Wilder Girls(10)

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.

Keeping it still with one hand, she fumbles with the other for one of the loose rocks at the rim of the pool. Gets a good grip and slams the rock down on the crab. It writhes, limbs twitching frantically.

“Jesus, Byatt.”

She stares down at the shattered crab. Starting at the very tips of its claws, the blue shell is darkening, turning black like it’s been dipped in ink. The sight of it is what sent those girls reeling in biology, what left them dizzy and gasping.

“Why do you do that?” I ask, looking away. If we’d already had breakfast, I might be throwing it up right now.

“Because,” she says. She picks up the crab, still moving but only just, and tosses it back into the water. “It’s how you know they’re real Raxter Blues.”

   “You can’t just pick a flower?” The irises do it, turn black as they’re dying. They have since before the Tox, and now we do too. Every Raxter girl, fingers black up to her knuckles as the Tox takes her.

“It’s not the same,” Byatt says.

She stands then, leaves me behind and picks her way out to the last of the rocks, her feet sure, boots slick as the tide pushes in. She told me once that it was her favorite thing about Raxter, the way the edges of it change. Earth dropping away and slipping under and there, Byatt with her eyes closed and her chin lifted.

“Can you remember?” I call suddenly, the winter breeze tearing my voice from my mouth. “What it was like, before?”

She looks over her shoulder at me. I wonder if she’s thinking of the same things I am. Of watching from the porch while the seniors gathered on the beach in their white graduation dresses, of linking fingers during assembly and squeezing hard to keep from laughing. Of standing in the dining room, the last echoes of sun drifting through the paneled windows, and singing an off-key hymn before sitting down to eat.

“Yeah,” Byatt says. “Of course.”

“And you miss it?”

For a second I think she won’t answer, and then her mouth splits wide, and she’s smiling. “Does that matter?”

   “I guess not.” Above us the clouds shift, let a little warmth through. “Let’s go in.”



* * *



—

We meet Reese at the kitchen threshold, waiting as two girls wash their hair in the sink with a bucket of rainwater. Every few days Byatt and I share a turn, my hair too short to need much more than a scrub at the roots, but Reese’s braid scatters the water like stars, beautiful and hard to look at, and she gets the whole sink to herself.

“They’re taking forever,” Reese says as we come up beside her. She’s got her braid gripped tight in her silver hand, and I can see the tension in the other girls, see them looking at the door like they might make a run for it.

“Sorry,” one of them says. “We’re almost done.”

“Well, hurry up.”

They look at each other, and then the girls are wringing their hair out and hustling past us. The second one has shampoo suds still glistening at her temples.

“Thanks,” Reese says, like she gave them a choice.

Byatt and I stand in the doorway as Reese undoes her braid and dunks her hair into the bucket of water. It takes a few minutes. By the time she’s done, her sleeves are drenched, and she’s still dripping as the three of us find an empty couch in the main hall and settle in to wait. If the shifts are going to change, Welch tells us early, right when the youngest ones have finished their breakfast.

   I slump against the armrest, drop my legs into Byatt’s lap. On the other side of her, Reese is bent forward, damp head ducked down as she rebraids her hair.

She isn’t nervous. There’s just something winding tight in her. It’s always there, but some days it feels closer to the surface, and today’s one of those. We don’t say anything when Reese starts picking at the upholstery with her silver hand.

I’ve never wanted anything the way Reese wants Boat Shift. I can still see her at the gate that day Mr. Harker left, reaching through to him. I can still hear her yelling as Taylor pulled her away. Of course she wants to go out, past the fence, past the curve of the road. To see if there’s anything left of him.