Wilder Girls(14)

   Julia and Carson aren’t the first Boat Shift girls. Taylor, whose place I took, was the last left of the original team. She got picked with Emily and Christine, twins from some school down near DC who were here on exchange. They were only supposed to be here for a semester. They chose the wrong one. About three months into the Tox, they came back from the woods with their names torn out of their heads. The Tox took who they were, took everything except how to hold a knife. It made them stick each other in the main hall during dinner, made them watch themselves bleed dry.

Carson smiles at me as I get close. She’s wearing a second jacket, this one heavy and lined with flannel, and she’s got her hair tucked up under her hood. Next to her, Julia is bent in front of the closet, pulling out things for her and I guess for me.

“Here.” She stuffs a bundle of clothes into my arms and sits, kicking off her boots to pull on more socks. “Get that on.”

The coat is somewhere between black and navy, with big brass clasps across the front, like on some kind of steamer trunk. It fits pretty well, and with the collar flipped up, I won’t feel the wind on my neck. There’s also a red hat, the kind with flaps over the ears, but I’m not convinced it’ll fit, so I look up at Welch, and she’s got a red scarf. So does Carson. And Julia, standing now and frowning impatiently, has a red puffy vest on over her jacket.

   “The color’s easy to spot,” Welch says. She’s fiddling with a walkie-talkie hooked on her belt, one that must connect her back to Headmistress’s radio. “So we can find one another, just in case.”

Julia snorts. “And everything else can find us too. Come on, Hetty, put it on. We have to go.”

It shouldn’t, but it surprises me when Welch presses a bowie knife into my hands and shows me how to slip it through the belt loops on my jeans just like Julia and Carson do with theirs. The knife is all I’ll get for now, but like Welch, Julia has a gun. Not a rifle like we use on the roof, but a snug little pistol that she seems to know her way around.

“All set?” Welch says, and nods at me. “Behind Julia. Stay close.”

We go out the front doors and onto the path. I turn around just to see the house, to remember, and it’s like I’m thirteen again, climbing out of the van and coming up the walkway with Byatt half a step behind me. The big doors, the porch, and everything feeling like it’s about to be something.

At the fence we stop and wait for Welch to pull it open. It’s wrought iron, the bars close enough together that you can’t slide through, not even if you suck in hard, and it’s been up since the school was built some hundred years ago. Built to keep the manicured grounds separate from the wildwood, built to keep the animals from finding their way into the trash. Built, too, I suppose, to keep the girls inside, on the grounds. As if there was anywhere else on this island to go.

   But since the Tox, the trees have crept closer, new saplings springing up, stretching through the fence like they’re reaching for us. Pines, some of them, dead needles dusting the frozen ground, and others, too, scaled and gnarled like nothing else. They grow right up against the iron, and their branches reach up and over the fence before dipping low, loaded with berries the color of blood. Nobody will eat them. When they break open, their insides are black and oozing.

There’s only one place where the trees pull away from the fence, and that’s on the north side of the island, right where the shore drops off at a twenty-foot cliff. Everywhere else we’ve hacked back what we could and built up the fence with everything we could get our hands on, everything we could spare.

The woods are bad enough—I’d swear they want us for their own—but when the animals come, they come fast. The coyotes, grown bigger than wolves. The foxes that hunt now in vicious packs. Too fast for the Gun Shift girls sometimes, and so we’ve studded the fence with glass shards and the lids off used soup cans. Boarded up the gaps with bulletin boards torn off classroom walls.

We don’t keep a girl stationed at the fence. Too close to the woods, too tempting for any of the animals, and we don’t need one anyway. Instead, the gate opens easy and locks behind you as you leave. The only way back in is with the matching iron key dangling from Welch’s belt.

   The gate inches open and we sidle through the narrow gap. When Welch shuts it again, you can hear the lock slide home, and it sounds so flimsy, like I could break it just by thinking about it. Is this really all that’s keeping us safe?

“Ready?” says Welch. She doesn’t wait to see if I am. We start walking.

The road is dirt, with roots and weeds bleeding through the edges, and potholes filled in with rocks by Reese’s dad, Mr. Harker. I’ve spent a year and a half staring at it from the roof, but I forgot what it feels like under my feet, frozen through, crunching like spun sugar. My breath in clouds, a snap in the air, and it was fall a week ago, but today it’s nothing but winter.

Above us the pines stumble up to the sky. Taller than they should be, trunks broader, branches splitting a thousand times and the canopy filtering what sun there is, turning the light muddy and clinging. It all feels forgotten, like we’re the first people here in a hundred years. No tire tracks left on the road, no sign this was ever anything but what it is now.

We shouldn’t be here. This place isn’t ours anymore.



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