Darren

Only when I decided to put pen to paper on something serious did I come to fully appreciate how restricted we were as citizens of Prospera. Our small world left us with little experience to draw on, making writing a challenge. For the most part writers in Prospera borrowed from the plays and novels from the outside world that were available at the library. The reality that none of us gave voice to was that this wasn’t good enough. A writer’s ambition is to be original, to write stories that open the reader’s mind to ways of looking at things they’d never before considered. In this respect too we were restricted. Every work produced by a writer went through an extensive screening process to determine its suitability. Before it was approved to be added to the library it needed to be cleared first by the Education Committee then by the Ethics Committee. If the work failed to get the approval of either committee it never saw the light of the day and the author was instructed to never speak about that work with anyone.

Since the advent of the curious series of events that had followed the excursion the others had taken into Eternal Forest we all agreed to be completely open with each other, including Hannah, who had broken the secrecy she’d been sworn to by telling us about the books she was reading and the work she was doing as she was being prepared for her future position on the Ethics Committee. I asked her to ask her mother about the screening process written works underwent and she said that they were screened for certain ‘risk factors’, and if those ‘risk factors’ exceeded a certain level the work was quashed. As to what those ‘risk factors’ were, her mother told her that she wasn’t ready for that information yet.

“What do you think these ‘risk factors’ are?” I asked her.

“I don’t know; ask Kevin, he’ll probably have a theory and chances are he’ll be right,” she answered.

I didn’t ask Kevin; I was afraid his answer would further deteriorate my enthusiasm for writing. How did Kevin go on? I wondered, having lost all of his faith in Prospera and not trusting any of its citizens. Very quickly I realized that my question was an academic one. Kevin had to go on because he was trapped, as were the rest of us. Surrounded by a high mountain, an endless forest and an ocean, Prospera was a place that made no secret of it’s refusal to let you out. More than anything else I would have liked to write about that, the feeling I had of being trapped, of being in a place that would be the only place I would ever know. Without even bothering to think about writing it I knew that such a story would be considered ‘unsuitable’ and quashed. I was certain that making people deeply contemplate the isolated nature of our lives as Prospera citizens would be classified as an unallowable risk factor.

The idea I had that I had planned on spending my time on the camping trip exploring was about an old fisherman who’s had a hard life who finds a young boy unconscious in a boat that’s adrift at sea and takes him home with him and raises him as his own until the boy’s parents that had abandoned him find him and try to take him back. I was envisioning a tale about hardship giving rise to compassion inspired partly by the imagery of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and a short story I’d read about an old Jewish woman who helps a lost German child find her parents during World War 2, the war that led to the nuclear world war that had destroyed most of the outside world. I was confident that I would be allowed to stage the play. The plot addressed a number of themes that I was sure the members of the Education and Ethics committees would approve of. The old man’s compassion served as an example of how one was supposed to treat one’s fellow man and the boy’s parents were an example of the kind of selfishness that had no place in Prospera.

I retrieved my pad and pencil from my cottage and staked out a remote spot for myself on the beach far away from the cottage where I could work in peace. Walking there I passed a boy and a girl kissing behind one of the cottages, a major violation of the rules regarding courtships. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen this sort of behaviour and I wasn’t the only one who’d seen it. From the whispers I’d overheard this was a relatively common occurrence throughout the camp, as it had apparently been the previous year. Given that we were going through puberty and were here entirely unsupervised this wasn’t an unexpected development, in fact it was irrational to think that the adults weren’t expecting it to happen, making it quite possible that the inevitably of it was part of the reason they’d sent us here. No doubt Kevin would have a theory on that too.

Kevin had been strangely quiet and detached on this trip. His paranoia normally caused him to avoid contact with others but this was different; this time he was avoiding us as well. I wasn’t the only one who noticed this; Hannah, Lisa and Miranda were just as confused by it as I was, particularly Hannah. She came to see me once at the spot where I was doing my writing to talk about Kevin’s avoidance of us, having been driven to distress by it.

