Lisa

I woke up the following morning to the sound of music. Miranda and Grant, our roommate who played the oboe, were playing a duet. The music was beautiful; Miranda and Grant were in perfect harmony. I sat up in bed and listened to their playing, enjoying the music and trying to put a name to the piece they were playing that sounded so familiar to me. Before I could find the name I was looking for, their performance came to an end. I got out of bed while there was silence and exited the bedroom to find Miranda and Grant standing in the sitting room part of the common area of the cabin and looking over some sheet music that they had opened up on a stand. I said good morning to them and proceeded to the bathroom to take care of my expulsions and ablutions.

“Is there any coffee?” I asked them when I emerged from the bathroom.

“There’s some in the pot, and there’s enough oil in the cooker for you to heat it up, and there’s bacon in the pan on the counter in case you’re hungry,” Miranda answered before quickly returning her attention to Grant and the sheet music.

I wasn’t feeling hungry so I just poured myself a cup of coffee and took a seat on the sofa close to where Miranda and Grant were busy looking over their sheet music.

“What was that you were playing before I came out? It sounded familiar to me but I couldn’t get the name.”

“It was Bach’s Concerto for Oboe and Violin in C minor; we were playing the first Allegro,” Miranda answered.

“You don’t sound like someone who hasn’t played in two years,” I said to her.

“Thanks, but I’ve still got a long way to go before I’m ready to rejoin the orchestra.”

“You sound like you’re already ready, it kind of sounded like you were carrying Grant a little when you were playing,” I said jokingly.

“Don’t say that,” Miranda playfully admonished me.

“It’s true, she was, but then anybody who plays with her will find it difficult to match her, she’s so talented,” Grant said.

Miranda blushed upon receiving this praise from Grant, and I felt…threatened. Of course I was delighted that Miranda was pursuing a return to the orchestra with so much determination but it was clear from watching her with Grant that her music was so important to her that it would always take priority over everything else, including me. Then there was Grant. From the way he talked about Miranda and looked at her the attraction that he felt toward her was obvious. That morning there was no room anywhere for me in Miranda’s world of music and that left me feeling like an unwelcome intruder.

For a long time a debate had raged among Darren, Hannah and Miranda as to who was the smartest member of our group: me or Kevin. Spending my time on this trip watching and listening to Miranda so that I could truly know and understand her, my feeling was that the smartest person in our group was most probably her. Her brilliance didn’t manifest itself in the form of high test scores or an acute sense of perception, as was the case with me and Kevin respectively. It was unique and special, only revealing itself to those who had the patience and perspicacity required to see it. I was beginning to see it, to appreciate it, and the more I did the more I was drawn to her. I found I couldn’t take my eyes off her when she was playing. As I came to understand her interpretation of the music the complete scale of her artistry became too wondrous to behold for me to look elsewhere even for a second. Miranda had, without knowing it, made herself the primary object of my attention. I thought about her constantly; when I was with our other friends and she wasn’t there with us because she was busy practising I felt her absence keenly, when I saw her with the musicians she was constantly practising with I felt angry and jealous.

The anger that I was feeling blindsided me. After two years of making myself more available to Miranda than any of our other friends it hurt to be pushed aside by her the way I had been so that she could spend more time with her musician friends. I thought that she was treating me with a great amount of insensitivity and was showing a lack of appreciation for all that I’d done for her. The angrier I got at her the less concerned I became with keeping her from being exposed to anything that might lead her to have another episode. At night when we went to bed I snuffed out my lantern as soon as I climbed under the covers and slept on my side so that I was facing away from her. I became increasingly cold toward her. If she asked me if I wanted us to do something together after she was done practising with her musician friends I said no, when we were with other members of our circle I spoke with them and all but ignored her. Whenever I treated her this way she got the hurt, confused look on her face that was generally a precursor to an episode. Seeing that look on her face, I didn’t care. I didn’t care that she was hurt by my indifference to her because she showed no signs of caring about how I felt when she’d been ignoring me when she was with her musician friends.

It never entered my mind at the time how irrational I was being. Things between me and Miranda had changed too much for me to respond rationally to the present state of events. The things that she was doing drew a response from me that was purely emotional, and with the sheer number of emotions that I was confronting—everything from anger to jealousy to feelings of inferiority—there was no space for any level-headed thinking. The coldness between us persisted until one night, while I was lying in bed facing away from her pretending to be asleep, she sat on my bed and asked me why I was treating her so coldly.

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“Please tell me why you’re treating me this way. You’ve been doing it for days and I don’t understand why and it’s getting harder and harder for me to live with the state of things between us. Please, just tell me what I did wrong,” she pleaded with me.

Her voice was tremulous; I could hear that she was in a bad way, on the brink of a collapse. The sound of it penetrated and shattered the hard exterior that I had been adopting with her. I turned over, sat up in bed, put my hands gently on her face and wiped away her tears with my thumbs.

