Wilder Girls(8)

“Where’d you go?” Reese whispers.

“For a walk.” But I know how a lie sounds. No way she risked sneaking out just to stretch her legs. We get enough of that every morning. No, there’s a secret buried in her voice, and usually, she shares those with me. What’s different now?

Reese doesn’t reply, and Byatt keeps going. “Welch caught me on my way back.”

“Damn.”

“It’s fine. I was only downstairs, in the hall.”

“What’d you say?”

“Told her I was getting a bottle of water, for a headache.”

Reese’s silver hand pulls her braid out of view. I can picture the shuttered gleam of her eyes, the strong set of her jaw. Or maybe she’s easier in the dark. Maybe she breaks all the way open when she thinks you can’t see.

The first time I met her was the day I got to Raxter. I was thirteen but not real thirteen, not thirteen with a chest and hips and bared teeth. I’d met Byatt already, on the ferry from the mainland to the island, and that had been fast and tight. She knew who she was and who I should be, and she fit right into all the places in me I couldn’t fill. Reese was different.

   She was sitting on the stairs in the main hall, her uniform too big, her knee socks sagging around her ankles. I don’t know if they were afraid of her already or if it was something else, if maybe her being the groundskeeper’s daughter meant something to them it didn’t to me, but the other girls in our year were clustered by the fireplace, as far away from her as they could get.

Byatt and I passed her on our way to the others, and the way Reese looked at me then, already angry, already burning—I remember it like nothing else.

For a while after that there wasn’t anything between the three of us at all. Just class and a nod here and there in the hallway on the way to the showers. Then Byatt and I needed a third for our group project in French, and Reese was at the top of the class—had muscled past Byatt a few tests back—so we picked her.

That’s all it took. Reese next to us at dinner, Reese next to us at assembly, and if I remembered how she looked at me that first day, if I noticed the way my stomach clenched any time she said my name, it didn’t matter. It still doesn’t. This is as close as I’ll ever get to her—a bunk above me, her voice soft in the dark as she talks to somebody else.

“Do you think,” she says after a while, “that it’s getting worse?”

I can practically hear Byatt shrug. “Probably.”

“Probably?”

   “I mean, I don’t know,” Byatt says. “Sure. But not for everyone.” A beat of nothing, and then her voice again, so quiet I have to strain to hear. “Listen, if you know something—”

I hear the scrape of Reese’s boots as she rolls over. “Get down,” she says. “You’re crowding me.”

I wonder, sometimes, if she was different before her mother left. If she was easier to reach. But I can’t imagine her like that.

I stir when Byatt gets into our bunk, but I pretend not to wake, just turn over so my back is to her. I think she watches me for a moment, but she slips under soon after. I only follow once light is starting at the bottom of the sky.





CHAPTER 3


Dawn breaks quick and cold. A new layer of frost on the windows. Ice collecting in sheaves among the reeds. Byatt and I get out of bed, try to leave Reese sleeping as we head outside for our walk.

The walks were just Byatt’s at first. Her, alone, making slow circuits of the grounds. The other girls used to whisper about it. Homesick, they said, lonely, and it was all pity and laughter. But I know it gave her a glow, made her someone to get close to. By the end of our second month here, I was wandering after her and hoping it would rub off on me.

Today the main hall is empty as we pass through, except for the girl keeping watch at the front doors. The school is shaped like a bracket, a newly built wing branching off each end of the old house. On the second floor it’s dorms and a handful of offices, and here on the ground floor it’s classrooms, and the hall, and Headmistress’s office at the corner of the bracket, Headmistress probably inside tallying supplies, checking the numbers.

   I reach out as we pass the bulletin board and tap the note about the cure, right on the letterhead. That’s where the luck is best, and you can see how the color’s worn away where a hundred girls have touched it a hundred times. I smile, think of me and Byatt in some sun-soaked city somewhere, free of the Tox.

“Hey,” Byatt says to the door girl, who’s one of the youngest we have left, thirteen. “Everything good?”

“Yeah.” The girl tugs on the door without Byatt asking. People are like that for Byatt, no matter what she’s like for them.

The door’s barely an inch open, too heavy for the girl to move on her own. We start them young on Door Shift—if there’s anything really wrong, the Gun Shift girls will take care of it, but the responsibility of manning the door molds the younger girls into the right shape. I step up and lay my hands over hers. Pull, feel the give under the rust, newer and thicker every season. This will be our second winter with the Tox, my third at Raxter altogether. How many more will I have here?

“Thanks.” I knock my arm against her shoulder so she won’t realize I don’t remember her name. “See you later.”