“It’s only his first day,” Tyrell reminds me. “This place takes some getting used to. When I first got here I wasn’t exactly thrilled either.”
“And now you love it, right?” I prompt.
“We-ell . . . ,” he begins.
“Okay, maybe you’re not the greatest example,” I concede. “It’s tough to be whole when your entire body is a giant rash.”
“It’s not that,” he admits. “It’s my family. You and your mom came here for wellness, but my parents are treating this place as a weight-loss clinic. Maybe I don’t want to lose weight.”
“You don’t have to,” I reason. “The food here is awesome!”
“For you—you’re vegetarian already! And then there’s my sister. She misses her boyfriend, Landon.”
“How’s that your problem?”
“It’s everybody’s problem,” he explains. “Sarah hates everybody in the world, and that includes me.” He points to the welts on his neck. “Not all of these are hives, you know. She hit me with a hot chestnut during the nut roast last night.”
I’ve met Sarah a couple of times. She’s seventeen, so she’s aged out of most of the kid stuff here at the Oasis. She talks about this guy Landon a lot, that’s for sure. Like when Tyrell stubbed his toe, she mentioned that Landon loves Stubb’s barbecue sauce.
I try to put myself in her shoes. “It must be tough for her at the Oasis, where she can’t call or FaceTime or even text.”
“They write letters to each other,” he supplies, disgusted. “Old school. Like three a day.”
When we get to the Bath, most of the kids are already in the water. Tyrell and I duck into the change booths to put on our swimsuits. The Bath is an irregular-shaped pool nestled in a natural rock formation. It’s a little tricky to get in, but at least the rocks are smooth, so you can go barefoot. It’s a shock when you first feel the water, because it’s so hot. I mean, not just hot-tub hot, but a couple of notches above that. Magnus says the water is heated by magma far underground. Sometimes you get the feeling that if you dig around with your toe you could burn it off because the magma must be right there. There’s a cloud of steam over the Bath even on the hottest days. But once you get used to it, you’ll experience total relaxation and a greater sense of well-being than you’ve ever known before. It’s the perfect finishing touch to Awakening, the cherry on top.
Tyrell lets out a contented “Aaaaah!” as he sinks in right up to his neck. It’s impossible to be itchy in the Bath. All you feel is the tingle of the heated water on your skin. I like to pinch my nose and go all the way under. The sulfur in the water stings my eyes a little, but it’s as good as a facial from a high-priced salon. I resurface and lie back against the rocks in near-perfect contentment.
A raucous bellow jars me out of my thoughts. “Cannonball!”
There’s the sound of pounding feet and a figure is airborne above the bath, blotting out the sun. Jett hits the water in the middle of everyone, scattering kids and raising a splash like a meteor strike.
Wait for it, I tell myself.
The scream comes almost immediately, ripped straight from the gut, an eruption of pure shock and anguish. “Yeeeeeowww!!!”
That’s when we learn that Jett Baranov can fly. He lifts out of the burning water like a submarine-launched missile and scrambles up onto the rocks, trembling and pink all over.
That guy Matt comes running. “Jett! What happened?”
“They tried to kill me!” Jett howls.
“Who?” Matt gawks at his boss’s son, who is crouched like a wounded animal in his soaked shorts and T-shirt. All the kids are laughing, including me.
Especially me.
“It’s a billion degrees in there!” Jett whimpers. “Why didn’t anybody warn me?”
“We thought you’d figure it out.” I snicker. “You know, from the sign that says ‘Hot Spring.’”
“I need a doctor,” Jett tells his companion. “Tell the pilot to fire up the Gulfstream. And we’ll need a chopper—stat—to get me to Little Rock.”
Matt’s patient. “Are you finished?” he asks. “Get a grip. You’re not dead. Everything’s still attached. All these other kids are in the same water you were in, and none of them need medevac.”
“The minute I get my phone back,” Jett seethes, “I’m telling Vlad you tried to boil me alive!”
I believe him. I can totally picture Jett getting a person fired just because he’s embarrassed about making an idiot out of himself.
But then Matt laughs in his face. “All right, Michael Phelps. Let’s go back to the cottage and get you some dry clothes.”
“You can use my towel if you want,” Tyrell offers.
Jett stares at him. “What is wrong with you?” To the rest of us, he adds, “You’re all crazy,” before storming off, Matt hurrying behind him.
I’m not laughing anymore. There’s nothing funny about Jett Baranov. “Don’t lend him your towel,” I tell Tyrell. “He wouldn’t give us the skin off a grape, and we should return the favor.”
“Come on, Grace,” he replies. “Haven’t you ever had a hard time fitting in somewhere?”
The answer is yes, obviously. We all have. Which is another reason I appreciate the Oasis. This is where I fit in better than any place in the whole world.
And I don’t intend to let a spoiled rich kid from Silicon Valley ruin my time here.
3
Tyrell Karrigan
My parents are on a diet. Not just now. Always.
I’m twelve years old and in all that time, I’ve never seen our kitchen without at least one chart on the wall, either CALORIES or FAT GRAMS or NET CARBS or a bunch of other headings that I can’t begin to explain because I don’t understand them myself. My earliest memory is of my father wrapping green garbage bags around his midsection in an attempt to sweat himself thin.
We’ve been on the bean diet, the kale diet, and the broccoli diet. We’ve tried Atkins and South Beach and keto, carbo-loading and intermittent fasting. I used to wonder why I have so many aunts and uncles. Turns out, they aren’t relatives at all. They’re professional dieticians. And the weirdest part is that Mom and Dad aren’t even overweight. They look just fine. More important, Dr. McConnell says they’re totally healthy.
“Of course I’m healthy,” Mom tells me. “I’ve been drinking those beet smoothies for three weeks.”
Here’s the thing, though. She looked the same when she and Dad were eating giant bricks of tofu, or before that when they were swallowing these supersize pills filled with pure unprocessed bran—except that her teeth weren’t dyed bright red.
So when they broke the news that we were all going to a wellness retreat in Arkansas, I was expecting a real Camp Starvation—as in all my parents’ crash diets put together, times fifty.
Is the Oasis as bad as that? Well, yes and no. It’s vegetarian, which isn’t my favorite thing. Even Mom and Dad would occasionally go on a protein kick, and we would live on nothing but steak, barbecued chicken, and pork chops for a couple of months. No chance of that at the Oasis. Here it’s all veggies, 24-7. If you want protein, it usually comes from soy. Unless soy gives you a rash—that would be me. A lot of the vegetables give me a rash too. The only time I don’t feel itchy is when I’m doubled over with gas pains from all those greens. Don’t mock—it’s a real thing. It happens to everybody when they first get here. For most people, it goes away. Turns out I’m not most people.