Reckless Girls(26)

I feel like I’m in a dream as I flip over and swim back to the beach, like the water has suddenly become glue, thick and viscous, slowing my movements even though I know I’m swimming as fast as I can, that the shore is so close. Still, my entire body is tense with fear, bracing for a sudden spike of pain, the numbing terror of knowing you’re about to become food.

Amma is right next to me, and I’m struck by a sudden, dark thought.

I don’t have to beat the shark, I just have to beat her.

Even as I reach the shallow water myself, scrambling to my feet in an awkward crawl, I can picture it in my mind: Amma and the shark both gaining on me, my foot connecting with Amma’s jaw, her teeth clocking together, her blood ribboning out bright red in the clear water as the shark turns for her while I’m safe, I’m out, I’m alive …

The vision is fleeting, fading as Amma and I both stumble onto the beach, but when I look at her, I’m filled with the same weird thrill of horror and amazement as when you peer over the edge of a cliff and think, What if I jumped right now?

The relief that you didn’t do it mixed with the giddy awfulness of knowing that you could.

We’re both on shore now, and looking out at the water, the fin is no closer than it was. The shark is just turning lazy circles out at the mouth of the lagoon. It was never chasing us at all.

We collapse onto the sand, laughing in the way you do when you’ve just been scared shitless, but somehow come out of it okay.

“Oh my god,” Amma gasps, wrapping an arm around her middle. “We were almost those girls!”

I raise a shaking hand to push my wet hair back from my face. “Which girls?”

She sits and wraps an arm around her knees.

“You know,” she says. “The stupid ones in horror movies. The ones who are flitting about and joking around despite it being really obvious they’re going to die in the opening scene.”

“Okay, but that couldn’t be us because we didn’t have our tits hanging out,” I remind her, and she laughs again.

“Solid point,” Amma says, nodding at me with approval. “It would’ve been Eliza, then.”

That makes both of us crack up, and out in the lagoon, I see the shark turn toward the open water. “Guess he got tired of our shit,” I observe, and Amma stands up, picking up a handful of sand.

“Fuck off, shark!” she yells, throwing it into the water, and for whatever reason, that’s the funniest thing I have ever heard, because I laugh so hard that tears stream down my cheeks, and Amma laughs, too, the two of us giggling in a way I haven’t done in nearly three years. Ever since Mom died.

“I like you, Lux,” Amma says once we settle down. “I mean, I knew when we met you that you were obviously cool, but now I really like you.”

It’s pathetic the way those words warm me, pathetic how much I’ve missed being accepted by other women, having this kind of easy camaraderie. It makes me think about how I felt just a few minutes ago, floating in all that clear water. Like I could just exist as someone in the present, no past, no worries about the future.

Fuck, that would be nice.

Amma smiles at me from behind her sunglasses. “And as we’ve discussed, I don’t like people that easily,” she says, “so it’s a very high bar.”

She’s teasing, but I’m remembering what I felt in the water, that urge to kick her to save myself.

You’re a survivor, Brittany had said after the storm. Maybe that’s all it was, some deep human instinct of self-preservation.

But something about that image—Amma in the water, blood in her mouth—stays with me for the rest of the day.





ELEVEN





We’ve been on Meroe for four days before we decide to tackle the jungle.

From the deck of the Susannah, the island is a paradise. Coconut palms rise up to the sky, the water laps against a white shore, and everything is postcard-perfect.

But the interior of the island is different.

I know Nico said that the island was used as a landing point during World War II, and that there’s an old airstrip somewhere in there, but studying all these trees now, it’s hard to believe. The island seems impenetrable and dark, and I don’t know why we can’t just do what we do every day—swim, walk on the beach, drink. That’s a lot closer to my idea of a good time than hacking our way through jungle just to see some old war shit.

But Nico and Jake were super pumped about the whole thing, calling it “an adventure,” so I’m trying—again—to be the cool girlfriend, who is up for anything. Sometimes I think if I can just keep pretending to be her enough, I’ll eventually become her.

Brittany and Eliza are both wearing similar expressions of resigned indulgence. Amma, on the other hand, has been right at Nico’s side, asking a million questions: how long is the airstrip, when was it in use, did people actually live here, on and on, and Nico is, of course, eating it up even though most of his answers boil down to, “Um … I don’t know.”

Next to me, Eliza nudges my arm. “Should we be taking notes?” she asks in a low voice, nodding at Amma, and I snort.

“Some people are definitely acting like there’s a test later,” I whisper a little too loudly. Amma glances over at me sharply, even though I don’t think she actually heard what I said.