Wilder Girls(3)

Now she has a lattice of scars across her cheeks and the beginning of an aura to her hair. Reese is like that, with her blond braid and the glow the Tox gave it, and it’s so much hers that it’s startling to see it on Mona.

“Hey,” she says, unsteady on her feet, and her friends run over, all fluttering hands and smiles, plenty of space between them. It’s not contagion we’re afraid of—we all have it already, whatever it is. It’s seeing her break apart again. Knowing someday soon it’ll happen to us. Knowing all we can do is hope we make it through.

   “Mona,” her friends say, “thank God you’re okay.” But I watch them let the conversation drop, watch them drift out into the last daylight hours and leave Mona stranded on the couch, staring at her knees. There’s no room for her with them anymore. They got used to her being gone.

I look over at Reese and Byatt, kicking at the same splinter in the stairs. I don’t think I could ever get used to being without them.

Byatt gets up, an odd little frown creasing her brow. “Wait here,” she says, and goes over to Mona.

They talk for a minute, the two of them, Byatt bending so her voice can slide right into Mona’s ear, the shine of Mona’s hair washing Byatt’s skin red. And then Byatt straightens, and Mona presses her thumb against the inside of Byatt’s forearm. They both look rattled. Just a little, but I see it.

“Afternoon, Hetty.”

I turn around. It’s Headmistress, the angles in her face even sharper now than they used to be. Gray hair twined tight in a bun, her shirt buttoned up to her chin. And a stain around her mouth, faint pink from the blood that’s always oozing out of her lips. Her and Welch—the Tox is different with them. It doesn’t cut them down the way it did the other teachers; it doesn’t change their bodies the way it does ours. Instead, it wakes weeping sores on their tongues, sets a tremor in their limbs that won’t go away.

   “Good afternoon,” I say to Headmistress. She’s let a lot of things slide, but manners aren’t one of them.

She nods across the hall, to where Byatt is still bent over Mona. “How’s she doing?”

“Mona?” I say.

“No, Byatt.”

Byatt hasn’t had a flare-up since late summer, and she’s due for one soon. They cycle in seasons, each one worse than before until we can’t bear it anymore. After her last one, though, I can’t imagine something worse. She doesn’t look any different—just a sore throat she can’t shake and that serrated ridge of bone down her back, bits of it peeking through her skin—but I remember every second of it. How she bled through our old mattress until it dripped onto the floorboards underneath our bunk. How she looked more confused than anything as the skin over her spine split open.

“She’s fine,” I say. “It’s getting about time, though.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Headmistress says. She watches Mona and Byatt a little longer, frowning. “I didn’t know you girls and Mona were friends.”

Since when has she cared about that? “Friendly, I guess.”

Headmistress looks at me like she’s surprised I’m still standing there. “Lovely,” she says, and then she starts across the main hall, down the corridor to where her office is hidden away.

   Before the Tox we saw her every day, but since then, she’s either pacing up in the infirmary or locked in her office, glued to the radio, talking to the Navy and the CDC.

There was never any cell reception here in the first place—character building, according to the brochures—and they cut the landline that first day of the Tox. To keep things classified. To manage information. But at least we could speak to our families on the radio, and we could hear our parents crying for us. Until we couldn’t anymore. Things were getting out, the Navy said, and measures had to be taken.

Headmistress didn’t bother comforting us. It was well past comfort by then.

Her office door’s shutting and locking behind her when Byatt comes back over to us.

“What was that?” I ask. “With Mona.”

“Nothing.” She pulls Reese to her feet. “Let’s go.”



* * *



—

Raxter is on a big plot of land, on the eastern tip of the island. The school has water on three sides, the gate on the fourth. And beyond it the woods, with the same kind of pine and spruce we have on the grounds, but tangled and thick, new trunks wrapping around the old ones. Our side of the fence is neat and clean like it was before—it’s only us that’s different.

   Reese leads us across the grounds, to the point of the island, rocks scrubbed bare by the wind and pieced together like a turtle’s shell. Now we sit there side by side by side, Byatt in the middle, the chilled breeze whipping her loose hair out in front of us. It’s calm today, sky a clear sort of not-blue, and there’s nothing in the distance. Beyond Raxter, the ocean drops deep, swallowing sandbanks and pulling currents. No ships, no land on the horizon, no reminder that the rest of the world is still out there, going on without us, everything still the way it always was.

“How are you feeling?” says Byatt. She’s asking because two mornings ago the scar across my blind eye bloomed wide. It’s left over from the early days, a reminder of the ways we didn’t understand what was happening to us.