make her the winner?

Or was she the loser, because everybody else had survived on the island longer?

...She actually cared about that. What the fuck.

They came in, woke her up. She wasn't aware she'd been sleeping. They were soldiers, or nurses, or nurse soldiers. The machine beeped as they changed out one bag of fluid for some other bag of fluid, and made some adjustments to another one. Juanita wasn't entirely sure which was which and what did what. She'd asked, probably more than once, because she remembered someone explaining it, but her brain was like a cracked mug and when she tried to put information in it just leaked out right out again.

One of the bags was probably painkillers. It wasn't working. She knew it wasn't, because she was still here, and the pain was still here, in every joint and every muscle and every thought, and if you took her pain away there'd be nothing left at all.

They asked her how she was feeling. She said something like "bad" and something like "hurts" and it probably came out "burts." They talked about upping something or trying some ccs of something. They pointed at her leg. Asked about that. "Really bad," she said distinctly. One of them nodded. They poked a bit and asked if this hurt and that hurt and she said yes and yes and YES and NNNNGH. Scribbling noises. They talked amongst themselves. She heard the words and they probably made sense, but then the second she stopped thinking about the words they evaporated, like they'd never been said at all.

They told her to rest.

Then someone else came in and said something and the soldier-nurse closest to her thanked them, and turned to Juanita. "There's some good news," she said, in a way that implied that there had been a lot of bad news that Juanita hadn't really picked up on. "It looks like Interpol has started contacting everyone's families. They're gonna let them know you're okay."

Juanita blanched. Her fingers seized the blankets in a death grip.

"What..." Her voice was a faint moan. "What are you gonna tell them?"

((Juanita Reid continued elsewhere))