Damselfly Read online

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  If you’ve never held a fake eye in your hand, I’ll tell you what it looks like. It’s made of glass and feels cool and heavy in your palm, like a big shooter marble or a stone from a cold stream. It’s not a perfect circle, but egg-shaped. If you tap it, you’ll hear it’s hollow inside. The black pupil is painted on, and so is the iris. As for the white part, it’s not true white. Tiny squiggles of pink give it a bloodshot look.

  I clenched the fake eye in my fist, so hard my hand hurt. This I knew, and nothing else. I had no idea how I’d gotten the eye in the first place, why my clothes were dirty and soaking wet, or what I was standing on. Why was it so green and squishy? Looking around, I didn’t know where my old world had gone. The brick, slate, and stone of Drake Rosemont Preparatory Academy were nowhere to be found.

  I took a tentative step, then winced. I was aching everywhere. I had to vomit, too, but I didn’t think about that as I looked around, mouth open like a dead fish. I was in what looked to be a jungle. The vegetation was thick, lush, impenetrable as a wall. I pushed away vines, mossy branches, and leaves the size of manhole covers. I closed my eyes against prickers and thorns, but when the branches snapped back like clawed hands, I opened them again.

  “Mel!” I yelled, tears starting to stream down my face. I felt so confused. So lost. But if I could find Mel, everything would be all right. My best friend would know where we were and what to do.

  Desperately, I looked in all directions. What struck me immediately was the violence. Everything seemed to be choking something else: Creepers twisted around brambles, brambles around vines, vines around trees. Every plant vied for space and the thin shafts of light that pushed through the greenery overhead. But there wasn’t enough space for all of them.

  “Mel,” I screamed again, my throat scratchy and raw. My brown school oxfords made sucking sounds as I walked. I felt as if I were being pulled down, as if the jungle might consume me.

  When my foot landed ankle-deep in mud, I was forced to stop and try to pull myself together. What I needed was some water. I reached for my bottle in a side compartment of my backpack, then realized I wasn’t carrying anything. I had nothing but the clothes I was wearing—and the eye. This fact panicked me even more. I didn’t know how to function without my cell, my iPad, and my laptop. They were as much a part of my everyday life as my toothbrush.

  My head started to pound. I took some deep breaths. I tried to think of what Mel or her father, Mr. Sharpe, would do.

  They would tell me to look for landmarks.

  “Okay, fine,” I said aloud, just to hear my own voice, something human and normal. “Landmarks.”

  I looked for exceptional things through the haze of green, and I found them: a particularly knobby tree, a cluster of red flowers, a huge, stand-alone fern. I tried committing these things to memory. But I’d never been much good at orienting myself—that’s what my phone’s GPS was for—and my concentration began to trickle away with the sweat that poured off my skin. The truth was, I was too freaked out to concentrate.

  It didn’t help that dozens of mosquitoes were following me. Swatting did nothing. They bit my hands, face, legs, hair part, and ears—whatever naked skin they could find. I began to scratch the itchy bumps, but stopped when I realized how many cuts and bruises I had. The blood that streamed down my shins incited a new wave of dread.

  What the hell happened to me?

  “If you can’t find landmarks, then at least walk in the same direction,” I said aloud, my voice quavering. But which way? For the life of me, I couldn’t remember Mr. Sharpe’s advice on telling direction without a compass. Something about true north and the length of shadows? Something about where moss grows on trees?

  “Damn it, Mel. Where are you?” I desperately needed her to make things right.

  Suddenly, I tasted vomit, acid-sour on my tongue. It came up fast, hot, and wretched, a torrent that washed away my shock. As I wiped my mouth, it finally hit me what had happened: Our plane had crashed. I began to remember details: where I’d been sitting in the cabin, where my teammates had been sitting, how I’d been reading some tabloid and listening to music. I must have drifted off—we’d been in the air for hours—and didn’t remember going down. I must have blacked out the screams, the terror, the frantic voice of our pilot on the intercom. That was the only explanation. And now I was on the ground, lost in a jungle, my teammates and friends nowhere in sight. Maybe they were injured. Maybe they were dead.

