Top of the Feud Chain Read online

  “Fine,” Charlie shrugged.

  “I’m coming, too,” Darwin said, grabbing the GPS and limping over to the boulder.

  On top of the boulder, with Darwin bent over the GPS unit, Charlie felt like she might panic-puke. Be calm… she commanded herself. Don’t rush this. She pulled Allie’s bobby pin out of a small zippered pocket on the arm of her flight suit and gestured for Darwin to hand over the GPS unit.

  “What are you doing? Don’t you want to try turning it on?” he said, holding the GPS tightly against his chest.

  “I want to check the motherboard and make sure all the wires look okay before we risk blowing out the unit,” Charlie answered, hoarse with exhaustion. She had rushed when she fit all the pieces back together, and she needed to check her work. Please, her cocoa-brown eyes pleaded with him. I’m too tired to fight.

  “I think we should try it first. If it doesn’t work, we can always open it back up,” Darwin started, but Charlie had already heard enough.

  “No.” She shook her head and snatched the GPS angrily from his hands. “I can’t believe you don’t trust me enough to let me do this right,” she muttered. “Who’s the engineer, Darwin? Me or you?”

  Darwin’s hazel eyes flashed with momentary anger that quickly dissolved into hurt. “Fine. Sorry for trying to help. Let’s do it your way.”

  Charlie nodded silently, blinking away tears of frustration. She knew she’d snapped, but she was mad, too, hurt that Darwin would try to tell her how to do something she knew so much more about than he did. But right now she had a job to do. She would save the anger for later. If there was even going to be a later.

  Charlie looked down at the machine, unscrewing the cover with shaking hands. Then she felt Darwin’s hand on her chin, tilting her face up to his.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his mouth forming a tentative let’s-make-up smile. “No matter what, you’ll always be my angelfish. Don’t forget that.”

  Angelfish. Of course he went there. Because when it came down to it, Darwin knew exactly how to make her feel better. Charlie’s mouth uncurled from a stressed-out pucker as she let her thoughts travel back to the coast of Brazil, where three years ago Darwin had first told her how much he cared about her. They were practically kids still, sitting on the edge of a snorkeling boat that Shira had chartered. Everyone else was either already in the water or working on one of Shira’s documentaries when their Brazilian boat captain pointed out a school of angelfish below.

  “Pez angel. They mate for life,” the captain said. “Muy romantico.”

  Darwin had blushed a deep red, and when the captain turned away, he grabbed Charlie’s hand and whispered that he was pretty sure she was his angelfish. Then he’d jumped into the water. When he surfaced, the school of angelfish had scattered, but Darwin’s goofy smile made Charlie even happier than the fish could.

  Charlie and Darwin had never forgotten that moment. They’d even talked about getting matching angelfish tattoos someday. Charlie looked up at him and wordlessly leaned over to give him a crushing hug, using the last of her strength. Darwin hugged her back, his breath reassuring and warm against her brown hair.

  Suddenly the GPS flicked to life. Their hug must have activated it!

  “Darwin!” Charlie cried, pulling away from him to stare down at the machine. Instead of static, there was a real, clear radio signal.

  “It’s working!” Darwin cheered. He stood up from the boulder and nearly fell off as he yelled to the others. “Guys, we got a signal!”

  Charlie grinned and turned to give the rest of the crew a thumbs-up, but they were all looking at something else. And screaming. And flapping their arms. Allie stood stock-still in the center of the plateau, her mouth a perfect O, her arms in the air. Next to her, Taz was screaming while doing the moonwalk. Mel was on the ground doing snow angels in the dust, his silver legging-encased legs flailing. What was going on?

  Charlie whirled around to see what it was behind her that had gotten everyone’s attention, not daring to hope for a plane. But when her eyes met the sky, she saw that was exactly what it was.

  “That was fast,” Darwin said as a shiny blimp floated toward them. Definitely not your average Delta flight to Delaware, but hey, it would work. And it was coming closer.

  Waving her arms and screaming louder than the front row of a Justin Bieber concert, Charlie almost sobbed with relief. Darwin grabbed her shoulders and spun her around, and the two of them jumped up and down together, hugging hard enough to crush each other’s windpipes but not caring in the least.

