Wilder Girls(2)

   Reese rips open the bag, and she lets me and Byatt root through it. My stomach clenching, spit thick around my tongue. Anything, I’d take anything. But we’ve got a bad one. Soap. Matches. A box of pens. A carton of bullets. And then, at the bottom, an orange—a real live orange, rot only starting to nip at the peel.

We snatch. Reese’s silver hand on my collar, heat roiling under the scales, but I throw her to the floor, shove my knee against the side of her face. Bear down, trap Byatt’s neck between my shoulder and my forearm. One of them kicks; I don’t know who. Clocks me in the back of the head and I’m careening onto the stairs, nose against the edge with a crack. Pain fizzing white. Around us, the other girls yelling, hemming in.

Someone has my hair in her fist, tugging up, out. I twist, I bite where the tendons push against her skin, and she whines. My grip loosens. So does hers, and we scrabble away from each other.

I shake the blood out of my eye. Reese is sprawled halfway up the staircase, the orange in her hand. She wins.





CHAPTER 2


We call it the Tox, and for the first few months, they tried to make it a lesson. Viral Outbreaks in Western Civilizations: a History. “Tox” as a Root in Latinate Languages. Pharmaceutical Regulations in the State of Maine. School like always, teachers standing at the board with blood on their clothes, scheduling quizzes as if we’d all still be there a week later. The world’s not ending, they said, and neither should your education.

Breakfast in the dining room. Math, English, French. Lunch, target practice. Physicals and first aid, Ms. Welch bandaging wounds and Headmistress pricking with needles. Together for dinner and then locked inside to last the night. No, I don’t know what’s making you sick, Welch would tell us. Yes, you’ll be fine. Yes, you’ll go home again soon.

That ended quickly. Classes falling off the schedule as the Tox took teacher after teacher. Rules crumbling to dust and fading away, until only the barest bones were left. But still, we count the days, wake every morning to scan the sky for cameras and lights. People care on the mainland, that’s what Welch always says. They’ve cared from the second Headmistress called Camp Nash on the coast for help, and they’re looking for a cure. In the first shipment of supplies Boat Shift ever brought back, there was a note. Typed and signed, printed on the Navy’s letterhead.




FROM: Secretary of the Navy, Department of Defense

Commanding Officer, Chemical/Biological Incident Response Force (CBIRF), Camp Nash Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

TO: Raxter School for Girls, Raxter Island

SUBJECT: Quarantine procedures as recommended by the CDC

Implementation of a full isolation and quarantine effective immediately. Subjects to remain on school grounds at all times, for safety and to preserve conditions of initial contagion. Breach of school fence, save by authorized crew for supply retrieval (see below), violates terms of quarantine.

Termination of phone and internet access pending; communication to route only through official radio channels. Full classification of information in effect.

    Supplies to arrive via drop-off at western pier. Date and time to be set via Camp Nash lighthouse.

Diagnostics and treatment in development. CDC cooperating with local facilities re: cure. Expect delivery.





Wait, and stay alive, and we thought it would be easy—together behind the fence, safe from the wildwood, safe from the animals grown savage and strange—but girls kept dropping. Flare-ups, which left their bodies too wrecked to keep breathing, left wounds that wouldn’t heal, or sometimes, a violence like a fever, turning girls against themselves. It still happens like that. Only difference is now we’ve learned that all we can do is look after our own.

Reese and Byatt, they’re mine and I’m theirs. It’s them I pray for when I pass the bulletin board and brush two fingers against the note from the Navy still pinned there, yellowed and curling. A talisman, a reminder of the promise they made. The cure is coming, as long as we stay alive.

Reese digs a silver fingernail into the orange and starts peeling, and I force myself to look away. When food’s fresh like that, we fight for it. She says it’s the only fair way to settle things. No handouts, no pity. She’d never take it if it didn’t feel earned.

Around us the other girls are gathering in swirls of high laughter, digging through the clothing that spills out of every bag. The Navy still sends us enough for the full number. Shirts and tiny boots we don’t have anybody small enough to wear them.

   And jackets. They never stop sending jackets. Not since the frost began to coat the grass. It was only just spring when the Tox hit, and for that summer we were fine in our uniform skirts and button-downs, but winter came like it always does in Maine, bitter and long. Fires burning in daylight and the Navy-issue generators running after dark, until a storm broke them to bits.

“You’ve got blood on you,” Byatt says. Reese slices off the tail of her shirt and tosses it onto my face. I press. My nose squelches.

A scrape above us, on the mezzanine over the main hall. We all look up. It’s Mona from the year ahead of me, red hair and a heart-shaped face, back from being taken to the infirmary on the third floor. She’s been up there for ages, since last season’s flare-up, and I don’t think anybody expected her to ever come back down. I remember how her face steamed and cracked that day, how they carried her to the infirmary with a sheet over her like she was already dead.