Let's get back to the challenges!

The break day passed more quickly than other break days had. Before I knew it, it was a new challenge day, the mess hall was still missing most of a wall after the explosion, and I felt like making a confessional about the way Julia was acting. "Seriously, that girl's getting on my nerves now. I get that she's mad someone posted a video of her and it's not what the Instagram community or anyone wants from her or whatever, but she doesn't have to take it out on us! I wish there was a team switch. Then maybe we could get rid of her. Then again, I guess it could be worse. I wouldn't want Chase and Emz put on the same team, and I don't want to be separated from her or Bowie, not while we've got our Final Three deal. Oh well. Maybe she'll calm down soon."

I was wrong. At breakfast, Julia stormed into the mess hall, demanding that someone own up to posting the video. She also snatched Bowie's burrito off him and smacked him with it for teasing her about "insulting forest creatures".

Okay, that made everyone gasp. The Hockey Bros literally started inhaling their burritos.

I jumped to my feet in defense. If Julia was going to start bullying anyone who she didn't like, I wasn't going to take it lying down. "Okay, Ms True Colours. I assume that means I'm allowed to tell everyone what you called me last week when we were in that tube?"

Julia glared at me. "Sure. Tell them everything. I honestly don't care anymore." She stalked out, declaring that she'd find out on her own who posted the video.

"Does this mean you won't be blessing our morning burritos?" MK called after her.

As it was, Chris called us to the challenge before anyone could answer her question. "Field in ten minutes!"

I'd already told Emz and Bowie about the way Julia had treated me, so I didn't need to explain it to anyone else. Frankly, I wasn't sure I wanted to tell MK. I didn't have time to tell the hockey bros either, because they were a little late catching up to us. They said they were trying to find their "lucky beards". Apparently, some superstition about shaving in the hockey league, but they had fake beards for the moment because they were too young to grow real ones. Either way, they couldn't find them.

"No fake beards?" MK said. I sensed another sarcastic comment. "However shall we win without them?"

Raj took her seriously. "I don't know. Where could they be?"

"Maybe I ate 'em in my sleep!" Wayne suggested. Apparently he sleep-ate. When he started acting like a cat with a hairball, he brought up a lot of things. No fake beards, though.

"I lost something myself," I told the guys. "My moisturizer."

"That explains why your skin suddenly looks cracked," Julia joked from just up ahead. "I thought you had really good skin, but turns out you just rub stuff on it. I guess I know why you need to now."

Bowie saw my expression and whispered "Don't listen to her. She's making it up. Like I said yesterday, you do have good skin naturally." I smiled gratefully at him.

MK smiled slyly. "Julia, any idea where those things are?"

Julia looked up from one of her phones. "Are you suggesting I took them?" she said, sounding genuinely confused. "I'm allergic to things that stick to bodies." She looked at me slyly. "Especially if they belong to clingy suck-ups."

Why did she suddenly think I was an easy target? I smiled, pretending I was enjoying the drama.

"Oh, are you?" MK challenged. "Or was that just another lie?" That was a good point. Julia had been lying to us from the moment she stepped onto the island, pretending to be that all-loving New Age chick that she told her followers she was. And we'd mostly bought her act.

But then she said something surprising. "Hey, I'm missing a necklace and a phone, so there is a thief here! It's just not me!"

Most of the team had lost something by now. It wasn't just the boys' beards. Emz had had to borrow my hairbrush that morning, because hers had disappeared. And at that moment, Bowie remembered that he'd lost some lip balm. Still, I remembered a case in Revenge of the Island where someone stole some things and then pretended to also have something stolen to frame someone else, so it was still possible that MK was right and Julia was pretending to have lost something.

When we finally got to the field, we found two human-sized catapults, with several pits dug. The object was to try and fling our teammates into these boxes with holes and 1,000, 2,000 and 3,000, which symbolized the amount of points we'd get if our teammate went through one of them. If we undershot or overshot, they'd fall into "penalty pits". Whoever got 10,000 points first won immunity. No one was allowed to go twice unless everyone had already taken a turn.

"So," said Chris, "Are you ready to – uh, Chase, are you okay?"

Chase was crouched in the foetal position, hugging his knees, but he babbled about how he was fine.

Emz nudged me. "He's scared of riding the catapult!" she hissed, grinning. "We went to the Eight Pennant Theme Park once to livestream, and I dared him to go on the Slingshot Ride, and he backed out at the last minute! You have to watch when it's his turn!"

