Chapter Three: A Night At The Fights

It was chilly on the dock that night. Not just because of the freak hailstorm earlier that day or the cool wind blowing, but because of the frigid atmosphere between the people waiting for the next eliminated contestant.

Nobody knew why, but Katie and Trent had apparently fought. At one end of the dock, Trent sat with his feet dangling off the edge, staring miserably off into the foggy distance. Katie had placed herself as far as possible away from him without actually stepping off the dock. Which meant she was still only a few feet away from him. It was a small dock. And if glares could kill, the ones Katie was shooting at Trent would have been the equivalent of the atomic bomb.

Sadie positioned herself between Leshawna and Bridgette, blocking herself from both Trent and Katie. "Sadie, girl, what's going on with those two?" Leshawna whispered.

"I dunno," Sadie said stonily. "I'm not friends with Katie anymore."

Sadie's tone of voice and general poutiness suddenly reminded Leshawna of one of her little sisters - who was five. She sighed. "I know that," she said. "Just thought you might know."

"Well, I don't," Sadie muttered.

Leshawna bristled. "Now, look here - "

Bridgette placed a hand on Leshawna's arm. "Give her a break."

Leshawna took a deep, calming breath and let it out slowly. "Sorry. Look, the boat's here."

The Boat of Losers chugged to a stop at the dock and a familiar mohawked head came into view. He smirked, taking in the view of the Playa des Losers. "Hey guys," he said, grabbing his duffel bag.

"Duncan?" Leshawna said, her eyebrows rising. "Didn't expect you to be coming any time soon."

He laughed bitterly. "Courtney dumped me."

Several of the ex-contestants held back the word finally. Several more wondered why Duncan hadn't dumped her first. Seriously, the girl had kneed him in the groin so many times that people were wondering if Duncan could still have kids. And she was the one to dump him? Even after the girlfriend contract snafu? Yet Duncan continued "trippin" over Courtney, as Leshawna said, despite Courtney's bossiness, misplaced jealousy, and all the other things on her long list of bad qualities. Duncan had even ended up sharing some- make that most - of the money he won on TDA with her. On her orders of course.

"And then she organized everybody to vote me off," he continued. He stared past everyone blankly, like they didn't really exist. It was freaking them all out.

"Oh no she did not!" Leshawna cried indignantly. "That girl has got a lotta nerve. I'm gonna kick her ass six ways to Sunday when she gets here."

"Yeah," Duncan said dully, stepping off the boat. He lifted his duffel bag and headed off to the hotel without another word.

The group standing on the dock slowly dispersed. Sadie, in the mood for a walk, peeled away from the main group and picked her way along the pearly white sand. The island was really beautiful. Too beautiful, actually. Nobody could believe that the same producers that had seemed so hell bent on cutting corners to make the contestants lives miserable had really gotten the ritzy island resort as a consolation for the losers.

What none of the contestants knew - or ever would know – was that the resort had actually gone belly-up as a result of the terrible location. (What idiots chose an island with freak weather off the coast of Muskoka as the location for a tropical island resort?) The producers had snapped up the island for dirt cheap and had even gotten the bonus of being able to fool the contestants into thinking they would be competing on the gorgeous island. The ad had said that they would be staying at a wonderful hotel, but it had never exactly specified when. Technically, that wasn't a lie. And they had lawyers on standby, ready to prove it.

The island was a whole lot bigger than Sadie had thought from her previous stays there. As she walked, the palm trees and other various tropical looking potted plants slowly disappeared from the path, giving way to more native greenery. Sadie plodded through the sand, stopping every so often to shake sand out of her flip-flops, until she reached a rocky cove. The sand turned into gravel and she was surprised to see a tiki hut suspended on stilts at the edge of the cove's small cliff.

She walked up the few steps leading up to the hut and found Ezekiel and Noah inside reading in the light of flickering tiki torches. They sat on wicker chairs at opposite ends of the hut. "Hi!" she said cheerily.

Ezekiel flinched violently and slammed his book shut. "Y-yo, eh," he stuttered.

Noah flipped a page and pointedly ignored Sadie. Being ignored only made Sadie curious about why she was being ignored. She trotted over to Noah's side of the hut and sat in the chair nearest him. "Whatcha doing?"

"Sadie, you talking to me makes it more difficult for me to ignore you," he said, not looking up from his page.

Sadie giggled, her automatic response to most mean things Noah said. "You're so funny."

Noah sighed. "Why don't you go bother Homeschool instead?"

