Reindeer Games
Page 2

“Wow,” I said. “You think they could have figured that out a little better, don’t you think?”
“Bettah?” Clarissa giggled. “Are you from Jersey Shore?”
Okay, if I didn’t kill Clarissa in week one, it would be a friggin’ miracle. “I’m from Boston. And I’m Luna.” It nearly killed me to do it, but I smiled at all of them as if this were the most fun I’d had in forever. Whee.
“Owen,” said the last guy, and I tensed at the sound of his voice. It was the asshole that had pointed out I was rowing wrong. He was number one on my shit list at the moment. Owen was clearly on the island – uh, Alaska – for looks. He was hot enough, with dusky skin, a strong, clean jawline and the prettiest pair of amber-colored hazel eyes I’d ever seen.
Too bad about that whole total ‘douchebag’ thing he had going.
“Well,” I said, sitting up and dusting off my hands. “Now that we’ve all introduced ourselves, we should probably make a fire and boil some water so we can have something to drink.”
“No,” said Owen.
I turned to look at him, incredulous. “What do you mean, no?”
“I mean, no.” He straightened and got to his feet. Not only was he pretty to look at, but he was tall and muscular. I resented that, because every time he spoke, I hated him more, and I knew if he was tall and strong, he’d last that much further in the game. “We need shelter before we do anything. It’s going to rain.”
“Listen, Owen,” I began, trying to keep my tone reasonable. “There are trees all along the edge of this beach. If it rains, we can duck under one of those. We need drinking water because we can’t get dehydrated.”
“No,” he said again. “We can’t just duck ‘un-dah’ a tree if it rains, Luna.” His tone was scathing. “Haven’t you ever heard of lightning?”
“Haven’t you ever heard of waterborne parasites?” I was pretty sure I’d seen one too many episodes of House to ever drink anything from a stream. Like, ever.
“It’s clear we need a leader here in camp,” Owen said, those pretty eyes staring daggers down at me. “So why don’t we have a vote? Those in favor of me being the leader, raise your hand.”
Every hand went up but mine.
I gritted my teeth. “Okay, fine. Shelter it is.” I could play along. I wasn’t stupid.
If Owen wanted to run this tribe, I’d let him. And when he ran it straight into the ground, his would be the first name we’d write down.
 
~~ * * * ~~
 
By the time night fell, we had about half of a shelter. Unfortunately, it was the wrong half, considering that Owen thought it was a brilliant idea to start from the floor and work our way up. Oh sure, I thought to myself. Because if it snows, what you totally want is a fucking floor instead of a roof.
But I kept that to myself.
In fact, I was pretty quiet all around. I mean, I knew I was right. I didn’t have to rub it in anyone’s face to prove that I was. They could already tell. I noticed some of the others kept shooting me looks as it grew dark.
“You think we should build a fire?” Patty asked in a perky voice. “How cold do you think it’ll get?”
“My guess is pretty cold,” Gary said. “Why else would they give us matches on day one without us doing anything to win them?”
And finally, someone had come to the same conclusion that I had earlier that day. They’d given us thick parkas and matches because they didn’t want us to die, even though they were sending us out to rough it in Alaska in the dead of winter. Dead people probably didn’t make good TV.
But I kept my mouth shut about this, too.
Instead, I huddled on my end of the uncomfortable, lumpy platform — because there was no way I was calling it a shelter – and decided to dig through the bag of supplies that they’d given each of us. Maybe we had some extra layers we could put on. I was already cold, and with the sun dropping below the skies, it was just going to get colder.
“I’m freezing,” Clarissa whined. She sidled up to Owen where he sat on the other end of the platform. “Can I come cuddle with you?”
“Of course,” Owen said, and wrapped his arm around her.
She promptly unzipped the front of his jacket and shoved her hand down it. “Ooo, you’re so warm,” she cooed.
It’s all that hot air, I thought to myself.
“Well, let’s try and see if we can’t make a fire,” Pat said to Patty.
After about twenty minutes of watching them fumble with the matches on some wet wood, I figured there was not going to be a fire. I wanted to try it myself, but that’d seem too aggressive, and the red team already thought I was pushy. So I dug into my pack to see what the good people of Endurance Island had provided for me to wear for the next month. A t-shirt, some panties, a pair of insulated pants that I’d be putting on in about two minutes flat, some water-shoes, and a small, crinkly little square package that I couldn’t figure out. I held it up to the fading light, frowning at it.
What the heck was it?
“I think the fire’s a bust,” Patty eventually said, pulling me away from my contemplation of the mystery item.
No surprise there. I unwrapped the little square and began to unfold it. It crinkled and was made of a thin, flimsy sort of plastic, but it was big – like the size of a sheet. “Is this some sort of blanket?”
All eyes turned to me and my crinkly mess. A moment later, everyone was digging through their packs, looking for their own. “It’s a thermal blanket,” Owen told us all.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
“Everyone get yours out and sleep in it tonight,” Owen told us, as if we couldn’t figure out how to use a blanket on our own. “We’ll finish the shelter in the morning.”
Obediently, the others crawled onto the platform and we all squished together to preserve body heat. One after another, blankets crinkled open, and then there was nothing to do but lay in the dark, shiver, and wait for dawn.
 
~~ * * * ~~
 
It rained that night. Of course it did. We didn’t have a roof, so God had to clearly be punishing us. You would think it would snow, but nope. Fat, drippy plops of rain with little icy cores flicked and spit on us all night, to the point that we wore our blankets over our heads and questioned why we’d ever signed up for this stupid show.
Why, oh why, couldn’t they have taken us to Bora Bora?
When the sun came up, after a night of horrific sleep, I decided that I didn’t care if the others got mad that I was pushy or not – I was going to make a damn fire. Patty seemed to have woken up with the same motto, and the two of us chatted and joked while we tried to get things going.
No sooner had we made a small fire than we put on a pot of water to boil (the pot the only thing they’d left at our campsite for us other than a team flag), than Clarissa came running up with a gaily wrapped Christmas present. “Santa’s elves left us a gift!”
“Really?” I asked drily. “You think it was Santa’s elves? Really?”
Clarissa froze at the sound of my sarcasm, and her lower lip began to quiver. Cameramen zoomed in, clearly smelling a fight.