"Tell us a little about yourself," Agent Faber began. Lydia raised her head slightly, her eyes so blue they managed to amaze the two agents a bit. "We have realized in the talks we have had with you and with the other girls that you are very calm, relaxed, we could say. As if what happened on that island was not a trauma for you. We want to find out if there is something about you, something that you may have so hidden inside you that you don't even know it exists, so ingrained that it has made you take a different position, that has made you react in a way that is too docile, considering the circumstances , of course."

Lydia twisted a lock of hair between her fingers, realizing that it had grown considerably since the last time she was home. She took a sip of the water the two officers had given her, but even that gesture wasn't going to make the brit go soft. She was not going to tell her private life to those people who she did not know anything about.

She didn't trust psychologists. From her own experience, you might say. Since the accident she had visited two different ones; her parents knew it was something that took time, but they were impatient because their daughter seemed not to improve. Lydia herself had realized that these sessions had not improved her behavior, that they only brought out the worst in her, made her drown in her own thoughts, reliving that night over and over again in her head until panic took over her.

"I've had a pretty normal life, to tell the truth," Lydia smiled. The red-haired agent cocked his head at the girl's sympathy. "I've lived in Birmingham, England, for as long as I can remember. I've played football since I was eight, because my father supported the local team and he agreed that I joined the school team, but then I joined the female team of my city. My parents worked for most of the time, they're both lawyers, but they made time for me, we even played board games during the weekends," Lydia chuckled a bit. "Then I moved to California with my grandmother, and life's been pretty much the same, except I don't play anymore. America is a bit rubbish if we talk about soccer, if that's how you like to call it," she giggled, mimicking an accent.

"You mentioned you moved to California with your grandmother. Any particular reason for it to happen?"

"Life in England was getting quite boring for me, I suppose. Moving to America would mean I'd get to live the famous American dream, right? My father lived in Cali before I was born, before meeting my mum, so I guess he wanted me to live that kind of life before I went to college in England. Being there with my grandma has been great, I won't complain. A break is always good."

The lie rolled off Lydia's tongue as fast as ever: her mind was always ready, used to being asked that question, so much so that her voice no longer wavered when she said it.

What the agents did not know was that her life was very far from what she had reported a few seconds ago. She joined the football team because it was the only way to get her father's attention —the only time they spent more than an hour together a day was when she was little and had training sessions. However, when she grew up, he also stopped going even to her matches. It was true that they played board games at night, but only because her parents were obsessed with training their mental agility and intelligence, so puzzle and movie nights were replaced by chained word games or reciting quotes from famous books.

And yes, it was true that her parents had lived in America for a long time, but the reason why she had moved could not be further from the truth: the further away she was, the less trouble she could give them.

Lydia couldn't find Shelby anywhere, so she decided to stop looking for her, thinking that she might have been hiding somewhere far away. After all, if someone didn't want to be found, they probably weren't. Therefore she chose to return to the camp. Well, what was left of it, really, since before all that chaos broke out Dot had announced that they were moving again to another part of the island.

She returned without saying a word to anyone. She didn't share any look with Fatin, with whom inevitably held a grudge for the words she had addressed to Shelby; least of all with Leah, who didn't dare look her in the eye after all the drama she'd staged for nothing. She just helped Rachel and Dot, carrying the few things the tide had left intact, and stopped when Dot did the same, wearily. "Yeah, well. It's not exactly the promised land, but it's as good as we're gonna get," Dot wiped the sand from her hands on her pants, and spoke again as she looked at an armchair on the sand, a little further from her position. "And look, it comes furnished."

"Alright, so how do we do this?" Rachel wanted to know, looking at Dot. Lydia, Rachel, and Dot were the only ones left standing, staring at each other. Fatin, Toni, Leah, Martha, and Nora rested on the sand, feeling tired and hopeless. "Should we start a fire, make another shelter?"

"Why are you asking me?"

"'Cause we always ask you," Shrugged Rachel, becoming a little confuse as to why Dot would complain just now.

"Alright, you're an athlete. What's it called when somebody trains so hard that they just, sort of, like, flatline?"

"Burn out?" Lydia suggested, entering the conversation like a confused child.

"Bingo. I'm done."

"Wait, wait. Are you for real right now?" Rachel walked over to Dot and took her arm to stop her from leaving. "Dot, you're the one that relocated us, and now you're just checking out?"

"Yeah. I'm nobody's guiding light. Not even my own," then Dot shuffled over to the chair that had been thrown from the plane during the crash and leaned back in it.

Rachel shared an uncertain look with Lydia, who simply shrugged. She glanced around: Leah had climbed the hill, completely oblivious to her surroundings. Fatin was glancing at her suitcase, checking that they had brought everything with them. Martha and Toni were talking in low voices, and Lydia thought she shouldn't get their attention because they were probably making up. Lastly, Nora was drawing in her notebook, something she seemed to do more than usual.

