Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,101

her thigh, her silver fingers gripping the back of my neck.

“Tell me if you want me to stop,” she says.

I shake my head. “Not until it works.”

I open my mouth. And Reese sticks two fingers as deep into my throat as she can.

I can’t breathe. A cough building in my chest, but I can’t get it out, can’t swallow, and a wave rolls through my body as it tries to force Reese out. My eye waters and the world is hazy, distorted, but something is moving, stuck halfway down.

I smack at Reese’s arm, and she pulls her arm back, dragging strings of spit. First one heave, and another, until finally, I vomit, pain everywhere like my insides have been torn out. Something fleshy and pulsing splatters onto the deck of the boat.

I wipe my mouth on my sleeve. Whatever it is, it’s covered in blood, but it looks familiar, like I’ve seen the shape of it somewhere before. In a textbook, in a body, in the woods with Mr. Harker.

“It’s a heart,” Reese says. “That’s a human heart.”

This one shrunken, shriveled, and mine still beating in my chest. I look away, collapse against Reese, head spinning. She loops her arm around my waist.

“Doesn’t someone at school have that?” she says.

“Sarah,” I say. “Two heartbeats.” But two hearts instead, and if her body kept hers, why couldn’t mine?

I think of Byatt and me, on the beach that day before I got Boat Shift. The last moment we had before it all went haywire. The crab she found, the Raxter Blue, with lungs and gills both like we learned every year in bio. Lungs and gills both. So it could live no matter what.

The Tox, working in the Raxter Blue, in everything, and in me.

“It’s trying to help,” I say. “It’s trying to make me better, but I can’t take it.”

Reese pushes my hair off the back of my neck to let the breeze cool it. “Calm down. It’s okay.”

I cough, blood tangy and metallic on my tongue, and Reese pulls me in so I’m leaning against her chest. The boat sways, salt spice in the air. I close my eye, shut out the glare off the water and the pallor of Byatt’s skin. “I’m fine. I just need to rest.”

The three of us together, laid out in the quiet. We’ve been here before. One weekend during my first year at Raxter. Byatt got a run in her last pair of tights, and Mr. Harker drove us to the mainland to get her new ones. We were supposed to meet him in the park when we were done, but he was late, so we stretched out in the dappled shade under a low sprawling oak. The leaves turned translucent in the light, the air fresh and sweet. Byatt in the middle, me and Reese on either side, and it was the first time we let the quiet be. The first time we were ever really us.

“You’re gonna be okay,” Reese whispers, and I let it push me further into sleep. “You saved me. Now I’m gonna save you.”

I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t know what’s next. But Reese’s heartbeat is steady in my ear, and I remember—I remember how it was. The three of us together, and I’ll make it that way again.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been so lucky to work on Wilder Girls with an incredible team. Thank you so much to each of you—you saw what I meant and helped me find the right way to say it. I will always be grateful.

To Krista Marino—thank you for your dedication as we pried the girls all the way out of my head, and for your guidance as we laid them out on the page. Your insights have taught me so much, and pushed this book to grow in ways I didn’t know it could. I could not have asked for a better editor.

Thank you to my agents, of whom I am in complete awe. To Daisy Parente, for every panicked email you have answered. For your enthusiasm, and your advice, and for seeing something in Wilder Girls. To Kim Witherspoon, for your wisdom and level head (and for a whole other set of answers to panicked emails). To Jessica Mileo, for your support and your invaluable feedback. And to the teams at Lutyens & Rubinstein, InkWell, and Casarotto—thank you so much for all of your help.

To Delacorte Press, thank you for your unending generosity and for the incredible dedication you put into making Wilder Girls the best it could be. Barbara Marcus, Judith Haut, and Beverly Horowitz: thank you for believing in Wilder Girls. I am so proud to have joined the Delacorte and Random House family.

Thank you to Betty Lew and Regina Flath, for designing such a stunning book, inside and out, and to Aykut Aydoğdu, for the cover art, which is eerie and beautiful and everything I could have wanted. To the rest of the Delacorte team, I can think of no better people to be working with. Monica Jean, Mary McCue, Aisha Cloud, and the Underlined team—Kate Keating, Cayla Rasi, Elizabeth Ward, Jules Kelly, Kelly McGauley, and Janine Perez—I am more grateful to you all than I can say.

Wilder Girls would never have existed without my cohort at the University of East Anglia. Thank you all for your support, and for giving me that most crucial of early feedback: asking to read more. To the faculty—to Jean McNeil and Trezza Azzopardi—for advising me as I shaped Wilder Girls into something readable. To Taymour Soomro, for understanding what I wanted to say even before I did, for all your feedback, and most of all, for your friendship. To Avani Shah, for accompanying me to a variety of breakfasts, for sharing my correct opinions on bread, and for reading version after version of Wilder Girls. I am so lucky to know you.

To my mother. Thank you for every Darwin’s trip, for every movie, for every dropoff at the train station, and most importantly, for texting me pictures of the dog on demand. Thank you for sticking with me. I will always stick with you.

To those girls I met on the internet: Christine, Claire, and Emily. You know just how much writing this pains me, but I’m awfully fond of you all. You are vivid and you are sharp and you are very, very dear, and I am so thankful to have you in my life.

Thank you to my sensitivity readers for your time and feedback—any mistakes this book contains are mine and mine alone. Thank you to the Yarboros, who generously introduced me to Harkers Island, the original inspiration for Raxter. To Sama’s in Middlebury and Sin in Providence, for witnessing the bulk of my Wilder Girls breakdowns. To my teachers, for the extra time you put in reading my work, and for the encouragement you gave me. To my friends, for enduring me as I showed you close-up pictures of parasites, and to my family, for your encouragement even as I changed my mind (again, and again, and again).

And lastly, thank you to younger Rory, who decided to stay. I would not be here without you.