Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,2

cooperating with local facilities re: cure. Expect delivery.

Wait, and stay alive, and we thought it would be easy—together behind the fence, safe from the wildwood, safe from the animals grown savage and strange—but girls kept dropping. Flare-ups, which left their bodies too wrecked to keep breathing, left wounds that wouldn’t heal, or sometimes, a violence like a fever, turning girls against themselves. It still happens like that. Only difference is now we’ve learned that all we can do is look after our own.

Reese and Byatt, they’re mine and I’m theirs. It’s them I pray for when I pass the bulletin board and brush two fingers against the note from the Navy still pinned there, yellowed and curling. A talisman, a reminder of the promise they made. The cure is coming, as long as we stay alive.

Reese digs a silver fingernail into the orange and starts peeling, and I force myself to look away. When food’s fresh like that, we fight for it. She says it’s the only fair way to settle things. No handouts, no pity. She’d never take it if it didn’t feel earned.

Around us the other girls are gathering in swirls of high laughter, digging through the clothing that spills out of every bag. The Navy still sends us enough for the full number. Shirts and tiny boots we don’t have anybody small enough to wear them.

And jackets. They never stop sending jackets. Not since the frost began to coat the grass. It was only just spring when the Tox hit, and for that summer we were fine in our uniform skirts and button-downs, but winter came like it always does in Maine, bitter and long. Fires burning in daylight and the Navy-issue generators running after dark, until a storm broke them to bits.

“You’ve got blood on you,” Byatt says. Reese slices off the tail of her shirt and tosses it onto my face. I press. My nose squelches.

A scrape above us, on the mezzanine over the main hall. We all look up. It’s Mona from the year ahead of me, red hair and a heart-shaped face, back from being taken to the infirmary on the third floor. She’s been up there for ages, since last season’s flare-up, and I don’t think anybody expected her to ever come back down. I remember how her face steamed and cracked that day, how they carried her to the infirmary with a sheet over her like she was already dead.

Now she has a lattice of scars across her cheeks and the beginning of an aura to her hair. Reese is like that, with her blond braid and the glow the Tox gave it, and it’s so much hers that it’s startling to see it on Mona.

“Hey,” she says, unsteady on her feet, and her friends run over, all fluttering hands and smiles, plenty of space between them. It’s not contagion we’re afraid of—we all have it already, whatever it is. It’s seeing her break apart again. Knowing someday soon it’ll happen to us. Knowing all we can do is hope we make it through.

“Mona,” her friends say, “thank God you’re okay.” But I watch them let the conversation drop, watch them drift out into the last daylight hours and leave Mona stranded on the couch, staring at her knees. There’s no room for her with them anymore. They got used to her being gone.

I look over at Reese and Byatt, kicking at the same splinter in the stairs. I don’t think I could ever get used to being without them.

Byatt gets up, an odd little frown creasing her brow. “Wait here,” she says, and goes over to Mona.

They talk for a minute, the two of them, Byatt bending so her voice can slide right into Mona’s ear, the shine of Mona’s hair washing Byatt’s skin red. And then Byatt straightens, and Mona presses her thumb against the inside of Byatt’s forearm. They both look rattled. Just a little, but I see it.

“Afternoon, Hetty.”

I turn around. It’s Headmistress, the angles in her face even sharper now than they used to be. Gray hair twined tight in a bun, her shirt buttoned up to her chin. And a stain around her mouth, faint pink from the blood that’s always oozing out of her lips. Her and Welch—the Tox is different with them. It doesn’t cut them down the way it did the other teachers; it doesn’t change their bodies the way it does ours. Instead, it wakes weeping sores on their