The Remains: Chapter Two - "Bikini Girl"

Lost: THE REMAINS
A "Lost" fan fiction.
By "Coby Clark Craft"
[Randall Hugh Crawford
as Napoleon Park]
Chapter Two.
“Bikini Girl”
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Some people thought Jenny was an exhibitionist. Or a nympho, or a slut. I don't think that's entirely true, but I'm not certain it it's 100% false either. It's not who she was before the events of September 22nd, 2004, though.

Jenny Slater was a shy, introverted and withdrawn girl. Not completely repressed, of course - it was the 21st century and she was a college student, after all. She'd been with a few boys.

Jenny wasn't a pretty girl. Not ugly or homely either, just rather plain. One boy who did her while they were both drunk called her a butterface and when she asked he told her: "she has a nice body, oh, but her face...” How sad is it that she took "has a nice body" as one of the nicest things a boy had ever said to her.

She'd had a few crushes in high school, and she believed she'd been in love twice as an adult, but no one had ever loved her. Until she met Hugh.

Her parents wanted to give her something memorable for her college graduation present - or maybe they just wanted to be rid of her for a bit. They sent her to visit her aunt and uncle in Australia. That's where she met Hugh Logan. He was a simple lad, not like the college boys she'd known. A bit thick, but sweet and... nice... and... Well simple really does just about sum it up.

Never having been loved before made Jenny suspicious. She wasn't completely certain that he wasn't just shining her on for a free trip to the States. But they were in love and the possibility of an engagement had been discussed and he wanted to meet her parents and politely ask her father for her hand, which was so old fashioned and charming. If it didn't seem real, at least she had right now to believe in it and those would be memories she'd have forever.

Right now ended abruptly when the plane began to jump and shake and then tore apart. She screamed and Hugh held her in his arms and screamed right along with her, like they were on a roller coaster instead of plummeting out of the sky.

She woke up pinned to the ground, hot sand beneath her, Hugh's twisted, mangled body on top of her, the weight of their airplane seats crushing him down on her, squeezing the blood from his corpse. She was drenched in it. She began to scream.

Two men lifted the seat from them and lifted Hugh's body off of her. She was drenched in his hot sticky blood.

Madly, she was relatively - physically - unhurt. They were on the beach, only twenty yards or less from the waters edge. She ran and knelt in the wet sand as the surf drifted in and out, licking at her thighs. She tore at her blood soaked clothing and threw them from her and scoured her blood stained flesh with handfuls of wet sand until she was clean. Then she ran into the water and screamed again as the saltwater burned her raw flesh. Two different men came and lifted her from the shallow surf and carried her struggling, naked and screaming, back to dry land and a woman draped a blanket around her bare shoulders. Someone looked through some luggage to find her some clothing. She threw everything she was given away from her, though, her mind associating clothing with her lover’s blood. She refused to take anything from the luggage - dead people's clothing, she called it.

Finally Genna gave her a yellow knit bikini, which she had knitted for her daughter. "I made this as a gift so it is not mine, but I have not given it to my daughter, so it is not hers. It is new; no one has ever worn it. I want you to have it." Jenny put it on - it fit and it was comfortable.

Left on her own, she began to scream again. Once calmed down, she got up and began walking around, asking for Hugh, her mind blocking out the horror she had just endured. Finally one of the men made her sit on a towel and held her in his arms and she fell silent for a time. He stayed with her all that evening and held her until she fell asleep, and then until he fell asleep.

She was deeply emotionally disturbed and needed constant supervision. Any time she was left alone for more than half an hour or so she was up and walking around, asking everyone if they had seen Hugh.

It was too much for any one person to babysit her full time, so some of the men took to trading her off, in shifts. She barely seemed to notice who she was with, or who's arms she slept in.

Stuart the architect and George the construction worker and Kirby the artist and Chick the furniture maker drew up some plans and Steve and Scott and Lance and Peter and Apollo and Marcus and I, and even Stefan, pitched in, collecting branches and bamboo and palm leaves and vines, sandstone and limestone and shells. It took weeks of hard labor just to grind the stones and shells and mix them with wet sand and waste and lay out the thirty foot square foundation and pound it flat and anchor the main beams and let it dry. Then came more weeks of construction. The result, set about twenty feet back into the jungle from the edge of the beach and just past a stone outcropping to the north of the main beach encampment, was what we came to call "the cabin". A thirty by thirty foot building, with only one door and a couple of windows covered with cotton t-shirt fabric and a few air vents covered with canvas just belong the overhanging roof. With ceilings less then eight feet high. There were two main interior walls and four dividers breaking the space into one main room and five small connected rooms not much larger than 8X10 cells, with doorways curtained with parachute silk. The room in the back corner was dark, with no windows. Peter had beaten some vines into a rough fabric and braided and thatched together a rug, and Chick made a low platform, basically a skid with a couple of drawers, and Apollo stitched several of the airplane seat cushions together. It was quite an effort for someone so incapable of appreciating it, but they had a house, dry, relatively snake and bug free, and a private bedroom and an actual bed for Jenny to sleep in, safely held in the arms of whoever's turn it was to hold her.

There were four other small rooms and Stu, Chick, Dr. Ranjimurtha the dentist and Mr. Raezynski, the cook claimed them.

Peter's system of beating and softening the fibers of vines and twisting them into fabric seems to be working and he enlisted Apollo. Steve and Scott and whoever else they could find who had a free hour to join in. Eventually they had enough soft yarn for Genna to knit Jenny a simple dress. Sometimes she wore it; sometimes she stripped down to her bikini and went looking for Hugh again. But she was getting better, slowly. And sometimes, when she was walking around displaying her lean sun bronzed form, she actually seemed quite lucid and people began to suspect she was enjoying the attention of being looked at and whispered about.

One day I was returning with my burden of fresh water from the waterfall and as I approached the clearing I heard Chick tapping away at the bongos he's made from coconut shells and boar hide and the conga he'd made from a length of hollow log and more pigskin. Jenny was sitting at his feet, watching, entranced. Then she leaned over and kissed him. It seemed to catch him off guard at first, but he kissed her back and she pushed him down onto his back and climbed atop him.

I confess to a mixture of embarrassment and voyeuristic interest, but I went on my way. Fifty yards further, as I emerged from the brush onto the beach, I turned and looked back for a few moments, but I know if I set my load down I wouldn't be able to pick it up again and I'd have to explain why I came so far and then set it down so close to the settlement. So I went on my way.

Even, or maybe especially, in a community of less than 48, people do talk, and they do gossip. If poor Chick had thought that she had picked him he was soon disillusioned. Now that her libido was reawakened, she was exploring her passion with whichever man she slept with that night, and it wasn't always limited to the men who lived under the same roof with her, although it did include all of them. Would it be ungentlemanly of me to admit that I was one of her many conquests?

There were some who disapproved of this lapse of society's conventional mores. But we were a population of 48 and falling and the men outnumbered the women, so a woman who was eager to share her affection with the men who had taken care of her during her time of distress simply evened out the ratio.

Some people thought Jenny was an exhibitionist or a nympho or a slut. But there was more to her story than that. Much more.