“I was just jealous. You were spending so much time with them and you looked so much more engaged with them than you do with me; I was worried that you preferred their company over mine and that you’d be spending more time with them and forget about me.”

“Forget about you? Are you listening to yourself? I could never forget about you,” she said, putting her hands on my face, looking into my eyes and smiling at me.

What happened next was as unexpected as it was unfathomable. Miranda was looking into my eyes and in hers I saw a glow that I was seeing for the first time. As if hypnotized by Miranda’s eyes my body lurched forward without me consciously instructing it to. Our lips met, and strangely, even though I’d never heard or conceived of relations between two girls, kissing her felt like the most natural thing in the world. Miranda returned my kiss and without any pause or trepidation our arms were around each other’s bodies and we were kissing each other like long-lost lovers that had just been reunited. We handed ourselves over to each other so quickly and so completely that this was obviously something that we had both wanted for a long time. But how could I want something without knowing that I wanted it? Miranda kissed me and ran her hand down along the side of my body and all I could think of was that I wanted her to go further, to grab my breasts, to put her hand between my legs. Passion and sexual greed flowing from some mysterious place within me entirely overcame me and impelled me to do to Miranda what I wanted done to me. I flipped our positions on the bed so that I was on top and I slid my hand under her pants, entering her with my fingers and kissing her aggressively as I moved to and fro with my fingers, increasing the speed and range of my movement the wetter my hand became. It ended with a full body contraction from Miranda and a deep vocal expression of pleasure that I muffled by strongly putting my mouth over hers. We were completely exhausted, sweating and out of breath. To further add to my confusion I was feeling more emotionally and physically fulfilled than I’d ever imagined was possible.

By doing what we’d done we had entered into a place that was fraught with uncertainty and peril. We didn’t know if what we were doing was natural even though there was nothing about it that felt unnatural. My mind raced that night asking if the feelings that had precipitated our passionate coupling could be trusted to last, if we were going to be able to keep seeing each other when we returned to the village, if we’d be able to cope with not seeing each other or what the consequences would be if we were found out. That night, however, none of that mattered. We fell asleep holding on to each other in bed thinking only about the remarkable discovery we’d made, that of a love between us that defied convention, that bound us together in every intimate way because it was exclusively ours.

Darren

There were undeniably very specific reasons for the adults sending us on this trip. We had witnessed too many incidences of behaviour that would not be tolerated in Prospera for the adults not to have conceived of the possibility of these things happening in this environment. Kevin felt the same way, and had formulated the theory that we were being watched by some of the other children who would be reporting to the adults when we returned. His theory was certainly plausible, but I believed that there was a different reason for this camping trip. I believed that the purpose of it had something to do with our psychology, and that the experiences we had here would in some way contribute to our development into ideal Prospera citizens. In the brief time that we’d been on the camping trip I’d noticed changes in the others that I hadn’t seen in a full year in the main village. Miranda was looking like the Miranda we knew from before the night they’d gone into the forest; Hannah and Kevin were no longer avoiding the feelings they shared; Lisa was displaying her emotions more, and I was writing with a greater level of clarity and fluency. On this camping trip we had enjoyed unprecedented freedom that had enabled us to experiment and explore in ways we wouldn’t be allowed to in the main village and the experience had been transformative.

Disappointingly, a series of events unfolded when we returned to the main village that confirmed Kevin’s theory and discredited mine. The four boys that had gotten into the fight that Kevin had had to break up were all assigned to the worst job in the village: shovelling manure from all the animal stocks and carting it in wheelbarrows to the farms to be used as fertilizer. Those that had been openly engaging in romantic activity also received sanctions in the form of undesirable physical labour, though not all of them, which I found strange. Hannah, Kevin, Lisa and I, got together and decided for Miranda’s sake that we shouldn’t tell her that we were being watched on the camping trip by the other children and that the developments that had occurred upon our return regarding occupational assignments was the product of that surveillance.

Miranda had returned to the orchestra since returning and appeared to have put most of her anxiety problems behind her. Not long after we returned to the main village and she had returned to the orchestra the concert that she was meant to be the star of two years ago was staged and Miranda was nothing short of breathtaking. She looked stunning in a flowing black dress and she commanded everybody’s undivided attention with the way she stepped onto the stage and made it her own. The first piece played on the night, to get the audience warmed up, was Schubert’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major. This was followed by Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 2, the Andante being played especially beautifully by Miranda. Bach’s Concerto for Oboe and Violin in C Minor was next, which Miranda played with Grant with whom she had been practising during the camping trip. The evening was capped off by Dvorak’s dramatic Violin Concerto in A Minor and then Bruch’s Violin Concerto no. 1 in G Minor, difficult pieces which Miranda played absolutely flawlessly.

When the concert was over, the first person to get out of their seat and lead the standing ovation was Lisa, who applauded rapturously for Miranda with tears in her eyes and to whom Miranda directed a special bow. Thanks to the camping trip Miranda was back, that made me okay with whatever the underlying purpose of it was.