Sadie paused and considered his suggestion. There were two options in the situation. She could attempt to carry a conversation with the extremely unwilling Noah or she could try to talk to the skittish Ezekiel. Also, unless you counted breaking Ezekiel's nose, she had barely interacted with him at all. So Ezekiel was obviously the more interesting choice, she concluded. She darted to the other side of the hut and flopped into the chair beside Ezekiel.

The homeschooled boy's eyes widened to an almost inhuman size. He stared at Sadie with the same expression found on small animals being hunted in the wild. "I'm not going to bite," she said, flashing him a carefree smile that made his eyes return to their normal size. "What's up?"

He bit his lip and looked up, clearly racking his brain for an elusive piece of information. "Um, nothing?" he said carefully.

"What's that?" Sadie asked, already reaching for the book sitting on his lap. Ezekiel moved to grab the book, but Sadie flipped it over before he could touch it. "The Dictionary of Slang," she read.

"I'm, uh, trying to learn teenspeak, eh," Ezekiel explained, staring at the book.

"Why?"

"The people oo'n this shoo' doon't like me, so I thought if I coo'uld talk to them they might like me moo're."

"We don't like you because of all those totally mean things you said on TDI."

"Oh." He looked a bit crestfallen and started to fiddle absent-mindedly with the book.

But Sadie had more to say. "And then you, like, were being creepy in the hot tub with Bridgette," she continued. "And then you pretended to be, like, a rapper or something. It was super annoying."

Ezekiel proceeded to stare at the ground unhappily, wishing it would suddenly drop out from beneath him and transport him elsewhere. Sadie continued to smile pleasantly. She felt that her words would somehow help him to reform himself. Meanwhile, Ezekiel continued to silently plead for the earth to swallow him up.

The silence grew so thick that even Sadie couldn't ignore it anymore. She was about to giggle and offer up another comment on something or other - what she would say hadn't quite been thought out yet - when Noah cleared his throat loudly. It was quite recognizable as the 'No, I do not have an amphibian in my throat, I would just like the attention of the people in this room' kind of throat clearing. Sadie bounced back over to his side of the hut.

Despite the fact that his own throat clearing had summoned her, Noah took his sweet time before speaking. Sadie shifted from side to side in front of him until he saw fit to close his book, hooking his thumb inside to mark his page. "Oh my god!" she squealed, checking out the cover. "I've totally read that book! Have you gotten to the part where Mr. Darcy-"

"Don't finish that sentence," Noah cut her off, shooting her a warning glare. She giggled sheepishly and ducked her head. "Anyway, give Zeke a break."

"From what?"

He stared at her incredulously, trying to figure out if she was actually being serious. After examining her clueless smile intently, he decided that she was definitely as clueless about what he was talking about as she looked. There was no way she was a good enough actress to fake that level of obliviousness. "The guy might be absolutely clueless about real life, but he has feelings, you know. If you point out every one of his bad points, he's going to be hurt." He rolled his eyes and opened his book, intending to resume reading now that he had imparted his wisdom upon Sadie.

Sadie gasped. "Like, did I hurt his feelings?"

Reluctantly, Noah closed his novel and returned to his conversation with Sadie. "Just look at him," he said, waving a hand in Ezekiel's direction. At that moment, the prairie boy was attempting to shrink into the chair and become unnoticeable. If the ground wasn't going to oblige and swallow him, the next best thing was to become as close to invisible as possible.

"Awww, he looks so sad," Sadie said sympathetically. She smiled reassuringly at Ezekiel. "Hey, I, like, take it all back!"

Ezekiel's expression morphed from one of unhappiness to the look of confusion that was generally stuck on his face. Sadie, who was, in his opinion, someone much cooler and more adjusted to the "real world" than he was, had just given him a scathing review of everything he had done wrong since arriving on the show. Then, after he had tried desperately to digest what she had thrown at him, she had taken it all back abruptly. This was why he just wasn't cut out for the "real world." People were so darn confusing! Ezekiel had thought- no, known- that he was smart before Total Drama. But for some reason, all his logic and intelligence didn't work with people outside his family's small farm.

Before TDI, he had generally spent most of his time inside, reading through the heaps of textbooks his parents - who also doubled as his teachers and only real friends - had passed on to him. Textbooks were less confusing than people. Textbooks didn't change their minds without warning.

Noah could see the confusion written all over Ezekiel's face, and while Noah couldn't read minds, he was intelligent enough to guess at what was rolling around Ezekiel's head. The whole situation was enough to make him want to hit himself over the head repeatedly with his book. He refrained from doing so because pain, like sports and most things that required energy, wasn't really his thing.

"Hey, Noah," Sadie chirped, interrupting his pessimistic train of thought. "Are you, like, friends with Ezekiel?"

