Savages

1: Fantasy Vs Reality

Winter Solstice, Island of Hirta.

Back when she was at school, in normal life, before the island, like a million years ago or something, Judit MaVae had a crush on this guy, Dek. It was so far away now it was embarrassing to think about it, really. It seemed like another girl, another planet.

But she was thinking about it, even though it was embarrassing. She was thinking about it because back then, when she tanged Dek, Judit'd had this very specific fantasy.

Dek had been older than her, and about a gazillion times more popular. Judit might as well've existed in a different dimension for all he noticed her. Well, he did notice her eventually... but that was another story. For a long time he didn't notice her, and Judit's desperate desires for his affection could only be satisfied by her imagination; by elaborately constructed fantasies in which fate threw them unavoidably and intimately together.

In one, Judit and Dek would get stuck in a broken-down lift overnight. In another, they'd be accidentally locked in an empty classroom. Occasionally they'd become the only victims of a military lock-down, in an atmospheric yet deserted café.

But her favourite fantasy, the one she was thinking about, had been the one about the deserted island. They'd be on a plane—why didn't matter, usually a school trip or something, as if their armpit of a school would ever take them on a trip—and the plane would crash.

Judit's mind would conveniently circumvent the terrifying ordeal, any tragic but necessary detail of mangled bodies and dead friends, and go straight for the romantic reward: her and Dek, survivors, stranded on a beautiful island.

No rules, no teachers, no world. Just togetherness and time and touch, stretching out ahead of them like a slow-motion, fern-curling dream. Skit, she'd loved that fantasy.

That's why she was thinking of it now, as she ducked under branches, going deeper into the forest, heading towards the familiar, solitary darkness of the caves. The tip of her nose was icy, and her breath fogged in the air like a spectre, yet this was undeniably a beautiful island, despite the winter cold.

She couldn't escape the irony. She'd thought about that deserted island all the time. How dream-like and perfect, how incredibly amazing, life would be if she could only be somewhere like this, away from everything, together with the boy she loved.

Well, here she was. She was in this dream of a place, totally free, and he was here too. A boy she loved utterly and completely, a boy she loved thick and heavy in her skin and her bones and her breath and her heart and every organ that lived in her pulsating, delirious body.

A boy who she loved maddeningly, passionately, more by far than she'd ever known she was capable of loving anybody, back in the silly, childish days of her tang for Dek.

This was just like the fantasy, exactly what she wanted. And it was literally the worst thing that had ever happened to her.