Realizing that she couldn't count on the other girls for help, Lydia pulled the lighter from her pocket. "We still have the lighter. I can take a look around the forest and get the logs to start a fire."

"Great, you do that. I'll try to manage things here."

Lydia nodded as she put the lighter back in her pocket. She glanced unconsciously at Leah, who jerked her head around when she was caught looking at Lydia first. However, Lydia was not in the mood to be as conciliatory and understanding as ever, so she left the others behind and headed into the woods.

Lydia was grateful for the shade provided by the trees, for her cheeks were beginning to take on a reddish hue typical of summer but unbecoming of her pale skin. Her skin had already started to become irritated on a massive scale, starting with her cheeks but spreading across her forehead, shoulders, and chest, the areas where the sun shone most during the day. So staying in the shade of the forest was just as refreshing as when she and Fatin found that lake.

She picked up some of the smaller, cooler twigs, assuming it would take less time to burn them, and also some thicker ones to shelter the smaller ones from the eventual breezes of air that would try to put them out. She turned quickly when she heard something to her left, and breathed a little easier when she saw that it was Shelby.

Lydia smiled gently. "Just getting a jump on the firewood situation. I won't bother you, do not worry."

"I only came here to get some space," Shelby justified herself. Lydia gave her a brief look as she continued to gather firewood. "I'm not... like, up to anything."

"Hey, I never took you for anything. That's Leah's shit."

Shelby let out a short humorless laugh. "Right. You just think I'm an asshole."

Lydia stopped gathering wood and raised her eyebrows, surprised by the choice of words of someone as polite and believing as Shelby. She whistled with a smirk. "You say your prayers with that mouth?"

That seemed to cheer the Texan a bit, who snorted lightly, and Lydia saw that her walls had dropped. However, Shelby didn't reply to that, just turned to Lydia, who had stopped trying to collect more wood. "I heard you before, you know? Looking for me, calling my name here in the woods. I just needed to be alone for a while, needed some space."

"It's quite alright. I can give you that."

Realizing that the Texan would not add anything else, Lydia went back to gathering branches. She walked around the place, soaking up the refreshment that was supposed to be in the shade for so long, and only came back when Shelby cleared her throat —or so it seemed to Lydia. "You know? My issues with— or whatever, like, with who Toni is... I don't hate her, Lydia. You get that, right?"

The girl just sighed. "I don't think it's me who you have to tell that to, Shelby. I already told you what I think about it, and I know the rest of the girls, especially Toni, would appreciate nothing more than a change from you. An apology is not enough when there's no change in your behaviour."

Lydia was able to understand that Shelby came from a deeply Christian family, tied to tradition and with a different perspective than others; but she also hoped the girl might have a change of mind. She was sure Shelby could come to think for herself, no matter what home she had grown up in or the thoughts that had been instilled in her since birth.

"Let me help," was all Shelby said, too lost in thought to give a reasonable response to Lydia's arguments. She just nodded, handing her some of the branches she had collected.

They didn't talk much the whole way. Different tasks were assigned without saying a word; so while Lydia searched for larger logs, Shelby busied herself with picking up stems that caught easily. Lydia wondered for a moment how things were going in the new camp now that Rachel had taken over. One part thought —with a grimace— that she probably wouldn't have gotten anything new given her dominating character; but she liked to think that they would all have agreed to carry out different tasks, as they had previously done.

The brit dropped all the logs she had collected in a clearing in the woods, scratching her arms to remove the splinters that had insatiably pierced her skin. She scattered all the logs to count how many they had, and nodded to herself when she realized they would have more than enough for tonight.

"It's genetic, by the way," Shelby pointed to her mouth, and Lydia knew instantly that she had been so quiet out of embarrassment. "When my baby teeth fell out, the other ones just never came in. In case you were wondering..."

"I wasn't," Lydia responded kindly. She didn't want to try to make her even more uncomfortable, just show her that no one would care about her teeth if she didn't. "I don't think any of us really paid attention to it, we were just struck by Leah's outburst."

"You probably thought I was just fishing for sympathy. It's just another reason in a big stack of them to hate me, right?"

"I don't think they hate you, Shelby. I told you, they need time and change."

"What about you?" The Texan gulped and leaned a little closer to her.

"Me? I even like you. Isn't that good enough for you?" Lydia chuckled.

"It's just— it hasn't not been hard," Shelby swallowed again and spoke too quickly, somewhat flustered by Lydia's response.

"You don't have to suffer for what people will think about you or your teeth, even less if we're in this fucking island. We will not judge you for that, we've got bigger problems to think about."

"Nobody believes me when I say this, but I do have actual problems. Like way more than any of you can imagine."

Lydia nodded. "Okay. Go ahead. You can tell me."

"Do you have any idea what it's like to have to be pitch perfect every second? To be watched like a hog for the slightest bit of weight gain, or the tiniest wobble in my heels, or if my hem it's just a centimeter off regulation, or if I say the wrong thing about international politics?" Shelby breathed like she'd taken a weight off her shoulders. "God help me."

