Darren

At the age of sixteen, with two years remaining until we graduated from school, all of the students were presented with an assignment. If we could come up with an idea, be it an invention, an innovation or a guiding principle, that proved beneficial to the village we would be allowed to graduate early. Should we decide to accept the assignment we would have a year to submit our idea for consideration. We could work as individuals or in groups that consisted of as many people as we wanted and whomever we wanted. Very rarely had a student or a group of students come up with an idea that was good enough to be implemented by the village and earn them early graduation. The last time had been a long time ago, before we were born. They wouldn’t tell us who it was or what their idea had been; that was the way Prospera worked, no individual’s contributions were singled out for praise.

Earning the reward of early graduation required an idea that was novel and transformational. The idea of coming up with such an idea intrigued me; the sooner I graduated the sooner I could start focusing solely on my writing. Whether the others would be interested in doing this with me I wasn’t sure. Miranda and Lisa seemed to only have time for each other, Hannah was always busy with her mother and Kevin was still as isolated and reticent as he had been on the camping trip two years ago. I thought about asking Penny to help me but ended up deciding against it. This wasn’t her sort of thing; truth be told she wasn’t a great intellect. Her writing was average and her stories and themes lacked depth. My guess was that she’d been approved for a career in writing because her particular brand of writing appealed to a specific type of reader, one who didn’t view literature as something that needed to be challenging. I was spending a lot of time with her because after years of the perennially serious friendship I’d had with the other four it was nice to have a normal friendship for a change. That and the drift that the five of us had been undergoing had left me feeling isolated and in need of a friend.

I didn’t know where we all stood with each other anymore. We had once made a pact when we were children to always be completely honest with each other and now our friendship was fraying at that critical linkage that had kept us close all our lives. I didn’t know what the reason was for Miranda and Lisa spending all of their time together, Hannah wasn’t sharing as much information about what she was learning as she used to, and Kevin showed no signs of bringing an end to his self-imposed seclusion. Our friendship had gone through periods of strain before, always brought about by our struggles with some new revelation that we’d made about Prospera. This time was different. We were much less informed about what was going on in each other’s lives and the strain in our friendship was not the result of any collective concern. I thought of the early graduation project as an opportunity for us to strengthen the bonds of our friendship that were weaker than they’d ever been before.

I went to each of them and asked them if they would meet me at the beach; they all agreed and they all showed up. It was the first time in weeks that the five of us were together like this, time was it was every day that we were together. The atmosphere among us was uncomfortable, as if nobody wanted to be there and they all couldn’t wait for the moment when they’d be able to leave.

“I know it’s not usual for me to be doing something like this but I called you all here to ask if you’d be interested in working on the early graduation project together.”

“I wasn’t planning on pursuing that,” Lisa answered.

“Me neither,” “Neither was I,” “I’m not interested in that,” the rest quickly followed with.

“I’m not asking because I care about doing something to help the village, I’m asking because it would mean we’d be working on something together.”

“What’s so special about that?” Hannah asked.

“You can’t tell me you’re not aware of what’s been happening with us. We’re drifting apart, I don’t know why, but we are. I thought that if the five of us were working on a project together it would allow us to deal with it.”

“Why don’t you ask Penny to do it with you?” Lisa asked sharply.

“This isn’t about Penny, it’s about us.”

“Since when do you care about us as a group? You’re always off on your own reading or writing,” Lisa responded, sharply again.

“I’ve always cared about this group; I wouldn’t have called you all here to ask you this if I didn’t.”

“Exactly what project did you have in mind?” Kevin asked, I suspected to defuse the tension between us that had escalated remarkably quickly.

“I don’t have anything in mind yet; I thought we’d start by coming up with an idea together.”

“That could take a while; very rarely are ideas considered good enough to earn the reward,” Kevin said.

“Some of us don’t have the time to sit around thinking up ideas; Miranda and I are busy with serious studies and Hannah spends most of her time with her mother,” Lisa said.

“You wouldn’t have to devote time to thinking of an idea, you’d just have to think about it casually, and I was thinking we’d all get together once a week to discuss any ideas we might have.”

“I think Darren might be onto something with this; we can’t afford to drift apart from each other, not when there’s nobody else who we can trust,” Kevin said.

“Do you want to know why we’ve been drifting apart?” Hannah said to him, in a hostile voice that was similar to Lisa’s, “It’s because what held us together was our fascination with your search for the truth about Prospera. Ever since you decided to completely isolate yourself we’ve been drifting apart from each other. You want things to go back to the way they were? Then you need to go back to the way you were.”

