Wilder Girls

by Rory Power

  Before the Tox we saw her every day, but since then, she’s either pacing up in the infirmary or locked in her office, glued to the radio, talking to the Navy and the CDC.

  There was never any cell reception here in the first place—character building, according to the brochures—and they cut the landline that first day of the Tox. To keep things classified. To manage information. But at least we could speak to our families on the radio, and we could hear our parents crying for us. Until we couldn’t anymore. Things were getting out, the Navy said, and measures had to be taken.

  Headmistress didn’t bother comforting us. It was well past comfort by then.

  Her office door’s shutting and locking behind her when Byatt comes back over to us.

  “What was that?” I ask. “With Mona.”

  “Nothing.” She pulls Reese to her feet. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  —

  Raxter is on a big plot of land, on the eastern tip of the island. The school has water on three sides, the gate on the fourth. And beyond it the woods, with the same kind of pine and spruce we have on the grounds, but tangled and thick, new trunks wrapping around the old ones. Our side of the fence is neat and clean like it was before—it’s only us that’s different.

  Reese leads us across the grounds, to the point of the island, rocks scrubbed bare by the wind and pieced together like a turtle’s shell. Now we sit there side by side by side, Byatt in the middle, the chilled breeze whipping her loose hair out in front of us. It’s calm today, sky a clear sort of not-blue, and there’s nothing in the distance. Beyond Raxter, the ocean drops deep, swallowing sandbanks and pulling currents. No ships, no land on the horizon, no reminder that the rest of the world is still out there, going on without us, everything still the way it always was.

  “How are you feeling?” says Byatt. She’s asking because two mornings ago the scar across my blind eye bloomed wide. It’s left over from the early days, a reminder of the ways we didn’t understand what was happening to us.

  My first flare-up blinded my right eye and fused it shut, and I thought that was all, until something started to grow underneath. A third eyelid, that’s what Byatt thought it was. It didn’t hurt, just itched like hell, but I could feel something moving. That’s why I tried to tear it open.

  It was stupid. The scar is proof enough of that. I barely remember any of it, but Byatt says I dropped my rifle in the middle of Gun Shift and started clawing at my face like something had taken hold of me, working my fingernails between my crusted eyelashes and ripping at my skin.

  The scar’s mostly healed, but every now and then it splits open and blood weeps down over my cheek, pink and watery with pus. During Gun Shift I’ve got plenty else to think about, and it’s not so bad, but now I can feel my heartbeat in my skin. Infected, maybe. Though that’s the least of our worries.

  “Can you stitch it for me?” I’m trying not to sound anxious, but she hears it anyway.

  “That bad?”

  “No, just—”

  “Did you even clean it?”

  Reese makes a satisfied sound. “I told you not to leave it open.”

  “Come here,” Byatt says. “Let me see.”

  I shift around on the rocks until she’s kneeling and my chin’s lifted to her. She runs her fingers along the wound, brushing my eyelid. Something underneath it flinches.

  “Looks like it hurts,” she says, pulling a needle and thread from her pocket. They’re always with her, ever since my eye first scarred over. Of the three of us she’s closest to turning seventeen, and at times like this you can tell. “Okay. Don’t move.”

  She slips the needle in and there’s pain, but it’s small enough, the cold air wicking it away. I try to wink at her, make her smile, but she shakes her head, a frown hanging on her brows.

  “I said don’t move, Hetty.”

  And it’s fine, Byatt and me, and she’s staring at me like I’m staring at her, and I’m safe, safe because she’s here, until she digs the needle in too deep and I buckle, my whole body folding in. Pain blinding and everywhere. Around me the world’s gone water. I can feel blood leaking into my ear.

  “Oh my God,” she says. “Hetty, are you okay?”

  “It’s only stitches,” says Reese. She’s lying back on the rocks, her eyes closed. Shirt riding up so I can see a pale strip of stomach, stark through the dizzy blur. She’s never cold, not even on days like this when our breaths hang in the air.

