
Cindy was sullen as she and Terri climbed over the big rocks at the bottom of the cliffs. Mist from the rising tide stung at the scrapes she’d accumulated over the past few days. She found herself glancing over her shoulder back in the direction of the cave even though it was fully out of view.
“I’m going to lie down for a bit,” Cindy said flatly when they reached camp.
She collapsed into a foldable lounge chair and covered her face with her hands. What a waste of time. They hadn’t found anything except shadows to jump at. Most of the tunnels were dead ends. She wanted to scream and bash something to piece against the rocks.
As that anger subsided, panic set in. They only had five days to figure this out and reverse it. Where had the fucking mural come from? Why weren’t there any other signs of life on the island? Was she going to live the rest of her life in a science lab after all?
“Are you alright?”
Chris, in his fucking Superman shirt, had sat down on another chair to face her.
She wanted to snap at him—it’s not like she could share the truth anyway—but Cindy was supposed to be gaining people’s trust. Taking a deep breath, she told him, “It’s not a big deal. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay. Hey, we talked a little bit about hobbies earlier. What stuff do you do for fun?”
“Oh, well, I guess I do play a lot of video games. Call of Duty, Red Dead Redemption, Fallout, Spider-Man. You know comic books, right? Is it Spiderman or Spider-Man with a hyphen?”
“With a hyphen, like the movies and the comics.”
“Oh, yeah. I never liked the Spider-Man movies. Superman and The Avengers were always more powerful, you know? Like, I’d rather have Wayne Manor than a crappy apartment I can barely afford.”
Chris shrugged. “I don’t watch a lot of superhero movies. It’s cool they’re popular, but they focus so much on spectacle that nobody ever feels heroic. Not in a real-world sense, anyway. Actually, there are a lot of superhero comics that have that same problem; I read a lot more manga and horror comics.”
“You read manga? Good manga or just popular stuff like Attack on Titan or My Hero Academia? Can you even name a manga that wasn’t turned into a shonen anime?”
He scowled at her, saying, “I don’t think I want to talk about it, if that’s how you’re going to be.”
“Hey, it was just a—! I mean…” She sighed, turning away as her face grew hot. “I’m sorry. That was mean to say.”
“Thank you. Hey, Terri.”
Cindy pulled her legs in as Terri sat down next to her.
“I heard you talking about horror comics?” Terri said. “Do you watch a lot of horror movies, too?”
“Sometimes, but those are more hit-or-miss. A lot of them just aren’t scary.”
Terri nodded. “Yeah, horror is very pulpy even with a high budget because audiences really respond to it. It’s harder for a film that really captures unsettling helplessness to find a big audience. Most of the scariest horror is pretty niche.”
“Actually, I think thrillers do better at being scary than horror does. There’s been more high-budget supernatural thrillers in the past couple years.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. Thrillers are more emotionally-driven, yeah, and there are probably a lot of films that could easily swap genres with a few minor changes to the script.”
Cindy said, “Guys, I don’t think it’s that deep.”
They finally took notice of her.
“I mean…” She struggled to find the words. “They’re just movies. It’s stupid fun. There’s no need to be so serious about it.”
“I think it’s interesting,” Chris said. “Art wouldn’t capture people’s imaginations if there was nothing there.”
Terri added, “There’s been over a hundred years of film developing as a medium and people leaving their mark on it. You could spend your whole life studying just directing or lighting or costuming and only ever understand a piece of the whole thing. It’s definitely worth talking about.”
Cindy grit her teeth, but Roberto’s warning from before ran in her ears.
“Maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about,” she said, refusing to look either of them in the eye.
She felt stupid.
The other two continued talking for a bit, but eventually Terri told Chris, “I need to get started on dinner. Do you want to help?”
“Yeah, absolutely.”
Chris got up, and Terri stood to follow but paused and handed her phone to Cindy. “Do you want to look over the photos? I couldn’t find anything that stood out, but maybe you can.”
“I can try.”
Terri had taken more than fifty photos of their trip into the cave: gold markings, strange patterns in the stone, holes in the walls. Cindy pored over them, but only grew more frustrated as any and all meaning eluded her. The only notable pictures were of the mural itself. The face of the taller figure was distorted. On each image, it looked like that section alone had digital corruption. The glyph that Cindy had touched was hard to make out through the glare of the camera, though Cindy didn’t remember it being any more reflective than the rest of the mural.
She stared at it until the caw of a seagull snapped her back to reality, then she stood up and walked over to the cooking station.
“That’s disappointing,” Terri said. She flipped through the mural photos a few times, the distortion growing worse every time an image was revisited. “I think my phone is broken.” Lowering her voice so Chris wouldn’t hear, she said, “We could still show what we ‘found’ without telling them the whole story.”
Cindy shook her head. “They’d find out. I can’t risk that. Besides, what if somebody got hurt because we dragged them into it?”
Chris glanced over at them from where he was cutting vegetables. “Something wrong?”
“No, it’s nothing,” Cindy said quickly.
He raised an eyebrow and glanced at Terri, who paused a moment before replying, “Yeah, it’s alright. Just a few pictures that didn’t turn out right.”
She selected and deleted all the photos, but shot Cindy a look that said she wasn’t convinced they were making the right decision. Or perhaps Cindy was projecting. While Terri went back to prepping food, Cindy scratched at the table while mulling over whether to ask the others for help and all the ways doing so would blow up in her face.
It took a minute to realize she was tracing the glyph on the table with her nail. A shiver ran up Cindy’s spine. She hadn’t realized how well she remembered it.
