Wilder Girls(7)

There’s a story going around it had something to do with her girlfriend, Mary, who went feral last summer. One day Mary was here and then she was gone—just the Tox left in her body, and no light in her eyes. Taylor was with her that day, had to wrestle her down and put a bullet in her head. Everybody thinks that’s why she quit Boat Shift, but when Lindsay asked her about it yesterday, Taylor backhanded her across the face, and nobody’s mentioned it since.

It hasn’t stopped us from wondering. Taylor says she’s fine, says everything is normal, but quitting Boat Shift isn’t normal. Especially not for her. Welch and Headmistress will have to post a new third name soon, someone to take her place.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I say. “I can ask.”

Reese opens her eyes, sits up. Her silver fingers twitch. “Don’t. You’ll only piss Welch off.”

   “Fine,” I say. “Don’t worry, though. You’ll get it.”

“We’ll see,” Reese says back. These aren’t the nicest things we’ve ever said to each other, but they’re close.



* * *



—

That night Byatt finishes the stitches over my eye, and afterward I can’t sleep. I stare up at the bottom of Reese’s bunk, to where Byatt’s carved her initials over and over. BW. BW. BW. She does that everywhere. On the bunk, on her desk in every class we had, on the trees in the grove by the water. Marking Raxter as hers, and sometimes I think if she asked, I’d let her do the same to me.

The quiet, on and on, until near to midnight two gun-shots break the silence. I tense, wait, but it’s barely a heartbeat before the shouts come echoing down from Gun Shift, yelling, “All clear!”

Above me, Reese is snoring on the top bunk. Byatt and I share the bottom, pressed so close I can hear her teeth grinding when she dreams. The heat went out a while ago, and we sleep as near as we can, in our jackets, in our everything. I can reach into my pocket and feel the bullet there, the casing smooth.

We heard about it soon after Welch assigned the first rounds of Gun Shift. The first girls saw something from the roof. They couldn’t agree on what—one girl said it was hazy and gleaming, moving almost like a person in a slow, measured gait, and another said it was too big for that—but it spooked them enough that they gathered all the Gun Shift girls into the smallest room on the second floor, and they taught us how to crack a bullet open. How to ignore that shudder in our guts and how to swallow the gunpowder like poison, just in case we ever need to die.

   Some nights I get to thinking about what it could’ve been, what they could’ve seen, and it helps to feel the casing in my hand, to know that I’m safe from whatever they saw and whatever they’re afraid of. But tonight, Mona’s all I can see—Mona holding the gun and Mona looking like she wanted to put it to her head.

I’d never held a gun before Raxter. There was one in my house, sometimes—my dad’s Navy-issue pistol if he was home—but he’d keep it locked away. Byatt hadn’t even seen one in person.

“I’m from Boston,” she said when Reese and I laughed. “We don’t have them down there like you do here.”

I remember it because she almost never mentioned home. Never slipped it into conversation the way I always found myself doing with Norfolk. I don’t think she ever missed it. Raxter didn’t let us have cell phones, so if you wanted to call home, you had to line up to use the landline in Headmistress’s office during afternoon rest hour. I never saw her there. Not once.

I roll over to look at her, stretched out next to me and already dozing. I’d have missed home if I were from a family like hers, all blue blood and money. But that’s the difference with us. Byatt’s never wanted anything she doesn’t have.

   “Stop staring at me,” she grumbles, and pokes me in the ribs.

“Sorry.”

“Such a creep.” But she hooks her pinkie around mine and slips under again.

I must fall asleep after that, because there’s nothing, and then I’m blinking, then a creak in the floorboards, and Byatt isn’t in the bunk with me anymore. She’s at the threshold, closing the door behind her as she comes inside.

We’re not supposed to leave our rooms at night, not even to go to the bathrooms at the end of the hall. The dark is too thick, Welch’s curfew too strict. I prop myself up on one elbow, but I’m covered in shadows and she must not see. Instead, she pauses at the foot of the bed, and then she climbs the ladder up to Reese.

One of them sighs, and there’s a rustle as they settle in, and then the yellow-white of Reese’s braid is hanging from her bunk to swing gently above me. It drifts like feathers, covers the ceiling in faded patterns of light.

“Hetty asleep?” she says. I don’t know why, but I slow my breathing, make sure they won’t know I can hear.

“Yeah.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” Byatt says.

“You went out.”

“Yeah.”

The hurt of it twists in my gut. Why wouldn’t she take me with her? And why is it Reese who gets to hear about it? Byatt isn’t supposed to find things in Reese that she can’t find in me.

   One of them moves around, probably Byatt tucking into Reese. She sleeps close, Byatt. I’m always waking with her fingers hooked in pockets of my jeans.