“Do you think it’s us? Do you think he doesn’t trust us anymore?” She asked me, grasping for an answer.

“No, that’s not it. My feeling is that he’s struggling to understand where he stands in the village; he was sent to work in the stables for close to a year then told to return to school and now he’s been entrusted with the responsibility of collecting our provisions every day. I think he’s torn between believing that he’s safe and continuing to be afraid and sceptical.”

“Kevin? Afraid? Sceptical, yes, but afraid he is not; there is nobody in Prospera who has more contempt for the rules than he does.”

“You don’t see it, do you?”

“See what?”

“You’re the one who’s closest to Kevin and yet you don’t understand him. He’s more afraid than all of us. He does the things that he does because he wants to know what it is we really need to be afraid of; he’s terrified of what he might discover.”

“Do you think that’s why he hasn’t told me he has feelings for me?”

“He has feelings for you?”

“I think so, I mean, he must; I’m the one that he trusts the most.”

“That just means that he trusts you, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he has romantic feelings for you.”

“If not me then who? There couldn’t be someone else.”

“Maybe that’s why we’ve been seeing so little of him, because there is someone else.”

I was being cruel, making a joke like that, when I knew, as we all did, that Hannah had had feelings for Kevin for years. She walked away from me in the direction of the cottages clearly disconcerted by my suggestion that Kevin was avoiding us because there was another girl in the picture.

I wasn’t expecting Hannah to give in to the same juvenile emotions that so many of the other children had given in to; I thought of her as being too mature for that sort of thing. It was the first time that she was displaying such anxiousness over her feelings for Kevin and whether he shared them. Was it this place? Was the freedom we were enjoying here causing us to lose our ability to control ourselves? Is that why we were here? To have our control tested? And if so, who would be reporting the results of the test?

Unsure of the reasons for this camping trip I decided to keep to myself for the remainder of it and not get involved with anything of the sort that was causing Hannah to have palpitations. Not that I was interested in such pursuits. My play was coming together nicely and I couldn’t conceive of diverting any of my attention away from it and toward something frivolous. Fuelled by a sense that I was creating something that was truly special I was able to finish my play in a matter of days and gave it to Lisa to read with Miranda in their cottage. Their differing personalities created the potential for different interpretations, and if they had different interpretations and both still thought it was good it would mean that the play was able to reach people on various levels and that would make it an unqualified success. To my immense delight they both enjoyed it, which meant moving on to the next phase and rehearsing it. One of Miranda and Lisa’s roommates, Steven, was an actor. I asked them if they’d ask him if he’d be willing to play the role of the fisherman and they told me that he would, leaving me with only the roles of the couple that abandon the boy to cast. I wanted to keep the circle of people who knew about my play as small as possible so I asked Kevin if he’d do me the huge favour of playing the father and to my surprise he agreed. Feeling bad about the fun I’d had at Hannah’s expense that day on the beach I thought I’d offer her the role of the mother, thinking that the close scenes between her and Kevin could at long last kick-start a romance that had seemed inevitable for a frustratingly long amount of time. Strangely, she said no, even after I’d told her that Kevin had agreed to play the father. I went to Lisa and Miranda with the news and they too found her refusal strange given the opportunity it represented. Perhaps thinking that with Hannah’s refusal to play the mother I was desperate for an actress Miranda volunteered to play the role and, eager to start rehearsals, I said okay.

For the location of rehearsals I selected a clearing in the woods between the back row cottages and Guardian Mountain and we each brought a folding chair to sit on while we watched the scenes being rehearsed. The opening scene was the moment when the fisherman finds the boy, pulls him into his boat with him and returns with him to his house. Steven performed this scene by himself, as he would be performing all of his scenes during rehearsals since we couldn’t get an actor of the appropriate age to play the boy. His performance was perfect, there was no need for us to go over or redo anything. Kevin and Miranda were next, doing the scene in which the couple that go on to abandon the boy start discussing the idea of having children. It was a romantic scene, featuring a great deal of physical contact and intimacy that Kevin and Miranda pulled off with a level of realism that astonished all of us. Without taking any cues from me they walked into and out of each other’s arms, took the other’s hand, took hold of the other from behind and nestled their chin on their shoulder with such perfect timing and execution that as a couple they were a marvel to behold.

