Island of Men

Chapter 1- How it all started

Emma felt like crap. 

And that was putting it lightly.  She turned on her side and made a sound that was a mixture of a groan and a yawn.  Basically, she sounded like a dying cow.  Why do I feel so bad? She thought.  It's not like I went running, I would have remembered if I was feeling that crazy last night.  

She tried to sit up, but she felt as if her entire torso was being pricked repetitively by a needle, the feeling you get when your toes fall asleep, when you have been reading for too long. 

But this covered all of her arms, all the way down to her legs and toes.  She felt like a Monday after a short weekend.  But something wasn't right. 

Emma opened her eyes and blinked.  Once.  Twice. What she saw wasn't the grey walls of her bedroom, or the clichely wallpapered interior of her room on the ship- it was just sky.  Sky that never seemed to end, sky that was the bluest she had ever seen. 

She sat up quickly, her entire body screaming in outrage, furious that it couldn't be left to sulk in its misery.  She felt the ground beneath her now, and it was sand.  Not the pleasant sand that you see on the front of vacations sold by Sandals, or in Facebook scams that offer sketchily cheap trips to Cabo.   This sand was wet, and compact, like brown sugar that has been sitting in a Tupperware container for a few decades. 

This was weird.  This was really weird.  She painfully and slowly moved to the left, as a small wave of water attempted to pull her back to wherever she had come from.  All she saw was beach.  Miles and miles of beach. 

Miles! She gasped.  Where is Miles?  Where are they all?  All of it fell together as quickly as the sand beneath the waves re-arranged itself, and she understood.  She had been on a ship, with her friends, for a junior summer trip.  They were all there, all twenty-four of them, including Miles. 

The events of the previous night became clear.  They had all been dancing, it was her class's favorite activity to do in the evenings.  When the rain had started to fall, they hadn't cared.  It was one of those moments where you feel that life is undoubtedly worth living, where you are thankful for every previous experience, good and bad, that brought you to the present.  They hadn't even thought to bother about dressing up, they just danced in jeans and shorts and sandals. 

Emma looked down and frowned; the laces of her worn black converses were tangled and the rest of the shoes were completely wet. 

Honey bunches of no.  They had danced, and danced, and before they had realized it, the rain was no longer an accompaniment to the music, but a raucous guest, coming to ruin the fun.  And ruin it did.  Soon, the lightning joined the party, proclaiming his frustration at a lack of invitation.  The ship tossed and jolted, people and items flying everywhere.  Emma remembered falling, and then just a cold feeling. 

This wasn't the cold you feel when a few pesky students persuade the teacher to keep the window open on a chilly day, nor the cold you feel when you first step out of the shower on a winter morning, leaving behind the comfort of those few thousand heated water droplets. 

It was the cold of a snowball, purposely thrown in the face.  The cold of being left behind.  The cold of feeling like you need to skip a meal to be able to fit into a dress. 

This was the cold that enveloped Emma, and that was all.  She remembered nothing else.  Emma sat nostalgically.  There wasn't much else to do with her body throwing a fit as it was.  That's when she heard it- a groan, a whisper of pain in the wind. 

She whipped around quickly, regretting that decision as soon as it was made and completed.  There, lying not fifteen feet away, was a wide expanse of trees, a Robinson Crusoe type of landscape.  And a little way down the beach was a body.