“There wouldn’t be any point in that. When those children from the camping trip were punished for their behaviour on the trip I decided to accept that the people who punished them must know all about everything I’ve ever done and that it’s inevitable that I too will face some sort of punishment, only mine will be much more severe.”

“That’s not going to happen; my mother is sharing everything with me about how Prospera really works; if I hear anything about you being targeted I’ll warn you.”

“And what would I do? Where would I go? We’re trapped here, surrounded by impassable natural obstacles. I’ve resigned myself to my fate.”

“I’ll talk to my mother, I’ll tell her that you’re not to be touched; she knows how important you are to me, she’ll listen to me.”

“That won’t sway them; their only concern is the smooth running of Prospera and if they view me as a threat to that then they’re going to eliminate me in some way.”

“Don’t say that! Don’t talk as if there’s no hope!” Hannah pleaded with Kevin, grabbing onto his robe and looking at him with tears in her eyes.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Hannah! You can’t talk like that when Miranda’s around! Have you forgotten about that?” Lisa said, aggressively.

“You can’t protect her for the rest of her life, eventually she’s going to have to acknowledge the truth about what’s going on around her!” Hannah said to Lisa, equally aggressively.

“You think you can protect Kevin, which he just told you can’t be done, so don’t turn on me for wanting to protect Miranda!”

“You only want to protect her because before her breakdown you thought of her as nothing but a nuisance!”

“Shut up! Miranda and I are in love now and that’s all that matters, that’s why I go out of my way to protect her!”

“What do you mean you’re in love?” I asked, nonplussed by what I’d just heard.

“We’ve been together for two years; we’re a couple,” Lisa said to me, taking Miranda’s hand in her own.

“Is what Hannah said true? Did you used to think of me as a nuisance?” Miranda asked Lisa in the distressed tone of voice of hers that always made us worry.

“That was a long time ago; I was a different person then, completely closed off and self absorbed. You changed that about me, you opened my mind and my heart and because of that I fell in love with you.”

“Don’t get too intimate with each other when we’re out in the open like this; there may be people watching us,” Kevin said coolly.

“Why would you say something like that? Is it because you’re jealous of what we have? You wish you could have it with Kevin, is that it?” Lisa said to Hannah.

Hannah didn’t have a response for this. I looked around at the four of them unable to comprehend what I was witnessing. How had things gotten this bad? Boiling to the surface before me were issues of jealousy, secrecy, resentment and terror. I didn’t know if this much damage could be repaired and was regretting calling everyone here and creating a situation that had led to the release of all of this.

“Kevin and I aren’t together because we know what the risks involved are. Do you know how much danger you two are in? I asked my mother about the kind of relationship that you have and she told me that it’s not allowed in Prospera. She said that when two people of the same gender like each other it’s called homosexuality and that in the outside world homosexuals were persecuted and the negative perceptions about them created social discord, that’s why it’s not allowed here.”

“Why are you only telling us now?” Lisa asked.

“I only asked my mother about it this morning, and she asked me if there was any reason in particular I was asking her, clearly referencing you two, so you need to be more careful than you have been.”

Hearing this, Miranda’s composure deserted her and Lisa had to quickly comfort her. The rest of us stood and watched hoping that we weren’t seeing the beginnings of a repeat of what Miranda went through four years ago after their excursion into the forest. Hannah looked genuinely, deeply contrite. She knew that she’d gone too far, that she was wrong not to have been considerate of Miranda’s presence and that there was no reason for her to have been so aggressive with Lisa.

Somehow our friendship had degenerated so much that we were disregarding each other’s feelings and attacking each other without giving it a second thought. Hannah was right, it had been Kevin that had always held us together and it was no coincidence that we’d started drifting apart when he decided to withdraw from us. What did that say about the strength of the rest of us as individuals? That without Kevin at the centre, our group had lost all integrity, had become weak and fragile. If he continued to separate himself from the rest of us there was frankly no hope for our group’s survival. And why was I the only one who didn’t know about Lisa and Miranda? Was I not considered as much a part of the group because of what Hannah had said about me preferring to spend most of my time reading and writing? Had there been previous occasions when I’d been kept out of the loop like this? I had called everyone together so that we could discuss the possibility of doing something that would bring us closer together, but, at that moment, looking around me at Miranda who was distraught and being comforted by Lisa, Hannah whose face betrayed the enormous contrition she was feeling, and Kevin whose impassivity was wholly inappropriate given the situation, I saw that for far too long we had been unfaithful to the pact we had made as children to always be honest with each other. We’d all been going through and dealing with things by ourselves, increasing the distance between us and altering our attitudes about each other.

