Wilder Girls(72)

“Is there a way out?” I say. “You didn’t tell Headmistress, but tell me, Reese. Can we leave here?”

She looks at me for a long moment, and then she sighs. “I think so, yeah.”

Is she serious? I pull her even farther away from the others. “Why the hell wouldn’t you use it before now?”

“At first I didn’t think I could get past the fence,” she says, avoiding my gaze. “And then I could, but this place is my whole life.”

I swallow hard, blink back a flicker of Mr. Harker’s face in the dark, empty eyes and blackened teeth. “And now?”

She shrugs. “You asked me to.”





CHAPTER 23


Nobody notices as we ease away from the others, down the hallway toward the corner where it turns toward the kitchen. There’s a door there, an emergency exit that nobody uses, just in case the alarms still work, but there’s no sense in worrying about that anymore.

We’re passing Headmistress’s corner office when I stop dead in my tracks. The door was open before, but now it’s mostly shut. Through the gap, I can see a box of food, and then somebody moves past, blocking my sight. It has to be Headmistress. And she’s hoarding supplies, supplies we’ll need if we’re leaving Raxter.

The door isn’t locked, but as I try to push it open, it hits up against something inside and stops.“Excuse me,” someone says inside, sounding indignant. Definitely Headmistress. “You’re not allowed in here.”

I almost laugh. Like that matters anymore.

I try again, give the door a shove with my shoulder, and slowly it scrapes open. I blink, adjust to the sun flooding through the tall office windows, and there’s Headmistress outlined against them, her shoulders slumped, her chignon coming undone.

   She’s standing over a carton of water bottles, and next to her, piled alongside her ancient, mammoth desk, are stacks of boxes I recognize—food, supplies, all stolen from the pantry, all stolen from us. Mixed among them are packets of medical tools, the kind the Navy used to send us. Small first aid kits, stacks of paper, records from the infirmary, and coolers, too, like the one I found in the woods.

How long has she been hoarding all of this? How long has she been only looking out for herself?

I move in front of Reese, because I’m not letting her go again, I’m not, but she bats me away, and after another look at Headmistress it’s clear why. Bloodshot eyes, trembling fingers. A crumpling, nervous laugh as she fusses with the hem of her shirt.

“Girls, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” she says, and I can hear the fractures in her voice. She’s afraid. Afraid of us.

“What’s going on?” I ask. “What are you doing with this stuff? This belongs to us.”

She brushes her hands off on her slacks, picks at a fleck of dried blood under her nails like she doesn’t have glossy pink pus spilling out of her mouth. “Nothing. Just taking inventory.”

The anger comes back in a flood, rushing over me until I’m drowning in it. “Nothing?” I say. “Like what you did in the music room?”

   Reese reaches for me, but I shrug her hand off, surge forward. Headmistress reels back against the wall, and it takes everything in me to keep myself in check, to keep from going after her.

“You locked us up!” I yell. “You tried to kill us.”

“No,” Headmistress says, eyes darting back and forth, “no, no. That’s not it. I was just trying to help you.” She smiles weakly at me. “That’s what this is all for.”

Behind me Reese lets out a bark of laughter. “Don’t lie. If you wanted to help us, you would’ve started a long time ago.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, come on.” I step back, let Reese ease in front of me, her face lit with a cold kind of thrill. “It’s just us girls here. You can be honest.” When Headmistress doesn’t answer, Reese nods. “I’ll tell you what I think, then. I think you were always planning to get out. I think you had your escape set from the start. Just in case they couldn’t cure us, right? But they left you behind, and that’s why you needed me.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Explain it, then.”

“We knew something was happening years ago,” Headmistress says, babbling now. “It was staying so warm in the winters, and the irises kept growing, and they asked—the people from Camp Nash, the Navy, and the CDC—but it was only access they wanted. Just to test a few things here and there. But we weren’t expecting something like the Tox. I promise you: we never thought, I never thought, that would happen.”

   It’s a lie and we can both tell. She knew. She knew something was wrong, before the Tox started. And she kept us here anyway.

“You mean you never thought it would put you in danger,” Reese says. “But the rest of us, we were a risk worth taking, right? My father always said you wanted the wrong things, he always said not to trust you, and now I know why.”

Person after person collapsing under the weight of this place, lie after lie, and I’ve had enough of this. Enough of these confrontations, of secrets spilling out of us like blood. I reach out, grab hold of Reese’s jacket, and tug until she looks back at me.