Shortly after the cubic-foot exercise, Mel asked the twins to take us to the tar pit. She was curious about it—and so were the rest of us.
Rittika was hesitant at first—she didn’t see the point. But Rish talked her into it. And once Rittika agreed, everybody else jumped on the bandwagon. We proceeded in a snaky train, armed with our weapons, pushing through brush, stomping over vines. Though small, the tar pit wasn’t hard to find. The stink was unmistakable—a trail that started out faint twenty yards away and became increasingly noxious the closer we got. At the edge of the pit, I gagged. The stench was worse than sewage, worse than diesel truck exhaust, almost worse than the smell of Warren’s decomposing body. I wished I hadn’t torn off the collar of my blouse. I wished I had something to press against my mouth and nose, anything to lessen the reek.
The smell was the only thing that gave the tar away. Coated with water and scattered with leaves, the pit looked like an ordinary pond. Mel knelt on the bank and dragged a stick through the black sludge beneath the water. When she pulled it out, sticky, stringy tar stretched from it like taffy. The sight of the tar was both exciting and disgusting. Chester and Rish found their own sticks and mimicked Mel. After a while they started to behave the way they had around the campfire the night they’d arrived. Like hoodlums. I watched them throw things into the pit: vines, branches, wadded-up leaves. These lay on the surface for a moment, then began a slow descent into oblivion. This is what must happen to animals, too, I realized, my stomach in knots.
I wondered how deep the pit was. Did the things that fell in, or were thrown in, travel ten feet down, twenty, all the way to the bowels of the earth? It was impossible to tell. The only thing I felt sure of was that they were gone forever. I didn’t know how fossils were retrieved from La Brea Tar Pits, but I doubted anything could be fished out of this, our own private waste station.
As Chester and Rish continued to lob things into the pit, Rittika walked along the very edge. Avery urged her to step back, but her pleas only egged Rittika on. She smiled and pirouetted like a ballerina, her arms long and graceful above her head. I don’t know why, but seeing her there, risking life and limb, I felt more envy than concern.
My attention switched back and forth between Rittika and the boys, who had hauled a huge branch out of the jungle. They swung it back and forth, gaining momentum. The queasy feeling in my stomach gained momentum, too.
“One. Two. Three!” they shouted euphorically, hurling the branch as far as they could. It landed with a colossal splash. Water droplets blasted into the air, then rained down. The tar swallowed the branch almost immediately, water rippling concentrically from the point of impact, then gradually going flat, as if nothing had happened.
Rittika laughed, pirouetted again, then dashed off to get her own branch. In silent collusion, Rish helped her drag it toward the pit.
“Step aside,” Rittika snapped. She was talking to Anne Marie, who was standing in her way.
Everyone expected Anne Marie to oblige. So when she held her ground, we stared at her, bug-eyed.
“Please put that down,” she told Rittika.
“What?”
“Don’t throw it. We’ve already made too much noise.”
“Oh-ho, look who finally put on her big-girl panties!” Rittika exclaimed, exchanging a titillated look with Rish.
“You don’t understand—he might hear us.” Panicked, Anne Marie turned 360 degrees as she scanned the jungle.
“Who might?” Rittika asked, setting down her side of the branch.
“The enemy—he’s close. That’s why you have to be quiet. The more noise you make, the more hungry he gets.”
Rittika raised an eyebrow. I couldn’t help but think that Anne Marie was doing exactly what she had wanted her to do. Stand up for herself. Make herself heard. Maybe the tough love had worked after all. But I don’t think it had worked in the way Rittika had intended.
Head cocked to the side, she took a step toward Anne Marie. “How do you know he’s around here?”
“I can feel him,” Anne Marie whispered, stepping back in the direction of the pit. Again, she scanned the jungle urgently, attuned to an imminent danger only she could sense.
“I think you might be right,” Rititka said, following the trajectory of her eyes. As if in a dance, she took another step forward, and Anne Marie another step back. “I think he’s coming for us.”
