CHAPTER EIGHT
"Scattered over this side of the island are a series of boxes." Allison marched down the line of teens later that day, distributing a coloured bandana to each. "They will be either red or blue; the ones you're after will correspond to your team's colour, i.e, whatever colour your bandana is."
Amber glanced down the line as she tied her red bandana around her head, noting with an audible sigh of relief that Hex was being given a blue one. Well that was the afternoon already looking brighter. Allison's plan to force them into co-operation seemed to have been abandoned, and Amber, for one, was eternally thankful. Suddenly finding herself keener to discover what Allison had in store for them, she turned her attention back to the supervisor.
"Charlie has hidden ten red boxes and ten blue boxes over the portion of the island on these maps." Allison made her way down the line again, this time handing out folded maps that depicted a stretch of the island that extended to the marina on the outskirts of the town, closest to the house, plus a stretch of the expanse in the opposite direction that included the small, inland lake and neighbouring beach.
"Wait. Charlie hid them?" Hex groaned. "We'll never find them." They had only met the guy twenty four hours earlier, but it was already clear that logic and order were not his strong points.
"Maybe not all of them," Allison conceded, getting his point and sharing it, "but so long as you find more than the other team, you'll win."
"And if we find the same amount?" Amber said.
"Then it's first team back."
So not so much a leisurely afternoon exploring the island, then.
"Is this just a wild goose chase around, hoping we might stumble across a box?" Alex asked.
Allison shrugged. "If you treat it like that, then sure. There are little clues in each box that will point you in the general direction to find another, but only if you interpret the clue correctly. Otherwise, yes: wild geese."
Amber's faint flicker of enthusiasm started to wane again.
"Now the honourable thing to do, if you happen to come across a box belonging to the other team, would be to leave it alone."
Hex perked up. "But that's not a rule?"
"No." Allison looked a bit indecisive, but only for a moment. "Just don't go deliberately moving stuff and putting it in impossible or dangerous places. Okay?"
She got eight solemn nods in return, although a couple she had to question if the person behind it had even heard her extra stipulation over the scheming in their heads. It was supposed to be something of a game of strategy, not sabotage.
"So you are letting us loose, on the island, unsupervised?" Paulo peered at Allison like she'd just had a second head start to emerge from her neck. "After yesterday?"
She shrugged again, assuming Paulo was referring to the volleyball incident when they had last been left alone. "I said I would treat you like adults if you all behave like adults. So just don't do anything stupid."
Did her care factor seem to be slipping a little bit?
"Go!" she added, flapping her arms like they were scavenging birds in a corn field. "Team back with the most boxes in the shortest amount of time gets out of breakfast duty tomorrow," she added, while deciding she really needed to start coming up with some better prizes pronto before the novelty of competing for that particular one wore off. "And don't be late for dinner."
She left them to it, and the teams hurried to form huddles. Amber found herself in a cluster with Paulo, Justin and Ruby, team mates that had her cringing a little bit; none of them struck her as very focused, capable competitors for varying reasons, and after the disaster of lunch clean up- and with dinner prep still to go- she fancied a free ticket out of breakfast duty the following morning.
"Okay," she said, deciding to be upfront and honest right off the bat. "We can't lose this."
"Is that harnessing the power of positive thinking, or-"
"It's 'losing isn't an option'." Amber shot Justin a frown; if he didn't get that, how the heck was he going to go about observing it? "I'm not getting stuck dealing with kitchen duty three meals in a row."
"Alrighty…"
Amber fought the urge to slap her palm to her forehead. She'd landed Paulo, whose general attitude to life was to take it at half pace; Justin, who took his 'pretty boy' status with great seriousness and was still milking his minor coral injury for all it was worth when it came to any task he didn't want to do; and Ruby, who was so quiet and inconspicuous it was very easy to forget she was even around.
A glance over at the blue team had her frown deepening. Alex, Stella, Li and Hex were crouched in a circle around one of the spread out maps, Alex pointing to it in between gesturing at different areas of their surroundings. Li had her game face on, Alex was clearly in charge, Stella seemed surprisingly invested in it, and Hex's usual poker face even had a tiny glint of determination to it. He glanced up, caught Amber studying his team, and a smirk slipped onto his face. Her resolve to whip them into second place deepened.
