Eden, Dawn Page 22

Chapter 16

  We arrived back at camp with about half an hour left before the last of the day’s light would surrender to the onslaught of darkness. Judd and I still had to light the perimeter fires and stoke the embers of the main fire back into life, too.

  I was numb, completely hollowed out by Judd’s confession of love for Gellica. Stumbling about on autopilot, I just went through the motions without saying a word to anyone. My brain felt like porridge, and a thickness plugged up my throat. Before he dropped his bomb, my plans were to return Gellica’s pendant, thank her for her daring show of support, and ask her to carve out some time with me the next day. To talk.

  Now, what do I do?

  A dear friend, probably my best friend on this terrible planet, had just laid claim to the one person who I had feelings for—awakened emotions I thought were long dead, but that I had only in the last few hours fully come to terms with. And when he told me of his love for her, had I come clean, had I shared my honest feelings with him, too? Did I use the only appropriate moment I had to confess? No, I had muttered something like, “Good for you.”

  Good for you?! I’m such a Hog’s backside! No, I’m the dingleberry on a Hog’s backside!

  How could I now go back to him with the truth?

  Just forty-eight hours ago, I was a simple, straightforward person. I lived on this nightmare planet where, in every ghastly second of every dreadful minute of every gruesome day of every awful moon, we were confronted with life-and-death struggles. Where we harnessed every thought and sense and bead of sweat in the sole aim of staying alive. And in less than two days, I had turned into a complete rockhead! A rockhead with four dark points! Six more and I would be banished … forever!

  I had an insane, sadistic bully for a clan leader, a conniving, power-hungry Mzee after my blood … and I had my knickers in a knot over a girl. A girl whom I had quite possibly been in love with for about five hundred years, even though I was too stupid to notice … a girl whom my best friend loved.

  And to crown off a real stinker of a day, it dawned on me that I lived perpetually in my own head; I talked way too much to myself! And if, as they say, talking to yourself was the first sign of mental health issues, they’d probably turf you into the loony-cave if you started arguing with yourself.

  And I’m losing this argument with myself!

  Needless to say, I didn’t have any nightmares that night. If you don’t sleep, you can’t dream.