Chapter Text
Toni doesn’t believe in love.
Well, obviously she knows it exists. Like, factually or whatever. She’s seen the Cosmo articles, the day-time talk show segments, the cheesy rom-coms starring “Chiselled Jaw and Biceps” opposite “Wearing Makeup Even Though I Just Woke Up”.
She’s seen her own words, printed obstinate and black on the third rib from the bottom on her right side. She knows that sometime, someplace, a girl will repeat those god-damned words and her whole world will shift into clearer focus and light will pour down from the heavens and angels will sing and, halle-fucking-lujah, she’ll be in love.
But right now, that doesn’t sound very fucking realistic.
Not when there’s a dent in her locker and her hand smells like a mixture of blood and piss and she can still see Marty’s face, disappointed, worried, scared, but not surprised, staring out at her from the stands.
She didn’t mean to, never means to, but this bitch, this stuck-up, six-foot, overgrown bitch from the other team had just kept fouling her, little fucking shoves and jabs and smug smiles. Toni had called “Ref, ref,” tried to just keep sinking her shots, tried to tune it out, stay in control. She had for a while, had gone into the last quarter with shaking hands, but a steely determination to just outplay her, until the bitch had pushed her with both fucking hands right onto the gym floor and watched as Toni picked herself up, then called her--
“Dyke.”
And it’s not like she’d never heard it before, but Toni saw red.
She can’t properly remember the rest of the game. Doesn’t know anything except orange rubber bouncing off the backboard with a thud, her coach’s shouts, determined then desperate then straight-up pissed off, the pound of the pulse at her temple. She’d shoved and dribbled and played her fucking heart out but she was distracted and missing passes and shots and at one point she even dropped the ball and her body was shaking and her hands were too slick with sweat to be any use. Then the whistle blew (and they’d lost, she doesn’t know by how many points, just that they’d lost, and it was all her fucking fault, and if she hadn’t missed that shot and-). The sound was sharp, cut through her foggy thoughts, and she blinked.
The bitch from the other team stared at her from the victory huddle the whole way across the gym, raised two fingers to her mouth in a “V” and licked, once, twice, then smiled.
Toni can always feel the moment she snaps. It’s like jumping off a cliff edge into free fall or feeling your fourth drink hit you, like a spinning room and bass pounding in your stomach.
It’s like losing control, and yeah, she’s been called a fucking psycho a few times, but she can’t help that it feels good.
Toni remembers being sat in a tiny, windowless office, somewhere in South Dakota. She was maybe seven, or eight, or something like that, just kicked out of her first foster home.
“So, Toni, do you know why you’re here?” The social worker pursed her lips, waiting. Her lipstick bled even further into the lines around her mouth. Above her head, a fan whirred. “Mmm’kay, honey. Can you tell me why you pushed your foster sister off the slide?”
Toni dug her fingers into the plastic of her chair. One toe poked through the top of her sneaker, and she could see a glimpse of bright-blue sock.
“Toni? I need you to explain to me why you did that, okay?”
The social worker smelt like tuna-mayonnaise. “I was angry.”
“Well, Toni, you’ve gotta use some control. You can’t lose it, okay?”
Toni shrugged. The fan stuttered to a stop. What colour was her other sock?
“I’m serious, Toni, if you can’t get your emotions under control, life’s not going to go very well for you. Okay, honey?”
Even at eight, Toni remembers thinking that advice was bullshit.
So, yeah, who gives a shit if she’d ran off the court and into the girl’s changing room and pulled her shorts down to her ankles and pissed, red-hot and dirty and angry, straight into her hands and cupped the piss to her chest like treasure, like a prayer. And the bitch’s face, her face, as Toni had poured it over her stupid fucking blonde head--
The silence in that gym felt like a gunshot.
It felt like a parking lot at midnight, like fear in the girl you love’s eyes, like a smashed-up car window. It felt like sinking like a stone into the sea, like salt burning your throat and cracking your lips, like drowning.
“Toni!” She’d turned towards that voice, towards Marty. Toni’s lifeline, Toni’s person, who loved her and would drive her back home and not care about piss staining her car-seats and dance with her to Biggie until her heart stopped beating so fast. But then her coach grabbed her shoulder, and she was being half-led, half-dragged outside the gym.
