Reality Gold Read online

  “You can wear your awesome sandwich shirt tomorrow,” Deb said. “And by the way, that goes for all of you girls—no changing. Even those of you in bathing suits. Looking at you, Willa.”

  “If you say so,” Willa said. Before this second I had never been sure that smirking was a real thing, but sure enough, it was. I wished I could remember if I’d ever seen her Instagram account. Probably filled with lots of artsy staged pictures of her doing trendy things. Faux hiking, drinking lattes, looking angstily toward the horizon, that sort of thing.

  “We can keep some of our things in a safe?” Maddie asked Deb. “That’s so nice.”

  She slipped her nylon bag off her shoulder and started transferring things into a safe, including that photo album she’d been talking about.

  “Those locks are the newest in fingerprint technology, so once you set it, you’ll be the only person who can unlock it,” Deb said.

  I quickly unpacked my own bag, putting everything into the safe and locking it right away. I breathed a sigh of relief. Map, compass, satellite, notebook—they’d all made it here safe and sound.

  I saw Alex looking around, probably noticing for the first time that her small nylon bag wasn’t in the pile of duffels. Chloe caught on, too.

  “Excuse me, Deb, I don’t see our little bags,” Chloe said. She was really polite, the sort of girl who could be cool while also appealing to adults. That nice girl Chloe was probably how her friends’ parents described her.

  “Yeah, about that. Joaquin is going to tell you—”

  Deb’s walkie crackled.

  “Deb, we need you by the staging area. We’ve got an issue with the C-cam.”

  “Again?”

  The voice came through even angrier. “Worse. I’m telling you, we’re freaking cursed—”

  Deb cut him off. “Okay. I got it. Flying in.”

  She clipped the walkie back on her belt, looking exasperated.

  “Listen up, gang,” she told us. “Time to go back to base camp where you can hang out with the boys and spend too much time on your new phones, so basically it’ll be exactly like you never left home.”

  “Wait,” Taylor said. “Our bags—”

  “Base camp. Joaquin. Move it.”

  The other girls didn’t need any prodding. If Joaquin knew where the bags were, then that’s where everyone wanted to go. We found him at the fire pit, but he told us we’d have to wait for the boys to arrive to talk about the bags. There were a few complaints, mostly from Taylor who had an A+ whine, but nearly everyone took his word and settled in on the logs to wait for the boys. I have a theory that really good-­looking people get away with things that less attractive people can’t, and I was sure if doughy, overweight Phil in his uncool orange Hawaiian shirt had been the one holding the secret of the lost bags he would have gotten a lot more pushback. But Joaquin was hot, so no one wanted to offend him.

  That didn’t mean he wanted to walk into trouble, so he stayed near those of us girls who had kept our bags and weren’t loudly fuming about injustice.

  “I like your Zodiac pendant,” Joaquin said to me. “Virgo?”

  I nodded and touched my necklace. It had been a birthday gift from Miles several years ago and I’d intentionally chosen to wear it to the island. I hoped it would bring luck.

  “So where are you from?”

  “San Francisco.”

  “Ah, a California girl. I live in Southern California, myself.”

  “Did you move there right from Brazil?” I asked him.

  Joaquin looked confused. Then he laughed. “Are you serious?”

  “You said your people . . .” My skin doesn’t usually flush, but I felt my cheeks go so hot that there was no chance he missed my embarrassment.

  “My people are from LA,” he said, and I realized he was speaking without even the slightest hint of an accent. A slow grin spread across his face. “You thought I was actually from Brazil? That’s great! It’s called acting, kid. Thanks for the compliment—you just made my day.”

  Noise in the distance indicated that the boys were on their way, so Joaquin stood and got ready to greet them.

  I didn’t know why I was surprised to hear he was an actor. By now I should be used to things turning out differently then they first appear, because after all, that’s the story of my life. I could hardly accuse others of being sheep and accepting whatever story they were presented with if I was guilty of doing it myself.