  “Yeah,” I say. Reese’s hand never gives her trouble, not like my eye does me, and I smooth a snarl off my lips. There’s enough to fight about without picking at this. “Keep going.”

  Byatt starts to say something, when there’s a yell from near the garden. We turn around to see if somebody’s had their first. Raxter runs sixth grade through high school, or it did, so our youngest girls are thirteen now. Eleven when this whole mess began, and now it’s started to take them apart.

  But there’s nothing wrong, just Dara from our year, the girl with the webbed fingers, waiting where the rocks start. “Shooting,” she calls to us. “Miss Welch says it’s shooting time.”

  “Come on.” Byatt ties off my stitches and gets up, holds out her hand to me. “I’ll do the rest of your eye after dinner.”

  * * *

  —

  We had shooting before the Tox, too, a tradition left over from the start of the school, but it wasn’t like it is now. Only the seniors—and Reese, best shot on the island, born to it like she was born to everything on Raxter—got to go into the woods with Mr. Harker and fire at the soda cans he’d line up along the ground. The rest of us got a class on gun safety, which usually turned into a free period when Mr. Harker inevitably ran late.

  But then the Tox took Mr. Harker. Took Reese’s firing hand and changed it so she couldn’t grip the trigger anymore. And shooting stopped being shooting and turned into target practice, because now there are things we have to kill. Every few afternoons, as the sun comes back to earth, one by one, firing away until we hit a target dead center.

  We have to be ready, Welch says. To protect ourselves, each other. During the first winter, a fox got through the fence, just slipped between the bars. Afterward, the Gun Shift girl said it reminded her of her dog back home, and that’s why she couldn’t take the shot. That’s why the fox made it through the grounds to the patio. That’s why it cornered the youngest girl left living and tore out her throat.

  We practice out in the barn, near the island’s point, with its big sliding doors open on each end so the stray shots fly into the ocean. There used to be horses, four of them, but early in the first season, we noticed how the Tox was starting to get inside them like it got inside us, how it was pushing their bones through their skin, how it was stretching their bodies until they screamed. So we led them out to the water and shot them. The stalls are empty now, and we pile into them to wait our turn. You have to fire at the target, and you’re not allowed to stop until you’ve hit the bull’s-eye.

  Ms. Welch keeps most of the guns locked in a storage closet in the house, along with the bullets the Navy started sending once they heard about the animals, so there’s only a shotgun and a carton of shells out here for all of us, laid out on a table made from sawhorses and a thin plywood plank. Not like the rifles we shoot with during Gun Shift, but Welch always says a gun’s a gun, and every time, it makes a muscle in Reese’s jaw twitch.

  I hoist myself up onto the door of a stall, feel it swing as Byatt jumps up next to me. Reese slouches between us. She’s not allowed to shoot because of her hand, but she’s here every day, tense and quiet and watching the target.

  At some point the order was alphabetical but we’ve all lost things, eyes and hands and last names. Now it’s the oldest girls who go first. We get through them quickly, most of them good enough to hit home in only a few shots. Julia and Carson both don
e in two, an endless, mortifying wait as Landry takes more than I can count, and then it’s our year. Byatt makes it in three. Respectable, but there’s a reason they pair her with me on Gun Shift. If she doesn’t hit her target, I will.

  She hands the shotgun to me, and I blow on my hands to work the feeling back in before I take her place, lift the shotgun to my shoulder, and aim. Breathe in, focus, and breathe out, finger squeezing tight. The sound rattles through me. It’s easy. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been better at than Byatt.

  “Good, Hetty,” Welch calls. Somebody at the back of the crowd repeats it, singsong and laughing. I roll my eye, leave the shotgun on the makeshift table, and join Reese and Byatt again by the stable door.

  It’s usually Cat who goes next, but there’s a little shuffle, a whimper, and someone shoves Mona out into the middle. She stumbles a step or two and then rights herself, scanning the faces of the girls around her for some ounce of pity. She won’t find any—we keep it for ourselves these days.

