Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,7
the base in Norfolk. She never saved me a seat, but when I sidled in next to her, she’d smile and let me fall asleep on her shoulder.
I’m just sitting down next to Byatt again when there’s a commotion by the front door, where Landry’s girls are clustered. You can break the whole of us into maybe eleven or twelve parts—some bigger, some smaller—and the largest group is centered around Landry, two years above me and from an old Boston family, older even than Byatt’s. She’s never liked us much, not since she complained that there were no boys on the island, and Reese gave her the blankest look I’ve ever seen and said, “Plenty of girls, though.”
It made something jump in my chest, something I can still feel at night when Reese’s braid casts a rippling glow on the ceiling. A reaching. A wish.
But she’s too far away. She’s always been too far.
Somebody yelps, and we watch as the group shuffles and knits itself into a ring, clustered thick around a body laid out on the floor. I bend down, try to get a glimpse. Glossy brown hair, frame frail and angular.
“I think it’s Emmy,” I say. “She’s having her first.”
Emmy was in sixth grade when the Tox happened, and one by one the other girls in her year have crashed headlong into puberty, their first flare-ups screaming and bursting like fireworks. Now it’s finally her turn.
We listen as she whimpers, her body trembling and seizing. I wonder what she’ll get, if it’s anything at all. Gills like Mona’s, blisters like Cat’s, maybe bones like Byatt’s or a hand like Reese’s, but sometimes the Tox doesn’t give you anything—just takes and takes. Leaves you drained and withering.
At last, quiet, and the group around Emmy starts to clear. She looks all right, for a first flare-up. Her legs wobble as she gets to her feet, and even from here, I can see her veins in her neck standing out dark, like they’re bruises.
There’s a smattering of applause as Emmy dusts off her jeans. Julia, one of the Boat Shift girls, tears a chunk off her stale dinner roll and tosses it to Emmy. Somebody will leave a gift under her pillow tonight. Maybe a pair of bobby pins, or a page ripped out from one of the magazines still floating around.
Landry gives her a hug, and Emmy’s beaming, so proud to have made it through so well. It’ll hit her later, I think, when the adrenaline fades away, when Landry isn’t there to watch. The real hurt of it. The change.
“I’m still bitter,” I say. “Nobody ever gave me anything for my first.”
Byatt laughs, her hands moving quick to open the soup can, and she gives me the lid. “There. My gift to you.”
I lick off the layer of vegetable sludge, ignore the sparkling acidity. Byatt takes a sip from the can. When she hits a third of the way down she’ll pass it to me. Reese always goes last. You can’t get her to eat any other way.
“When do you think they’ll post the new Boat Shift list?” Byatt says loudly. She’s asking me, but she’s doing it for Reese—Reese, who’s been angling to get on Boat Shift since nearly the very beginning.
Her mom left before I ever came to Raxter, but I knew her dad, Mr. Harker. He was the groundskeeper and maintenance staff and handyman all in one, and he lived in a house off the grounds, on the edge of the island. Or he did, until the Tox, and the quarantine, and then the Navy sent him in to live with us. He doesn’t anymore. Went out into the woods when the Tox started getting to him, and Reese has been trying to go after him ever since.
Boat Shift’s the only way to do that. The only way past the fence. Usually, it’s the same three girls until one of them dies, but a few days ago the third girl, Taylor, said this was her last trip and she wouldn’t go out anymore. She’s one of the oldest still here, and she was always helping, always calming everybody down and stitching everybody up. We can’t figure out exactly what made her stop.
There’s a story going around it had something to do with her girlfriend, Mary, who went feral last summer. One day Mary was here and then she was gone—just the Tox left in her body, and no light in her eyes. Taylor