Wilder Girls(45)

In the distance a branch cracks, and we stop, press ourselves behind a pine and wait. Welch, maybe. Or something else, something worse. My heart racing, nerves alight. Whatever it is, we’re safer in the dark than I was that day on Boat Shift. We must be.

“Hey,” Reese whispers. She’s crouched low, leaning around the tree trunk. “I think it’s okay.”

What could be okay out here? “Really?”

“Yeah.” She stands up, beckons to me. “It’s just some deer.”

I peer around her shoulder, and there, ambling toward us through a patch of moonlight, a pair of bucks. From here they look fine, almost normal, but up close, I know I’d see their veins raised out of their skin like patterns of lace. And I know if we sliced them open, their flesh would twitch like it’s still living.

When I was on Gun Shift we’d shoot them like the other animals, like anything that got too close. To be safe, that was what Welch told us. But they are only deer, and I always wondered what they could really do.

   “Let’s go,” Reese whispers. “They look harmless.”

I shake my head. “Not until they pass.”

“Fine,” she says too loud, and their heads swing around, considering the shadows with eyes washed over white. I hold my breath. Maybe they’re blind.

We’re not that lucky. One of the deer takes a hesitant step toward us, and as it opens its mouth, I gasp. Incisors long and gleaming wet, sharp like a coyote’s.

“The gun,” Reese says, trying to sound calm, but she’s hitting my arm, dragging me out in front of her. The deer cocks its head. “Shit, Hetty, get the gun.”

“Someone might hear the shot.”

She scrambles back. “It was your idea.”

Just like on the roof, I think. Like I always used to do. The shotgun snug against my shoulder. My eye squinting through the sight. Even in the dark it’s not a hard shot, but the deer’s moving now, coming closer, and I only have the two shells.

“Reese,” I say. “We should’ve stolen more ammo.”

“What?”

I take the shot. The recoil sends me stumbling back, but I hit home, the shell striking deep into the deer’s flank. It wails, back legs collapsing, and behind it the second deer darts a few yards into the trees, fur bristled and raised.

The deer thrashes weakly, crumpling with a whimper as the wound begins to ooze, blood pooling thick on the frost-covered ground. I step closer to its prone body, and it lifts its head. I swear it’s looking right at me.

   “What do you think?” Reese asks. “Put it out of its misery?”

“No,” I say. There’s no room to feel bad. If I feel that, I have to feel everything else.

We continue on into the gloom. When I look over my shoulder, the second deer is back in the moonlit clearing, standing over the first with its head bent. I watch as it rips a bite out of the wounded deer, coming away with a mouthful of flesh, blood staining the white fur on its throat.

I should be surprised. But I only feel a flicker of recognition. We’re all like that on Raxter. We all do whatever it takes to survive.

I balance the shotgun on my shoulder and keep after Reese. We’re not far from her house.



* * *



—

It took until spring of my first year for Reese to invite us over. We’d spent third-quarter break on campus, all three of us together—Byatt didn’t want to go home, so I didn’t either—and when school started up again Reese was easier somehow. Still never smiling, still quiet and closed, but at lunch she started letting me cut ahead of her in line. In English she lent me her copy of The Scarlet Letter when she saw I’d lost mine, said she’d read it already even though I knew she hadn’t.

   One night she showed up to dinner and she wasn’t wearing her uniform. We were supposed to wear skirts and collars from sunup to sundown on weekdays, but there she was, jeans and a ratty old sweatshirt, and she said, “Thought we’d eat at my place.”

We followed her out through the double doors, down the walk to where two bikes were leaning against the fence. I never had one, never learned to ride, so I waited and tried not to look anxious as Byatt climbed onto hers. I remember wondering if they’d leave me behind. Reese hadn’t technically invited me. She hadn’t named names.

“Come on,” Byatt said. “Get on the handlebars.”

“People only do that in movies,” I said. But I straddled the wheel, eased myself onto the bars.

It was starting to stay light out in the evenings, and as we flew down the road there was sun everywhere, glare reaching in off the ocean. I wanted to be the girl who closes her eyes, tips her head back. Instead, I asked Byatt to slow down.

Reese’s house backed onto the beach, low-slung and weathered, like it grew up out of the reeds. As we got nearer I could see a dock behind the house, stretching out into the waves, and two rowboats bobbing at their mooring. And on the front porch, waving to us, Mr. Harker. Tall, broad. Hair trimmed neat, like my dad’s Navy cut.

“You made it,” he said, and came down the steps to help me off Byatt’s bike. It made me nervous, I remember, seeing him so close up. We saw him through classroom windows, and we saw him across the grounds as he mowed the lawn and cleaned the gutters, but this—a man, his calloused hand on my arm. I forgot I could be afraid of them.