Julia insisted on working the catapult for us. I couldn't help wistfully looking over at the Trout, where Priya was drawing out a plan of who and how to hurl with a stick and Damien was checking out the angle of the catapult, clearly trying to figure out how to manipulate the physics for the best chance of landing in the right place. Okay, so Zee accidentally flung Damien into a pit full of crabs by pulling the lever while he was in the catapult and not completely prepared, but still, at least the team had people trying to plan things out from a scientific standpoint.

The hockey boys pulled the wheel to place the catapult close to the ground while Julia barked orders at them. "Who's up first?" she asked the rest of us.

Bowie, MK, Emz and I looked at each other, hoping someone would volunteer.

"Come on, people!" Julia demanded. "We've got a challenge to win!"

Then I gave a sigh. It always seemed like I had to step up before anyone else did. But this was still a competition, and I wasn't going to stop proving my worth, so if I had to play guinea pig, I'd do it. "Fine, I'll go first. But you better actually try to throw me for points instead of being petty and flinging me into a pit just because you hate me."

Julia gave me a hard look, like she thought I was stupid. "I don't hate you, I just really dislike you. And duh, of course I'm trying to win here. Then you won't be able to vote me off!" Wow, she actually admitted that was the reason she wanted to win. "Ready to be launched, scale-skin?"

I couldn't help glaring at her. "Just because someone took my-" I didn't get to finish.

Still, I had to admit that Julia delivered. The moments flying through the air were terrifying, but I landed on a padded mattress, inside one of the point boxes (I found out later it was the two thousand one). Still, it left me pretty dizzy. I had to take it slowly to get up and out. Even when the world stopped spinning for me, I still felt nauseous. I waited so long for the feeling to start subsiding that I didn't even see the Trouts getting their first points (I later found out Millie was the one to reach the point box).

I managed to start walking (unsteadily) towards my team just as Chef was telling the hockey bros that they weren't allowed to get flung together. Wayne went first, and ended up landing in a penalty pit with an angry bull. Actually, he landed on the bull. When Raj went, he flew too far instead of falling short and ended up in a pit full of tapioca pudding.

"Since you're doing, well, I'm just gonna say it, horribly," MK said to Julia as I arrived, "Maybe let somebody else work the catapult?"

"Back off!" Julia hissed at her. "I got this!"

"I don't get it," I mumbled weakly. "How can a few seconds of flying and landing on a mattress make me feel so awful?"

MK spoke up again. "A cross between high altitude and a lack of stamina?" she suggested.

I scowled at her, roused to anger this time. "Excuse me, I have plenty of stamina! I've been going for long walks every day and I do fine in gym class!"

"Do you ever fly?" MK pressed. "Low stamina for flying, not stuff on the ground."

She had a point, so I didn't argue with her. I had to make an effort not to glower, though.

"Guys, I got a cramp!" we heard Raj yelling. "I can't tread this tapioca much longer!"

We then heard another yell from Wayne. "Someone save my buddy Raj!"

It took literally a second for Bowie to jump into the catapult. "Put me in the pudding," he ordered Julia. And yet, two minutes ago, he'd shuddered at the thought of tapioca.

Of course, that wasn't her plan, but whatever it happened worked for us. Bowie originally plummeted into the 3,000-point box, but then managed to bounce out and into Raj's penalty pit. Okay, there was definitely something going on between those two. Bowie was just too eager to rescue Raj, especially when I knew he usually put the challenge first, even before something like this. He had to really care about Raj as more than a friend. While Emz and I considered him a good friend, I somehow always imagined him waiting until after securing a win to save one of us.

Meanwhile, Wayne got thrown into the same box as me, and since he'd landed on the bull in the penalty pit and never touched the ground, Chris counted it. We were on seven thousand, and the only person the Trout had hurled successfully so far was Millie, with three thousand.

After Bowie was hurled, we suddenly heard a commotion of intermittent screaming from above, with seconds of silence littered between each scream.

"What is that?" Julia questioned.

Emz giggled. "It's Chase! He's screaming and fainting."

So Chase was so scared of flying that he kept fainting from fear, then woke up, screamed and then passed out again. He was actually more comfortable when he ended up in the same crab pit as Damien, and this time, he roused a giant hermit crab. But Priya made up for it for making another three thousand hurl. Still, we were one thousand points ahead when Chris announced that there was one other pit that we could now use, worth ten thousand.

We would have been happy to make MK, Emz or Julia go for the last three thousand we needed, since we didn't need to take a chance on the much harder one, but of course, Queen Julia seemed to think she had a better idea: Go for the ten thousand herself.

