The Compound

by Aisling Rawle

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

Ever since I was a teenager, I worried that in a group of people I would be the stupidest one there.

It felt almost indecent, we girls rested and showered, gazing at the boys, dirty and exhausted, their eyes darting around the compound, and traveling inexorably back to us.

I felt more conscious of my words when I was speaking to him, perhaps because he seemed to be paying close attention.

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

“I think Tom’s kind of sexy,” Susie said. “He nearly drowned Becca,” I said. “Did he? I still want to get to know him, though.”

He pressed me gently into the grass, stroked my hair, and whispered that I was beautiful. I thought that it must have been a great moment of television.

There was something about Sam in those moments—it wasn’t that I admired his killing of innocent creatures, but I was fascinated by the easy, clinical way he did it before handing the carcasses to me so gently. I found myself examining him closely, the way he twisted his mouth while making a quick jerk of his wrist. I was unable to look away. Ryan might as well have not existed to me.

It felt like a vulgar thing, to admit to how much it thrilled me: the promise of material things, the rush you get from obtaining something new, something better than you had before.

And what was the point of it anyway, if I was never going to be able to afford nice things, or have anything worth owning—when we all would probably be dead in twenty years, maybe thirty if we were lucky? What did it matter to wake up at the same time every morning and wear the same clothes and try to eat more protein but less sugar, when an earthquake or a tsunami or a bomb might end it all at any minute? Or maybe we would all continue to boil, slowly but surely, in the mess that we pretended was an acceptable place to live.

I couldn’t bear to see him go, but I couldn’t fathom leaving. 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.