Cindy had never been a fan of scrambled eggs or spicy peppers or cooked onions, but the way Terri brought them together in a single dish just hit differently. She gobbled down three mini burritos before Terri had even turned off the grill. It was only afterward that Cindy realized her voracious appetite had left her free to “volunteer” for dish duty.
While she scrubbed the cutting board as intensely as she could, Cindy listened to the rest of the group throw out plans for the day. A small group had decided that they were going to explore the cliffs around the island while a few relaxed at camp. They were already tying their shoes by the time Cindy got a bump in the ribs.
“You should come along,” Terri told her.
“I really want to look for clues. The sooner we figure out what happened, the sooner I go back to normal.”
“Yes, but if people lived here once, there’s probably more we can find by exploring. Plus, it’s a good opportunity for you to open up and help people see the real you.”
Cindy sighed. “Winter’s not coming, is she?”
“No, she and Roberto are staying behind.”
“I guess it couldn’t hurt, then.”
She put on a glittery pair of Terri’s sneakers and followed the group at a safe distance through the trees. Terri was up ahead with Diana. Even just watching the back of her head, Cindy felt butterflies in her stomach. Occasionally she’d glance over at Chris and Alex making small talk and grind her teeth. The dog came over to inspect her at one point, but she shooed it away.
Once the hill grew steep enough for them to have to focus on their footing, Cindy pressed forward so she was level with everyone else.
“Do you go camping very often?” she asked Chris and Alex, knowing full well what the answers were but trying to commit to her character.
Alex replied, “No, I’ve always been too busy with basketball practice.”
“I don’t really go camping,” Chris said. “Usually I go to the park to play with Nightwing. Isn’t that right, Nightwing? You like the park?” The dog barked in reply. “This is nice, though. I like a vacation where I can get some exercise in. Rock walls are nice, but this feels much more authentic, you know? What about you? Do you go camping a lot?”
“Ah, no. Not really. One time I went white water rafting, but it was closer to a theme park ride than a real river.”
As the ground leveled out again, Cindy made sure to keep scanning the woods for any signs of habitation—litter, decrepit buildings, a hot dog stand—but her gaze kept falling back on Diana and her DSLR camera. Every hundred feet or so, Diana would stop to snap a photo of something or someone. Cindy took a moment during their water break to scoot closer.
“You like photography?”
Diana nodded. “It’s a passion of mine. I’m hoping to get into a photography class in college so I can work with hands-on photo development, but that’s really the only part of the experience I can’t get with a digital camera. Do you do art? Music?”
“Um, no, sorry. Do you want to become a photographer, then?”
“Not professionally. I wouldn’t mind seeing one of my photos in a magazine or a display somewhere, though. What do you do for fun?”
“Call of Duty. Uh… Movies?”
Diana started to ask more, but Terri wedged her way between the two of them. “I’ve been trying to get Cindy more into classic cinema. Or anime. There’s a lot of good dramatic anime that you’d probably love if you gave it a chance. Stuff that gets on TV is usually just for kids.”
Cindy bristled but choked down a biting remark.
Nodding, Diana said, “I’d love to hear more about it. Now that we’ve had the chance to meet in person, I hope we get to know each other better.”
“Uh… Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.”
“I’m putting together a digital scrapbook,” Diana continued. “Something to give everyone before we go off to different colleges. I can make a copy for you too, if you’re interested.”
Cindy winced. She definitely didn’t want any memories of this disaster vacation, but Diana was smiling so gently at her. “O-Okay.”
“Great! Terri, pose with her real quick.”
Terri bit her lip but did as she was told, putting on a pretty convincing smile for Diana. When Cindy saw the photo, she had to suppress a groan at how flush her face was. Was she so transparent?
They made it out of the woods to a bare spot of the cliffs not much later. The ocean below them was so massive that they almost couldn’t see the mainland even from so high up. It would have been humbling if Cindy didn’t have better things to focus on.
Terri avoided looking at Cindy while refusing to stray too far from Diana. Cindy tried to get her attention, but Terri kept finding other people to talk to. Just as Cindy started to march over to confront Terri about how weird she was being, everyone’s attention was stolen by a yelp from Diana.
“Something wrong?” Alex asked, reaching her first.
Diana shook her head, navigating to the album on her camera. “I was just looking for a good shot of the forest, and I thought I saw…” Cindy leaned in closer as the blood drained from her face. In the image was the blur of a tall figure ducking behind a tree.