Where we went from there wasn’t clear. We were fractured along multiple fault lines and repairing things, at first glance, looked impossible. Lisa walked off supporting Miranda, Kevin stoically followed not long after, leaving me alone with Hannah, who stayed and started crying from the contrition she was feeling. I didn’t know how to act. I was too shaken to provide any meaningful support to Hannah and I couldn’t be sure if that was what she wanted; she was so consumed by guilt that I could imagine her wanting to be left alone to feel it in its entirety. It was hard to accept that the five of us were done as friends but after witnessing that scene on the beach our chances of returning to the way we used to be looked dispiritingly slim. After a while I did go to Hannah and comfort her and when she regained a reasonable amount of her composure I walked her back to her house, the silence between us reflective of the disbelief we were in about the negative turn that our friendship had taken.

* * *

On Fridays Kevin didn’t attend school. He went out on the fishing boat with the regular crewmen as well as three other boys around his age to help bring in a haul of fish that would last the entire village a full week. Once collected, the fish, along with meat from slaughtered animals, was salted and placed in clay drums that were lowered into the icy waters of the lake to keep them from perishing. During winter there was no need to utilise this method of preservation as the snow and ice acted as natural preservants.

Kevin had been a member of the fishing crew for two years and had become a skilled and valuable member of the crew. He understood every aspect of the work and was the de facto mentor of the other young crew members, thanks in large part to the natural leadership skills that Hannah’s mother Diane and others had recognized in him. When they were below deck rowing out to sea he made sure that the rowing wasn’t being done at a pace that couldn’t be managed by some of the weaker ones. Slowly, he taught each one the various aspects of how fishing worked, from how to tie the knots when the nets needed to be repaired to the methods used for identifying the best location for fishing, the most commonly used one being searching for blue herring that are diving in and out of the water. Once they’d gotten there the crew stopped rowing and made their way above deck and got to work unfurling the nets so that they could begin casting. Every week the routine was the same: the first net was pulled out of the sea, tied up and secured to the side of the boat after which the second net was cast which was secured to the opposite side of the boat. Two full nets was always enough to last the entire village a full week, unless we were having a festival or a celebration, so after the second net was pulled out and secured to the boat they returned to the dock where the fish nets were offloaded and opened up on the deck where the fish were salted before being placed in eight large clay drums which were then transported by horse-drawn wagons to the lake where they were lowered onto an underwater platform and sealed.

During the fishing expedition that he went on the Friday after our contentious meeting at the beach, Kevin experienced what he believed was the fulfilment of what had always been his greatest fear. While the boat was stationary at the location of a shoal of fish and he and three crew members were pulling the second net out of the water one of the other crew members brought one of the oars above deck to push some seaweed off the bow of the boat that had been making it harder to achieve forward movement. When he was done he lifted the oar onto his shoulder and when he turned to head back below deck he struck Kevin hard on the back of his head with the oar, throwing him over the side of the boat and into the water. The contact was purely accidental, but for Kevin there was only one way of interpreting it.

The knock that he’d sustained wasn’t strong enough to render him unconscious or even to split him open. He hit the water and, upon realizing what had happened and reaching the conclusion that it had been decided that the time had come to ‘deal with him’, he started swimming.

“Kevin, where are you going? Come back! You’ll get eaten by a shark if you stay out there!” The crew yelled after him.

Kevin heard them but he had no intention of turning around, stopping or even slowing down. He believed that he had been fortunate enough to escape with his life and he wasn’t going to allow the chance he’d been afforded to save himself slip away. Not caring what direction he was going in, he swam; with all his might he swam. The weather that day was unpleasant, it was cloudy and windy and the ocean was choppy. The crew members on the boat were exhausted from rowing and from pulling up the nets. Rowing after Kevin in those conditions would take too much energy, energy that they needed to quickly get back because the likelihood of a storm was high. They didn’t go after him.

Kevin swam relentlessly until he looked around him and couldn’t see the boat anywhere. All he could see, far in the distance, were the sea cliffs. With nowhere else to go he swam for the coastline on the other side of the cliffs, intending to come up with a plan for what to do next after he’d taken a moment there to catch his breath.