Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,10

Reese sleeping as we head outside for our walk.

The walks were just Byatt’s at first. Her, alone, making slow circuits of the grounds. The other girls used to whisper about it. Homesick, they said, lonely, and it was all pity and laughter. But I know it gave her a glow, made her someone to get close to. By the end of our second month here, I was wandering after her and hoping it would rub off on me.

Today the main hall is empty as we pass through, except for the girl keeping watch at the front doors. The school is shaped like a bracket, a newly built wing branching off each end of the old house. On the second floor it’s dorms and a handful of offices, and here on the ground floor it’s classrooms, and the hall, and Headmistress’s office at the corner of the bracket, Headmistress probably inside tallying supplies, checking the numbers.

I reach out as we pass the bulletin board and tap the note about the cure, right on the letterhead. That’s where the luck is best, and you can see how the color’s worn away where a hundred girls have touched it a hundred times. I smile, think of me and Byatt in some sun-soaked city somewhere, free of the Tox.

“Hey,” Byatt says to the door girl, who’s one of the youngest we have left, thirteen. “Everything good?”

“Yeah.” The girl tugs on the door without Byatt asking. People are like that for Byatt, no matter what she’s like for them.

The door’s barely an inch open, too heavy for the girl to move on her own. We start them young on Door Shift—if there’s anything really wrong, the Gun Shift girls will take care of it, but the responsibility of manning the door molds the younger girls into the right shape. I step up and lay my hands over hers. Pull, feel the give under the rust, newer and thicker every season. This will be our second winter with the Tox, my third at Raxter altogether. How many more will I have here?

“Thanks.” I knock my arm against her shoulder so she won’t realize I don’t remember her name. “See you later.”

Out on the porch I wait while Byatt buttons her jacket. The grass is long dead, and there, stamped into the frost that covers it, is a trail of footprints. Could some of them be Byatt’s from last night?

“So,” I say. “Cold out.”

She doesn’t answer. She’s fussing with the top button of her jacket, hidden under her chin, as we step onto the flagstone path to the gate.

I try again, hope I don’t have to dig too deeply. If only she’d just tell me where she went. “Sleep well?”

“Sure.”

“Was I restless?”

“No more than usual.”

I wait, give her another chance to come out with it, but she doesn’t. “Because I woke up, right in the middle of the night, and you weren’t there.”

Byatt veers off the path, to the left. It’s the way we always go. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

At first I think she won’t explain—she doesn’t always with me, even though I do with her—but then she stops, looks me full in the eye, and says, “You talked in your sleep.”

It’s so far from what I’m expecting that my jaw drops. “I did?”

“Yeah.” There’s a delicate sort of hurt creeping into her expression, like she’s not sure she wants to let me see it. “I don’t know what you were dreaming, but you said…something.”

I didn’t. I know I didn’t, but I don’t understand this enough to say so. “What did I say?”

She grimaces, shakes her head. “It wasn’t something I’d want to hear again. Let’s leave it at that.”

For a moment I feel just the way she wants me to. Too anxious, too guilty to keep pushing. But it’s not real. I was awake, and I saw her. “Oh,” I say. “Are you sure?”

It’s the closest I can get to confronting her. Lean too hard and she’ll let herself snap. I’ve seen her do it a hundred times, with teachers when one of us forgot their homework, with field trips when Welch caught her forging my mom’s signature. Byatt lies so well. But usually, she’s lying for me.

“Yeah,” she says, with just the right tremble. “It’s fine, okay? I just climbed up to bunk in with Reese.”

That, at least, is true. But what secrets are there to keep at Raxter? We all have the same horrors in our bodies, the same pains, the same wants.

“I’m sorry,”