by Rory Power
Reese crouches down at Byatt’s feet, and we watch Byatt’s head slowly swing around to look at her. At first I think there’s something, a spark in her, but it’s gone before I’m sure I saw it.
“Let’s see if she can move,” Reese says. “You’re not strong enough to help, and I’m not sure I can get her to the boat carrying her on my own.”
Too hurt, she means, but she’d never say it. Not even now, after everything.
I get on one side and Reese gets on the other, and together we’re heaving Byatt to her feet when a low roar kicks up, soft but growing, in the distance. The jets. My mouth goes dry, fear lifting the hair on the back of my neck.
“Shit,” I say. “We have to hurry.”
Byatt’s steps are halting, like she’s only just learning how to move her limbs, but we start heading for the door back into the center.
Inside, then, and down hallway after hallway. I’m fading, strength leeching out of me, and every step we take is slower than the last until we reach the main lobby, noon sun sneaking through the boarded-up windows. We stop, lean Byatt up against the desk so I can rest for a moment. I can feel Reese watching me. She’s waiting for me to say it, for me to leave Byatt behind, but she’ll be waiting a long time.
“Come on,” I say. “Now or never.”
Out across the marsh. There’s our boat on the beach, and it’s so far and I’m losing my will, but Reese says my name once, just once. Stern and strong, and she believes I can do this, so I have to.
A whistle, and a huge rush of freezing air. “Get down,” I have time to say before a trio of fighter jets comes swooping overhead. It’s so loud I can’t think, can’t do anything but endure it. They’re flying too low. We have to go now.
They disappear then, circling around for another pass, and I hoist Byatt farther up with my good arm. “Come on.”
At last, the pier, and we scramble down the shore as fast as we can, Byatt’s feet dragging in the sand. Carefully, we drape her body between the seats, and her eyes are closed, but she’s breathing. She’s alive.
“Get in,” Reese says. “I’ll shove us out.”
The sway of the water, the rev of the engine, Reese at the stern as the boat eases away. A quick turn and we’re skimming along, the island blurring until it’s lost in the spray. Farther, farther, until I can’t hear the jets.
* * *
—
The snow stops and the day grows warm, the ocean throwing shimmer across my sight, the hull of the boat spangled with waterlight. I lose minutes, hours, staring at the horizon, trying to make out the low-slung buildings of Camp Nash. But the mainland blurs and it never seems closer, no matter how Reese steers us against the waves.
We’re still miles away from shore when she cuts the engine with a frustrated groan. I start, rubbing at my blind eye. “What are you doing?”
“Current’s pulling us away from the inlet. We won’t gain any ground like this.”
“So we’re just stopping?”
“Until the tide changes.” She pushes her hair out of her face and gets to her feet, the boat sloshing to one side. “We only have so much fuel. It’s a waste to use it now.”
Reese steps over Byatt’s prone body to sit next to me at the bow of the boat. Byatt looks so strange, her face slack, her eyes closed. There was always something sparking about her, even when she slept. It’s gone now, or different somehow.
“What’s he like?” Reese asks suddenly. “Your dad, I mean.”
“I don’t know.” It falls out of my mouth before I can stop it. It’s true, really, but I know that’s not what she’s looking for. “He comes home from deployment and he goes away again.”
Reese tilts her head. “And you love him?”
“Of course I do. I just don’t know him.” It doesn’t make sense to her, I know, and I want to explain, to tell her how he doesn’t live in my heart the way her father lived in hers, but I don’t get the chance. My body twists, chest wrenching to one side, and I feel my throat thicken with spit.
“Hetty?”
The fever in the marsh, outside the visitors’ center. The one Byatt’s body burned out of my mind. I should’ve recognized the sign. It sizzles through my body and settles in the pit of my stomach, and there’s something heavy inside. I gag, lean over the side of the boat, and spit out a watery mouthful of bile. I can feel an object in my throat, but I can’t get it out.
“Help,” I manage, and Reese is tugging me around to face her, eyes wild. “I have to—” Another racking shiver, blood trickling down my chin. “You have to get it out.”
She looks at me blankly, and then I see it click. “Okay.”
I sit astride the bench, and Reese mirrors me. My hand braced on her thigh, her silver fingers gripping the back of my neck.
“Tell me if you want me to stop,” she says.