  Now their version of forever wouldn’t end in the desert. In fact, Charlie realized as the plane got closer, forever might actually be a long, long time. Thank goodness. Because these two angelfish had a lot more swimming to do.

  11

  THE MOJAVE DESERT

  TOP OF THE PLATEAU

  NOVEMBER 3RD

  10:15 A.M.

  Shocked into statue-caliber stillness in the center of the plateau, Allie dared to breathe a tentative sigh of relief as the plane flew closer. Soon, the sigh became a whoop of joy and relief. They were saved!

  Ever since they’d spotted the plane, they’d all been waving and screaming like a bunch of Beliebers in the nosebleed seats of a stadium show. Now that they knew the plane saw them, too, every sunburned pair of shoulders visibly relaxed as the odd-looking aircraft slowed above them, hovering for a moment before lowering forty, then thirty, then twenty feet above the seven exhausted castaways.

  Allie’s navy blue eyes squinted hard even beneath her purple sunglasses, but she was too tired to obsess about crow’s feet and too curious not to stare. The plane’s huge propeller whirred noisily, and in seconds, there was so much sand in the air that Allie could hardly see her hand in front of her face. She pressed her forearms over her forehead and eyes, leaving just a slit to see from, and began to look for Mel. At six feet and 175 pounds, her boyfriend would make a much better windshield than her arms ever could.

  She ran blindly around the plateau, coughing as dust filled her lungs, before at last she crashed into Mel. “This way,” he screamed over the sound of the propeller, and they ran together toward the edge of the plateau and waited for the sand to settle.

  While the plane slowly lowered to the ground, Allie lifted her face out from under Mel’s girly lace shrug and examined their ride home through the curtain of beige dust it had kicked up. The plane was entirely platinum, as if it had been dipped in high-quality metal. Even the windows were tinted.

  It was really more of a blimp than a plane, except it had those huge propellers and was designed with an indentation in the middle that gave it a kind of waist, like a curvy girl wearing a tight belt or a sparkling sky peanut.

  “Get back!” Darwin hollered in a hoarse voice. He shoved Mel hard in the chest, and Mel grabbed Allie’s hand and pulled her with him to give the plane a wider landing pad.

  With a sound like a thousand ionic blow-dryers blasting all at once, the peanut-craft lowered down and four little legs popped out of its body so it appeared to be squatting on the ground.

  A crazy-lady laugh escaped Allie’s dry lips, partly in response to the bizarre-looking plane, but mostly she laughed from relief. The desert was dirty and desolate. Sure it was kind of cool to feel so tiny in such a big landscape, but she could go to Zara and try on all the size twelves to get the same rush.

  As their rescue became more and more imminent, Allie grabbed Mel’s hand and squeezed. Whatever happened—they’d probably be kicked out by Shira the second she found out they’d crashed the PAP—at least she could go home feeling good about how things had ended for her here. After all, she had come a long way from the girl who’d snuck in by posing as someone else. She’d gotten over Fletcher, at least as much as she ever would. She had found a possible soul mate in Mel, who happened to be one of the most coveted celeb-utantes alive. She had also found her passion in acting, and she believed in herself enough to pursue it seriously.

  And mos
t of all, she’d found Charlie and Skye. Allie was absolutely certain they’d stay friends for life. If a plane crash didn’t bond you, nothing would. Allie blinked hard, dislodging a layer of desert crud from her long eyelashes. She looked from Mel on her right to Charlie, Darwin, and Skye standing to her left, and her heart swelled like it had just been injected with collagen.

  “I love you guys!” Allie shouted. But the thousand-watt blow-dryer hum blocked anyone from hearing. Then a thought bounced toward the negative like a pinball shot out with a flipper. And I don’t want this all to end! If only they could fly back to Alpha Island and not be met with the sight of their packed suitcases and a one-way ticket to the real world.

  As if she could read her friend’s thoughts, Charlie moved closer to Allie and gave her tan shoulders a squeeze. “Hey, we’re saved,” her friend’s voice said in her ear. “I’d rather be alive and expelled than dead and still an Alpha, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Allie shook her head. “I just wish this wasn’t about to end. It doesn’t feel over.”

  “What?” Charlie shouted over the roar of the plane’s whirling propellers.

  Allie nodded her head so Charlie could tell that yes, she’d rather be alive to face another day than dead in a metallic flight suit.

