Wilder Girls(9)

Out on the porch I wait while Byatt buttons her jacket. The grass is long dead, and there, stamped into the frost that covers it, is a trail of footprints. Could some of them be Byatt’s from last night?

   “So,” I say. “Cold out.”

She doesn’t answer. She’s fussing with the top button of her jacket, hidden under her chin, as we step onto the flagstone path to the gate.

I try again, hope I don’t have to dig too deeply. If only she’d just tell me where she went. “Sleep well?”

“Sure.”

“Was I restless?”

“No more than usual.”

I wait, give her another chance to come out with it, but she doesn’t. “Because I woke up, right in the middle of the night, and you weren’t there.”

Byatt veers off the path, to the left. It’s the way we always go. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

At first I think she won’t explain—she doesn’t always with me, even though I do with her—but then she stops, looks me full in the eye, and says, “You talked in your sleep.”

It’s so far from what I’m expecting that my jaw drops. “I did?”

“Yeah.” There’s a delicate sort of hurt creeping into her expression, like she’s not sure she wants to let me see it. “I don’t know what you were dreaming, but you said…something.”

I didn’t. I know I didn’t, but I don’t understand this enough to say so. “What did I say?”

   She grimaces, shakes her head. “It wasn’t something I’d want to hear again. Let’s leave it at that.”

For a moment I feel just the way she wants me to. Too anxious, too guilty to keep pushing. But it’s not real. I was awake, and I saw her. “Oh,” I say. “Are you sure?”

It’s the closest I can get to confronting her. Lean too hard and she’ll let herself snap. I’ve seen her do it a hundred times, with teachers when one of us forgot their homework, with field trips when Welch caught her forging my mom’s signature. Byatt lies so well. But usually, she’s lying for me.

“Yeah,” she says, with just the right tremble. “It’s fine, okay? I just climbed up to bunk in with Reese.”

That, at least, is true. But what secrets are there to keep at Raxter? We all have the same horrors in our bodies, the same pains, the same wants.

“I’m sorry,” I say. There’s nothing for it but to play along. “Whatever it was. You know you’re my best friend.”

Byatt brightens immediately and throws her arm around my shoulders to draw me close. We start walking again, steps matching steps. “Yeah,” she says, “I know I am.”

Above us, the house looms, and the voices of other girls spill through cracked windows as they start to wake. Arguments over clothes and bedding, and a few sharper than that, but mostly the same conversations every day. The same magazines passed around and around, quizzes taken and retaken, the same memories told like stories until they belong to everybody. Parents sliced up to share, first kisses exchanged like gifts.

   I never had anything to add—couldn’t conjure up enough of my dad, couldn’t bear thinking of my mom all alone in our house on the base. And I’ve wanted boys, and I’ve wanted girls, but I’ve never wanted anyone enough to miss them, enough to pluck them from the slideshow of my old life and bring them here.

Sometimes if I close my eye, I forget what’s changed. And Raxter isn’t a rush of gunpowder and hunger anymore. It’s boredom, an idleness burrowing deep.

We’re at the fence now, the house behind us and the woods stretching out ahead, branches evergreen. Road slicing through, worn flat and narrower each year. A few feet past the fence, I can see what the gunshots must’ve hit last night—a deer, hours dead, flesh too contaminated to eat. Worms crawling in its open mouth, blood stiff in its fur.

Besides the deer there’s more out there. It’s something we all know but don’t talk about. If you’re outside at the right time, you can feel the ground shake every now and then, like my house on the base whenever a jet flew too close overhead. Early in the Tox we used to leaf through the earth science textbooks, look at the lists of flora and fauna and wonder what might be out there. But then we had to burn the books for warmth, and wondering wasn’t as fun anymore.

“Come on,” Byatt says.

   We don’t look up to the roof, where two girls are aiming rifles over our heads. Instead, we trail our fingers along the bars of the fence, follow it until it meets the water, where frills of rock pile and stack, catching the spray in pools that won’t freeze through until the deep of winter. Folds of gray, the algae a sharp green, and the ocean rolling into the distance, black and heaving.

I climb onto a spear of rock, lean onto my palms so I can look into the biggest pool. No fish—barely any come near the island since things changed—but this time I see something. Small, no bigger than my fist, and a bright, uneasy sort of blue. A crab.

“Hey,” I say, and Byatt clambers over to balance next to me. “Look.”

They showed up a few years before I did. A sign of the times, that’s what our biology teacher said when she took us out here to observe them my sophomore fall, during our climate change unit. Used to be they never came north of Cape Cod, but as the world changes, so does the water. We call these ones Raxter Blues, and they grow different up here.