  My last iota of courage vanished. I crumpled to the ground and covered my face, a feeble attempt to block out both the mosquitoes and my own fear. I’m not sure how long I stayed like that—ten minutes, maybe twenty. When I finally opened my eyes again, I was numb. Though I was sixteen, I felt younger—younger and helpless. What got me back on my feet, finally, was a glimpse of the landscape ahead. The packed greenery thinned a little, giving way to trees. Enormous trees—the biggest I’d ever seen. I dusted off my filthy skirt and walked toward them.

  Up close, they were almost too massive to be believed. I’d never seen redwoods before, but these must have been similar—enormous and imposing, like a tribe of giants. One had a trunk so thick, six or seven Drake Rosemont students could have stood in a circle, hand in hand, and still not have reached around. The tree’s massive roots poked up from the jungle floor and lay like long, sinuous snakes. I ran my hand against the rough bark of the trunk. I’d always liked trees: how they lived so long, how their roots sank deep into the ground, stabilizing them, giving them strength. I rested my head against the trunk. Soon, drops of rain began to fall. I was grateful for those drops, because the mosquitoes finally left me alone. I was grateful until the drops turned into a crashing wave of water, the weight of it shocking and scary. Even under the branches of the giant tree, I was pounded. Droplets as big as robins’ eggs pelted my skin. I’d never felt so vulnerable and alone.

  Minutes passed—long, drenching minutes. I must have cried, but my tears meant nothing. The rain washed them away as soon as they appeared. I began to go numb again. Maybe that was better. Better to believe this wasn’t happening.

  When I saw her, I didn’t believe it at first. I thought I was hallucinating. It would have been easy to conjure things through the blur of water. But the longer I stared, the more certain I was that she was real. Her Drake Rosemont blouse was untucked as usual. Her lank blond hair hung soggily down her back. Her stiff, awkward stance was instantly recognizable.

  I ran, screaming her name. When I reached her, I grabbed on for dear life. Mel let out a wild screech and wrapped me in her arms, squeezing me hard. We both cried out in relief.

  “Are you all right?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know. I think so …”

  I detached myself long enough to catch a glimpse of gashes on her legs and a deep, bloody gouge on her chin. I touched it gently.

  “Thank god you’re alive, Sam,” she said. Even now, under dire circumstances, her tone was the same: clipped and monotone. People always assumed she was cold or unfeeling. They were wrong.

  “Have you seen the
others?” I asked.

  “No one. You’re the first.”

  Filled with relief, I gave her another hug. Seeing Mel meant recovering hope. She’d take charge. She’d get us through this—somehow.

  We huddled under a tree and waited out the sheets of water that fell one after another. At last, the downpour subsided. Mel got down to business immediately. She was still wearing her backpack, and showed me what it contained—some books and notepads. But no technology. No phone. As we double-checked zippered pockets, she told me what she remembered of the flight: After the layover in Honolulu, the pilot had said we would have to stop again. He’d called it “a precautionary measure.”

  “We were all there when we boarded again—you, me, Rittika and Rish, Jeremiah, Chester, Ming, Avery, Warren, Betty, Anne Marie …” she said.

  “And Pablo,” I added.

  “Yeah, Pablo was there. The pilot said everything was all right, that there was no mechanical problem.”

  “Well, obviously there was.”

  Mel bit down on her lip. Her lips were always chapped. The Sharpe sisters didn’t believe in ChapStick, or any beauty supplies, for that matter.

  “I wonder if Coach Coifman knows yet,” she mused.

  “I still can’t believe she wasn’t on the plane.”

  “Me neither.”

  “And Mr. Singh—I would have thought he would’ve come.”

