Wilder Girls(42)

Why me

I’m watching her closely, and when she smiles at me, I can spot the sadness underneath.

“I’ll tell you the truth, Byatt,” Paretta says. “There’s really no reason at all.”

I think she expected me to be hurt. But it’s a relief more than anything else. I’m not special. I’m not immune. I’m not better at fighting this off, and that’s good, because I don’t want to.

Right place right time?

“Sure.” She gets up. “Something like that.”



* * *



—

It was Mona who started it for me. She came down from the infirmary and I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe she was still alive. I asked how she was and I asked what had happened, and she barely said anything.

I was going to leave when she laid her hand on the inside of my arm. And then, in a wry voice: “They’ll ruin it.”

When I turned around I saw Headmistress talking to Hetty. Watching me.

That night, after Gun Shift, after Mona’s flare-up, I snuck out of the bunk I share with Hetty. When I came back I told Reese I’d gone downstairs, and she was Reese, and she didn’t ask, and I needed it that way because it wasn’t true.

   Really, I went to Mona’s room. Her friends had moved in together and left her alone, so she was sleeping in the single at the end of the hall. Her door was unlocked. I went in. There was barely any light from the window, but I could see her prone on the bottom bunk.

“Hey,” I whispered. “You still alive?”

She didn’t answer, so I went over, shook her until her eyes opened. She looked awful, the gills on her neck fluttering slowly, their edges frayed and bloody.

“Go away,” she said.

Instead, I knelt down in front of her. I wasn’t going until I got what I wanted. “What did you mean? In the hall this morning.”

She sat up. So slowly, like it was the hardest thing, until at last she was looking at me, her legs crossed underneath her, red hair shining so dimly I almost didn’t notice. She took a long breath, and by the end of it, I thought she’d forgotten I was there. But then she reached up, ran one shaking finger over the scalloped lips of her gills.

“You’d keep it,” she said. “If you could. Right?”

I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know what she meant. Hetty cried when she lost her eye, and I even caught Reese sometimes looking at her scaled hand like she’d rather just cut it off. Me, I never minded. Bled, and screamed, but that’s the cost of sleeping easy.

   “No,” I lied. “Would you?”

She looked so tired. I almost felt bad for her. “Go to bed, Byatt,” she said.

But I couldn’t face my room and my bunk, so I went downstairs, wandered the length of the main hall, walking the cracks between the boards. And I thought about Mona, and I thought about me, and of course I would keep it.

Because I think I’d been looking for it all my life—a storm in my body to match the one in my head.

That’s where Welch found me. I told her I had a headache, and she felt my forehead, led me up to the infirmary, and took my blood—for good measure, she said, just in case—and then sent me back to my room. And when I got there, I climbed into bed with Reese, Reese who wouldn’t force a lie out of my mouth.

If I hadn’t spoken to Mona. If I hadn’t left my room that night. There are a million ways coming here doesn’t happen, but none of them feel possible. I was always on my way. This has always already happened.





CHAPTER 12


“And how have you been feeling?”

I shrug.

“No stress? Anything you felt a particularly pronounced emotional response to? Because you’ve been through quite a lot.”

I’ve never seen this woman before now. She came in after Paretta. Didn’t tell me her name, just pulled a wheelchair over to my bed and sat down like the room was hers.

“Is there something you’re uncomfortable with?” she asks.

She’s dressed the way Paretta usually is, that same protective suit and a surgical mask. Only her mask is clear plastic. So I can feel connected to her, I think, but it only distorts the bottom half of her face.

“Byatt?” she says, leaning forward.

I look away, hunch over the whiteboard. I’m not uncomfortable, I want to write. I’m just bored.

   Instead I settle for No

“No?”

Not uncomfortable

She nods, sits back. I stare down, at where the covers are pulled up over my legs.

“Do you know my name?” she asks.

No

“Would you like to?”

I point to the whiteboard.

“Why not?”

I keep my mouth closed, just blink at her slowly, and she nods like it means something.

“What about what I do?” she asks. “Would you like to know that?”

You’re a therapist

“How do you know?”

I roll my eyes.

“Have you been to one before?”

What do you think

“Let’s try something else,” she says. I know her. Brand-new, but I’ve met her a thousand times. This is how they look at me when I don’t give myself away.