No Rest for the Wicked (thinking about deleting idk)

#7 Harsh Past

If only I'd been more alert. If only I'd been cautious enough to look behind my back. But most of all... If only I'd never betrayed her in the first place.

 It wasn't her fault. She didn't know about my short history with Max, and she didn't know that I liked him. She didn't have to go through all of that.

 But she did. She saw the whole thing, she saw me push Max into the water, she saw Max laughing at me, she saw a happy couple. And it brought tears to her eyes. She thought she was something, now she thinks she is nothing. She feels what I felt.

 But there was no victory in it. There was no revenge or triumph in it. That just wasn't what Arriane deserved.

 "Do you want me to go talk to her?"

 "No. That is the last thing she needs," I said. "Besides, she's probably halfway to the camp by now.

 It was no longer fun at the beach anymore. The water was now cold. The sun was no longer shining. Everything was ruined.

 "Well, we better be off, shouldn't we?" I nodded. He grabbed his pack and we started walking again. "Oh, nice beard." He said. I frantically brushed the sand off my chin.

 "Missed a spot, whoops." Could I have been any worse?

                                                                        ***

We arrived back at the camp fifteen minutes later. It was tough, Arriane kept on scolding me, Bren gave Max a huge lecteur on his 'delicate' state, how he shouldn't have been walking 3 miles there and back with his injury. Fiona, she was reading 'Pride and Prejudice', again. It was the only novel we had on site.

 "Fiona, can you read me your journal entry now?" It took her a second or two to focus.

 "What? Oh, yeah sure." She picked it up beside her, and opened it to page 132. "Thursday the 16th of August, 2019" she read out-loud. Fiona had always kept good track of her journal, she put a lot of effort into hers. She read them to me regularly, and I enjoyed every single one of them. “Today wasn’t the same old same old. I woke up this morning to hear not 2, but 4 people digesting their breakfasts,” I giggled. “We had 2 new people in our little ‘group’, called Bren and Max. One of them had been shot in the hand, so Arriane and I had the gruesome job of stitching it up. An ugly sight. Anyway, after eating my horribly over-cooked egg for breakfast, I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ for the 80th time. And that’s my boring day so far, this is Fiona Webb, signing off. What’d you think?”

“Well done! If only I had the patience to write in mine,”

“Well, I don’t think it’s too late my friend. We’ve been on this island since we were… since we were 10 years old.”

“Are you serious? I can’t even remember that far. Hey! Can you read the earliest entry you’ve ever written? Please!”

“Oh all right. But really you should be referring to yours,” Fiona flicked back 131 pages, to page 1. “Ok. Monday the 1st of January, 2015. Dear Journal, my name is Fiona Webb. I found you in my cargo container the scary people shipped me in to land onto this mysterious island. I don’t know where mummy and daddy are but I suspect they’re on a container on another ship, I hope they get here soon. I’ve made two new friends today, one called Victoria and the other one Arriane. They can’t find their mummy and daddies either so I’m not alone. I can’t understand what the scary people are saying, and they have lots of scary weapons which make them even scarier. They once said something in normal language to me though, they said to ‘go far, far away from the beaches or either mummy and daddy or Arriane and Victoria get shot.’ So I told my new friends and we ran away very quickly, one of them fired their guns in the air and we all started screaming and we never saw them again. Whenever we were really hungry we took some of the food the soldiers didn’t eat, but you had to be careful because some of the other kids got shot for trying it, and now there are no kids left except for us. We found lots of helpful rubbish for our shelter today, but most of all I hope I can meet mummy and daddy soon. Love from Fiona.” Fiona’s eyes were wet, she dropped her journal and broke out into a sob. This was an extremely bad idea of mine, to make her read that journal entry. I hugged her while she cried, she was gripping onto my shoulders really tightly, as if I was about to let go.

“I won’t,” I whispered into her ear, realizing that it was almost 4 years on, of surviving on this wretched island.  The soldiers were still here, they were still guarding the coast. In fact, they were coming inland, most likely to finish off the children they’d dumped here.

Little did they realize that the children had grown up.