  “Can I have a pass?” she says, turning to Welch. There’s a waxy calm on Mona’s face but a fidget in her body. She almost made it, almost got by with skipping her turn. But the rest of us won’t let it happen. And neither will Welch.

  “Afraid not.” Welch shakes her head. “Let’s go.”

  Mona says something else, but it’s too low for anybody to hear, and she goes to the table. The gun is laid out. All Mona has to do is point and shoot. She lifts the gun, cradles it in the crook of her arm like it’s a doll.

  “Any day now.” From Welch.

  Mona levels it at the target and sneaks a finger onto the trigger. We’re all quiet. Her hands are shaking. Somehow she’s keeping the gun aimed right, but the strain is tearing at her.

  “I can’t,” she whimpers. “I don’t…I can’t.” She lowers the shotgun, looks my way.

  And that’s when they slice, three deep cuts on the side of her neck, like gills. No blood. Just a pulse in them with every breath, the twitch of something moving under her skin.

  Mona doesn’t scream. Doesn’t make a noise. She just drops. Flat on her back, mouth gasping open. She’s still looking at me, her chest rising slow. I can’t look away, not as Welch hurries over, not as she kneels at Mona’s feet and takes her pulse.

  “Get her to her room,” she says. Her room, and not the infirmary, because only the worst of us wind up there. And Mona’s been sicker than this before. We all have.

  The Boat Shift girls, marked out by the knives they’re allowed to keep stuck in their belt loops, they step away from the rest. Always them, and they take Mona’s arms. Haul her up, lead her away, back to the house.

  Chatter, and a break as we start to follow, but Welch clears her throat.

  “Ladies,” she says, and she drags it out like she used to do during dorm checks. “Did I dismiss you?” Nobody answers, and Welch picks up the shotgun, gives it to the first girl in the order. “We’ll start again. From the top.”

  There’s no surprise in any of us. We left it someplace and forgot where. So we line up, we wait, and we take our shots, and we feel the warmth—Mona’s warmth—seeping out of the shotgun and into our hands.

  * * *

  —

  Dinner is scattered and fraying. Usually, we manage at least to sit in the same room, but today we get our rations from Welch and then split, some here in the hall and others in the kitchen, crowded around the old woodstove, the last of the curtains burning to keep them warm. After days like this and girls like Mona, we peel apart and wonder who’s next.

  I’m by the stairs, propped up against the banister. The three of us were last to get food today, and there was barely anything good left: just the ends of a loaf of bread, both slimy with mold. Byatt looked about ready to cry when that was all I brought back—neither of us got anything for lunch, not when Reese won that orange fair and square—but luckily, Carson from Boat Shift gave me some expired soup. We’re waiting for the can opener to come our way so we can eat, and until then, there’s Reese on the floor trying to nap, and Byatt looking up to where you can just see the door that bars the staircase up to the third-floor infirmary.

  It used to be the servants’ quarters back when the house was first built. Six rooms branching off a narrow hallway, with a roof deck above it and the double height main hall below. You can only get there using the staircase off the second-floor mezzanine, and it’s locked behind a low, tilting door.

  I don’t like looking at it, don’t like thinking of the sickest girls tucked away, don’t like that there isn’t room for everyone. And I don’t like how every door up there locks from the outside. How, if you wanted to, you could keep someone in.

  Instead, I stare across the main hall, to the glass walls of the dining room. Long empty tables ripped apart for kindling, silverware dumped into the ocean to keep the knives away from us. It used to be my favorite room in the house. Not on my first day, when I had nowhere to sit, but every one after I’d come in for breakfast and see Byatt saving me a seat. She had a single our first year, and she liked to get up early, take walks around the grounds. I’d meet her in the dining room, and she’d have toast waiting for me. Before Raxter, I ate it with butter, but Byatt showed me jam was better.

  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 floo
r. 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.