“Then let’s go! What are we waiting for?”
“Where are we going to go, Anne Marie? There’s no safe place. Not here.”
Anne Marie got a pained look on her face. She raked her fingers through her dirty, snarled hair.
“I think he has his eye on you,” Rittika continued. “He can sense weakness. He knows who’s vulnerable. He’s like a shark smelling blood in the water.”
“Please,” Anne Marie begged.
“Hey,” shouted Pablo, “stop teasing her!”
Rittika continued to advance. “He knows the ones who are injured. The ones who can’t get away.”
Anne Marie’s mouth twisted as she spat out a succession of nos, each one softer than the last.
“It doesn’t matter what you say. If you don’t watch out, he’ll getcha!”
Suddenly, Rittika lurched forward, surprising Anne Marie, who stumbled back roughly onto the narrow slope of the muddy bank. She tried to right herself but lost her balance and slid backward into the pit. Horrified, I watched her eyes widen in disbelief. She struggled to move, her legs now covered in viscous black tar. She tried to pull herself out, but her efforts only caused her to sink deeper.
Probably no more than two or three seconds passed. So why did I feel like I was moving in slow motion as I ran toward the bank? Even Ming and Avery arrived before me. In fact, they were the first ones there. The first ones to reach out their hands. I caught Avery stealing a glance at Rittika as she called, “Hurry! Grab on!”
Thank god, I thought, the world around me turning like a top.
Anne Marie hesitated a beat, then reached for their hands. She had no choice. The tar was already up to her waist. The girls began to haul her up, slowly but surely. And then the unthinkable happened. They let go.
I watched with horror as Anne Marie fell back into that hellhole. In a flash, Pablo and Mel crawled onto their stomachs. They stretched their arms out as far as they could. Their fingers strained to reach Anne Marie, who had gone still, as if she’d given up. Fortunately, Pablo’s fingertips managed to catch the edge of her blackened blouse. He pulled inch by inch until he and Mel could safely grab hold of her arms. They quickly hoisted her onto the shore. On dry land, Betty and I tried in vain to pull off the tar that clung to her clothes and body. It stretched like gum, sticking stubbornly to our fingers. The more we tried to get it off, the more of a mess we made. Soon my hands were coated in black.
I kept looking at Anne Marie’s face, waiting for her to react. But she didn’t. She seemed to be in the same numb state she’d been in after the monkey attack. Only now it was worse, because she didn’t even open her eyes. She couldn’t. Her lids and lashes were covered in sludge. Betty, Pablo, and I—we talked to her gently. But she made no effort to reply.
Leaving Anne Marie’s side, Pablo stalked up to Avery and Ming. He was red-faced and furious. His arms shook at his sides.
“What do you think this is—some kind of sick game?” he cried. Ming looked away. Avery looked at Rittika.
“It’s not a game,” Rittika piped. She walked calmly over to the trio. “Never has been.”
“I don’t even know where to start!” Pablo replied, his body shaking, sweat dripping off his skin. “That was the cruelest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“And you say I live in an ivory tower,” Rittika balked. “This—this cruelty, as you call it? It’s how the world is. How it’s always been. Some of us make it, and some of us don’t.”
“And who are you to make those decisions?”
“The way she stepped back—afraid? Ready to give up? I’d say she made the decision all by herself.”
I watched Pablo’s hands curl into fists at his sides.
“Hey!” Rish called, squeezing between Pablo and his sister. He put his hand on Pablo’s chest. “Leave her alone. Ritt didn’t push her in.”
“She might as well have—the way it went down!”
“No, man, that’s not how it was.”
Shaking his head angrily, Pablo looked away. I could tell he was trying to calm down. To control himself. But judging from his expression, he couldn’t.
“You know, you’re as bad as your sister,” he said, voice trembling. “Why didn’t you stop her? Don’t you have a conscience?”
Now Chester inserted himself into the middle, pulling on Rish, who looked ready to swing.
“And you!” said Pablo, lashing out at his old roommate. “You’re the biggest disappointment of all.”
