Cathy

As long as I’d known them I’d never gotten the sense that they’d lived such hard and complicated lives. From the little that they’d told me about it at breakfast Prospera sounded like an Orwellian nightmare; they’d done well to survive and escape. I was happy to have been the one who’d found them; had they been left to wander they could have ended up in all sorts of trouble with their lack of knowledge about the world. They were good kids, each special in their own way, Miranda in particular with her musical talent. After hearing their stories they all looked very different to me. I’d learned so much about them in such a short space of time that they felt like strangers that I had to get to know all over again. I’d come to know Kevin as a quiet and unassuming character and Hannah as the strong leader of their quartet. I’d clearly gotten them all wrong.

Hannah’s case was a curious one. She was almost unrecognizable from the girl that I’d taught how to drive the truck, the tractor, and how to use the computer and the internet. She had turned her back on the ‘outside world’ as they called it and thought of me, a citizen of that world, as a hostile entity. Kevin, Lisa and Miranda had changed in my eyes but I felt no increase in the distance between us; I wasn’t afraid to ask them questions about their lives as Prospera children and it was reassuring to know that they were coming back to Huntingdale with me. I spent that day in the cabin learning as much about Prospera from them as I could. Kevin appeared to know the most about the place and he was the most willing to talk. Later that morning, after the dishes from breakfast had been washed, I sat next to him on the porch where he was sharpening a knife on a whetstone. Miranda and Lisa had gone for a walk in the woods, and Hannah was busy with something inside the cabin.

“Were Miranda and Lisa right to fear for their lives in Prospera?”

“I’d say they were. In Prospera nothing is left to chance. Every year the teenagers in the village are sent on a month long camping trip free from adult supervision where the children they’ve identified as ideal romantic partners for each other are housed in the same cabins; they’ve never done that to facilitate the coupling of two boys or two girls, so it’s a good bet they don’t approve of that.”

“What about you and Hannah? Did they want you to be together?”

“Far from it; they once removed me from school and assigned me to work in the stables to keep us apart.”

“Did it work?”

“No; every day after school she’d come to the stables and we’d each take a horse and ride down to the beach together; when they saw their ploy to keep us apart wasn’t working they let me go back to school.”

“You guys were meant for each other then.”

“For them that’s not enough, all they’re interested in is personality compatibility; couples fighting and separating wouldn’t be good for the harmony of the village.”

“Surely more people must know about all of this.”

“They do, but they dare not say or do anything. That’s the genius of the way they do things in Prospera, they allow people to have just enough information that they’re supposedly not supposed to know to keep them compliant; I’m sure that even the four of us only know a fraction of what they’re up to.”

“The more you tell me about Prospera the more frightening it sounds; should you be going back?”

“Hannah feels she has to go back, something greater than herself is pulling her back, something from her time in Prospera; all I can do is make sure she gets back safely.”

“Aren’t you going to miss her? Why don’t you just refuse to take her back?”

“That wouldn’t stop her, she’d try and get there by herself, and these woods are too dangerous for her to make it through them on her own.”

“What happened when you travelled through the woods?”

“We nearly died of starvation, having only packed a little meat and a bag of apples before leaving; Miranda injured her leg sliding down a muddy bank and we were attacked by wolves, one of which almost got Miranda because she couldn’t run fast enough because of her injury.”

“Wolves? We thought they were all gone by now.”

“There must be only a few of them left, unfortunately we managed to cross paths with them, and they ate all the meat from the deer that I’d killed.”

“This trip…I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“Listen to me, if we get into any trouble I need you to do whatever you have to do to keep yourself safe, don’t worry about us, my main priority on this trip is to keep you safe.”

“I can’t just leave you guys if there’s trouble!”

“I can’t allow anything to happen to you after your family has done so much for us; do you know how to shoot a gun?”

“Yeah.”

“Good, if anything happens grab the gun and run and don’t look back.”

“Why are you so worried about a few wolves if we have a gun? It’ll be easy to scare them off.”

“It’s not the wolves I’m worried about. I’ve always thought that it was too easy for me to survive outside the village after I’d been knocked overboard, and that we had escaped from Prospera too easily. I think they let us leave, that they could’ve stopped us at any time but chose not to. If I’m right and we’re detected on our way back I don’t know what will happen, that’s why I wanted the four of us to make this journey on our own. If anything happens to us it will be our own fellow Prosperans that are responsible for it; but you have nothing to do with any of this, it wouldn’t be right for you to suffer any misfortune at Prospera’s hands.”

My conversation with Kevin on the porch opened my eyes to the dangers that awaited us much more than the conversation at breakfast had. To gather my thoughts I took a walk into the woods in the direction that Miranda and Lisa had gone in. Prospera was feeling to me like a whole other world, not just some isolated village. Their values were in many instances diametrically opposed to ours in the ‘outside world’. I was going into the unknown, they weren’t. Their anxiety about what awaited us gave me added concerns about the wisdom of making this trip.

Miranda and Lisa hadn’t gone too far into the forest; I reached them after only a couple of minutes of walking. They were kissing against a tree; Miranda with her back against the trunk and her arms around Lisa, who had her hand under Miranda’s thigh and was holding up her leg. I stood back and watched them, wary of disturbing and intruding upon them. I noticed something inordinately deep about the way they were kissing each other. They were worried, very worried. Slowly, quietly, I turned around and made my way back to the cabin. What am I doing here? I asked myself as I walked. Being alone in the woods, between these two couples, I was acutely aware of my aloneness, of the fractured state of my life. The only reason I’d followed them was because I’d lost Morgan and I was afraid of losing them too. I had no history with Prospera, I wasn’t in search of answers, I wasn’t needed for anything, in fact, after what Kevin had said about making sure nothing bad happened to me, I could only think of myself as being a burden. I continued walking back to the cabin in a haze, searching for reasons to keep going with the others that made sense, finding none, but not feeling any desire to return home. I was lost, clinging to Hannah and the others as a way of feeling like I was a part of something, which I wasn’t. I was nothing more than what Hannah saw me as: an outsider, an intruder.