The outside was cool, fresh and just what Toni spent every winter longing for; the smell of Minnesota air in the spring. Now it just shocked her, like a slap to the face. Her coach screamed.
“-disappointment.”
Toni sank to the ground.
“Disgusting, unsportsmanlike conduct--”
Head in her hands, and just shut up, shut up, shut up.
“--no choice but to suspend you from the team.”
And Toni had cried then, softly, like she was five years old again and watching her mother getting carried out of their trailer on a stretcher; pale and track-marked and hopeless.
She couldn’t stop, not until she stepped back into the locker-room. There was a puddle of golden piss still on the tiles by the showers and her team was quiet and watching her like she was a fucking animal in a cage, hissing and ready to bite.
So she snapped, again, met all of those girls stupid expectations and slammed her fist into the nearest locker door, over and over and over, and she doesn’t remember ever stopping, doesn’t remember ever wanting to. Everything goes black, for a little while, until she feels Marty’s arms around her and that feeling is the exact opposite to the pulsing sting in her hand.
“Marty,” Toni whispers, and fuck, she sounds so pathetic. “Please can we go home?”
Marty’s brown eyes soften and she lifts Toni from the floor and runs water over her bleeding knuckles and doesn’t say anything the whole car journey home. She doesn’t need to, really. Toni can feel the disappointment coming off her in waves and it makes her feel sick to her stomach. Mrs Blackburn is sitting at the table when they walk through the door. She tells Toni that the shower is running upstairs and Toni can’t even meet her eyes. Instead, she slopes down the corridor to the bathroom and tries to ignore the hushed voices that follow her.
Toni turns the shower’s heat all the way up and stands under its spray, relishing in the water like it will somehow cleanse her of all her mistakes and shame and sin. She rubs at her knuckles until the last of the dry blood is washed away with the rest of the night, runs her fingers through her hair, untangling knots and sweat-soaked curls. Water streams down her face, circling the drain until it disappears and Toni’s mom’s face, aged by drugs and fuck-ups and late nights, blurs in her memory. She drags soapy fingers across her ribcage, scrubbing at the words there until her skin feels raw and turns pink.
Goodbye Regan.
The shower goes cold and Toni steps out onto the bathmat, shivering.
--
“Hey Toni,” Marty whispers from her bed. Toni can just make out her features in the soft light that glows from her phone. “Hey Toni, look!”
It’s a post on Insta, a background of pastel-coloured clouds with white script over the top. “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once,” it says.
“God, Marty,” Toni scoffs and shifts on her mattress, half-turning away from the screen. She loves her, but her heart is about three sizes bigger than Toni’s, and a lot more naive. “What does that even mean?”
With wide eyes, Marty sighs and stares up at the peeling paint on her ceiling. “I don’t know yet. But, Toni, aren’t you excited to find out?”
“I’ve been in love.” And Toni has, but she never spouted sappy shit like that.
Marty looks over sympathetically like Toni’s a kid who knows nothing about anything and needs to be brought up to speed. “Yeah, but you haven’t found your soulmate. That’s different.”
“How would you know?” She’s being rude, she knows it, but it seems like all Marty wants to do recently is talk about this shit.
“I just do.” God, how can one girl be so optimistic? “And, hey, maybe you’ll meet your soulmate on this retreat?”
Toni rolls her eyes. Her soulmate has to be far-off and grown-up, waiting for Toni in a rosy, sun-soaked future someplace far away from Minnesota, someplace where Toni’s learned how not to break shit and lose her temper and drive people away. Whoever she is, Toni prays to God that she’s out of reach, at least for now.
“Don’t be so pessimistic, Toni, maybe she’ll be standing there, in a bikini, all tan, and open her mouth and say--”
Toni shoves her head into her pillow. “La-la-la, not listening!”
--
The morning that they leave, Martha’s up hours in advance, trying on outfits in front of her mirror and doing and re-doing her makeup. She lands on a pink top, with colourful, tribal-esque patterns (Toni had thrown a fit when she’d bought it -- “It’s not authentic Marty! Do you really think some coloniser working for Hollister cares about our culture?”) and ripped blue jeans.
“I wanna look nice y’know,” Marty says, as Toni stands behind her in the mirror. “But still be comfy on the flight.”
