Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,6
of the shotgun and into our hands.
* * *
—
Dinner is scattered and fraying. Usually, we manage at least to sit in the same room, but today we get our rations from Welch and then split, some here in the hall and others in the kitchen, crowded around the old woodstove, the last of the curtains burning to keep them warm. After days like this and girls like Mona, we peel apart and wonder who’s next.
I’m by the stairs, propped up against the banister. The three of us were last to get food today, and there was barely anything good left: just the ends of a loaf of bread, both slimy with mold. Byatt looked about ready to cry when that was all I brought back—neither of us got anything for lunch, not when Reese won that orange fair and square—but luckily, Carson from Boat Shift gave me some expired soup. We’re waiting for the can opener to come our way so we can eat, and until then, there’s Reese on the floor trying to nap, and Byatt looking up to where you can just see the door that bars the staircase up to the third-floor infirmary.
It used to be the servants’ quarters back when the house was first built. Six rooms branching off a narrow hallway, with a roof deck above it and the double height main hall below. You can only get there using the staircase off the second-floor mezzanine, and it’s locked behind a low, tilting door.
I don’t like looking at it, don’t like thinking of the sickest girls tucked away, don’t like that there isn’t room for everyone. And I don’t like how every door up there locks from the outside. How, if you wanted to, you could keep someone in.
Instead, I stare across the main hall, to the glass walls of the dining room. Long empty tables ripped apart for kindling, silverware dumped into the ocean to keep the knives away from us. It used to be my favorite room in the house. Not on my first day, when I had nowhere to sit, but every one after I’d come in for breakfast and see Byatt saving me a seat. She had a single our first year, and she liked to get up early, take walks around the grounds. I’d meet her in the dining room, and she’d have toast waiting for me. Before Raxter, I ate it with butter, but Byatt showed me jam was better.
Cat catches my eye from across the room, and she holds up the can opener. I push off the banister and pick my way toward her, skirting where a quartet of girls are arranged in a square on the floor, their heads resting on one another’s stomachs as they try to make one another laugh.
“Saw you got Carson to cave,” Cat says as I approach. Black hair, so straight and fine, and dark considering eyes. She’s had some of the worst of the Tox. Weeks in the infirmary, hands bound to keep her from clawing at her skin as it boiled and bubbled. She still has the scars, pockmarks of white all over her body, and blisters that bloom and bleed fresh every season.
I look away from a new one on her neck and smile. “Didn’t take much.” She gives me the can opener, and I tuck it in my waistband, under my shirt so nobody can steal it from me on my way back to the stairs. “You guys good? You warm enough?” She’s only got the detachable fleece lining of her friend Lindsay’s jacket. The two of them had bad luck in the last clothing draw, and nobody manages to keep a blanket around here for long unless you never take your eyes off it.
“We’re all right,” Cat says. “Thanks for asking. And hey, with your soup, make sure the can’s not bulging at the lid. We’ve got enough to worry about besides botulism.”
“I’ll pass that on.”
That’s Cat, kind in her own way. She’s from our year, and her mom’s in the Navy like my dad. Raxter and Camp Nash are the only life for miles up here, and over the years they’ve twined so close that Raxter gives a scholarship to Navy girls. It’s the only reason I’m here. The only reason Cat’s here. We took the bus down to the airport together at the end of every quarter, her on her way to the base in San Diego, and me on mine to