Chester shrugged uncomfortably. “What do you want from me, dude?”
“I don’t know—a reaction?”
“I was an innocent bystander.”
Pablo shook his head. “There’s no such thing, and you know it.”
Guiltily, I realized I agreed with Pablo. His comment made me ashamed for being so passive. Ashamed because maybe there was a reason it had taken a few seconds for me to get to Anne Marie, and that reason was cowardice. Looking at the three boys, one by one, I understood something. Chester wasn’t who I thought he was. He looked like the kind of hero you read about in fairy tales: big, strapping, and handsome. But in real life, Pablo had more courage in his pinkie than Chester had in his whole body.
Pablo stepped back. He stared at Rittika and Rish, then at Avery and Ming, as if evaluating them for the first time.
“You’re savages,” he swore. “All of you.” Turning on his heels, he stalked into the jungle.
When he’d gone, I immediately looked at Mel, wanting her reaction. Her guidance. “I’ll take Anne Marie to the ocean,” she said. She put her hand on Anne Marie’s sticky arm and helped her up. “We’ll be able to scrub the tar off with water and sand.”
“Wait for me,” I replied, relieved that Mel was taking charge. Quickly, I stole a last look at the pit, which was once again placid after all that action. I stared at the shiny, reflective layer of water that hid the void below. It was like peering into a dark mirror.
A full hour later, Mel and I had managed to scrape off most of the tar—and unfortunately, some of Anne Marie’s skin, too. In all that time, I wanted her to cry, complain, react in some way. Any way. But she remained eerily silent, cocooned deep inside of herself.
Later, the three of us trudged back to Camp Summerbliss in silence. When we arrived, we found a flock of black birds helping themselves to the remainder of an earlier meal on the rock table. Mel charged at them, whipping her knife from side to side. Like a single amorphous animal, they flew into the air—a loud, shifting inkblot against the twilight. One more shadow before nightfall.
In the morning, Pablo still wasn’t back. He didn’t come back the day after, either. Or the day after that. I worried about him constantly, as much as I worried about Anne Marie, who now spent all her time at the lookout or in the jungle. I wondered if he was brooding somewhere, too disgusted by our behavior to ever rejoin us. I wondered if he’d fallen into a trapping pit or gotten into an accident. My worst fear was that the enemy had found him, alone and vulnerable.
With Pablo gone, we seemed to lose faith in ourselves, and our plan to get off the island lost momentum. At the same time, the organization we’d established in the first days began to erode. For some, it was just an hour. For others, it was three, or five, or a whole day. People were skipping their chores to sunbathe, swim, or nap in the damp of the jungle. The campfire was going out frequently; everyone assumed someone else would relight it. Ming told us to cook our own breakfast; she wanted to sleep in. At night, only Mel, Betty, and I patrolled.
Believe it or not, even Mel was beginning to slack. She spent long hours looking for ibises. I couldn’t tell one bird apart from the next, but she had identified six distinct individuals. In her notebook she sketched them and gave them names. She wrote about their locations and behaviors, habits and diets. Her fixation was so consuming that I sometimes had to remind her to come back to camp.
After the tar incident, I stopped wanting to have anything to do with Rittika. Almost. That was the terrible thing. Even though I hated what she’d done, and wanted to hate her, period, I didn’t. I couldn’t. She still captivated me. It was hard to come to terms with how someone so beautiful could also be so ugly. Against my better judgment, I still hung out with her. I still clung to the compliments and offers she tossed to me like candy.
“When we get back home,” she said one afternoon, “we should vacation together, you and me. You can come to our house in Switzerland. You’d love it. It’s beautiful. And Swiss boys—they love brown girls. Sorry, gold girls.”
I blushed.
“So you’ll come? To Switzerland?” she asked. “Or Buenos Aires, maybe. We’ve got a place there, too, right on the beach. It’s sick. The clubs, the shopping, the surfers, the restaurants. Everything is amazing.”