They monopolised our attention, rendering us oblivious to Hannah’s reaction to what we were seeing. The final act of the scene called for a kiss between the two characters, a kiss which Miranda and Kevin lingered on for longer than was necessary. The silence that prevailed among us for the duration of Miranda and Kevin’s scene and especially during and immediately after the kiss was vacuous. It was broken by the sound of twigs and dry leaves on the ground being crunched as Hannah ran away from us as fast as her legs would carry her. Apart from Steven, her reaction was understood by us all. Miranda was the first to react and run after her, leaving the rest of us behind to wonder if this was going to change the way we all felt about each other as friends.

Hannah

How could they do this?! How could they do this?! I thought to myself as I ran through the forest. Miranda knew I had feelings for Kevin; Kevin must have known that I had feelings for him; how could they do that to me?! How could they embarrass me like that in front of all the others?!

I ran without any destination in mind, thinking only of getting as far away from all of them as I could. When I was out of the forest and had ran past the two rows of cabins I was on the beach and could go no further. I paced up and down in a fog of confusion, unable to understand how I’d missed the existence of feelings between Miranda and Kevin. When Kevin had offered to give her a ride to the campsite I’d thought he was just being nice. How long had I been oblivious to this? And was I the only one who was oblivious to it?

Miranda came running out of the forest toward me just as I was in the middle of these thoughts, and at that moment the sight of her was more than I could handle.

“No! Go away!” I yelled at her when I saw her making her way toward me.

“Hannah, wait!” She yelled after me when I started walking away from her, “Hannah!”

“How could you?! You know how I feel about him!”

“Hannah, it was only a scene; the only reason I did it was because you refused.”

“That was more than a scene! There is something between you and Kevin; that was made obvious by that scene you did.”

“We were just acting; there is nothing between me and Kevin, there couldn’t be.”

“How can you expect me to believe that after what I just saw?!”

“Because I like Lisa!”

“What?”

In an instant, all of the anger and confusion that I was feeling dissipated and was replaced by a confusion that was even more difficult to overcome.

“You like Lisa? What does that even mean? A girl liking another girl? What is that?”

“I don’t know, but it’s how I feel and I can’t do anything about my feelings because I’m afraid that if I do something will happen to me. I don’t know what to do…”

Miranda started crying then; being the only one there it was up to me to comfort her. She sobbed and heaved in my arms as I continued my struggle to make sense of what she’d just disclosed to me. Never before had I heard of anything as bizarre as someone being attracted to someone else of the same gender. Miranda was right to be afraid. Most likely the reason we’d never heard of anything like it before was because the governing authorities had decided that such relationships were a threat to Prospera’s existence.

Having been angry at Miranda only moments earlier I held onto her fearful of one day suddenly losing my friend, because what this meant was that like Kevin, Miranda was in mortal danger.

“You mustn’t say a word about this to anyone else, it’s too dangerous.”

Too depleted to talk, Miranda nodded her assent.

“I think we should tell Kevin though, if anything were to happen we’d need his help in handling it.”

“Okay, but nobody else can find out.”

“You know we can trust him.”

I felt so bad for Miranda. She’d gone through absolute hell coming to grips with what our trip into the forest had exposed us to and the whole time she was dealing with this as well. We were all relieved to see Miranda coming out of her shell and socializing with different people but the reality was that she still needed our unyielding support and she needed it now as much as she did following our return from the forest. I would be there for her, as would Kevin, and we would need to convince the others not to start worrying about her any less based on the change they’d seen in her on this camping trip.

I walked her back to her cabin and made sure she climbed into bed so she could have a rest. She desperately needed one and I wasn’t going to leave her side until Lisa returned and could take over watching over her from me. I didn’t need to wait very long, Lisa returned after just over an hour, at which point Miranda was asleep.

