Wilder Girls(6)

Cat catches my eye from across the room, and she holds up the can opener. I push off the banister and pick my way toward her, skirting where a quartet of girls are arranged in a square on the floor, their heads resting on one another’s stomachs as they try to make one another laugh.

“Saw you got Carson to cave,” Cat says as I approach. Black hair, so straight and fine, and dark considering eyes. She’s had some of the worst of the Tox. Weeks in the infirmary, hands bound to keep her from clawing at her skin as it boiled and bubbled. She still has the scars, pockmarks of white all over her body, and blisters that bloom and bleed fresh every season.

I look away from a new one on her neck and smile. “Didn’t take much.” She gives me the can opener, and I tuck it in my waistband, under my shirt so nobody can steal it from me on my way back to the stairs. “You guys good? You warm enough?” She’s only got the detachable fleece lining of her friend Lindsay’s jacket. The two of them had bad luck in the last clothing draw, and nobody manages to keep a blanket around here for long unless you never take your eyes off it.

   “We’re all right,” Cat says. “Thanks for asking. And hey, with your soup, make sure the can’s not bulging at the lid. We’ve got enough to worry about besides botulism.”

“I’ll pass that on.”

That’s Cat, kind in her own way. She’s from our year, and her mom’s in the Navy like my dad. Raxter and Camp Nash are the only life for miles up here, and over the years they’ve twined so close that Raxter gives a scholarship to Navy girls. It’s the only reason I’m here. The only reason Cat’s here. We took the bus down to the airport together at the end of every quarter, her on her way to the base in San Diego, and me on mine to the base in Norfolk. She never saved me a seat, but when I sidled in next to her, she’d smile and let me fall asleep on her shoulder.

I’m just sitting down next to Byatt again when there’s a commotion by the front door, where Landry’s girls are clustered. You can break the whole of us into maybe eleven or twelve parts—some bigger, some smaller—and the largest group is centered around Landry, two years above me and from an old Boston family, older even than Byatt’s. She’s never liked us much, not since she complained that there were no boys on the island, and Reese gave her the blankest look I’ve ever seen and said, “Plenty of girls, though.”

   It made something jump in my chest, something I can still feel at night when Reese’s braid casts a rippling glow on the ceiling. A reaching. A wish.

But she’s too far away. She’s always been too far.

Somebody yelps, and we watch as the group shuffles and knits itself into a ring, clustered thick around a body laid out on the floor. I bend down, try to get a glimpse. Glossy brown hair, frame frail and angular.

“I think it’s Emmy,” I say. “She’s having her first.”

Emmy was in sixth grade when the Tox happened, and one by one the other girls in her year have crashed headlong into puberty, their first flare-ups screaming and bursting like fireworks. Now it’s finally her turn.

We listen as she whimpers, her body trembling and seizing. I wonder what she’ll get, if it’s anything at all. Gills like Mona’s, blisters like Cat’s, maybe bones like Byatt’s or a hand like Reese’s, but sometimes the Tox doesn’t give you anything—just takes and takes. Leaves you drained and withering.

At last, quiet, and the group around Emmy starts to clear. She looks all right, for a first flare-up. Her legs wobble as she gets to her feet, and even from here, I can see her veins in her neck standing out dark, like they’re bruises.

   There’s a smattering of applause as Emmy dusts off her jeans. Julia, one of the Boat Shift girls, tears a chunk off her stale dinner roll and tosses it to Emmy. Somebody will leave a gift under her pillow tonight. Maybe a pair of bobby pins, or a page ripped out from one of the magazines still floating around.

Landry gives her a hug, and Emmy’s beaming, so proud to have made it through so well. It’ll hit her later, I think, when the adrenaline fades away, when Landry isn’t there to watch. The real hurt of it. The change.

“I’m still bitter,” I say. “Nobody ever gave me anything for my first.”

Byatt laughs, her hands moving quick to open the soup can, and she gives me the lid. “There. My gift to you.”

I lick off the layer of vegetable sludge, ignore the sparkling acidity. Byatt takes a sip from the can. When she hits a third of the way down she’ll pass it to me. Reese always goes last. You can’t get her to eat any other way.

“When do you think they’ll post the new Boat Shift list?” Byatt says loudly. She’s asking me, but she’s doing it for Reese—Reese, who’s been angling to get on Boat Shift since nearly the very beginning.

Her mom left before I ever came to Raxter, but I knew her dad, Mr. Harker. He was the groundskeeper and maintenance staff and handyman all in one, and he lived in a house off the grounds, on the edge of the island. Or he did, until the Tox, and the quarantine, and then the Navy sent him in to live with us. He doesn’t anymore. Went out into the woods when the Tox started getting to him, and Reese has been trying to go after him ever since.

   Boat Shift’s the only way to do that. The only way past the fence. Usually, it’s the same three girls until one of them dies, but a few days ago the third girl, Taylor, said this was her last trip and she wouldn’t go out anymore. She’s one of the oldest still here, and she was always helping, always calming everybody down and stitching everybody up. We can’t figure out exactly what made her stop.