Cindy sat in her folding chair and stared into the fire as the sun approached the horizon. It was a cloudless evening, and stars were already out in the east. Everyone was chatting happily like the oldest of friends. She felt floaty, like she was watching a dream unfold. The derealization of the moment was heightened by her shaggy haircut and the outfit Terri had lent her—short shorts and a tight T-shirt—and how comfortable she was being seen like this. People kept talking, but the sound of Diana strumming slowly on her acoustic guitar drifted in and out under the popping of the fire.
“Who wants to play a game?” Alex asked, opening a cooler to reveal beers on ice. “Two truths and a lie. Guess wrong, you drink.”
Several people joined in immediately, but Cindy was silent. She wanted to play with them. She wanted to open her mouth and say anything at all, but she was afraid that the moment she added her voice to the mix, the tranquility of the night would shatter.
The guitar stopped as everyone shuffled where they were sitting. Cindy stared into the fire and didn’t really notice who ended up sitting next to her. A beer entered her field of view, but Cindy shook her head.
“I’m hoping that a drink will oil your jaw a little and get you to open up,” Diana said.
Cindy blinked and snapped back to reality, turning to face Diana and replying with a flustered, “Oh. Thanks,” before taking the beer. She noticed Terri on Diana’s other side, watching her intently, but focused back on her crush when Diana continued speaking.
“Come on, tell me about yourself. Where did you grow up? What do you do for fun? We all know each other, but you’re a mystery, Cindy No-Last-Name.”
“I…” Terri had told Cindy so much about her fake backstory, and all of it was wiped from memory by the overwhelming fact that Diana was asking her about herself. “I don’t remember.”
Diana chuckled. “Okay, I’ll start. I met Terri when we were in the Brownies together in grade school. I did not stick with it. ‘Too rebellious,’ they said. I’ve mellowed out since then. Got a lot more bisexual, too, which I don’t think they’d appreciate as much.”
“I didn’t know you were in the Girl Scouts with her,” Cindy admitted, glancing over at Terri. “Doesn’t really sound like you.”
“I’m a woman of mystery. Are you?”
Her eyes sparkled with a hunger for knowledge.
Cindy gulped and rubbed the back of her neck. There were plenty of things that Clay could say about himself—he was damn good at soccer even if his other teammates had always held him back, he’d gotten accepted into a pretty good college, he had a very good kill-death ratio in Call of Duty and had even won a local tournament. It wouldn’t be hard for Cindy to make herself look good without having to lie about it.
“I… I got a math scholarship?” she offered. It was something that Clay would never have admitted, but she pushed the fact that they would eventually learn who she was out of her mind. “I’ve always had an easier time at math than other students. Not that I think they’re dumb or anything. I’m not smarter than anyone else, at least not by much.”
Diana nodded, but a cackling from Cindy’s other side drew their attention.
“What?” Cindy demanded.
Winter calmed down enough to say, “You’re so bad at pretending to be nice, you know that? Nobody would have thought you were arrogant until you started insisting that you weren’t.”
“Stop it, Winter,” Terri said. Diana added, “You’re being mean.”
“It’s just an observation.”
“You’re one to talk!” Cindy snapped.
“Look,” Winter said, putting her drink aside, “you’re a bit of a bitch. There’s no denying that, so own it. Make it work for you. Watch. Terri, I thought the steak was a little stiff. When you tenderize it, pretend that it just asked you why we need affirmative action.”
Diana spat out her drink from laughing while Terri turned red and sank down in her chair.
“Okay, so I get a little passionate sometimes.”
“See, Cindy? You can be mean and still be funny and likable.”
Cindy scoffed. “So if I say ‘I was always the best in my class at math, but only because I’m smarter than everyone else,’ people would laugh instead of getting pissed off?”
“As long as you’re actually self-aware and not just pretending to be.”
“Gee, Winter, if you’d opened with that yesterday, it would have saved me from having to apologize to your boyfriend.”
“Oh no!” Diana said, still coughing. “There’s two of them now.”
Terri laughed, as did Winter. Cindy blushed. She was embarrassed but… in a good way? It was a new feeling.
Not so much "spiky egg" as "egg tangled up in razor wire": I'm so here for this
The circumstances ring true as a fitting milieu where Cindy can flail free from bad patterns. The friends have found room for one rather rough-around-the-edges girl, with Winter; they've already traced a template. Meanwhile Cindy has a little more wiggle room inside her head, no longer boxed-in by those alarm bells she didn't realize could ever go quiet.
The thwarted genre insight is quite a nice touch here! Chris could have passed along a helpful infodump on (for example) Junji Ito, but instead Cindy had to preempt him with self-aggrandizing interrogations of knowledge and taste.
I might have to give Oxenfree (2016) another chance after this story wraps up. On my first playthrough I bounced hard off of its "jerkwad teen" dialogue trees-- Island Goddess might just give me the nerve and the appetite to push through! It's always a big plus when a narrative leads you to reevaluate other media
highly recommend retrying oxenfree. the "jerkwad teen dialogue" helps explain a lot of the tensions between characters and i think it works(maybe other than the speed requirements, but its the stylistic choice they went with)
Island Goddess might just give me the nerve and the appetite to push through!
That is incredibly sweet of you to say. I'm so glad you've been enjoying the story so much!
Thanks for the fun story so far! Just finished a bunch of your other work, and now I guess I'll just have to wait like everyone else for the rest of this one to come out