  “Welcome back, guys.” When they’d all arrived, Joaquin took a minute to show us where to sit at the fire pit. “Let’s talk for a minute about how you all shook out,” he continued. “Team Sol, it looks like most of you are the danger lovers, the adrenaline junkies. Ninety percent of your team jumped off the helicopter. Do you think that love of danger is going to give you an edge in the game?”

  “Damn straight!” Porter called out.

  “Are you sure about that?” Joaquin said. He paused, letting that hang for a minute. “It’s true that Team Sol might have the brawn, but it’s also true that Team Huaca might have the brains. You’ll notice that those of you who jumped into the water left your personal items bag behind on the helicopter, but those who walked off carried theirs.”

  It was hard not to feel a little bit superior as most of the Sol team began to realize that maybe they weren’t the team with the edge after all.

  “Wait a minute. What? Are you keeping our bags?” Taylor wailed.

  A list of lost items floated into the air, with varying degrees of exasperation.

  My headlamp, my best bathing suit, my journal.

  “Why would you do that to us?” Taylor demanded, arms flying, voice rising. But Joaquin was unmoved.

  “Treasure hunting tools left behind.” He shook his head sadly. “The best advice I can give you is that going forward in this game you’ll need to think like a treasure hunter. Every tool matters. Every clue matters. Don’t take anything for granted.”

  Joaquin’s accent was noticeable now. I was starting to get it: when he spoke with an accent it was for the show. A lack of accent meant the cameras weren’t rolling and he was off-duty.

  AJ was even more agitated than Taylor, which was saying something. “Okay, sure, but seriously, I need my bag.” AJ’s glasses kept sliding down his nose and he’d push them up with the heel of his hand. “I really, really need it. I actually have important things in it.”

  “Important?” Maren asked, perking up. “What kind of important things?”

  “My map, my Cipher, things.”

  AJ? The stealth treasure hunter was AJ? I gave him the once-over. I guess it made sense that it would turn out to be one of the smart guys.

  “You told us to put our most important things in those bags,” AJ complained to Joaquin. “You set this whole thing up! You tricked us.”

  “You set yourself up, AJ. For every action, there is a reaction.”

  More wails of protest, which, honestly, Joaquin deserved for that lame comment. I was feeling pretty good, though. Who knew that all my previous difficulties would turn out to be good practice for this show? A year ago I took everything at face value, which meant I’d have fully trusted Deb, left my bag behind, and completely lost out.

  Murch, representing the ten percent of the Sol team who hadn’t jumped, looked at Maren. He leaned over to say something to Justin, one of the other athletes on Sol, then he pointed at me and Maren. “Those two took some stuff out of the bags. See if they’ve got anything,” Murch said loudly to his teammates.

  What? No! I hadn’t taken anything, but even more importantly, I’d saved his butt from jumping. And seriously, those two? If I looked like Willa or Alex or Chloe he would definitely have known my name. I was about to take myself out of the equation, but I got a look at Maren’s face. For a tough girl dressed in black from head to toe, she looked worried.

 
I felt the cameras on us. On me. So much for trying to blend in. How was it that I’d been on this island less than an hour and I’d somehow stepped right into the same problem that got me here? I could see how it would play out on TV: I step away, say I had nothing to do with it, and then the show cuts to a clip of Maren throwing me a bag—eliminating the part where I don’t take it, of course. And voilà: there it is, my online reputation in full color. A girl who would do anything to save herself, including hurting friends, if that’s what it took.

  But if I let myself get grouped with Maren, my “be friendly” strategy was basically toast. She had to be the prickliest person on the island, and I’d be tied to her, which basically meant I was facing two bad options. If I sided against Maren, it would be better for me now—but no doubt I would pay for it later when the show aired, and a big reason I was here was to provide visual proof that I wasn’t the troll the world thought I was. My other choice wasn’t much better, though, because if I sided with her now, well, I’d become a target. No doubt about that. It could be worth it, though, to get to look at AJ’s things. His notes might be helpful.