Toni’s pulled her hair back in a pony-tail-braid thing, that, yeah, is not really the cutest. But Toni doesn’t do cute, she does real. Her leggings and “Hopewell Lake Basketball Team” tank top feel like a protest because, fuck knows, she’s not about to dress up to fit in with some stuck-up rich white girls. She keeps it 100 and if people don’t like who she is, fuck them.
--
Mrs Blackburn is driving them to Fargo, suitcases rattling around in the trunk of her beat-up Dodge Nitro. Minnesota gets hot in the summer, in a sticky way, like the heat is wrapping itself around everything, leaving dead flies stuck to the half-rolled car windows and a trail of sweat running down Toni’s neck. She’d been wearing her mom’s jacket, sandy and slightly worn down but still comforting, until the heat had gotten too much and she’d had to stuff it back in her case. Even Marty stops singing along to dad-rock on the radio and as they pass the sign for Richwood, begs her mom to pull over for snacks at the Mini-Mart.
Toni grabs an orange Gatorade and two packets of Takis. One for now, one for later, like always. Martha gets a Dr Pepper instead and drinks it alongside both packets of Takis as they sit on the curb outside the convenience store and wait for Mrs Blackburn to use the restroom.
“I think,” Martha says once she’s crumpled the first empty packet into a ball in her hand, “that if I had a soulmate, there’s no way they wouldn’t like Takis. We’d, like, never work out.”
“Dude, right? They’re so fire.”
“You’d have to be crazy not to like these things.” Marty grabs a handful, stuffing them into her mouth all at once and spraying Toni with crumbs.
“Gross, Marty!” But Toni’s laughing as she shoves her playfully, red-stained fingers smearing dust all over Marty’s carefully-chosen pink top. She retaliates, wiping her hand right down Toni’s arm. It turns into a full-on war, waged on hot tarmac, until they’re both gasping for air between laughter and covered in fuego dust.
“Truce, truce!” Toni finally calls when Marty gets two arms wrapped around her middle, holding up her scarlet hands in surrender. “Hey, maybe that’s how I’ll know when I meet my soulmate. We’ll both have Taki dust on our fingers and it’ll be love at first sight. Fuck words when you have hot chips, right?”
She’s joking, but Marty looks thoughtful, almost concerned. “But if you guys had chilli on your fingers...wouldn’t that really sting? When, you, you know...”
Her serious face breaks into a smile, and then they’re losing it again, cracking up on the side of the road outside a Mini-Mart while Toni shouts “Gross, gross!” and pretends to be sick. Her stomach aches from laughter and who needs a soulmate when she has Marty?
Then Mrs Blackburn finally makes her way out of the restroom, apologising for the queue, and when she pulls out of the parking lot Toni can’t help feeling like she’s just left something important behind on that sidewalk.
--
The plane walls start rattling around them and lights start to flash and it’s like they’re falling sideways through the sky and Toni just jumps from her seat and runs, runs towards Marty.
“I love you, I love you, I love you.”
She screams it over and over again, because fuck, if she dies, she wants these to be her last words.
Marty’s sweet, sweet face is terrified and Toni just holds it, holds her, and tries to remember the look in her eyes when she pets an animal or dances and she’s too good and she can’t die, and Toni clings tighter, and Marty is shaking and starts crying for her mom, and Toni just presses kisses to her cheeks, to her forehead.
“I love you, Marty, I love you, I love you.”
Toni thinks of spring air in Minnesota. She thinks of her mom, before shit got bad, waking up early before school to chain smoke on the porch of their trailer while Toni ate cereal. She thinks of Martha’s sunshine smile.
“I love you, I love you.”
Her prayer is not enough. The plane plummets, down towards the sea, and Toni holds on tight to Marty and closes her eyes, waiting.
--
Toni’s heart leaps when she spots her.
“Martha!”
Fuck, she just sprints, takes off through the water towards the beach, leaves the girls to struggle without her, because there’s Marty. She’s limping, and a mess, but she’s the most beautiful thing that Toni’s ever seen and when she calls back in response, Toni feels like she could cry.
It sounds insignificant, what Toni says when they collide. Instead of telling Marty just how scared she’d been, of how she’d imagined finding a corpse lying bloody on black sand, just a hug, and the quick, muffled words, “That’s the last time you ghost on me,” are enough. Marty knows her fears from the tightness of Toni’s grip on her shoulders.