Noah's eyebrows rose and he stared at Sadie for several long seconds. Exactly where this line of thought had come from he couldn't fathom. He gave up trying to understand her momentarily and answered with a one word sentence that would hopefully get her to leave him in peace with Mr. Darcy and the Bennett family. "Sure."

She sat in the wicker chair beside him, which he took as a sign that she wasn't planning on leaving any time soon. He peeked out of the corner of his eye at her, not quite ready to close his book and devote full attention to her. Amazingly, she didn't say anything and was instead staring thoughtfully off into the distance. He decided that Sadie's silence was one of life's rare miracles and turned his eyes back to his book.

Unfortunately for Noah, what was going through Sadie's mind would have made him wish for her constant chatter instead. She had taken his one word response and run with it in a direction that he could never have predicted. "So do you like, like like him?" she asked, staring at him with a bright smile.

Noah blinked, sorted through the twisted jumble of words she had thrown at him, and came up with a translation he didn't like at all. "For the last time, I. Am. Not. Gay," he hissed. Shooting her the most venomous glare he had, he stood and stomped out of the tiki hut.

Sadie was slightly stunned by the amount of anger in his voice, but her natural immunity to most mean things Noah said allowed her to also brush this off in a few seconds. She ran after him, catching up to him about halfway down the beach. "Are you, like, mad?"

Noah continued stomping down the beach while Sadie attempted to keep up. Several sarcastic one-liners ran through his head, but he settled on, "Now what gave you that idea?"

"I'm so sorry!" Sadie said. She stumbled on a sand dune, almost hit the ground, and popped up again with an apologetic expression all in one movement. "There's nothing wrong with being gay!"

"Spare me the after-school special."

"I'm serious! Like, I would totally be your wingwoman if you were gay."

"I'm. Not. Gay. People here just like to spread lies about each other because it's fun. I want no part of it."

Sadie bit her lip. "They're not just… spreading lies. It's based on something!"

"Oh yeah?" he said, throwing her a withering glare. "Please, enlighten me. Tell me what proof people have about my sexuality that justifies them telling people on national television that I'm gay. I'm sure all my conservative family members that watch the show would like to know."

Sadie's cheeks heated. "It's just, like, you kissed Cody that one time." Noah's already stormy expression managed to get even angrier. Sadie continued on, not noticing that she was digging her own grave and jumping head-first into it. "And then you weren't that convincing when you said you weren't gay so we just thought you were in den-" She finally noticed Noah's death glare and realized stopping before it got to the point where he would never forgive her was the best course of action.

"In denial?" he spat out, as if saying the word was causing him actual physical pain.

"N-no!" she stuttered.

"Then what?"

She bit her lip and tried to think of something that began with den. There had to be something! "Denver!" she finally said after a lengthy pause. "That's where… gay people hang out nowadays!"

He continued speedwalking towards the hotel, annoyed that he was forced to spend so much time with the girl who was determined to spread fake rumors about his sexuality. Seriously, why was the island so freaking big? Toying with the idea of calling her out on the sheer ridiculousness of her attempt to not make the hole she was in any deeper, he sent her a deadly glare. She flinched slightly and tried to return his glare with an apologetic smile. "I'm so sorry!" she repeated.

Finally, Noah got the entrance to the main hotel in his sights. He picked up the pace. "Why should I forgive you?" he said. "It's not like you're all that forgiving yourself."

She stopped short, her eyes narrowing until they were tiny slits. "What does that mean?"

He waved his hand in the air dismissively and continued walking. "You know exactly what I'm talking about."

"No, I don't," Sadie said flatly, fixing a glare at his retreating back. "Hey, stop! I'm talking to you!"

"Well, I'm not interested in talking to you," he replied, not turning around. The automatic glass hotel doors slid open, sending a blast of air conditioning into the already cool night.

She ran after him and grabbed at his elbow, stopping him. He directed a cool glare at her over his shoulder, which she returned with a steely gaze. "I'm talking to you," she hissed. His eyes widened a fraction of an inch in surprise, amazed that she was capable of lacing her voice with such venom.

He recovered from his surprise and shook her off. "You're the one who is in a ridiculous argument with Katie," he said, rolling his eyes. He started on his way again, and this time she didn't bother to stop him.

"You're such a jerk!" she called after him.

It stung a bit, he'd admit that. But he locked away the part of himself that felt just a little bit hurt and smothered it with cynicism and smugness. "I know," he said, the words dripping with so much arrogance and mockery that Sadie wanted to throttle him on the spot. Instead, she stomped her foot childishly and stuck her tongue out at him. Then, she turned and headed for the closest stairwell because she sure wasn't going to take the elevator with him.