I nodded, trying to solve a question in my mind, whether I’d rather tromp through the backwoods of Maine with the Sharpe sisters or go clubbing in Argentina with Rittika. I couldn’t decide.
“So, Sam,” she said, “tell me something about you that I don’t know.”
“You first.”
She laughed. “Okay. Anything?”
“Anything.”
“Hmmm … well, I have nightmares almost every night. Terrible nightmares. Usually, I dream I’m a little girl again, and I’m being chased.”
“By who?”
“Oh, by just about every evil creature you can imagine. Monsters, vampires, Gollum, Medusa. Sometimes even by kids at school. I run and run, but they always gain on me. And just when I’m about to get caught, boom, I wake up. For a second or two, I don’t know if it’s really happening—if I’m really about to die, and I’m terrified. It’s always the worst part of my day: the very beginning.”
“Whoa,” I mumbled, too shocked to form a coherent reply. I couldn’t get over the fact that Rittika felt terror every night. Rittika, who seemed so indomitable, so fearless. Nor could I believe that she’d admitted it to me.
“Your turn,” she said.
“Oh god, I’ve got a million issues.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Really!”
Her tea-green eyes appraised me. “Samantha, you just think you’ve got a million issues. That’s your real issue.”
I waved her off.
“So,” she continued, “if you don’t want to talk about yourself, tell me something about Mel.”
I felt more than a twinge of discomfort. I didn’t want to be a traitor. “What do you want to know?”
“Something good. Something juicy.”
I stared into the jungle, stalling. “There’s nothing juicy to tell. What you see is what you get.”
“She is pretty bland,” Rittika acknowledged condescendingly. “So why do you hang out with her so much?”
How to explain the lure of the youngest Sharpe sister to someone like Rittika, someone preoccupied with boys and fashion and popularity? It was impossible.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“I don’t know. I guess I find it fascinating how much she knows about nature. Like, who else our age can make canteens out of gourds, or identify a million animal prints, or extract poison from frogs? It’s a gift. She’s kind of a genius.” A half second later I realized my mistake. How dumb could I be? I prayed Rittika wouldn’t pick up on it. I prayed that her finely tuned sense of opportunism would malfunction this one time.
“Are you talking about that frog Ming found?”
Oh hell.
“Yeah, but it’s nothing.”
“Mel found a way to take its poison out?”
“I mean—kind of.”
Rittika peered into my eyes. I felt boxed in by her stare. That’s the particular power of beautiful people. When you have their attention, they can make you feel exalted and claustrophobic at the same time.
“Yeah, so she caught it. I don’t know how, but she did. And then she took out some of its poison—that part was gruesome, actually. She said we should have it,” I babbled, “in case we need to use it on the enemy.”
The “we,” I knew, didn’t include Rittika. Not really. But I’d given her an in, and she was way too savvy not to use it.
“So where is it—the poison?”
“I forget …”
“Sam …”
I knew better, but it didn’t matter, not when her eyes were boring into mine. Pretty soon I’d spilled the rest of the secret: where the syringes were hidden in the storage tent.
“Well, that was smart of her,” Rittika said, tossing her hair. “Getting the poison and all.” She put her arm around me and gave me a squeeze. Enveloped in the clean, sweet scent of her hair, I felt sick to my stomach. “Hey, you want to know something?” she continued. “My dad is a fan. He always says, ‘Why don’t you invite that nice Indian girl from school anywhere?’ I swear he wants you to be my bestie.”
Still reeling from my own stupidity, I gave her a skeptical look.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I barely know your father.”
“But you made an impression.”
Maybe I had, I thought, but I doubted it had been a good one. My one and only conversation with Mr. Singh had happened at Drake Rosemont’s ninth-grade holiday party. It was a big, splashy affair: punch in a crystal bowl, delicacies folded in paper-thin phyllo dough, a string orchestra with a harpist. A Christmas tree festooned in white lights and Swarovski crystals dominated the center of Drake Rosemont’s main reception hall. There was also a menorah, a basket of dreidels, and a Kwanzaa kinara. I assumed Mrs. Duval, ever obsessed with diversity, had insisted on those.
