Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,15
two bites and wipes crumbs off her mouth. “So? Ask what you want to ask.”
“What?”
“Your name shows up on the Boat Shift list and you’re in here talking to me by accident? Okay, Hetty.”
I take another cracker, but my mouth is dry, and I wind up just holding it in my clammy palm. “I guess I’m wondering what I should be prepared for. I mean, what, we go pick up the stuff and come back? It can’t be as easy as that.”
Taylor laughs, and it’s the kind of thing where you hear it and laugh along with her because if you don’t, she might cry. “They use the lighthouse at Camp Nash to tell us they’re coming. Morse code or some shit. I don’t know. But Welch’ll come in and wake you if they give the signal. She likes to leave early so you can get home before sundown. It’d be nice if they could just drop the stuff here, save us a trip.”
I’d never even thought that was a possibility. “Why don’t they?”
Taylor takes another crumbling bite of cracker. “They say it would risk contamination,” she tells me, mouth full. “Really, I just think they can’t get around the rocks off the point. Not like they’re the Navy or anything. Not like the Navy’s supposed to be good at that whole sailing thing.”
It’s startling, hearing this hallowed process rendered in bitter words. But then, she’s been a lot closer to it than I have.
“Is it…” And I have to stop, find the right words. “Is it as big as it looks out there?”
“Big?”
I think of the grounds, the way the pines have gotten taller, the way they seem nothing like what I’ve seen from the roof. In the woods the Tox is still wild. No girls for it to pick apart, so it got into everything else. Out there it blossoms and spreads with a kind of joy. Unbridled and vicious and free.
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess.”
Taylor leans forward. “Do you remember what it was like? That first day?”
A year and a half back, in early spring sun. I was out in the jack pine grove when it happened, in the tangle of trunks and limbs, Reese and Byatt watching as I walked out on the lowest branch as far as I could go. And I fell, which wasn’t strange; we were all of us covered in scabs and nicks then, some of us turning a corner too fast, some of us sewing our hems too short, some of us pressing sharp things into ourselves just to see what it would feel like. It was what came after.
I stood up, laughing, but then blood started dripping out of my right eye. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster, running down my cheeks and pooling in my mouth. Hot like it was about to boil, and I started to cry because I couldn’t see.
Byatt swore and grabbed my elbow. Reese took the other, and they rushed me to the house. I kept my eyes closed. I could hear other girls, hear them talking and giggling and falling silent as we passed by. Byatt tucked her body in close to mine. She was the only thing that kept me on my feet.
In the main hall, Byatt sat with me on the stairs while Reese ran to get the nurse. We sat there for a while, I don’t know how long. Byatt held my hand in both of hers while I leaned on her shoulder and bled on her shirt. When Reese came back, she had Welch with her, and they pressed gauze to my right eye until it dried. Until they could see the skin of my eyelids fusing together.
The nurse was gone. Three other girls were sick. Everything was starting.
They quarantined the island the next morning. Helicopters overhead, military issue. Days of doctors in hazmat suits swarming the house, tests and tests and no answers, just a sickness spreading through every one of us.
“Yeah,” I say. I have to clear my throat. “I remember.”
“It’s still like that outside,” Taylor says. “Here at the house you have it so easy, but out there it’s like the first days. Like we don’t know a damn thing.”
Maybe she’ll tell me the truth. Maybe I’ve earned it, now that I’m Boat Shift. “Is that why you quit?”
It’s the wrong question, and Taylor’s face changes the second I ask it. Eyes cold, mouth a flat line. She gets to her feet.