Chapter Nine
Milo
I’m with Allie.
On a tiny boat.
In the Arctic Ocean.
There’re three dinghies, and each pair was assigned one, plus a shit ton of equipment to balance in the bottom, and now all six of us are sailing to shore away from Beefcake Lars’ big-ass boat (I’m sure Allie would roll her eyes if she heard me call it that, correct me with the right name, be all self-important and, ‘Actually, that’s a world-renowned Big-Butted Boat.
Not ass. You mustn’t say ass. You’ll die in the camp if you say ass’).
Speaking of the ‘camp’, it seems to be just .
. . a beach? A gnarly, untouched beach. I’m not sure what I expected, but even calling it a beach is a stretch, because that is not what it is.
It’s more like a layer of cement-dark sand, still half coated in snow.
I’ve camped before. Mom and I used to go when I was young.
Campsites with picnic tables and showers; just a few miles away from home and Dad’s eternal crankiness.
But this is . . . real-deal shit. Wild camping.
In snow. The sort of camping you watch on TV kicked back on your couch with an extra large meat feast pizza, while saying to your friends, ‘Yeah, screw that, I’d rather stay alive and stay here. ’
Wish I was on my couch right now actually.
The atmosphere on this boat is so suffocating, I feel pretty sure some of this fancy science equipment would pick it up, measure it on a graph, like the sharp red spikes of a seismogram.
Maybe Jameson and Iris can already see it from land. An angry, smoky red haze.
They went on this nightmare first, except it doesn’t seem like a nightmare for them; Iris’s head was thrown back with laughter the whole way, Jameson non-stop talking and filming. They’re already on land setting up, erecting two huge white tents that sort of look like those ones from CSI.
Lars anchored his big-assed boat, and now he and Polly sail in another dinghy, just ahead of us, weighed down with all this stuff but still slicing through the water as if it’s nothing.
Until we reach the shore, it’s just us. Allie and me.
In a tiny boat, on the coldest, darkest-looking water I’ve ever been close to, weighed with our own heap of stuff. Oh, and painful silence.
Silence.
Silence.
More damn silence.
I clear my throat. Allie’s eyes, round, blue, slide to me, then back to the horizon again. Serious. They’re always so serious.
I sigh. I stretch – shit.
OK, I don’t think she noticed that I stretched a little too far back then; almost socked heads with the ocean—
‘Careful,’ she sighs.
‘Sorry.’
Sorry what? Sorry I almost . . . fell in? Died?
Are there things that kill here, in the water?
Polar sharks or something. There are whales, right?
Killer ones? Things in the sky I know about these days, thanks to Allie, but I don’t know about shit in the water.
Not sure Allie would’ve thrown me a lifebuoy, so I feel I should’ve probably become acquainted. Bit late for that now though, I guess.
‘So, like, uh . . . will we just . . . be there?’ I ask, and I wince.
But since the snowmobile, I want to talk to her more.
I keep going over and over what she said about coming here – about her DMs and fans and her Christmas alone and .
. . it made my blood run red-fucking-hot, despite the ice cold of the arctic air, could feel my veins practically popping in my forearms. I wanted to say, ‘Well, that’s the name of the game when you press publish on your life for your own gain!
’ But, equally, I wanted to wrap my arms around her, protect her.
Because maybe she underestimated it. Maybe she underestimated the backlash of being celebrity gossip when she chose to leak everything.
It can be more brutal than you could ever describe to someone.
Being so exposed and picked apart that your mind begins to warp and you start to believe what literal strangers who only know you from a movie and a blurred photo of you at an LA coffee shop are saying about you.
‘Sorry?’ she huffs.
‘Oh, I meant the camping? Will we just be setting up . . . just – there? Like, on the pebbles and ice and sand and stuff?’
‘Do you mean, the beach?’
I laugh. ‘Well, yeah.’
‘Yes,’ she shrugs. ‘No hotels here, Milo.’
‘Ha. No?’ What a smart mouth. ‘Shame. That’s all a guy like me is used to. As you said, I’m going to die out here probably.’
‘I didn’t say that,’ she replies.
‘No?’
‘No.’ She looks down at her gloved fingers; splays them like a starfish. I glance behind her, to Polly, who watches us and then quickly grins and waves like she’s been caught. Maybe there really is a red haze around us . . .
‘I didn’t say exactly that,’ Allie carries on. ‘You won’t die – so long as I’m with you, anyway.’
‘Are you absolutely sure you can promise yourself that? You’ve got four days of me.’