"Do you not like the pageants? Have you tried telling your parents you're a bit stressed about it? Maybe they'd understand."

Shelby stuttered. "I do, but I just— I'm not just talking about pageant stuff. It feels like everywhere I go, somebody's asking me to, like, meet some kind of expectation. It's a lot, it's all. The pressure."

"You're free here, Shelby. We're just a bunch of teenage girls with enough problems of their own to judge you. The baggage you carry on your shoulders is gone here. Here you can be whatever you want, whoever you want, do what you fucking want to do. There's no expectations, there's no judgement, you don't have to answer to anybody. There's just place for whoever we are, because each other is all we have. If you don't take advantage of it, I don't know what else to tell you."

Lydia's eyes widened when she saw Shelby approach her dangerously and grab her by the cheeks. Shelby kissed her unexpectedly, and Lydia's heart raced for unknown reasons. She felt her cheeks redden, and although she would have liked to say she was carried away, she froze, rigid in place, that familiar feeling coursing through her veins.

Shelby's thumb stroked her cheeks and she found comfort in that, but the strange sensation lasted for a short time, less than she would have liked, as the Texan pulled away from her, and her eyes were wide in surprise. Lydia opened her mouth to say something, but Shelby beat her to it.

"That was the nevermind. I—" Shelby tried to say something, but when she saw Lydia's confused face she knew she had screwed up, so she ran away from there.

"Shelby!" The British managed to say after coming out of her slumber.

Now she could understand everything. Shelby's comments about Toni's sexuality hadn't been out of sheer contempt, but because Toni could express herself freely, in a way that Shelby probably couldn't do in her deeply Christian home. She felt suddenly bad for having judged Shelby before learning her story, the details that made her who she was, and ran after her.

"Shelby, wait!" Lydia screamed, and at that moment Fatin's words came to her mind, those she had so often denied because she thought they were the cellist's imaginations. But no, they were true, and now they left Lydia wondering why her heart had raced like that. "Stop!"

But Shelby was too fast for Lydia. When they reached the new camp, things were very different from what Lydia had expected. Yes, it might've been too much to ask that Rachel had organized the girls, but very different was the pitched battle before her eyes: Rachel and Nora fighting, crawling across the sand, Fatin in front of Dot with her hand outstretched, the latter with her hand on her nose, bleeding, and kneeling in the sand, while the others watched the image with strange serenity.

"Wait," Lydia whispered, putting a hand on Shelby's shoulder, who instantly jerked away, as if her presence was hurtful, and a frown washed over Lydia's face.

She was soon drawn into the twins' fight, landing in the sand when one of the sisters fell on top of her.

"STOP! Just everybody, stop!" Dot yelled, making herself heard over the others. "This right here, this ain't happening. If we go out, and I'm not so sure that we won't, it's not gonna be at each other's throats, because there is zero fucking dignity in that."

"What do you mean 'go out'?" Fatin asked, her face taking on a serious expression, something the others weren't used to seeing.

"I've been thinking. First few days of this, we were on every paper, every channel. News vans in front of your houses, sticking microphones in front of your moms, and your dads and your dogs. A couple more days go by and maybe it's only in the local news. Few more days and country A invades country B, Elijah Wood dies, Sasha Obama rips a bong and then..."

"We're no longer in the conversation," Lydia finished for Dot, her eyes long lost in the horizon, trying to lose focus of reality. Because if she saw reality she'd drown in her fucking thoughts. And she couldn't let that happen, she had to stay strong, maybe not for her, but for the others. Stay strong was the only option, losing her mind again was not happening.

"The world's moved on," Dot continued. "And I mean, maybe we've got some diehards out there, people who love you enough to keep making noise and pounding the pavement, but it's been fifteen days and searches don't last forever, not without leads and not without cash. We're stuck here. The least we could do is not kill each other, 'cause trust me, this place can take care of that just fine on its own."

Lydia felt the anxiety attack rise from her stomach to her throat. A lump formed there, waiting to be released somehow, but the British did not find any solution for that. She felt her vision blur momentarily, but she remembered the advice: take a deep breath, try to blank your mind, and try to embrace something that binds you to reality. She took sand furiously between her hands, letting it escape between her fingers, which were trembling violently.

A voice inside her screamed, and then she stopped moving. Calm down, fuck. She tried to do it, the thought of them discovering the truth about her blooming in her mind again. So she struggled and struggled to control the panic and anxiety that took hold of her, because hell, she hated knowing that no one would be looking for them, she hated knowing that she was left in that place, the constant fear of starving or dying at the hands of some unknown beast that inhabited the island. She didn't want to go back to her tragic world, but she didn't want to know death there either.

"Jeanette might've been the lucky one. The one who went out quick," Dot sipped from the bottle, and Lydia wondered if she was being rude or if it was just that the reality was this blatant.