“I’m fine, seriously.” Martha looks to the side then, to the blonde girl from the plane that Toni had barely even noticed. “Shelby’s been...Shelby’s been amazing.”
Martha’s voice is breathless, eyes filled with something like adoration and Toni feels the hair on the back of her neck stick up. The girl is wearing a fucking swimsuit top and white cutoffs, like she’s in a fucking music video or some shit, probably loving her Baywatch moment, while Toni was going out of her mind looking for her best fucking friend--
The girl, Shelby, smiles, with pearly white teeth and hands on her hips and spray-tanned stomach all on display for no reason at all.
“What the fuck are you wearing?”
She looks confused, but Toni just glares over Marty’s shoulder. Seriously, who the fuck takes off their shirt in the middle of a plane crash?
--
“Keep your ears peeled. You’ll hear moving water before you see it.” Shelby blends right in with the tall grass they’re walking through. Perky and blonde. All-American.
“How come you know all this?”
Shelby spins around, and her smile is winning, sparkling. “This may surprise you, but I’m not just some delicate, indoor princess, okay? I go huntin’ with my dad all the time.”
“So you do one hard-core thing?” Toni doesn’t know why she’s starting an argument that no one else is having, but the words itch at her, demanding to be spoken. “That doesn’t mean you’re not mostly an indoor princess.”
There’s just something about Shelby that makes Toni feel like all her nerves are exposed, like her breath won’t settle right in her throat. She feels uncomfortable, like she wants to bite first before she gets bitten. “How many pillows do you have on your bed? Bet you’ve got one of those mega beds with, like, 50 pillows.”
It’s unprovoked, totally, but Shelby just keeps walking forward, moving stem after stem out of her way in a calm rhythm. Toni needs her to feel as bothered as she is.
“And your maid, Lupe, she’s gotta keep taking them off and putting them back on and it’s making her want to off herself, am I right? You know I’m right.”
Shelby spins around and the look on her face is so smug, so self-satisfied that Toni wants to scream.
“Yeah, well, I’ve also shot down a ten-point buck, snapped his neck to finish the job and butchered him in the field all by myself. God built us to contain multitudes, Toni. Now will you turn around, ‘cause I have to pee?”
She actually physically turns her, the pads of her fingertips pressing gently onto Toni’s shoulders. They touch for just a second, but Toni catches Shelby’s eyes and they’re a shade of green that Toni’s never seen before in her life. Something jumps in her stomach, dread and anticipation like when she lines up on the foul line to shoot a free throw and the ball is tipped back in her hands, waiting to be released--
But then Shelby’s singing a fucking song about Jesus’s word being a lamp while she pisses into the grass on the deserted island they’re trapped on together, and Toni’s right back to annoyance.
“Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me.”
--
They’re sitting around the campfire, flames flickering over the sand. Eight girls, not nine, their breaths keeping a steady chorus with the rush of the waves and the hum of the insects. It’s like they’re already becoming part of the island, or the island’s becoming part of them, and fuck, Toni thinks, one of them’s already bound to it forever.
She’d washed her hands in the ocean for what felt like hours but now she can’t stop digging underneath her fingernails, digging back and forth, deeper and deeper, trying to cleanse herself of particles of Jeanette, of sand, of anything.
Shelby’s fingers keep touching her temple, coming away stained scarlet. Toni thinks of Taki dust, of Regan, who hadn’t bled too badly, but bruised. Blue and purple, grotesque but beautiful, still, because it was her, in that exact same spot on the side of her head. Toni would feel more guilty, about Regan and Shelby, if she wasn’t so fucking scared.
Toni thinks that maybe Regan could still be her soulmate, but now, maybe she’ll never get to know.
She looks up again, ignoring the sting of smoke. The fire has grown lower, dimmer, and Shelby’s face is cast in shadow and suddenly Toni can see her at fifty. It's Shelby with crow’s feet and grey threaded in with the blonde, but her eyes are the same green they were in that moment in the long grass. Right now though, across the fire, in this awkward, unnatural light, they look closer to grey.
--
The water is cold. It’s meant to be shocking, cleansing, grounding, but as it pours from Toni’s hands over her face she swears she can feel it sizzle on her skin and evaporate away, into nothing.
