Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,11

I say. There’s nothing for it but to play along. “Whatever it was. You know you’re my best friend.”

Byatt brightens immediately and throws her arm around my shoulders to draw me close. We start walking again, steps matching steps. “Yeah,” she says, “I know I am.”

Above us, the house looms, and the voices of other girls spill through cracked windows as they start to wake. Arguments over clothes and bedding, and a few sharper than that, but mostly the same conversations every day. The same magazines passed around and around, quizzes taken and retaken, the same memories told like stories until they belong to everybody. Parents sliced up to share, first kisses exchanged like gifts.

I never had anything to add—couldn’t conjure up enough of my dad, couldn’t bear thinking of my mom all alone in our house on the base. And I’ve wanted boys, and I’ve wanted girls, but I’ve never wanted anyone enough to miss them, enough to pluck them from the slideshow of my old life and bring them here.

Sometimes if I close my eye, I forget what’s changed. And Raxter isn’t a rush of gunpowder and hunger anymore. It’s boredom, an idleness burrowing deep.

We’re at the fence now, the house behind us and the woods stretching out ahead, branches evergreen. Road slicing through, worn flat and narrower each year. A few feet past the fence, I can see what the gunshots must’ve hit last night—a deer, hours dead, flesh too contaminated to eat. Worms crawling in its open mouth, blood stiff in its fur.

Besides the deer there’s more out there. It’s something we all know but don’t talk about. If you’re outside at the right time, you can feel the ground shake every now and then, like my house on the base whenever a jet flew too close overhead. Early in the Tox we used to leaf through the earth science textbooks, look at the lists of flora and fauna and wonder what might be out there. But then we had to burn the books for warmth, and wondering wasn’t as fun anymore.

“Come on,” Byatt says.

We don’t look up to the roof, where two girls are aiming rifles over our heads. Instead, we trail our fingers along the bars of the fence, follow it until it meets the water, where frills of rock pile and stack, catching the spray in pools that won’t freeze through until the deep of winter. Folds of gray, the algae a sharp green, and the ocean rolling into the distance, black and heaving.

I climb onto a spear of rock, lean onto my palms so I can look into the biggest pool. No fish—barely any come near the island since things changed—but this time I see something. Small, no bigger than my fist, and a bright, uneasy sort of blue. A crab.

“Hey,” I say, and Byatt clambers over to balance next to me. “Look.”

They showed up a few years before I did. A sign of the times, that’s what our biology teacher said when she took us out here to observe them my sophomore fall, during our climate change unit. Used to be they never came north of Cape Cod, but as the world changes, so does the water. We call these ones Raxter Blues, and they grow different up here.

Mr. Harker helped us catch a few, and we took them back to the classroom, took turns holding the scalpel. Salt thick on the air, and two girls nearly fainted as we cracked the shells, lifted them like lids. See, our teacher said. How they have both gills and lungs, to breathe in the water and on land. See how a body will change, to give you the best chance it can.

We watch the crab for a while as it trundles across the floor of the tide pool, and then Byatt shuffles forward and nearly knocks me into the water.

“Careful,” I say, but she’s not listening, her arm outstretched, fingers breaking the surface. Something thin and long darts under a shelf of rock.

“I want to see it again,” she tells me. She’s sweeping circles in the water, lifting the crab with the current.

“Don’t,” I say. “It’s awful. And if you keep putting your hand in there, you’ll get frostbite sooner or later.”

But she’s not listening. Quick like one of the herons that used to live here, her hand darts in, ripples splashing at her elbow, and when she comes up again, it’s with the crab pinched between two fingers, dangling