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It’s definitely an…adjustment, for everyone. Living on a new island with a group of boys, after everything they’ve been through, isn't exactly a dream vacation for any of the girls.
Even Fatin admits this is not what she meant when she said she’d fuck the rowdiest guy with the biggest dick as soon as she could. She tells the girls she’d take her toothbrush over any of them, even if she spent the first night making the girls play fuck, marry, kill using them as options. The game ended pretty quickly after Toni had elected to kill all of them, and Martha pointed out none of them seemed like marriage material.
Sometimes the girls meet late at night, to talk about how they miss the first island. The introduction of boys back into their lives feels like a bleak reminder of exactly the sort of things they don’t miss from the real world. It’s also this group of boys, to put it shortly, they suck. They’re always either arguing or attempting to be comedians. Dot laments the fact that they’re a whole extra set of bodies to keep fed and alive. Toni suggests using them as hunting bait, but Martha doesn’t fully support that idea yet. Rachel warms up to the idea after one of the boys keeps hounding her with dumb questions about the shark attack.
It’s especially hard on Shelby, since the boys make her think about her dad. Toni hears their hushed whispers and wary glances to Shelby’s shaved head, her stomach drops when she realizes this means Shelby must notice it too. They shut up pretty quickly after Toni blows up on them. She feels like she blacked out from pure anger, but she remembers yelling something about hacking up their bodies and braiding their intestines together.
She often finds Shelby praying quietly to herself. They still haven’t really talked yet. Toni’s been trying to find the right words to say.
Toni doesn’t even believe in the whole praying thing, but she finds herself silently wishing things to whoever might be out there to hear it. She wishes the boys would disappear. Maybe if she got to know them better, they wouldn’t seem so bad to her, but their presence is too much too soon. She doesn’t even feel like she’s had enough time with the other girls yet, so this whole new group is really messing up the dynamic. She misses when Marcus was the only boy on the island. She wishes she could make things right with Shelby too.
Okay, maybe Fatin’s right, and positive affirmations and manifesting do work, because things finally start going Toni’s way. Some of it is definitely from her own doing, but some of it makes Toni wonder if God is real.
It starts with making things right with Shelby. This one she can mostly credit herself for, although Fatin helps out too.
“When are you going to talk to her?” Fatin blurts out one night, when it’s just her and Toni sitting by the fire. “Because if I have to watch you guys shyly look at each other with all that charged emotion in your eyes one more time, I’m actually going to explode.”
Toni doesn’t say anything, but she takes Fatin’s words to heart. She tells herself to do it for Fatin, so she won’t explode and all.
She finds Shelby by the water one morning, looking at her distorted reflection in the rippling water. She takes a seat on the rock next to her. Shelby glances at her quickly, before looking back at the water.
“Hey,” Toni says softly.
“Hey, you’re up early,” Shelby replies.
The way Shelby says it so simply makes Toni’s chest feel warm. It’s such a small thing, but she loves how Shelby picks up on everything about her, like how her wake up time is usually a few hours after this. “I wanted to come find you.”
“Why?” she asks quietly.
Toni looks at her for a second, and takes her in. She smiles to herself and thinks about how so much has changed since the first time they met on that plane; it feels like a lifetime ago. She’s always felt guilty about how she’d acted those first few days. “I miss you. I miss us.”
“I miss us too.” Shelby inches her hand closer to Toni’s, like she wants to hold it, but she doesn’t. Toni closes the distance and laces their fingers together, squeezing her hand gently. Shelby looks at her tentatively, letting her gaze drop to her lips. Toni decides they’ve already wasted enough time as it is and leans in to kiss her; it feels different from their other kisses, like they’re both trying to apologize through it.
“I love you,” Toni whispers against her lips. She wants to say more, wants to talk everything out with her, but they’re interrupted by distant shouts and yelling.
They stand up together and grasp hands, before running together to see what’s the cause of all the commotion. Toni wonders if maybe this time, the shark could get one of the boys. They find the rest of the girls standing around several piles of clothes on the beach.
“Why are y’all yelling?” Shelby asks. Fatin glances at Toni and Shelby’s joined hands with a small smile on her face.
“Have you seen any of the boys?” Dot asks back.
Everyone shakes their heads. Toni hasn’t seen any of them since last night, when she’d left dinner early after one of them tried to show her some stupid magic trick. She tries to remember his name…Jeff? No, that’s not it…maybe she’ll remember later.
Leah points to the two piles of clothing on the ground. “Unless they went skinny dipping, it’s really fucking weird that they just left all of their clothes here.” Everyone fans out, searching the coast to see if they spot any of them in the water. They find a few more piles of clothes, eight total, all belonging to one of the boys, but that’s all they manage to find. They don’t find any other trace of the boys, it’s as if they’ve -poof- vanished into thin air. Dot theorizes that they went skinny dipping and then got pulled away by the tide. This one seems plausible, except for the fact that the piles of clothes are scattered randomly on the shore and inside the bunker, and each one is arranged in the exact same way: like whoever was wearing the clothes suddenly disappeared.
“Is this one of those bad pranks?” Rachel wonders.
“Oh, like we’re on one of those hidden camera shows! Like the audience is watching to see what we’ll do now,” Martha says as she looks around in the air, searching for where the cameras could be placed. “Leah did say there were cameras on the island at one point. Faking a plane crash is kind of extreme though, so I’m not sure if that counts as a prank.”
“Boys do love pranks that aren’t funny, just borderline fucked up,” Toni adds.
Leah looks like she’s going to rip her hair out. She’s muttering something under her breath about hidden cameras and Gretchen and informants. Fatin eyes her warily and tries to talk her down.
“Maybe it finally happened,” Shelby looks around with wide eyes, “the rapture,” she adds when the other girls give her confused looks.
The rest of the girls exchange glances, processing this idea. It wouldn’t even be the craziest thing to happen on the island. They spend the rest of the day looking for any clues or evidence, but they come up empty handed. Shelby’s theory starts to hold more weight; well, without the religious connotations of what a rapture would mean. Toni thinks maybe it’s like an unexplainable Bermuda Triangle type thing. She wishes she had internet access to be able to look into this kind of thing.
As the days go on, they come to just accept the sudden disappearance. They don’t exactly miss any of the boys, so it’s more eerie than sad. They still make little tombstones and have a moment of silence out of respect. Toni can’t help it when she rips a fart half way through their makeshift ceremony. This sends the girls erupting into laughter and things almost feel normal again.
Leah’s the only one who continues asking questions about it. She’ll get her answers one day.
Toni starts to think about what her other wishes would be, since the universe seems to be granting them lately. She wishes she could be home in Minnesota with Marty and Bernice, like before all of this, but this time, she pictures Shelby’s there with her. She wishes that Nora was alive and could be there to answer their questions, especially Leah’s. She doesn’t think she’d wish for this to never have happened, even if she could. It feels weird thinking that, considering how fucked up all of this has been, but she selfishly loves all of the girls being in her life too much to wish that. She wishes for all of the girls to be home and happy.
It won’t be easy, but one day Toni will get everything she wishes for.