She sits on a rock. Her feet burrow into the sand, still wet and the sand clings to them, then falls in clumps as she raises one leg, and the other. The horizon taunts her, grey and distant and tangible, just over the ocean. Toni thinks of the Lakes, back home, of water just as vast as this, but trapped by land instead of trapping it. She thinks of Mishibijiw, the Water Panther, a demon covered in scales that, if satisfied, could ensure safe travel across the Lakes, or, cause terrible storms and bring harm to those who dared to cross his water.
Someone moves behind her, and Toni’s head snaps up.
It’s Shelby, in a pink tie-dye bralette and her hair is piled on top of her head and she’s leaning on a branch, leaning forward, and her cheeks are just as pink as her top, peeling from the sun--
“Hot as Hades today.” Her drawl is smooth, butter-yellow, so different from the crack and rasp of Toni’s words. It’s like everything that Shelby does exposes one more of Toni’s flaws. “Every religion has their version of Hell. Greeks had Hades.”
She circles Toni, once, twice, around the rock that she perches on.
“Islam has Jahannam.”
And Toni doesn’t know why she thought this would be a good time for a sermon, only that she feels like Shelby can see every one of her sins, that they’re written in her expression in the same block capitals as the words on her ribs.
“Southern Baptists have the fire and brimstone kind.”
Toni’s heard it before, and flinches as Shelby sits on a rock beside her. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure this is hell, having to listen to you lecture.”
“Maybe it is.” Shelby looks out towards the ocean, face in profile and calm, serene. Toni wonders what peace she’s managed to find out there. “Hell is where the Lord sends us to try and teach us something. I know he’s trying to teach me patience.”
It feels like the first victory Toni’s had since they landed on this fucking island. And she can’t help but stick out her chin, defiant. “I do bug you. I knew it.”
The words feel cheap, a childish “told-you-so” as soon as they leave her mouth. No matter how hard she tries it’s like she can’t get on even footing with Shelby, like the ground keeps shifting beneath her feet.
“I just don’t understand why you run so hot all the time.” There’s something hard in Shelby’s eyes, and the thrill of a challenge sparks in Toni’s chest. And then-- “Martha said it’s not just about me. You’ve always been this way.”
She knows what she’s saying. Knows that this is how to hit Toni hard, and Toni, too, knows that, knows what she’s doing, but that doesn’t make it less painful. A lump of ugly shame still rises in her throat, swallowed down, immediately, quickly, hard, but still.. Toni’s always been a fucking embarrassment, a let-down, a lost-cause, but these girls, just six days in, already know it.
“That first day--why haven’t you told anyone about how I smacked you with the branch?” It comes out like an accusation, and maybe it is, and Toni can’t stop her arms from shaking.
“Because it was an accident.” Shelby’s accent gets more Texan when she lies.
Toni’s learnt the fucking hard way that people don’t just protect strangers out of the goodness of their hearts or the kindness of their character. People want shit from you, for themselves, and you’ve gotta be ready for it. “We both know that it wasn’t. So what are you waiting for?”
“I’m waiting to get off this island so I never have to think about you ever again.” Lie.
“I bet you think about all the different ways that you could get back at me,” Toni says, and she can’t help but sound sure because that’s what she’d be doing if she was in Shelby’s place. “If you had the guts.”
When she is met with nothing, whatever’s been bubbling up inside Toni since the plane crashed, or maybe since she was fucking born, suddenly feels like a whirlpool, currents ripping and tearing through her, and maybe Shelby’s kind placation is really not what she needs. She’s a storm inside a girl, and she squares up to Shelby, because goddammit, Shelby’s got to know that.
“You’ve got a lot of people here thinking you’re all rainbows and unicorn shit.” Their faces are inches apart and Shelby’s eyes are as yellow as her hair in the sunlight and she looks as pissed off as Toni’s ever seen. “But I see you.”
Shelby searches her, silent, and Toni waits one, two, before she can’t bear it anymore and she turns-
A sand-dusted foot kicks at her calf, and Toni stumbles forward. This is what she’s made for.
“That all you got?” She smiles, and it’s pure excitement.
Shelby is solid, unmoving. “I have the strength for lots more, but I’m not gonna waste it on you. You’re not worth it.”