"Right." She snatched her map up and spread it out on the ground between them, cutting the area into quarters with two slices of her hand, drawing invisible boundaries that outlined two coastal sections and two inland ones. "One quadrant each. Look in the most obvious possible locations first to find a box, then work from there based on the clues."
"Should we stick together?" Paulo asked, looking to Justin and Ruby to see where they were on his suggestion. "More eyes, more heads…"
"Apart from kind of butchering the saying," Justin said, "he's got a point. And we don't know this island- I don't want to get lost. Why not go in pairs?"
"Oh so now everyone's full of bright ideas?"
Paulo and Justin held their hands up, trying to placate Amber before she totally lost her cool.
She sighed. "Fine. Whatever." She slapped her hand down on the map, just to the left of the green X that marked the house, and drew a straight line up the guts of the map. "Justin and Ruby: head thataway," she said, jerking her thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the town, tucked out of sight from the house by the headland. She swung her arm around, sending Ruby ducking for cover, to point down the beach towards the volleyball net. "Paulo and I will head towards the lake. Any problems?"
Her stare said there had better not be, and no one was game enough to do more than agree with a shake of their heads. Leaving the blue team still strategising, the reds split up, each pair heading for their respective segment.
Paulo and Amber took off down the beach at a run- or, rather, Amber took off at a run and Paulo hurried to catch up after realising, too late, that she was setting such a frenetic pace straight out of the gate.
"Think," she said as he drew level, just as they started on the track that cut away from the beach through a thin ribbon of bushland before forking right, away from the high ropes and obstacle course area, and popping out at the lake.
"Just in general, or…"
"Where would Charlie be most likely to hide the boxes?"
"Somewhere we would not think to look?" Paulo guessed.
Amber's frustrated sigh was like a big 'error' buzzer. "It's Charlie," she reminded him flatly. She barely knew the guy, but had him pegged like washing on the line. "He's lazy. He doesn't put much effort in. He spends most of the time unaware of what is happening in his surroundings. The boxes will be obvious if we act like we're inside his head."
"Inside his head?"
She nodded, screeching to a sudden halt as the lake appeared. Hands on her hips, she surveyed the area, brown eyes narrowed as she tried to study their surroundings in the mindset of their simple, dreadlocked co-supervisor.
"Gotcha!" she crowed, spying a canoe left out, down by the shore.
They hadn't been onto the lake yet, and fastidious Allison wouldn't have deliberately left out any equipment, so the fact that the canoe was even there in the first place screamed Charlie's handiwork. Sure enough, on closer inspection, they found a little metal box with a red circle stuck to the top.
"Good start," Amber said, flicking the latches and opening the lid.
Inside was a small plastic toy- a flimsy paddle- and nothing else. Amber turned the box over in her hands, shook it upside down, rechecked the interior, and scowled at the offending container like it was the one to blame for the problem they now found themselves facing.
"What happened to the clue?" she asked no one in particular.
"Is this not it?" Paulo held the paddle in between thumb and forefinger.
"No, that's the- Oooooh…" Amber's wicked grin returned, making Paulo feel a bit nervous. She clapped him on the shoulder. "Come on, big guy," she added. "Time to put those muscles to good use."
"Huh?"
Amber nodded out at the lake. "Box number two is somewhere out there." She plucked the toy paddle off him and wriggled it in front of his face.
Understanding lit Paulo's features. "Oooooh," he said, grinning. "Clever."
"I am, aren't I."
"That is not-"
"Come on."
With the blue team's potential progress- which had to have surely got into gear by now- at the front of her mind, Amber seized the front of the canoe and started to drag it the couple of metres to the water. Paulo retrieved the paddles that had been left behind on the ground, tossing them into the canoe so he could help shove the fibreglass hull the final stretch into the water.
Amber gingerly clambered in as Paulo held the canoe steady. He finally clocked onto Amber's more urgent pace and didn't even wait for her to sit before giving the canoe a shove out of the shallows. He leapt in with a surprising turn of nimbleness, but it was the last in a line of unexpected motion that had Amber flailing to grip the sides of the canoe in an effort to stop herself from being tipped overboard.