  I’d wanted to avoid attention, but now that I was getting it, let no one say I hadn’t learned from my mistakes. I wasn’t going to make the selfish decision. I wouldn’t throw Maren under the bus.

  “Fine. Yes, we might have some things,” I told everyone. “When we realized the bags had to stay on the plane, we—”

  “Ah, capitalism at its finest,” Deb interjected. “Now the rest of you can bargain with Riley and Maren if they’ve got something you want returned.”

  I stood there, openmouthed in shock. That isn’t what I’d meant, but now it was too late to explain and the crowd was audibly and visibly turning on us.

  Why do you get to do that? Who are you to go through our things?

  Cody folded his arms across his impressive chest. He spoke in a slow, Texan drawl.

  “Y’all, I believe we are witnessing the start of this game. You’d best straighten your backbone, because it’s gonna be the law of the wild out here. Kill or be killed.”

  “On that note,” Deb interjected brightly, “how about we play some nice icebreaker games?”

  6

  After a few awkward and unproductive rounds of two truths and a lie, it was time for lunch. Those cute little groupings of tables with two, three, or four chairs I’d noticed before in the dining hut? Not so cute when you had a plate of food and had to awkwardly walk through them looking for an inconspicuous spot to slide into.

  I bypassed the core Sol group, obviously. They’d pulled two tables together so that Willa and the three other girls from Sol—Alex, Chloe, and Taylor—were sitting with Porter, Justin, and Murch. At this point I was glad they were ignoring me instead of giving me dirty looks, but even so it was almost as annoying to hear them talking like old friends already, cementing the fact they were a unified team. And there really was no getting away from noticing it, because Taylor’s voice was loud and persistent and her idea of conversation was to exclaim Oh my God at everything. Justin and Porter were commiserating about the college sports commitment process—Dude, you’ve got to get your coach on those letters!—while Willa was establishing her social media cred. Once I moved to LA and started posting a lot of beach and party pics I went over a million followers. Not as many on Snapchat yet but I’m trying. I could tell that Alex and Chloe’s discovery that they were both from nearby towns in Ohio had taken a backseat to Willa’s tales of her more glamorous hometown.

  Honestly, it was amazing how certain people always ended up together. Like little balls of mercury, pretty people inevitably flow together to merge and form one bright, shiny pool. It happens everywhere. Even, apparently, on deserted islands.

  Maddie was sitting alone. I’d have to sit with her—it would look odd if I didn’t, but I really wanted to sit with AJ so I could find out what he knew about the gold. He hadn’t taken a seat yet. It had to seem natural, so I looped back around to a buffet set up by the kitchen entrance and picked up another spoonful of rice and beans.

  This time when I passed the Sol table, Murch leaned his chair right into me, knocking my plate to the ground.

  “Oops,” he said.

  My face got hot. This was the worst-case scenario. Not only wasn’t I invisible, I was being actively targeted. I felt a wave of shame crash over me, and I bent down to retrieve the plate, hoping Taylor’s latest Oh my God was in response to finding out Willa’s average number of likes per post.

  It wasn’t. When I stood up, the Sol table had stopped talking. Taylor was looking at me in wide-eyed embarrassment and amusement, and a bit of something else, too: relief. I had seen it at school all the time after the scandal—the realization on old friends’ faces that they’d dodged a bullet by not hanging out with me. Right about now, Taylor had to be feeling pretty glad she’d left me behind on the helicopter.

  “Careful there,” Murch said warningly to me. “You wouldn’t want to get in the way and get hurt.”

  It was a split-second decision. I faked a stumble and tipped my plate of sandy food right onto Murch’s lap.

  “Are you freaking kidding me?” Murch jumped up, sending his chair backward. His reaction was so fast, so extreme, that I didn’t even have time to pretend to look sorry. My regret was legit, though—he towered above me, huge and quivering with anger, and if Porter hadn’t jumped up and put himself between us, it was possible Murch would have hit me.

  God, Riley—think!

  My knees trembled. I was starting to feel warm and fuzzy again toward Porter for saving me, but before I fully turned into a pile of mush, he said to Murch, “Hey, man, sit down and cool off, would you? It’s not worth getting kicked out over an annoying girl like her.”