  Rish and Rittika’s father, Mr. Singh, was the sponsor of our teams, that is, Drake Rosemont’s boys’ and girls’ fencing teams. He paid for everything: our equipment, uniforms, and travel expenses. We’d come to expect extravagance from Mr. Singh—he was a billionaire, after all—but he’d outdone himself this time. Normally, we flew coach, but for this tournament in Japan, he’d offered our teams the use of his private jet and his own personal pilot. It had been unbelievable, like a dream, that sleek silver jet with leather seats that reclined into beds. Before Drake Rosemont, I’d never even been on a plane. And now I was traveling like a celebrity.

  We’d flown out of Logan International Airport in Boston, about an hour from Drake Rosemont. Our final destination was Haneda Airport in Tokyo. Coach Coifman was supposed to be traveling with us, but a sudden family emergency meant she’d arrive twenty-four hours after we landed. Everyone thought our headmaster would cancel the trip—or at least reschedule the flight so that we’d have an adult chaperone. But he’d surprised us by giving the green light.

  “I’m letting you go under one condition,” he’d told us. “I expect you to be on your best behavior, like the responsible young men and women that I know you are.”

  I bet that right about now, he regretted his decision.

  “Do you think the pilot made it?” Mel asked me.

  “I don’t know. But I don’t have a good feeling.”

  “Why?”

  “You remember how you thought one of his eyes was fake?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It was.”

  I took her hand and rolled the eyeball into her palm, then watched her eyes widen, the colorless fans of her lashes spread far apart.

  “It’s cool,” she said, turning it over. “My dad has a collection of prosthetic eyes. Did I ever show them to you?

  “No.”

  “I used to hide them in my sisters’ breakfast cereal.”

  “You’re such a freak.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it.”

  Thinking about how the eye had felt—wet and sticky in my fingers, I vomited again. It was bile this time; there was nothing left in my stomach to purge. Mel wiped my mouth with her own sleeve. Then she held up the eye for a better look.

  “Do you want it back?” she asked.

  When I shook my head, she tucked it into one of her knee socks, out of sight.

  “Come on,” Mel said, “we’ve got to look for the others.” I trudged behind her, willing my feet to move, one after the other. “I saw some wreckage a ways back,” she remarked. “I don’t know what we’ll find, Sam.” She didn’t sound optimistic, but her jaw was stiff and her expression determined. I’d seen that look a thousand times.

  “Which way?” I asked. I wondered if, deep inside, Mel felt as stricken as I did. I wondered if she knew that the only thing keeping me from going crazy was her.

  She charged ahead.

  The day grew hotter, even under the shade of the canopy. I continued to wipe away sweat, as well as fresh blood on my shins. I rolled up my sleeves to my elbows, baiting the mosquitoes. We walked a long time, until something caught Mel’s attention in the distance. I looked in the direction she was staring. There seemed to be a black cloud hovering above the ground. It turned out to be a swarm of flies, dark as a clot. I stopped in my tracks, realizing what they were fussing over. But Mel didn’t hesitate to get closer. She actually touched it: a leg. A man’s leg. My eyes traveled from the long, narrow foot up a sinewy brown calf dotted with curly black hairs. Above the knee was a mangled stump of flesh. The femur jutted out along with bloody globs of muscle and tissue.

  Names trundled through my head—Chester, Pablo, Warren, Rish? It was a good thing I had nothing left to throw up.

  “The pilot,” Mel said, answering the unasked question.

  “You sure?”

  “Positive. Look at the knee. That’s an old hinge. It couldn’t be from one of the boys.”

  I didn’t look again. I’d take her word for it.

  Silently, Mel collected a bunch of leaves. She covered the leg until it was invisible on the forest floor.

  “That’s two missing body parts,” she said. “His odds are officially terrible.” She must have seen that I was completely losing it, because she added, “But we’re okay. We’re gonna be okay.”

  We continued our search, eyes peeled for the dead as well as the living. Meanwhile, the sun continued its scorching arc across the sky, shedding heat and sending bright, slivered rays through the canopy. I was so thirsty I thought I might faint. It was impossible not to think about water while walking through the jungle. The ground was moist. Droplets dripped off the ends of reeds and puddled in the center of leaves. A thick mist clung to the air. Water was everywhere, and yet there was barely enough in any one place to moisten the tongue.

