Whoever said you had to stroke my beard in front of the public?
Good night, Colton Downing.
Good night, Missy Jean.
I hear the shuffle of feet in the plane’s cabin just beyond the galley and feel my time alone coming to a close, so I speed read this morning’s messages, finding too much joy revisiting every word as Missy and I dissected and hypothesized about the results of Mayday Challenge Four.
This morning, each of the four remaining teams had to send out a member to one of four wooden poles that protruded out of the ocean. The first team that fell off their pole and into the water would be part of the Black Box Elimination tonight.
Joseph, Maria, Silver, and I had stood on the poles while the team members who weren’t on them did their best to make us fall. Tyrone had taken that to heart and spent the majority of the game splashing water on me or attempting to shake the thick pole beneath my feet. But in the end, all four of us on the wooden poles stood for a record-breaking ninety-eight minutes before a thunderstorm rolled in and the show had to call a four-way tie.
Neither Missy nor I knew what that meant for the Black Box Elimination tonight. If no team was clearly the winner or the loser, will the show choose who will be eliminated? Will America?
I trail a finger down the last of our messages in the coloring book, laughing when I read the note about how Tyrone guiltily offered me front-row tickets to his opening MLB game after today’s Mayday Challenge. Missy had called it a make-up bribe, but I called it an opportunity.
Missy Jean, when we get home, what would you say to going to a baseball game with me?
A baseball game? You mean, an entire nine innings of the slowest game on planet Earth? I think I’d rather stick glass in my retinas. Or spend my life making only left turns across a highway.
Okay, okay. What if I said there would be some salted steak fries with ranch there?
You should have started with steak fries. My stomach is currently digesting itself. I guess I’m going to a ball game.
I take the pen and scribble my response in the minuscule slit of blank space that’s left in our coloring book. I just manage tosqueeze in my three words by curling a few letters up the edge of the page.
It’s a date.
I smile, feeling like I just won the World Series when I hear a voice next to me.
“Colton.” I turn to find a woman with waist-length brown hair held back by a sun visor that matches her coral polo shirt. She’s aSunsets and Sabotagestaff member that I’ve seen several times on set but have never actually spoken to. “I’m here to inform you that there will be no Black Box Elimination tonight. Instead, you’ll be participating in another Mayday Challenge tomorrow, except the team who loses this challenge will automatically be eliminated.”
Panic grips me. But this time, it’s not about my typical intrusive thoughts, the ones where I watch my dad smile as he greets me at the airport, telling me how excited he is for me to spend the next five years of my life working at his old firm. Instead, I’m filled with a new worry. A worry that if I go home tomorrow, this island bubble will pop, and this new and delicate relationship between Missy and me will disappear with it, becoming just another memory.
Even though my stomach begs for food and my body could do with a long shower, I wish I could stay here. Because on this island, I’ve felt more alive than I have in years, and I know that at the center of that feeling is Missy.
Chapter 21
MISSY
· DAY 16 ·
The sun hangs low in the late afternoon sky by the time the hulk of a man in front of me wearing a sweaty coral polo finally stops. I feel like I’ve been walking for hours, and I can only hope that this is the end of our trek through the jungle-turned-sauna. My bruised ankle begins to ache, and I roll it around, giving it a moment’s relief.
Earlier on the beach, I had been shelling out the remaining meat from a coconut when I’d been cornered by thebulkySunsets and Sabotagestaff member. He gave me little more than a “follow me” before ushering me off the beach and into the jungle. I’d searched for Colton but couldn’t find him amongthe sudden influx of coral polos swarming base camp. But one parting glance across the beach told me that the other teams left in the game were also being separated and individually taken to unknown locations without their teammate.
Yesterday, we’d all been informed that there would be an additional Mayday Challenge and that it would take the place of our last Reward Challenge in the game. That meant that today’s challenge would be the very last one before Mayday Challenge Five—or in other words, the finals.
Everyone had spent the past day speculating about what this challenge would be and when it would take place. It seems we are finally getting answers. Well, sort of. Despite the many questions I’d asked after being led away from base camp, like where Colton was or why I wasn’t being united with my teammate, I wasn’t given a response.
I rest my hands on my knees, inhaling a long breath before eyeing the staff member who served as my jungle sherpa, guiding my weak little limbs over rocks and hills as the drone above us caught every step on camera. The man looks nearly as worn out as I do, but somehow he’s managed to whistle Simon & Garfunkel tunes throughout our entire expedition, likely to avoid playing twenty questions with me as I tried to siphon information from him to no avail. He wouldn’t even tell me his name, so I’ve just been calling him Simon as an homage to his favorite musical duo.
I place my hands on my hips. “So, is this where you finally tell me what this new Mayday Challenge is all about?”
In answer, Simon steps aside, exposing what was previously hiding behind those big shoulder bricks of his.
“Whoa.” I’m both creeped out and curious at the structure before me. I take a few tentative steps forward, marveling at the scene that looks to have come straight out of anIndiana Jonesmovie.
About twenty feet in front of me lies the cockpit of a small airplane that appears as if it’s been ripped from its main cabin. Jagged metal edges and stringy wires, which I hope are purely for aesthetic purposes, hang haphazardly from the severed cockpit. My eyes travel around the exterior, noting the bold teal stripe that lines the front of the structure and the vines that wind across the windshield and roof, making it seem as if this cockpit has been abandoned in the jungle for years.