  Finally, the propellers stopped whirring. The platinum peanut had landed atop the plateau, dust settling around its insect legs.

  Taz and Skye bolted up to the golden nose of the plane and started wiping away the layer of dust now coating the space where the windows should have been. They ran around the side and pulled open a small portal to the cockpit. Skye and Taz stuck their heads in, then pulled them out, looking perplexed. Their hands dropped to their sides.

  “There’s nobody driving!” Skye yelled, waving her hands in agitated confusion. “It’s empty.”

  Just then, the plane’s engine went silent. A perfectly round door in the center of the plane’s side popped open, and a ladder soon followed, bending and extending to the ground like a single leg of a golden caterpillar.

  “It must be remotely operated,” Charlie said, suspicion replacing relief in her big brown eyes. “Why would a remotely operated aircraft show up here? I don’t get it.”

  “Who cares, we’re saved!” Allie interrupted. Couldn’t they just be happy for five minutes? Charlie always overthought things. The analytical part of her brain was set on perma-worry. Obviously, there weren’t any other options, so they may as well take what they had. She turned to embrace Mel, determined to celebrate the fact that even if they were expelled, at least they weren’t destined to turn into sun-bleached skeletons.

  But when she whirled around on one blistered, gladiator-sandaled foot, Mel’s beefy body was nowhere in sight. He had vanished, leaving only a view of beige desert landscape in his place. Allie frowned, her eyes scanning the empty plateau behind her and still not seeing him. Where’d he go?

  When she turned back toward the plane, she was just in time to get an eyeful of Taz and Mel in their ridiculous girl-disguises, racing toward the portal of the plane. They high-fived, whooping with joy at having been rescued. Allie opened her mouth to call out to them, then snapped it shut in disbelief as they scrambled up the plane’s ladder without even turning around to make sure their friends were behind them. As they disappeared inside, the rancid taste of betrayal bloomed on Allie’s tongue, and the chocolate-cherry BrazilleBlast bar she’d eaten earlier threatened make a repeat appearance on her.

  Allie swallowed hard, shaking her head. She’d decide later how to deal with Mel’s rudeness. Right now, all that mattered was that they were saved. Her navy blue eyes found Skye’s aqua ones, and she saw that Skye looked as hurt and shocked as Allie felt.

  Allie had thought she’d found the perfect guy, that their relationship was just beginning, but now she wasn’t sure. Maybe she was just his Alpha Island fling. Now that they were rescued and Allie was sure to get sent home, maybe Mel was already moving on. And now that he’d shown her how immature he could be, maybe Allie might be wise to move on, too. Looking at Skye, it seemed she might feel the same way about Taz.

  Ever the gentleman, Darwin had turned purple with anger. “I can’t believe we’re related,” he muttered, his hands clenched in tight fists and a frown line deeper than San Andreas creasing his forehead. He rolled his eyes and shot a look at Charlie that said “Hang on while I go get my brothers and pummel them for being such un-chivalrous morons,” before sprinting toward the platinum peanut.

  Charlie’s the only one of us with a worthy boyfriend, Allie mused. But she didn’t have time to analyze things with Mel right now. Instead, she brushed the dust off the shoulders of her flight suit and prepared to board the plane and confront whatever came next. Pasting a brave smile on her face, she tried to be happy for Charlie and not think about Mel. There would be time in the plane to sort it all out.

  As Darwin disappeared inside the peanut, Allie walked over to Charlie, took her hand, and the two of them went over to get Skye. “Let’s do this together,” Allie whispered. The three Jackie O’s would board the plane as a team. AJ, who’d been sitting cross-legged on a rock and watching the whole scene from under her sagging green tam, could board on her own.

  But just as Allie’s hand made contact with Skye’s, she heard the plane’s engine start up again. Looking at Skye’s horrified expression, Allie whirled around just in time to see the ladder retracting back into the plane and the door sealing shut. Then Darwin’s anguished face appeared in the driver-less cockpit, his hands pressed against the curved metallic glass and his mouth forming the words no, no, no just as the plane lifted into the white-hot sky.

  Allie scream-sobbed along with Darwin. “No! This isn’t happening!” She felt hot tears streaming down her dusty cheeks as her hopes floated away along with the platinum peanut and the Brazille nuts housed inside.

