Wilder Girls Read online

  “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 was with her that day, had to wrestle her down and put a bullet in her head. Everybody thinks that’s why she quit Boat Shift, but when Lindsay asked her about it yesterday, Taylor backhanded her across the face, and nobody’s mentioned it since.

  It hasn’t stopped us from wondering. Taylor says she’s fine, says everything is normal, but quitting Boat Shift isn’t normal. Especially not for her. Welch and Headmistress will have to post a new third name soon, someone to take her place.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I say. “I can ask.”

  Reese opens her eyes, sits up. Her silver fingers twitch. “Don’t. You’ll only piss Welch off.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Don’t worry, though. You’ll get it.”

  “We’ll see,” Reese says back. These aren’t the nicest things we’ve ever said to each other, but they’re close.

  * * *

  —

  That night Byatt finishes the stitches over my eye, and afterward I can’t sleep. I stare up at the bottom of Reese’s bunk, to where Byatt’s carved her initials over and over. BW. BW. BW. She does that everywhere. On the bunk, on her desk in every class we had, on the trees in the grove by the water. Marking Raxter as hers, and sometimes I think if she asked, I’d let her do the same to me.

  The quiet, on and on, until near to midnight two gun-shots break the silence. I tense, wait, but it’s barely a heartbeat before the shouts come echoing down from Gun Shift, yelling, “All clear!”

  Above me, Reese is snoring on the top bunk. Byatt and I share the bottom, pressed so close I can hear her teeth grinding when she dreams. The heat went out a while ago, and we sleep as near as we can, in our jackets, in our everything. I can reach into my pocket and feel the bullet there, the casing smooth.

  We heard about it soon after Welch assigned the first rounds of Gun Shift. The first girls saw something from the roof. They couldn’t agree on what—one girl said it was hazy and gleaming, moving almost like a person in a slow, measured gait, and another said it was too big for that—but it spooked them enough that they gathered all the Gun Shift girls into the smallest room on the second floor, and they taught us how to crack a bullet open. How to ignore that shudder in our guts and how to swallow the gunpowder like poison, just in case we ever need to die.

  Some nights I get to thinking about what it could’ve been, what they could’ve seen, and it helps to feel the casing in my hand, to know that I’m safe from whatever they saw and whatever they’re afraid of. But tonight, Mona’s all I can see—Mona holding the gun and Mona looking like she wanted to put it to her head.

  I’d never held a gun before Raxter. There was one in my house, sometimes—my dad’s Navy-issue pistol if he was home—but he’d keep it locked away. Byatt hadn’t even seen one in person.

  “I’m from Boston,” she said when Reese and I laughed. “We don’t have them down there like you do here.”

  I remember it because she almost never mentioned home. Never slipped it into conversation the way I always found myself doing with Norfolk. I don’t think she ever missed it. Raxter didn’t let us have cell phones, so if you wanted to call home, you had to line up to use the landline in Headmistress’s office during afternoon rest hour. I never saw her there. Not once.

  I roll over to look at her, stretched out next to me and already dozing. I’d have missed home if I were from a family like hers, all blue blood and money. But that’s the difference with us. Byatt’s never wanted anything she doesn’t have.

  “Stop staring at me,” she grumbles, and pokes me in the ribs.

  “Sorry.”

  “Such a creep.” But she hooks her pinkie around mine and slips under again.

  I must fall asleep after that, because there’s nothing, and then I’m blinking, then a creak in the floorboards, and Byatt isn’t in the bunk with me anymore. She’s at the threshold, closing the door behind her as she comes inside.

  We’re not supposed to leave our rooms at night, not even to go to the bathrooms at the end of the hall. The dark is too thick, Welch’s curfew too strict. I prop myself up on one elbow, but I’m covered in shadows and she must not see. Instead, she pauses at the foot of the bed, and then she climbs the ladder up to Reese.

  One of them sighs, and there’s a rustle as they settle in, and then the yellow-white of Reese’s braid is hanging from her bunk to swing gently above me. It drifts like feathers, covers the ceiling in faded patterns of light.

  “Hetty asleep?” she says. I don’t know why, but I slow my breathing, make sure they won’t know I can hear.

  “Yeah.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” Byatt says.

  “You went out.”

  “Yeah.”

  The hurt of it twists in my gut. Why wouldn’t she take me with her? And why is it Reese who gets to hear about it? Byatt isn’t supposed to find things in Reese that she can’t find in me.

  One of them moves around, probably Byatt tucking into Reese. She sleeps close, Byatt. I’m always waking with her fingers hooked in pockets of my jeans.

  “Where’d you go?” Reese whispers.

  “For a walk.” But I know how a lie sounds. No way she risked sneaking out just to stretch her legs. We get enough of that every morning. No, there’s a secret buried in her voice, and usually, she shares those with me. What’s different now?

  Reese doesn’t reply, and Byatt keeps going. “Welch caught me on my way back.”

  “Damn.”