  Annoying girl. Oh. He’d done it for Murch, not me.

  “Yes, don’t mind me,” I said, taking a few steps back and retreating for the buffet. “Annoying, clumsy old me.”

  Willa tossed Murch her yellow towel and the friction dissipated.

  Porter catcalled Murch. “Strip, strip, strip!” while Willa laughed and covered her eyes. “Please, no! Keep your clothes on,” she pleaded teasingly.

  I felt strangely let down. The confrontation had actually been a little exhilarating. But now it was over, and I was back on the outside, watching Chloe dip her towel in a glass of water to rub the stain on Murch’s shirt while the other kids laughed at Murch’s extreme reaction.

  By the time I finished with the buffet for the third time, the Sol team seemed to have forgotten all about me, which was a good thing—but I couldn’t help feeling a pinch of bitterness that they’d moved on so quickly. Luckily, I had other things to focus on. Enough people had settled into the tables that the only one with any seats left was Maren’s. AJ was right behind me.

  “My bag,” he said, plopping his plate on the table and not bothering with any niceties. “You guys have it?”

  “Nope,” Maren said.

  I opened, and then closed, my mouth. She was the one holding his things; if she wanted to pretend otherwise, I’d have to let her. I fiddled with the salt and pepper shakers.

  “I thought you said you had our bags?”

  “I didn’t say anything.” Maren looked at me pointedly.

  “Fine,” AJ said, obviously exasperated. “Not you. Riley. Riley said you had our bags.”

  “Nope,” Maren repeated.

  “No? Really?”

  I felt sorry for AJ. He looked crushed, understandably. I’d have felt the same way.

  “What did you say you lost?” I asked innocently. “A journal?”

  “Yeah, my journal, and some other stuff. The treasure map, for one thing. And then I had a little book, too. Orange, with lots of notes in it. That thing is key because it’s the definitive guide to interpreting the signs.”

  “Ohhhhh,” Maren said, tipping back in her chair. “Thos
e things. Why didn’t you say so? I didn’t take anyone’s bag, but I did take some things out of the bags. Orange booklet, you say? That does sound vaguely familiar.”

  AJ looked so grateful that he didn’t even seem to mind she’d been playing with him. “Thank God.”

  “Here’s the thing, though. I don’t quite understand why you’d bring any of that in the first place. We literally only found out today that searching for the treasure was an option.”

  “Deb told us to study the island history,” AJ said.

  “Yeah, study the history,” Maren said. “Not bring a dissertation on the methodology of treasure map reading, complete with aerial photos.”

  “Oh, so you do have my notes!” AJ brightened up. He lowered his voice. “I got a heads-up this was going to be a thing. Deb found me and convinced me to do this show because she read an independent study I recently published on drone usage to survey and chart the terrain of this island. I used those pictures, plus some open-source NASA images, to graph a series of undiscovered subterranean cave systems”—my heart nearly stopped. He knew about the caves, too?—“and Deb was into it. Finding the treasure will be great PR for the show, while adding a solid footnote to my article. Probably get me into Harvard, actually.”

  “But if you find the treasure, you’ll get a chunk of change,” Maren said. “You won’t need to go to Harvard.”

  “Are you crazy? Harvard is the dream. The rest is gravy.”

  I barely heard the discussion that followed—something about weighing an Ivy League acceptance against the archaeological importance of discovering a priceless treasure. My head was spinning. I couldn’t believe the odds of someone else, someone here, coincidentally discovering the existence of the caves. I might be way out of my league. While I was going to have to rely on the satellite for assistance with the clues, AJ needed nothing more than his own brain.

  I definitely needed to see his notes before Maren gave them back.

  Most of the crew had left us alone after lunch, other than a few cameramen who weaved and circled around us, nonstop filming. When Deb had said it would take a while to get used to their presence, I’d thought she’d meant days. But here we were, not even halfway through the first day, and I was already starting not to notice them.