  “What is going on? How can they leave us here to fry and die?” Skye shrieked, whirling around with her hands on her hips to face Charlie and Allie as if they knew something she didn’t. “This is completely illegal and totally immoral. Who sent that plane?”

  Suddenly, Allie didn’t even have the energy to shrug, let alone scream. It was bad enough that her boyfriend had the manners of a chimpanzee. But to be left to bake under the heat lamp of the sun like a box of stale McNuggets while the Brazille boys were on the skyway to food and water was more than she could possibly bear.

  They were doomed. Might as well accept it and start dying.

  Apparently, her body agreed. Her legs buckled beneath her as she collapsed in a dusty, miserable heap on the desert floor. She buried her face in her Purell-scented hands and closed her moist eyes, not wanting to waste any more tears since she needed the fluids. Behind her closed eyes, all she saw were angry red splotches. So this was what the end of hope looks like, she thought, her mind’s eye floating above her and observing the pitiful girl curled up on the plateau floor like a crumpled-up tissue. The end of hope also had a dry throat, an empty stomach, and a broken heart. And the end of hope apparently came with a weird buzzing sound, like apocalyptic bees coming to destroy them all…

  Buzz! Buzz!

  For a minute, Allie was too busy drowning in self-pity and anticipating her own death to notice her aPod vibrating in the pocket of her flight suit. Finally, the simultaneous clicks of Skye, Charlie, and AJ’s phones sliding open reached her ears.

  “What now?” Allie moaned, channeling a Shakespearean monologue Careen had just assigned her in acting class. “What fresh hell is this?”

  “See for yourself,” muttered Charlie as she plopped on the ground next to Allie and handed over her aPod. “Un-freaking-believable.”

  Allie took it, expecting a texted apology from the Brazille boys, as if from the plane they would somehow have figured out how to activate the group’s aPod signal again.

  But what she saw was far worse than a lame, too-little-too-late hey-babe-I-totally-meant-to-go-back-and-get-you apology.

  Shira’s
face floated on the aPod screen. Beneath her wild auburn curls, a pair of black sunglasses masked her eyes. The mogul’s mouth was pursed in her usual blood-red smirk-smile. Below was a typed message.

  SHIRA: MY BOYS ARE SOFT. THEY’RE NEVER GOING TO HAVE TO WORK A DAY IN THEIR LIVES. IF YOU MAKE IT BACK, MAYBE YOU WON’T EITHER. THERE’S NO MAP TO LIFE. RETURN TO ALPHA ISLAND BY SUNDOWN TOMORROW AND PROVE YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES. I’M WATCHING YOU. TRY NOT TO DIE.

  12

  THE MOJAVE DESERT

  TOP OF THE PLATEAU

  NOVEMBER 3RD

  10:30 A.M.

  The propeller sounds slowly faded away as the plane floated farther into the scorched sky. Despite the heat, the stunned silence of her fellow Jackie O’s, and her growling stomach, Charlie began to feel a jangly new energy seeping into her from where she stood on the desolate plateau. Prove to me you have what it takes. As her mind turned the text message over, it quickly became her own personal jolt of Red Bull.

  Like a greyhound with a mechanical bunny, Charlie performed best when there was something to chase. And up until now, their Alphas-in-Arabia adventure didn’t have that scurrying bunny to urge them forward. Sure, they’d kept going to avoid certain death. But now, it was clear Shira was perfectly aware of the Jackie O’s whereabouts. This calmed Charlie’s fears, since she was pretty sure Shira would never let four teenagers keel over on her watch. Shira was ruthless, but she wasn’t a murderer—after all, wrongful death was a PR nightmare, and Shira was allergic to bad publicity.

  Spurred by the possibility of becoming an AFL (Alpha for life), Charlie leaped up from the ground and began to look for something she could use to draw. A prickly heat rose in waves on her arms and legs. Hopefully, it was newfound motivation and not sun poisoning.

  If Charlie could get the Jackie O’s back to Alpha Island, maybe her resourcefulness would prove to Shira that she deserved AFL status. Charlie smiled as a second mechanical bunny popped up in her mind: Shira couldn’t possibly object to an AFL being TF (together forever) with her son.