There was no movement in the woods except for the wind, but Cindy didn’t look away even as the others rationalized away the blur in the image—probably just a camera distortion, actually. Cindy turned and finally locked eyes with Terri, whose expression shared her concern.
Everyone else was still in high spirits when they got back. Chris took it upon himself to chop some extra firewood while Alex and the dog went swimming. Cindy almost followed Diana until seeing that she was going to hang out with Winter, pivoting to stick with Terri.
As Terri started pulling vegetables out from a cooler, she told Cindy, “We should… uh… We should probably go back to the cave after lunch and see if we can find any more clues there.”
“Are you serious? Did you not see what happened back there?”
“She spooked herself because of a trick of the light. Probably just a bug or whatever. Cindy, nobody is here with us. That wouldn’t make any sense. How would they get food without outside help?”
“It doesn’t make sense to me either, but I can’t just pretend like it didn’t happen.”
“What do you want to do about it?”
“...I don’t know.”
Terri took a deep breath and turned toward the table. “I need to make lunch. You should apologize to Roberto for what happened last night.”
“Why?” Cindy growled. “I thought it wasn’t a big deal. Even Winter said I shouldn’t beat myself up over it.”
“I get that you’re embarrassed,” Terri said, turning to face her, “but you’re going to have to practice being a little vulnerable if you want people to like you.”
Cindy huffed and walked away, muttering to herself, “People seem to like Winter just fine.”
Roberto was sitting on the beach with a towel spread out in front of him. A radio, some tools, and several electronic parts had been spread out. He was currently patting the sand, looking for something he’d lost. From how hard he was squinting, Cindy assumed it must have been another contact lens.
A joke tried to claw its way out of her, but Cindy managed to choke it down to instead say, “Uh, hi. Sorry about the joke from last night. Okay?”
Putting his glasses back on, Roberto looked up to inspect Cindy. “I know my vision is really bad; I don’t care about that. When people make fun of my whittling, though, that really upsets me.” He picked up the pocketknife. “This was a gift my dad gave me when I turned thirteen. He talks a lot about how hard his childhood in Cuba was and all the work that went into moving to America, and he wants his own kids to be strong and manly like him and his father. And I’m… not. Giving me this was the most affection he’s ever really shown me.”
“I… I didn’t know.”
“It’s not really a secret, but there’s not really a reason Terri would have brought it up. Whittling is the only way I can feel close to my father. 3D printing isn’t exactly his idea of craftsmanship.”
Cindy crouched down and pointed at the radio. “I mean, you also know this stuff. What are you doing with it, anyway?”
“Trying to get it to work. Can’t get a signal out here for some reason.”
“We’re just too far away from the mainland to get anything. That’s why cell phones don’t work out here.”
“There’s no cell signal because there’s no cell tower; the sat phone works just fine. I did the math before coming, and with how high and strong the transmitter on the mainland is, we’re still close enough to get AM radio under most conditions, and at night we should be able to get decent FM too. But all I’m actually getting is static even though the radio worked before we came, and I made sure to store it properly so it wouldn’t break on the way here.”
Cindy folded her arms, face burning. “I came here to apologize. You don’t have to be mean to me.”
Roberto gave her a long stare before saying, “I don’t mean to. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but if you ask questions instead of confidently getting things wrong, people would just explain things to you instead of correcting you all the time.”
“You can correct people without being a smartass about it,” Cindy hissed.
“Maybe your experience was different, but Winter told me a lot about going to middle school for the first time and everybody thinking she was dumb because she came from homeschooling and didn’t have a lot of social skills. They mocked her so much that she started fighting back and getting in trouble. It wasn’t until she made some real friends that she realized good people weren’t going to judge her for not knowing something.”
“The world isn’t full of good people, though.”
“She knows that better than I do.” Roberto shrugged. “But people will like you more if you ask them about their interests instead of talking over them.”
He went back to tinkering with the radio while Cindy tried to formulate an appropriately devastating response to dismantle his argument. The boy was smart, but he didn’t know Cindy, and she was nothing like Winter. Not that Winter was somebody to emulate.
Both of them were startled when the radio sprang to life. Breaking through the static were garbled voices in a language Cindy didn’t understand, harsh and strained in a way that set her teeth on edge. Roberto had to hit the power button a few times before the radio turned off.
“It… Maybe you were right,” he said. “The radio works fine, but there must be something interfering with the signal. Never seen that before. I hope it didn’t scare you too much.”
“No, I’m fine,” Cindy said, rubbing the goosebumps on her arms.
She doesn't like art, music or pets?