And for the first time in eighteen hours, warmth washes over her face like a passing sunray, and there’s the tiniest, tiniest smile at the edge of her mouth; as if she’s holding in laughter, and I feel .
. . I dunno – high on it. Like I’ve won something.
Cracked a code. (Dumb animal appears to be firmly in control right now.)
The feeling fades fast, though. A swift retract, like a mark in the sand.
I think about the station – that clinical cafeteria, the strangers trudging the corridors, the wilderness that surrounds it.
I hate knowing she came here alone. But .
. . it didn’t need to be this way. I told her to just give me a second.
I told her we’d come up with a plan, that I’d speak to my publicist. She seemed .
. . tentatively all right with that. We even talked about meeting the next day, before I flew back.
That was when she blocked me. On everything.
Erased me like I never, ever existed. Then the website statement. Then, weeks later, the goddamn podcast.
‘Does this feel weird to you?’ I ask, despite the fact I know she really wants me to shut my mouth. ‘That this is the first time we’ve actually met. It does for me.’
‘Yes,’ she says quietly. ‘Everything aside, seeing you . . . it’s weird.’
‘Jameson said it’s like something on TV.’
She gives a single nod.
‘Catfish or something . . .’
Her head snaps up. ‘Catfish?’
Ah, fuck. Words. This is what happens when, despite extensive media training, you’re always fighting the urge to fill every gap with words without thinking. Rogue words make their way out. Stupid ones that piss people off.
‘I obviously didn’t mean—’
‘What? That I’m not what you expected online—’ She rolls her eyes.
‘That’s not what I meant. Especially about you—’
‘It’s fine, Milo. I wasn’t actually being serious.’
‘You are what I expected.’
‘I was kidding—’
‘More even.’
She says nothing to that, but her chest rises and falls beneath her coat.
Ah, shit, what is this, an endless ocean? Because, of course, we’ve got a huge hunk of silence once more. She pulls on her hat, adjusts her hair under the edge of it. Her face is pink and flushed.
‘And, like, there were things I didn’t notice, of course, online,’ I carry on. Because I don’t know when to shut up. Because I feel responsible and guilty for her flushed face. Because my clueless inner animal is a galloping rogue . . . ‘Didn’t notice on camera, I mean.’
‘Milo, stop talking.’
‘Like – I – I didn’t realise you had that – little thing?’ I gesture to my own mouth, tap an index finger above my top lip.
She raises her eyebrows. ‘Little thing?’
‘The . . . the little line above your lip.’ I swallow.
Shut up, man. Shut up. ‘W-when you smile. You can’t see everything on video chat, I guess.
’ It’s like a second smile, I want to say.
But I don’t, because she looks mad again.
And it makes me want to say, Oh you’re mad?
Yeah, well, me too, gorgeous, but I’m the one who was betrayed here and I’m trying to be a grown-up.
We move across the waves. The motor of the boat seems to be making a weird humming sound now. And that’s all there is for what feels like an age. Increasingly loud humming. Sloshing of waves. Distant laughter from the shore. Allie’s eyebrows knitting together.
‘All good, R2?’ crackles Iris’s voice on the walkie-talkie, laughter around the words. ‘Alive and well?’ And the way she says it – it’s an inside joke vibe, if ever I heard one.
‘Confirmed,’ Allie says, humourlessly.
‘Hot Shot Actor still on board, present and correct?’
‘Confirmed,’ says Allie again, flatly.
‘Unfortunately,’ I say. ‘Go on. There’s still time to add an unfortunately on. I don’t mind.’
‘Why would I need to add an unfortunately on?’
‘It would be easier to be rid of me, right? Nothing to explain if I’ve accidentally fallen overboard, had a little rifle accident. It’s a heroic way to die, so I’ll take it.’
Allie barely reacts, save for the tiniest eye-rolling whatever-you-say smirk.
She moves to rest her chin on her hand, arms tight and close to her body. Sandy bangs fall over her eyes and she squints, moves them with her fingers, which my body reacts to; finds cute.
Stupid. The body is a stupid, disobedient machine, stuck in the ‘back then’.
Back then, when were so close. Back then, when I’d listen to her sleepy voice, her breath catch in her throat when we talked at 3 a.m. The memory makes my limbs tense.
Back then, we were – at least, I believed at the time – moments away from . . . something. Everything.
And here we are.
Nothing.
Strangers.
In the arctic. Me and Allie. Victim and perpetrator. Right?
Allie suddenly jumps up, leans over the boat.
‘The . . . the motor,’ she says, with more feeling than I’ve heard her show ever since we got here. ‘It’s . . . oh my God, it’s blown.’
‘Are you kidding?’