Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,19

grass. Too big for a coyote, too dark for a bobcat. A black bear.

I know what I’m supposed to do if it sees us. Grizzlies are different, but with a black bear, you make noise, stare it down. Don’t run. Fight back. That’s the lecture we got after Mr. Harker saw one digging through his trash. They’re faster than they look, he said, and they can spot a flash of color in the brush.

I snatch off my red hat and smother it under my coat, sweat freezing on my scalp. Count the beats of my racing heart, try not to breathe too loud.

Next to me Welch smiles, just a smudge of one, like she can’t help it. We stay there for I don’t know how long. Wait until the footsteps have passed, the trees stilled, the noise faded, and then she stands up, pulls me with her.

“It’s gone,” she says. “You can put your hat on again.”

She calls out to Carson and Julia. They come jogging through the branches looking like they didn’t just have the life scared out of them, like they see this kind of thing all the time.

“Having fun?” Julia asks. I think she might be serious.

* * *

—

Raxter is only about five miles long, give or take, shaped like a bullet with the tip pointing west, but we’re moving slow so it takes us a while to get to the other end. You can tell as we start getting close; all the trees rear back from the shore like they’re afraid of it. Up ahead somewhere, hidden from view by the last of the woods, is the visitors’ center. It was built even before the school, used to be the headquarters for some local fishing company until the lobsters disappeared and it got converted. Before the Tox it was always empty and closed up except during summers, and even then it was just Mr. Harker, sitting behind the counter and listening to a Sox game while tourists passed by on ferries, headed to other towns, other islands.

At last the woods start to thin, and ahead I can see the open stretch of the salt marsh. In the distance, maybe a half mile out, the ocean is gray and rough, the horizon empty like it always is.

“Oh,” I say, before I can stop myself.

Welch frowns at me. “What?”

“I just thought they’d be waiting for us.”

Nobody answers me, so I swallow my disappointment and fall into single file with them, me between Carson and Julia, as Welch leads us out of the cover of the trees. Immediately, the wind is stinging, so strong it just about knocks me over. I shove my hat in my coat pocket and edge closer to Julia, hope she’ll take some of the worst of it for me.

The road here is scrubbed flat, and on either side the ground drops off into reeds and soupy pools of mud. To the right I can see the remains of the boardwalk that used to lead from the pier to the visitors’ center, winding through the marsh and the woods, dotted with informational plaques that don’t seem to be there anymore. I want to ask what’s happened to them. But the answer would be the same as everything else: the Tox.

We stay on the road, and it’s a slow walk until we hit the start of the ferry pier, ragged old red tape fluttering across the entrance. Everybody said at the beginning that they were planning a wall, a real one, with metal and plastic to see through, but this was the most they ever did. Some tape and a sign that says “Wait until area has been cleared.”

We stop here, and Welch drops her bag on the ground and digs around in it. She comes up with a pair of binoculars, stares through them at the horizon.

“What do we do now?” I say, knocking one foot against the other to shake off the cold.

“Usually,” Carson starts, “we have to wait a while. But so—”

And then a bird chirps. I whip around, checking the trees, my depth perception slipping as my eye fights to adjust. “What the hell was that?”

The birds stopped singing right when we got sick, went quiet like they’d never been there at all. As the days passed we watched them fly away, herons and gulls and starlings flying forever south. I haven’t heard one in so long I’d forgotten what they sound like.

“Oh, good,” Welch says. “They’re almost here.”

I’m