"Dislike me all you want!" she ranted. "When I win this, you can't vote me off!"

"When she loses this, we have a much better reason to vote her off,' I muttered to my allies. They nodded agreement.

She was up against Zee. And guess what happened? Yep, Zee actually made it and Julia didn't. Still, she tried to argue her case by saying she was the reason we were in the lead.

"And if we had just kept doing what we were doing," MK argued back, "We would've been able to win it before Zee landed!"

"Says the team member who didn't even fly."

I consciously decided not to point out that Emz didn't fly either. It was true that MK hadn't flown or done anything, but she'd proved herself useful in other challenges. She lowered team morale, but then Julia was doing that now, too. Sarcasm wasn't as bad as plain meanness.
"Ugh, you are so moolo."

I didn't know what that meant, but when Julia asked, MK just said "The fact that you have to ask makes you even more moolo." I didn't want to ask the same question and get insulted. No matter what it meant, it was definitely some kind of insult. If I had to guess, it was probably a name for a know-nothing-know-it-all, since Julia was acting like one.

I didn't have to talk to my allies that night. Julia had lost the challenge for us, she was treating everyone with zero respect, and it was possible she'd stolen my moisturizer. Who else would I vote off?

Once we were called to the elimination ceremony, MK smirked at Julia and said cheerfully, "Well, I guess it's time to vote you off, buttknuckle."

As we walked, I whispered to MK "Not to be, uh, moolo, but what kind of insult is buttknuckle? Never heard that word before."

MK grinned and said in a voice above a whisper, "Ask Julia. If she's still here, that is. She knows."

However, Julia was a little late to the elimination ceremony. When she did show up, she was holding a huge sack. "Guys, wait!" she called. "It was MK! She's been listening to all our confessionals!"

Okay, I had no idea where this was coming from. It seemed like a last-ditch attempt to shift blame.

Bowie said what we were all thinking. "Um…what?"

"She's heard everything we said!" Julia reiterated. "And got the password to post that video, and heard me call you buttknuckles!"

"Call us what?" Bowie asked again.

"That's not important!" Julia said quickly. "I found all this under MK's bunk!"

She upended the sack. Out came all the lost objects. The boys' beards, Emz's hairbrush, Bowie's lip balm, Julia's phone and necklace and my moisturizer.

Julia picked up the phone, explaining that MK had been supposedly downloading the confessionals on it. She even played one – I briefly recognized Priya's voice before Bowie snatched it off her. "I'll take care of this," he declared, flinging it into the lake. "Okay, now our secrets are safe." Fair enough. I wouldn't have wanted Julia to have my confessionals either.

MK herself looked a little anxious, but she finally spoke up for herself. "Okay, I've never seen any of that stuff before, and Julia is the one who just showed up with it."

That was a good point. I didn't like MK, but I liked Julia even less, and by this point, either of them could have been the thief and downloaded confessionals. Although MK must have posted that video of Julia, because she would never have done that herself…but what if the thievery accusation was just a ruse to motivate us further?

My decision, eventually, was not made by Julia continuing to insist that MK downloaded our confessionals (which she denied on the grounds that they were on Julia's phone). Or by her insisting that since MK had been watching the outhouse, she'd also been watching people using it as an outhouse. Right, that was why I'd been using the one in the communal bathrooms as much as possible.

My vote was still for Julia, but a lot of other people, apparently, were more weirded out than I was. MK was taken out.

"Aw, how sad," Julia mocked her. "What a shame. Oh, wait! No, it's not."

"Follow me to the dock," Chris ordered our smallest teammate. "It's time for, MK drone home."

MK just raised an eyebrow at him and said "Is that some kind of pop culture reference for old people?"

As we walked back to the cabins afterwards, I walked with my allies. "So, did you guys believe all that stuff Julia was saying?" I asked. "I mean, considering I voted for Julia and MK probably did too, that's five votes that could have been different."

Bowie shrugged. "I didn't like either of them, but I figured Julia's making herself more unpopular. She'll end up getting herself sent home next. MK's more of a wildcard."

"Yeah, I agreed," Emz chipped in. "I wasn't sure at first, but MK did post that video online. We know that's true, because Julia would never have posted that herself." She gave a humourless smile, suddenly. "You know, it's funny, but I feel like something in the game changed. Like it's suddenly getting more serious. Are you guys feeling that?"

I shivered, suddenly. I understood what she meant. Yeah, something about the game did seem to have changed. Like now a third of us were gone, it was going to get tougher.

Well, it is. The early merge isn't far off.