Wilder Girls(21)

It’s Welch. I twist around on the couch to see her. Her mouth is flat, a tight, thin line, but she seems almost nervous, like she did before the Tox when she’d catch you breaking curfew.

“Sure,” I say, and get up, start toward Welch.

“I’ll save you some food,” Byatt calls. “Whether you like it or not.”

I wave over my shoulder. “Thanks, Mom.”

Welch leads me to the mouth of the hallway. This close I can see frown lines setting in her forehead, and her eyes look bright, like she’s on the edge of a fever.

“What’s up?” I say.

“Byatt is right. You should eat something.”

“I’m not hungry.” I can’t. I can’t take more than what I’ve taken already.

Welch lets out a breath. “Hetty.” And she sounds serious. “I need you to work a little harder, please.”

“What?” Just the fact that I’m in the main hall is already more than I can take.

“I told you it was your job to show everybody here that things are fine. But instead, you’re sitting there looking, quite frankly, ready to vomit.”

“I’m trying, okay?” I say, frustration bleeding into my voice.

“Not hard enough.” She looks over my shoulder, to where I know Byatt is sitting. “There are usually three of you. Where’s Reese?”

   “That’s not related.”

Welch scoffs. “Everything is. After that stunt she pulled when you got Boat Shift, the two of you are on the radar.” She leans in. “The girls are watching you, Hetty. So whatever your little fight was about, I need you to fix it. Kiss and make up. Anything that gets the three of you back to normal. Normal, Hetty.”

“It’s Reese. Sulking is normal for her.”

“I’m not asking,” Welch says sharply. Her jaw set, her eyes glinting.

“Yeah.” I hold up my hands in surrender. “Okay. I’ll talk to her.”

“You won’t tell her anything you shouldn’t.”

I barely tell her anything on a good day. “I won’t.”

Welch smiles, or gets close to it, and rests her hand on my shoulder. “Thank you,” she says. “Sometime today would be good.”

She makes it a few steps away before it slips out of me. “Doesn’t it bother you? Lying to everyone?”

For a second she doesn’t answer, and then she turns. I can see it in her face, how she wants to do it right, how she wants to say the adult thing. “Yeah, it does.” And she shrugs. “So?”

So doesn’t that mean something? I want to yell. So doesn’t that matter?

“So nothing, I guess.”

   She nods. “Today, Hetty.”

When I get back to Byatt I can tell she’s been watching us. Fingernails freshly bitten, frown lingering.

“I have to talk to Reese,” I say. “You better come find us in about five minutes in case she tries to kill me again.”

“It was only choking,” Byatt says, but she nods, and hooks her fingers in my belt loop to stop me as I pass. “Careful, yeah?”

I give her a smile. I’m always careful with Reese, even though she rarely is with me. “Sure.”



* * *



—

It was easier with Reese when her dad was here. Right when they set up the quarantine, they brought Mr. Harker to our side of the fence, stuck him in the wing with the teachers, and we all pretended like it wasn’t the strangest part of what was happening, having a man in the house with us.

He was here for maybe a month. We kept track of things like that, then, but now it feels so long ago I can barely remember. All that’s left are flashes. Reese and her father eating breakfast in the dining room, back before we trashed the furniture for burning. Reese and her father rigging up the generator out back. The two of them on the porch tracing constellations in the sky, Reese laughing in a way she never did with me and Byatt.

And other things too. How he started to change—slowly, at first, just an eagerness in his hands, to scratch and tear apart. The Tox, though we didn’t call it that yet. All we really knew was that one day Mr. Harker was safe and the next he wasn’t. One day he was himself, and the next he was throwing up a black sludge, grainy like dirt, and looking at us with empty eyes.

   Reese ignored it, pretended it was fine, picked a screaming match with Byatt, and then the next day Mr. Harker was gone. He left a note tucked in Reese’s jacket while she was sleeping, saying he had to go. Saying it was safest that way for everyone.

She ran to the fence that morning, I remember that. Cut her palms to ribbons clawing at it, trying to get through. But Taylor held her back, and me and Byatt, we watched Reese fall apart. When she came back together again, there was something gone.

It was never like that for me. Goodbyes at airports and watching the news, but my dad always came back.



* * *



—

I find Reese in the jack pine grove by the water, in the same spot where we were sitting the first day of the Tox. She’s there, now, on that same low branch of that same tree, and the only thing different from that day to this one is the glint of her silver hand as she shivers in her thin jacket.

I come up slow, in front of her where she can see, which is always safest. In the nearly two days since I last saw her, circles have darkened under her eyes. She looks hungry, I think. And cold. But it was never her who needed us. Always the other way around.