Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,76

sure she knew the name of. “Then—why?”

“I wouldn’t.”

Vida scowled. It had been so easy to get Whiting, and Bill, and Theodore to kiss her—why should Sal be so difficult? “Am I that hideous?”

“No! No, it’s just that I wouldn’t kiss you if you didn’t want me to. I know that girls like you, your reputation is so important. That if you do the wrong thing you’re finished.”

Vida studied him. “Don’t you want me?” she whispered.

“I’d like to know what you want.” The words sounded like an evasion, but the steady way he held her gaze felt like the opposite.

“How would I even know?” Vida had gone trampling over everyone and everything to take what she thought she wanted, and it had only led to disaster. She was aware suddenly that they were a boy and girl standing on a beach where there was no evidence that people ever had been or ever would be. Just the two of them, in sun-bleached rags, like the only boy and girl on Earth. “I wasn’t raised to know. Not really.”

Sal’s eyes creased. He smiled broadly. “Vida, you’re the most remarkable person I’ve ever met. If you don’t know what you want, it’s because you haven’t asked yourself.”

Vida’s brow flexed in confusion. “So much talking,” she murmured.

The distance between them was about a foot, all of it wild with energy. She could hear his breath, smell his skin. Did she want to kiss him because they were alone on an island together, or because of the black crown of his eyelashes, or because he was mysterious, or because she felt so wonderfully large in his presence? It seemed very important to be sure. And because it seemed important to know for sure, to not be her usual impulsive self, she stepped sideways, away from him, and gazed across the low, damp beach, out across the flat expanse of ocean, and saw . . .

“What in the . . .” she murmured, squinted. There was a little black spot, like a fly on a landscape painting. A shape, way in the distance, like a toy ship on a duck pond.

While she stood alone with Sal, want had bloomed in her like a wild flowering vine. It was still there; it pulled her like gravity.

But she was distracted from that wanting by a desperate curiosity regarding the ship-like thing, this evidence of people beyond this beach, this island. This odd proof that she and Sal were not the only two people on Earth.

And afterward, she would always wonder what might have been if she had not looked away.

“Is that a ship?” she said. Maybe it was a trick of the eye conjuring the thing she had hoped to see every day since their arrival. Then, when she was sure it was not a hallucination, she wondered if it might somehow pass—if it might not notice the island at all—if they might be forgotten twice.

“Yes,” Sal said.

Their eyes met again, but the urgency now was of a different kind. They barely spoke as they hurried back up the ridge, along the edge of the island, the wind cold at their ears, both of them seeking each other’s gaze, then glancing back to make sure the ship was still there, their stomachs tight and hard with the wretched possibility that it might pass and not know that they were here. That this could well be their only chance.

As they descended along the waterfall, their breathing became noisy and anxious, and they grasped for each other’s hands to keep from falling.

“Hurry,” she called to Sal. He was coming along behind, but not fast enough. When the camp was in view she became impatient and began to run. “Get the fire lit!” she cried. She was thinking that if they could get the fire going soon enough, they could light torches and climb to the heights and then surely someone on board would notice them, surely the ship would turn, and they would be rescued. This was all she could think of—and what she had recently wanted in the most deep and secret part of herself—or for that matter what was worth wanting—shrank in her mind. As she emerged from the jungle, she began to shout and swing her arms overhead. “Torches!” she cried. “Torches!”

But the others, those thirty and some people who had become her whole city, the only world, did not hear her.

Already they drifted from the huts, onto the rocks, down the beach, their mouths hanging open,