  “It’s fine. I was only downstairs, in the hall.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “Told her I was getting a bottle of water, for a headache.”

  Reese’s silver hand pulls her braid out of view. I can picture the shuttered gleam of her eyes, the strong set of her jaw. Or maybe she’s easier in the dark. Maybe she breaks all the way open when she thinks you can’t see.

  The first time I met her was the day I got to Raxter. I was thirteen but not real thirteen, not thirteen with a chest and hips and bared teeth. I’d met Byatt already, on the ferry from the mainland to the island, and that had been fast and tight. She knew who she was and who I should be, and she fit right into all the places in me I couldn’t fill. Reese was different.

  She was sitting on the stairs in the main hall, her uniform too big, her knee socks sagging around her ankles. I don’t know if they were afraid of her already or if it was something else, if maybe her being the groundskeeper’s daughter meant something to them it didn’t to me, but the other girls in our year were clustered by the fireplace, as far away from her as they could get.

  Byatt and I passed her on our way to the others, and the way Reese looked at me then, alrea
dy angry, already burning—I remember it like nothing else.

  For a while after that there wasn’t anything between the three of us at all. Just class and a nod here and there in the hallway on the way to the showers. Then Byatt and I needed a third for our group project in French, and Reese was at the top of the class—had muscled past Byatt a few tests back—so we picked her.

  That’s all it took. Reese next to us at dinner, Reese next to us at assembly, and if I remembered how she looked at me that first day, if I noticed the way my stomach clenched any time she said my name, it didn’t matter. It still doesn’t. This is as close as I’ll ever get to her—a bunk above me, her voice soft in the dark as she talks to somebody else.

  “Do you think,” she says after a while, “that it’s getting worse?”

  I can practically hear Byatt shrug. “Probably.”

  “Probably?”

  “I mean, I don’t know,” Byatt says. “Sure. But not for everyone.” A beat of nothing, and then her voice again, so quiet I have to strain to hear. “Listen, if you know something—”

  I hear the scrape of Reese’s boots as she rolls over. “Get down,” she says. “You’re crowding me.”

  I wonder, sometimes, if she was different before her mother left. If she was easier to reach. But I can’t imagine her like that.

  I stir when Byatt gets into our bunk, but I pretend not to wake, just turn over so my back is to her. I think she watches me for a moment, but she slips under soon after. I only follow once light is starting at the bottom of the sky.

  CHAPTER 3

  Dawn breaks quick and cold. A new layer of frost on the windows. Ice collecting in sheaves among the reeds. Byatt and I get out of bed, try to leave Reese sleeping as we head outside for our walk.

  The walks were just Byatt’s at first. Her, alone, making slow circuits of the grounds. The other girls used to whisper about it. Homesick, they said, lonely, and it was all pity and laughter. But I know it gave her a glow, made her someone to get close to. By the end of our second month here, I was wandering after her and hoping it would rub off on me.

  Today the main hall is empty as we pass through, except for the girl keeping watch at the front doors. The school is shaped like a bracket, a newly built wing branching off each end of the old house. On the second floor it’s dorms and a handful of offices, and here on the ground floor it’s classrooms, and the hall, and Headmistress’s office at the corner of the bracket, Headmistress probably inside tallying supplies, checking the numbers.

  I reach out as we pass the bulletin board and tap the note about the cure, right on the letterhead. That’s where the luck is best, and you can see how the color’s worn away where a hundred girls have touched it a hundred times. I smile, think of me and Byatt in some sun-soaked city somewhere, free of the Tox.

  “Hey,” Byatt says to the door girl, who’s one of the youngest we have left, thirteen. “Everything good?”

  “Yeah.” The girl tugs on the door without Byatt asking. People are like that for Byatt, no matter what she’s like for them.

  The door’s barely an inch open, too heavy for the girl to move on her own. We start them young on Door Shift—if there’s anything really wrong, the Gun Shift girls will take care of it, but the responsibility of manning the door molds the younger girls into the right shape. I step up and lay my hands over hers. Pull, feel the give under the rust, newer and thicker every season. This will be our second winter with the Tox, my third at Raxter altogether. How many more will I have here?

  “Thanks.” I knock my arm against her shoulder so she won’t realize I don’t remember her name. “See you later.”

  Out on the porch I wait while Byatt buttons her jacket. The grass is long dead, and there, stamped into the frost that covers it, is a trail of footprints. Could some of them be Byatt’s from last night?

  “So,” I say. “Cold out.”

  She doesn’t answer. She’s fussing with the top button of her jacket, hidden under her chin, as we step onto the flagstone path to the gate.

  I try again, hope I don’t have to dig too deeply. If only she’d just tell me where she went. “Sleep well?”

  “Sure.”

  “Was I restless?”

  “No more than usual.”

  I wait, give her another chance to come out with it, but she doesn’t. “Because I woke up, right in the middle of the night, and you weren’t there.”