And she looks like she thinks she’s unbreakable, but Toni’s pretty good at breaking shit.
“You know who clings to religion? People who like to tell themselves a nice story about who they are, ‘cause deep down, they’re hiding some pretty fucked-up shit.”
Heat burns between her ribs and she wishes Shelby would shout something awful back. But she doesn’t, of course, so Toni strides across the beach and doesn’t let the words ring around her head and tries her fucking best to feel satisfied.
God loves a fucking trier.
--
“Okay, you need to take it down a notch.”
And Toni sees the tremor of Martha’s lip and Shelby’s placating hands, and Toni burns.
--
On the bluff, the wind tugs at her fucking Hopewell Lake basketball tank and runs its fingers through Marty’s ponytail, and she won’t even look at her.
“Marty, I didn’t--”
“Don’t.”
Toni twists her fingers behind her back, like a child, like the ball of guilt in her gut, like knots pulled so tightly they can’t be undone.
“Why can’t you ever just walk away?” It’s a question, genuine, like Marty can’t understand what she’s done at all. Like Marty can’t understand her, at all. “Or run, even, y’know.”
Marty gasps as she speaks like she can’t breathe, and Toni wants to sob into her chest, wants to be held in a twin-sized bed in Minnesota. She wants to be 17 again, and messing up in ways that are forgivable.
“And not make your shit everyone else’s problem.”
They’re facing each other now, and Toni just stares at the ground and Marty’s almost shouting at her and Toni feels like she’s being split in two.
“You ruin things, you destroy things and you break things! And I’m done picking up the pieces for you.”
It all rings true. Marty’s eyes, so honey-brown, so sweet, have gone dark with grief and searching sorrow.
“You’re exhausting.”
Her words feel like a gunshot.
They feel like a parking lot at midnight, like fear in the girl you love’s eyes, like a smashed up car window. They feel like a plane crashing to earth in a blaze of fire and acceptance, like blonde hair and cold green eyes, like splintering branches and sand between your toes and salt and sweat and hunger.
Wind whips at her, a punishment, and Toni crouches to the ground and weeps into the earth until night comes.
--
They find the waterfall.
Sunlight turns the water flashing shades of gold and green, and everything flickers before her, and Shelby’s hair is bright and Toni had thought she was watching Martha but she can’t look away.
That night, the roar of the falls rushes through her dreams. Suddenly the sound is echoey laughter, and Toni knows it’s her soulmate. She dives, beneath the surface, towards the sound, but they’re underwater and she can’t quite make out a face. Light is different here, distorting instead of illuminating, and everything is blurred.
The girl opens her mouth, but before she can speak, Toni snaps awake. It’s cold; the fire’s gone out and she’s shivering all over.
--
Marty’s dying.
Not in her bed, surrounded by children, grand-children, great-grand-children, face lined with age and experience and love, but on black sand, in clothes borrowed by strangers. Marty’s dying for Toni.
And this is why Toni could never believe in Shelby’s God, because there’s no kindness or wisdom in this.
“Why did you do it? Why did you give me the last one?” It’s her fault, it has to be, because why could she not see that there was really no choice in it?
“Toni-”
“You wasted it on me.”
Toni wonders whether if Marty could change it she would.
“Toni, I didn’t-”
That first day, at fourth-grade recess, would she have walked over to the new kid with unbrushed hair and skinned elbows and too-big clothes.
“Look at her!”
Marty was so beautiful that day, Toni remembers, her smile and her hair, silk-shiny and braided, and now she’s grey and half-way dead. She has to make Shelby see, see her stupid, terrible mistake and see the 8 years of beautiful that Marty brought to her life and how much Toni loves her for it.
“Okay, she is a good person, and she cares about people, and people care about her, and she has a whole family, and you threw me a lifeline.”
And yeah, Toni’s alive, but in return, she’s killed the only person who ever made her shitty life worth living.
“Toni, you were dying.”
Shelby’s just not getting it, and Toni wishes more than anything that she had never been on that fucking plane, with her smiles and her ice-breakers and her need to save everyone, and then maybe Marty wouldn’t be lying still beside them.
“Who cares? I don’t matter. Fuck, I don’t matter, I don't matter.”
Her cry dies into a whisper. She rocks back and forth to those three words and hopes that Shelby’s God is fucking listening.