“What happened with her?” She asked me softly to avoid waking Miranda, who had fallen asleep.

“She had to deal with too much for one day I think; the rehearsal, chasing after me after my reaction to the rehearsal; it all took a severe toll on her.”

“Okay, I understand. Did you two talk, about what happened at the rehearsal, because if you’re worried about Miranda and Kevin you should know…”

“I know; it was ridiculous of me to react the way I did. I think it’s this place, it’s not just my emotions that are getting away from me, it’s everybody’s; Darren and Kevin have both observed it.”

I couldn’t believe the way I’d behaved. Losing control of my emotions was no excuse for me treating Miranda the way I had. We had all undertaken to be nothing but accommodating and gentle with her and because of petty jealousy on my part I had potentially set her back years. More and more, the question of what the point of the camping trip was troubled me. Everything that was going on during the camping trip was in complete violation of so many rules and already in just a few days things that we never would have imagined doing in the village had become commonplace. A boy and a girl had been caught in bed together; four boys had gotten into a fistfight that Kevin had had to break up. If things kept going like this there was no telling what would end up happening. The Education Committee must have known that in the absence of adult supervision these sorts of things would happen, so why then would they send us here when they were so vigilant in ensuring that none of the things that were happening here happened when we were in the village?

As I always did when I was plagued by uncertainty, I sought out Kevin. Having had this experience with Miranda I understood why he was keeping to himself and wished that I had come to understand it sooner. I found him sitting on an old, large, rotting tree trunk on the shore not too far away from the cabins. He’d chosen it as the place where he preferred to spend most of his time because it afforded him privacy and if ever we needed him we’d know exactly where to find him. Kevin was so far ahead of us in deciphering Prospera that whenever we were struggling with something just the sight of him proved calming. Afraid of any awkwardness there might be between us following my reaction to seeing him kissing Miranda I didn’t approach him with the same ease with which I would ordinarily approach him. In typical Kevin fashion he responded to my approach with a disarming smile, reassuring me that I could talk with him without having to worry about any discomfort between us stemming from what had occurred earlier.

“Did you and Miranda talk?” He asked me after I’d taken a seat next to him on the trunk.

“Yeah, everything’s fine, but there was something she told me that she’s been keeping to herself for years that could place her in a lot of danger.”

“What is it?”

“She told me that she likes Lisa; she’s attracted to her.”

“Oh that, I already knew about that,” he responded nonchalantly.

“She told you? She didn’t tell me that you already knew when I said we should tell you.”

“She didn’t tell me, I noticed it a long time ago, it was impossible to miss.”

“How could you notice it? There’s never been anything like it in Prospera before, how can you recognize something without knowing what it is?”

“Just because you’ve never seen something before doesn’t mean it can’t be real. You can tell from the way Miranda looks at Lisa that her feelings for her are very real.”

“Do you think we’ve never come across anything like this before because whenever it has come up the governing authorities have ‘dealt with it’?”

“If that’s why you think this puts Miranda in danger, you’re right; I can easily see them regarding this as a problem capable of destabilizing the village that needs to be ‘dealt with’ as you say. You’re the only one who knows?”

“Yes.”

“We need to make sure it stays that way, especially while we’re here.”

“You’re isolating yourself this way because you think there’s a reason for us to be careful while we’re here; what is it?”

“I think we’re being watched while we’re here, it’s the only explanation for why we’re here that makes sense.”

“How can they be watching us, we’re here by ourselves. If we are being watched it would mean that some of the other students here are the ones doing it.”

“That’s exactly what I think, that’s why I’m keeping away from all of them.”

“If they wanted one of the students to spy for them wouldn’t they have asked me? Wouldn’t it be better from their perspective to keep the number of people who know about their clandestine activities to a minimum?”

“It could be they don’t trust you as much anymore, or it could be they don’t want to overburden you.”

“Who do you think it is?”