  As if reading my mind, Mel stopped in front of an odd-looking shrub. “Here, you can drink from these.” She gestured at the reddish orbs that dangled from its branches. They resembled vials and had fluid inside.

  I looked at her skeptically.

  “It’s a pitcher plant,” she continued, touching one of the orbs. “My mother has them in her greenhouse.”

  Mrs. Sharpe was a botanist and a walking, talking encyclopedia of plant-related know-how. Her greenhouse was nearly as large and cluttered as the Sharpe home. It was filled to the brim with trees, flowers, herbs, and stranger things: cactuses, funguses, even algae. With these, Mel’s mother made potions, lotions, and medicines, which she sold online. There were so many extraordinary things in her greenhouse, I doubted I’d have remembered the pitcher plants even if I’d seen them before.

  “The liquid inside lures insects,” Mel explained. “They fall in, and the plant digests them.”

  I looked at her skeptically. “And this is safe to drink?”

  Instead of answering, she squatted and tilted an orb toward her mouth. The liquid poured between her lips. That was enough for me; I was too thirsty for doubt. I followed her lead, drinking orb after orb.

  “I want more,” I told her.

  “I’ve seen some palms around. We can drink coconut water if we have to. Come on!”

  She pulled my arm and we kept moving, slapping mosquitoes, pushing brush and bracken out of our way. I started to walk behind her, following in her footsteps. My ears buzzed with the incessant din of the jungle: droning insects, flapping wings, manic birdsong. Suddenly, a new sound cut through the noise: a female voice. Rittika’s. Mel and I looked at each other in astonishment. We’d never been so happy to hear Rittika before. At Drake Rosemont, we usually went out of
our way to avoid her.

  But she sounded distressed. Her voice, usually haughty and confident, quavered.

  We began to run in her direction. As we drew closer, we heard other voices, too—Betty’s, and Ming’s, and was that Anne Marie’s? Suddenly, there was reason to celebrate. Mel and I weren’t the only survivors. Some of our teammates—our friends—had made it, too.

  We ran faster, till my lungs ached. But it seemed we didn’t make it in time.

  “If Rish is dead, I might as well be, too!” Rittika declared.

  Then I heard a sharp splash and even louder screams.

  The tangle thinned right before we reached them. Trees and snarled vines gave way to slim palm saplings, stalks of bamboo, and banks of dark moss littered with coconut shells. Though Rittika’s words still echoed through my brain, filling me with dread, I was awed by what lay ahead—a huge turquoise lake. An oasis in the middle of the jungle.

  Ming, Betty, Anne Marie, and Avery were standing on the shore, oblivious to our presence. They were gazing at something on the far side of the lake. A waterfall.

  “What’s happening?” Mel yelled.

  “Mel, Sam! She jumped! Rittika …” Betty’s voice began to sputter.

  It became instantly clear that Rittika had leapt from the high rock outcrop over which the water flowed. Mel began sprinting toward the waterfall. I followed with the others. We scanned the water as we went, anxious for Rittika to surface, knowing that every second counted. My relief at seeing my friends was quickly fading into fear.

  When we’d made it three-quarters of the way, she bobbed up, finally. My heart stopped racing a million miles a minute. I was almost as grateful to see her as I’d been to see Mel.

  “Why did you do that?” Avery screamed in her nasal voice. Kicking off her shoes, she jumped into the lake and swam toward Rittika. She was a good swimmer; we all were. Everyone enrolled at Drake Rosemont took swimming lessons in the Olympic-size pool named after some rich alum. Mastery of the breaststroke, backstroke, and butterfly were required for graduation. You always knew who had been in the pool by the chlorine stink of their hair.

  “I wish I’d drowned,” Rittika exclaimed petulantly. Her long black hair was a shiny oil slick down her back.