Most of the school’s ninth graders and their parents had been in attendance. The boys looked like they’d borrowed their fathers’ tuxedos. The girls had borrowed their mothers’ jewelry. I hadn’t borrowed my mother’s—which was costume, anyhow—but I was wearing one of Betty’s dresses. My breasts barely filled out the top, but it didn’t matter. It was an expensive LBD with a matching velvet stole, and I felt good in it: sophisticated, elegant, and grown up.
Parents talked with one another as we kids loitered in clusters. The musicians played upbeat holiday fare: “Jingle Bells” and “Joy to the World.” You could tell my classmates and I wanted to dance by the way we bobbed our heads and tapped our feet, but we didn’t, because looking cool was more important.
I had known Mr. Singh was there. Everyone knew. When he made an appearance at a school event, it was like having a celebrity in the house. Even at a wealthy, one-percent place like Drake Rosemont, Mr. Singh stood out. There was something mysterious and decadent about him, and it wasn’t hard to figure out what it was.
“Yeah, the billionaire,” I heard a curly-haired girl whisper, pointing. “My dad read about him in Forbes.”
When I found myself next to him at the punch bowl, I felt starstruck. He smiled and said hello. I almost had to pinch myself.
“Another beautiful Indian girl, like my daughter,” he said. “Do you know my Rittika?”
I smiled back. Mr. Singh was neither tall nor distinguished-looking, but his eyes were as pale green and nimble as Rittika’s. I blushed when I looked into them.
“Yes, sir.”
I hoped the conversation would be short. By ninth grade, I’d already taught myself a protocol around Indian people. Smile, listen, don’t talk too much.
“Are you having a good time?”
I nodded, worried that the unraveling of my Indianness was about to begin. If Mr. Singh heard my lack of accent, he’d ask if I’d been born here, in the US. I’d have to admit, yes. Where in India were my parents from, he’d want to know. I’d concede that my father was from Bihar, known for thugs, bandits, and poor people. And my mother? She’d been born here, in America, in Detroit.
Mr. Singh would see then that I wasn’t a “beautiful Indian girl” but a diluted impostor. A mixie, as Pablo liked to say. He’d look closer and notice: My hair had glints of blond in it, my skin was too pale—northern Indians tended to be darker. And what of the freckles on my nose and cheeks? Very unusual. Very Anglo.
Did I at least visit India?
No, I’d be forced to say. I’d never been there.
“What is your name, dear?” he asked me, filling my glass with ruby-red punch. I tried to keep my hand from trembling.
“Sam Mishra.”
“Ah, ‘Sam’ for Sampatti?”
I shook my head.
“Yes, I know, Samiksha.”
“No.”
“Samaah?”
“No—it’s Samantha.”
“Your parents named you Samantha … Mishra?”
“Yes.”
He was silent, lost in thought.
“Samantha, have you ever been to India?”
Here we go, I thought.
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
There were numerous reasons. My mother didn’t want to go. My sister’s health was never good enough. Such a trip would be too expensive. And the main reason: My father’s relatives had disowned him when he’d abandoned an engagement back home to marry my mother.
“It just hasn’t worked out yet.”
“It will work out. One day.”
“I hope so.”
“Don’t have hope. Have certainty.”
Conversation ceased then. Mr. Singh continued to look at me, but now it was a different look, infused with what seemed like pity.
“Nice to meet you,” I told him, my punch glass filled too high, so that it sloshed in my shaking hand. Liquid dribbled onto my dress. I wondered whether dry cleaning would be able to remove the stain or if I’d owe Betty. There was no question the dress cost way more than I could afford.
“Nice to meet you, Samantha,” Mr. Singh replied.
I tried to catch his eye one last time, but he was already looking at something or someone else. I deposited my cup next to the punch bowl and practically ran away, feeling overcome with shame, pride, or both.