“I don’t know; I’ve been watching them all since day one trying to spot something out of the ordinary but so far nothing.”

“How do I know it’s not you, sitting here and watching everybody; wouldn’t that make you the likeliest candidate?” I asked him jokingly.

“You’re learning,” he responded approvingly.

“Is there anything that you would be doing, if you believed like all of the others that we were totally free here to do whatever we wanted?”

“You mean is there any girl who I would be spending my time here with?”

“Well, is there?”

“We shouldn’t talk about this.”

“I had planned on not talking about what happened at that rehearsal but I can’t ignore it; you know why I acted the way I did, I need to know how you feel about it.”

“It’s too dangerous for us to be having this conversation; whatever plans they have for you don’t involve me, so whatever you’re thinking you need to forget it.”

“I can’t forget it. I love you, Kevin; how am I supposed to forget that?”

“Hannah…”

“I don’t know how you feel, I think I do but I don’t know, so if you just tell me that you don’t love me I won’t speak of this again.”

“I can’t say that.”

“So you do love me then?”

“Of course I love you Hannah, but they won’t allow us to be together.”

“But if we love each other…”

“It doesn’t work that way. One of Lisa’s roommates before she left her cabin to stay with Miranda was a boy who is being trained to one day work producing medicines from the plants and herbs in the medicinal greenhouses; the girl who was supposed to be Miranda’s roommate, Penny, is going to be a playwright, one of Miranda’s male roommates, Steven, is an actor; do you get what I’m saying?”

“They’re rooming us with people who they think are perfect matches for us; that’s sick.”

“That’s one of the reasons we’re here, I realized that the moment I learned who all of our roommates were to be. Do you understand now? Just because we have feelings for each other it doesn’t mean they’ll allow us to be together; they’ve got their own plans for all of us.”

“I’ll talk to my mother, and to my grandfather, if they know how strongly we feel about each other maybe they’ll allow us to be together.”

“All that would do is put us in danger; please tell me you won’t talk with them about this.”

“You really are terrified, aren’t you?”

“One person is already dead because of me, and because of me all of you are now in danger, I don’t want to be responsible for the same thing happening to any of you, that’s why ever since what happened in the forest I’ve been trying to remain as anonymous as possible.”

“We all thought that you’d lost interest having found the proof you’d been searching for.”

“There’s still too much I don’t know for me to have lost interest, and if we’re all in danger then I can’t afford to be any less watchful.”

The image of Prospera that we had been brought up to embrace, that of a paradise, didn’t seem compatible with the many burdens that we were having to carry at such a young age: Miranda and her attraction to Lisa, Kevin and his concern for all of our safety, me and my awareness of the knowledge that was being kept from everyone else. We were only fourteen and we were carrying burdens that were either breaking us, as was the case with me and my feelings for Kevin, or had broken us, as was the case with Miranda. That evening, as Kevin and I sat together watching the waves crashing into the shore, I began to feel what he had felt since he was just a small child, a strong sense of the inherent wrongness of much of what made up Prospera. I felt sick thinking about how I could have been oblivious to it for so long. Fortunately Kevin was there. He put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close to him, allowing me to feel, for that moment at least, that somehow we would all get through this.

Miranda

Rehearsing that scene with Kevin, I had felt something strong enough to make me feel like I was being dishonest to Hannah when I told her that there was nothing between me and Kevin. From the first moment of physical contact between us during the scene I felt something that I never expected I would feel with a boy. The feeling kept growing throughout the scene and exploded into something I couldn’t make the slightest sense of when we kissed. I was in love with Lisa; I shouldn’t have experienced the feeling that I did when my lips were pressed against Kevin’s, a feeling so strange it caused me to freeze and keep my lips pressed against Kevin’s. All this time had I been misinterpreting the feelings I had for Lisa as romantic attraction? Were the feelings that I had for Lisa and that I had felt with Kevin the product of emotional instability on my part? Or was it Kevin in particular for whom these feelings had been aroused? Like Hannah I too had developed a deep level of trust in Kevin, it was possible that was the cause of my reaction and not any genuine feelings of attraction. But if the trust that I had in Kevin was causing me to be attracted to him then I was going to continue being attracted to him; how was I going to keep this from getting between me and Hannah again?

