The Compound

by Aisling Rawle

There was no part of her beauty that didn’t make me question mine.

I’ve always been a passive kind of person; it is both my worst quality and the thing that people like most about me.

Within minutes of speaking to the girls, I knew that I was one of the most beautiful, and one of the least interesting.

They didn’t know beauty, these boys. They saw blurred outlines and thought they knew the picture.

As a viewer it was fun to try to spot which couples were faking it and which were genuine. As a participant I found it no easier to discern which relationships were genuine.

I knew his features in the dark.

even as I rejoiced in the realization that he could now be mine, I wanted more: I wanted to know that he wouldn’t grow bored and find someone else.

Aside from the finger-pointing, I think that the real reason that we didn’t talk to each other was because we were all ashamed of what had happened, and what had become of the compound.

It was easy to let anger fester, and to pin the blame on someone else, but the fact remained that the compound was left in our care, and it was now laid to waste.

There was something sort of thrilling about it, actually: you spend so much of your life adhering to all of these rules and ideas—keep everything orderly, keep busy, look presentable. When we stopped following these basic tenets, I realized how meaningless they had been. We got on fine as we were.

You came to crave it again and again, that shock factor, the surge of conflict, the possibility of violence.

Reality had become a slippery thing: I wasn’t certain on what part of my life I was an active part of, and what was a result of the machinations around me.

I didn’t want him to see just how small and insignificant my life had been before. If my greatest accomplishment had been getting onto the show, then everything beyond that would be a disappointment.