  Byatt veers off the path, to the left. It’s the way we always go. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  At first I think she won’t explain—she doesn’t always with me, even though I do with her—but then she stops, looks me full in the eye, and says, “You talked in your sleep.”

  It’s so far from what I’m expecting that my jaw drops. “I did?”

  “Yeah.” There’s a delicate sort of hurt creeping into her expression, like she’s not sure she wants to let me see it. “I don’t know what you were dreaming, but you said…something.”

  I didn’t. I know I didn’t, but I don’t understand this enough to say so. “What did I say?”

  She grimaces, shakes her head. “It wasn’t something I’d want to hear again. Let’s leave it at that.”

  For a moment I feel just the way she wants me to. Too anxious, too guilty to keep pushing. But it’s not real. I was awake, and I saw her. “Oh,” I say. “Are you sure?”

  It’s the closest I can get to confronting her. Lean too hard and she’ll let herself snap. I’ve seen her do it a hundred times, with teachers when one of us forgot their homework, with field trips when Welch caught her forging my mom’s signature. Byatt lies so well. But usually, she’s lying for me.

  “Yeah,” she says, with just the right tremble. “It’s fine, okay? I just climbed up to bunk in with Reese.”

  That, at least, is true. But what secrets are there to keep at Raxter? We all have the same horrors in our bodies, the same pains, the same wants.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. There’s nothing for it but to play along. “Whatever it was. You know you’re my best friend.”

  Byatt brightens immediately and throws her arm around my shoulders to draw me close. We start walking again, steps matching steps. “Yeah,” she says, “I know I am.”

  Above us, the house looms, and the voices of other girls spill through cracked windows as they start to wake. Arguments over clothes and bedding, and a few sharper than that, but mostly the same conversations every day. The same magazines passed around and around, quizzes taken and retaken, the same memories told like stories until they belong to everybody. Parents sliced up to share, first kisses exchanged like gifts.

  I never had anything to add—couldn’t conjure up enough of my dad, couldn’t bear thinking of my mom all alone in our house on the base. And I’ve wanted boys, and I’ve wanted girls, but I’ve never wanted anyone enough to miss them, enough to pluck them from the slideshow of my old life and bring them here.

  Sometimes if I close my eye, I forget what’s changed. And Raxter isn’t a rush of gunpowder and hunger anymore. It’s boredom, an idleness burrowing deep.

  We’re at the fence now, the house behind us and the woods stretching out ahead, branches evergreen. Road slicing through, worn flat and narrower each year. A few feet past the fence, I can see what the gunshots must’ve hit last night—a deer, hours dead, flesh too contaminated to eat. Worms crawling in its open mouth, blood stiff in its fur.

  Besides the deer there’s more out there. It’s something we all know but don’t talk about. If you’re outside at the right time, you can feel the ground shake every now and then, like my house on the base whenever a jet flew too close overhead. Early in the Tox we used to leaf through the earth science textbooks, look at the lists of flora and fauna and wonder what might be out there. But then we had to burn the books for warmth, and wondering wasn’t as fun anymore.

&n
bsp; “Come on,” Byatt says.

  We don’t look up to the roof, where two girls are aiming rifles over our heads. Instead, we trail our fingers along the bars of the fence, follow it until it meets the water, where frills of rock pile and stack, catching the spray in pools that won’t freeze through until the deep of winter. Folds of gray, the algae a sharp green, and the ocean rolling into the distance, black and heaving.

  I climb onto a spear of rock, lean onto my palms so I can look into the biggest pool. No fish—barely any come near the island since things changed—but this time I see something. Small, no bigger than my fist, and a bright, uneasy sort of blue. A crab.

  “Hey,” I say, and Byatt clambers over to balance next to me. “Look.”

  They showed up a few years before I did. A sign of the times, that’s what our biology teacher said when she took us out here to observe them my sophomore fall, during our climate change unit. Used to be they never came north of Cape Cod, but as the world changes, so does the water. We call these ones Raxter Blues, and they grow different up here.

  Mr. Harker helped us catch a few, and we took them back to the classroom, took turns holding the scalpel. Salt thick on the air, and two girls nearly fainted as we cracked the shells, lifted them like lids. See, our teacher said. How they have both gills and lungs, to breathe in the water and on land. See how a body will change, to give you the best chance it can.

  We watch the crab for a while as it trundles across the floor of the tide pool, and then Byatt shuffles forward and nearly knocks me into the water.

  “Careful,” I say, but she’s not listening, her arm outstretched, fingers breaking the surface. Something thin and long darts under a shelf of rock.

  “I want to see it again,” she tells me. She’s sweeping circles in the water, lifting the crab with the current.

  “Don’t,” I say. “It’s awful. And if you keep putting your hand in there, you’ll get frostbite sooner or later.”

  But she’s not listening. Quick like one of the herons that used to live here, her hand darts in, ripples splashing at her elbow, and when she comes up again, it’s with the crab pinched between two fingers, dangling by a claw. It nips at her, but she pins it to the ground.