I’d told her about my attraction to Lisa to disabuse her of the idea of me being attracted to Kevin and had consequently given myself an added worry: people now knew about my attraction to Lisa. I didn’t think that there was any reason for me not to trust Kevin to keep my secret safe but the idea of no longer being alone in knowing about it was a scary thought, scary enough to cause me to have my first anxiety episode in months. Thankfully by then Hannah had stopped being angry, and kindly held me before walking me back to my cabin where she stayed with me until I’d fallen asleep. When I woke up Lisa was there, laying in her bed and reading a book. It was dark out and perfectly silent; night had fallen. Had she stayed up late so that when I woke up she could be there for me? I wondered.

“Hey,” she said to me when she saw that I was up, after which she put down her book and got out of bed and came to sit next to me on mine.

“Are you okay? Do you want me to get you anything? Some juice, some milk, some food?” She asked, gently stroking my face.

“Some milk, please.”

“Okay.”

She left to get me some milk from the kitchen, returning shortly with a big glass filled to the brim.

“Here,” she said, handing me the milk and retaking her seat next to me on the bed.

Having been asleep for several hours my throat was dry and the creamy milk quenched my thirst wonderfully; I drank the full glass in one go and finished it wishing for more.

“Want some more?” Lisa asked me.

“No, thanks,” I answered, not wanting to ask too much of Lisa.

She took the glass from me and set it down on the nightstand between our beds and climbed under the covers next to me in bed, putting her arm around me so that my head was resting against her breast.

“Aren’t you glad I kicked that other girl out of here and took her place as your roommate?”

“Well at first I thought that you were being a bit pushy but now I’m glad that you did it; I’m happy you’re here.”

“I still can’t get over Hannah’s reaction; how could she ever think that there was something between you and Kevin?”

“It was the realism of the scene, her reaction wasn’t based on any pre-existing suspicions she had.”

“You two were believable as a couple; I guess if I was Hannah I also would’ve been worried.”

“She understands now that there’s nothing for her to worry about, hopefully starting tomorrow this whole thing will be behind us.”

“You’re really amazing, you know that? For you to be the most gifted classical musician in the village and a talented actress is really incredible. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s anything you can’t do.”

“I don’t know if I’d call myself a talented actress; that was the first time I’d ever tried acting.”

“Which makes it all the more impressive, and I’m not the only one who thinks so, Darren was saying that if he gets to stage the play he might ask you to play the role again.”

“What about Kevin? He was pretty good too.”

“He was, but he only agreed to do it because it was going to be in front of a small group and to do Darren a favour, no way will he perform on stage in front of an audience of six hundred.”

“It was surprising though, wasn’t it? That he was so natural. He’s always so dark and distant; I wasn’t expecting him to be as good as he was.”

“None of us were, except maybe Hannah. She’s probably always known about that side of him, it’s probably why she’s always liked him.”

“Do you think what happened today is going to change anything between those two? I mean we can’t pretend anymore that Kevin doesn’t know.”

“We’ll have to wait and see. When Hannah left here she said she was going to look for Kevin, maybe they’ll work it out.”

Lisa and I had never been as close as we were that night. I put my arm around her midriff and held her tightly, not to take advantage of the opportunity I’d been presented with to enjoy intimate physical contact with the girl I had feelings for but because I was so glad to have her as my friend. Lying with her I wasn’t thinking about the softness of her breast under my cheek, I was thinking about the past two years during which all four of my friends had been with me nearly every moment of every day. The episode that I’d had earlier following my confrontation with Hannah was not going to consign me to my bed for days as previous episodes had. I didn’t feel the same sense of fear and isolation that night as I did when I had had all of my previous episodes. How could I, when I was warmly ensconced in Lisa’s arms.