"Bit of warning would have been nice," she snapped, dropping onto her seat at the front of the canoe before Paulo could unleash any more accidental boat tipping attempts on her.
"I though you said that losing was not an option?" he asked, genuinely confused.
"Yeah, but the same goes for ending up with yet another one of my outfits saturated."
Paulo shrugged, completely unbothered by her concerns or outburst. He handed her one of the paddles and they set out across the lake, their progress steady after an initial rhythm confusion and ensuing one sided dictatorship courtesy of Amber, eyes peeled for anything that might have indicated the location of their next box.
The lake wasn't big and it didn't seem overly deep- less a serious body of water and more of an overkill puddle- and it took no time at all for them to realise that the surface was unblemished by a marker or buoy or a floating metal box.
"Maybe he just forgot about the clue? Or putting out the next box?" Paulo said, picking up their conversation from back on the shore.
Amber's brow wrinkled into an annoyed frown. She shielded her eyes with one hand and took one more scan of the lake. "Maybe it's not so literal," she mused, casing the shore that they'd paddled out from. For that to be the explanation, though, they'd have to be giving Charlie a whole lot more credit than she was sure he was entitled to. "Maybe the canoe shed, where the paddles are? Or a… a canoe shop, or something, up in town? Or-"
"Across the other side." Paulo pointed past Amber, to the opposite bank and the metal box sitting on a rock, glinting in the sun. "Clever?" he said with a cheeky smile.
"Yeah, yeah." Amber rolled her eyes. "Get paddling."
Alex's strategy for the blue team had been slightly less along the 'everyone for themselves' mentality that Amber had originally opted for. Figuring- like the rest of Amber's team, and then Amber (grudgingly) herself- that the boxes could prove hard to find initially, the four blue bandana teens stuck together and headed for the town's main drag. With four pairs of eyes on the look out, it wasn't long before they'd spotted the first box, and with Stella certain that the tiny toy sail boat it contained suggested the marina as the next location, she'd peeled off from the group to investigate, leaving Alex, Li and Hex to find three more starting points.
The elation at the quick discovery of the first box wore off as the minutes continued to tick by without so much as an idea of where they'd find another. With ten boxes- or, rather, eight cancelling out Stella's initial one, and hopefully subsequent second- scattered across a relatively small area, they all remained fairly confident that at least one or two more would be nestled somewhere in the town. But having that confidence, and it actually living up to expectation, were two entirely different realities.
The trio found refuge under a sprawling tree opposite a scrapbooking store- something that seemed a bit odd and rather specialised for such a small island. How many people scrapbooked? And did they really require a whole store just for their supplies?
"Come on," Hex said, continuing to suss out their surroundings while Alex and Li flopped onto a bench, their continual lack of success putting something of a damper on their initial enthusiasm. "There has to be a box around here somewhere. Even a red box would be a start." A rather sadistic chuckle followed the muttered comment.
Li beamed, choosing to ignore the tail end of his comments- or at least look at it as a loyalty to the blues rather than a desire to deliberately mess with the reds' heads. "Aw," she said. "Nice to see some team spirit from you, Hex."
"It's not." Hex's scowl returned. "Don't think it is. I'm just really not keen on getting stuck with kitchen duty again."
"Well after what happened at lunch, I think you'd be hard pressed finding anyone who would want to volunteer to wash dishes with you again anyway."
"Hey." He pointed a finger at her, making sure she was paying attention. "That was an accident."
Li held her hands up, but her expression coupled with averted eyes said just how much she believed that little story.
Hex actually seemed somewhat taken aback by her reaction and clear suspicions. "Woah. Okay, fine, she's more than a little irritating, and I'm sure that at some stage over the next two weeks I am going to want to throw something at her, but you actually believe I tipped hot water on her on purpose?" He considered Li like she'd just said that was her master plan. "What do I look like?"
"A little unhinged," Alex admitted. "Sometimes."
"Unhinged?"
"Ah… Yeah. A bit. Just every now and then."
"And that means?"
Alex shrugged, scuffing one sneakered foot back and forth in the sandy dirt. "I don't know," he said vaguely. "Like you might… maybe… toss hot water on someone?"
Hex blinked at them, and for a moment he looked genuinely stunned before the usual facade of not giving a shit slid back into play. "I think you have to question how hinged you are if you think that. I'm not a psychopath. I'm not even a juvenile delinquent." He decided not to bring up that had been avoided technically by the skin of his teeth, and an agreement to sign up for one of the camps.
"Never said you were," Alex was quick to point out.
Li considered Hex with a tilted head as she tapped one finger against her chin. "What's your problem with Amber anyway?"
"Seriously? You have to ask?"
"Yeah. I don't get it. I think she's nice."
Alex and Hex shared a look before shifting it to Li.
She squirmed under the scrutiny. "Okay," she relented. "Maybe that's a bit strong, but she's certainly not terrible. She's a nice person, she just doesn't want to be here. Like you." She nodded at Hex.
He made a face. "Let's not draw similarities. Okay? There aren't any. She's a spoilt, rich little brat who's used to having people start jumping as soon as she even looks sideways at them."
Li's face started to clear with comprehension. "Ooooh. So that's your problem with her. Right? Kind of, like…" She struggled to find a tactful way around voicing her theory. "Ah… Different sides of the tracks? Sorta?"
Hex ignored her. "Weren't we looking for a box? This isn't working. I say we split up." He didn't wait for a vote, turning on his heel and marching off up the street.
Li watched him go, then turned to Alex with a shrug. "I don't get him," she said matter-of-factly.
"Join the club."
Despite Hex ditching them in something of a huff, neither Alex nor Li could see much point to deviating from what remained of their tattered plan of attack. The town was clearly drawing a blank, and with Stella (hopefully) hot on the trail of more of their boxes, and Hex now flitting solo around looking for a trail of his own, they abandoned the main street and headed back towards the house; maybe their lack of luck in town was because Charlie had opted to lay most of the boxes out in the direction of the lake and activity clearing?
They passed Ruby and Justin on their way, the red pair jogging for town with determined, sweaty faces. Justin's leg seemed surprisingly strong, especially considering the dramatic performance he'd put on for them only an hour or so earlier. They ignored Li and Alex, intent on their task at hand, and possibly with Amber's voice ringing in their ears about kicking the blue team's backsides. As they passed, Li caught sight of the cluster of small plastic toys in one of Ruby's hands.
Alex noticed it at the same time, and nudged Li as soon as they were out of earshot. "I think we're toast," he said.
"Oh yeah," she agreed with a nod, "but we're not going down without some kicking and screaming, right?" She bunched one hand into a fist and landed it in her other palm. "Boo-ya."
The determined fire, voiced aloud, aligned some much needed universal karmic power, and just seconds later, Li let out an excited squeal that had Alex jumping in alarm. She darted off the track, dropped to her knees and started to flail wildly in the undergrowth, emerging with a box bearing a very welcome blue sticker.
"Nice job!" Alex met her high five, then took the box off her as she retrieved the contents: a tiny plastic badger.
They blinked down at the toy standing on Li's palm, questioning what was left of Charlie's sanity, until Alex snapped his fingers.
"Down by the high ropes course," he said, tugging at Li's arm to get her jogging along down the trail with him again. "There's a badger painted on the side of the equipment shed."
"Brilliant!" she enthused. "Although you have to question why they chose a badger; all the wonderful wildlife in this region, and that guy gets the gig?"
The path they were on took them around the back of the clearing, popping them out by the obstacle course. They cut up the side of the area, heading for the slightly leaning shed plonked in the middle, right on the boundary where the clearing gave way to the bushland again. Just as they pulled up by the mural, they heard a shout from over the other side, behind the high ropes course.
Amber gave them a cheery wave, smiling sweetly. "Looking for something?" she called, spoiling her attempt at nonchalance with the evil grin that followed. "Hope you find it quick." She held up the assortment of plastic toys in her hands like they were Simba being shown off to the pride lands. "We're just about done. See you back at the house."
She disappeared down another one of the paths, leaving Alex and Li to stare at the faded badger on the shed, and the open blue marked box that rested at his painted feet, downcast. Only on their second box, and they were at a dead end thanks to Amber's tampering.
"I take it back," Li said.
"Not nice?"
"Not so much."