I shake my head. “Not until it works.”
I open my mouth. And Reese sticks two fingers as deep into my throat as she can.
I can’t breathe. A cough building in my chest, but I can’t get it out, can’t swallow, and a wave rolls through my body as it tries to force Reese out. My eye waters and the world is hazy, distorted, but something is moving, stuck halfway down.
I smack at Reese’s arm, and she pulls her arm back, dragging strings of spit. First one heave, and another, until finally, I vomit, pain everywhere like my insides have been torn out. Something fleshy and pulsing splatters onto the deck of the boat.
I wipe my mouth on my sleeve. Whatever it is, it’s covered in blood, but it looks familiar, like I’ve seen the shape of it somewhere before. In a textbook, in a body, in the woods with Mr. Harker.
“It’s a heart,” Reese says. “That’s a human heart.”
This one shrunken, shriveled, and mine still beating in my chest. I look away, collapse against Reese, head spinning. She loops her arm around my waist.
“Doesn’t someone at school have that?” she says.
“Sarah,” I say. “Two heartbeats.” But two hearts instead, and if her body kept hers, why couldn’t mine?
I think of Byatt and me, on the beach that day before I got Boat Shift. The last moment we had before it all went haywire. The crab she found, the Raxter Blue, with lungs and gills both like we learned every year in bio. Lungs and gills both. So it could live no matter what.
The Tox, working in the Raxter Blue, in everything, and in me.
“It’s trying to help,” I say. “It’s trying to make me better, but I can’t take it.”
Reese pushes my hair off the back of my neck to let the breeze cool it. “Calm down. It’s okay.”
I cough, blood tangy and metallic on my tongue, and Reese pulls me in so I’m leaning against her chest. The boat sways, salt spice in the air. I close my eye, shut out the glare off the water and the pallor of Byatt’s skin. “I’m fine. I just need to rest.”
The three of us together, laid out in the quiet. We’ve been here before. One weekend during my first year at Raxter. Byatt got a run in her last pair of tights, and Mr. Harker drove us to the mainland to get her new ones. We were supposed to meet him in the park when we were done, but he was late, so we stretched out in the dappled shade under a low sprawling oak. The leaves turned translucent in the light, the air fresh and sweet. Byatt in the middle, me and Reese on either side, and it was the first time we let the quiet be. The first time we were ever really us.
“You’re gonna be okay,” Reese whispers, and I let it push me further into sleep. “You saved me. Now I’m gonna save you.”
I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t know what’s next. But Reese’s heartbeat is steady in my ear, and I remember—I remember how it was. The three of us together, and I’ll make it that way again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been so lucky to work on Wilder Girls with an incredible te
am. Thank you so much to each of you—you saw what I meant and helped me find the right way to say it. I will always be grateful.
To Krista Marino—thank you for your dedication as we pried the girls all the way out of my head, and for your guidance as we laid them out on the page. Your insights have taught me so much, and pushed this book to grow in ways I didn’t know it could. I could not have asked for a better editor.
Thank you to my agents, of whom I am in complete awe. To Daisy Parente, for every panicked email you have answered. For your enthusiasm, and your advice, and for seeing something in Wilder Girls. To Kim Witherspoon, for your wisdom and level head (and for a whole other set of answers to panicked emails). To Jessica Mileo, for your support and your invaluable feedback. And to the teams at Lutyens & Rubinstein, InkWell, and Casarotto—thank you so much for all of your help.
To Delacorte Press, thank you for your unending generosity and for the incredible dedication you put into making Wilder Girls the best it could be. Barbara Marcus, Judith Haut, and Beverly Horowitz: thank you for believing in Wilder Girls. I am so proud to have joined the Delacorte and Random House family.
Thank you to Betty Lew and Regina Flath, for designing such a stunning book, inside and out, and to Aykut Aydoğdu, for the cover art, which is eerie and beautiful and everything I could have wanted. To the rest of the Delacorte team, I can think of no better people to be working with. Monica Jean, Mary McCue, Aisha Cloud, and the Underlined team—Kate Keating, Cayla Rasi, Elizabeth Ward, Jules Kelly, Kelly McGauley, and Janine Perez—I am more grateful to you all than I can say.
Wilder Girls would never have existed without my cohort at the University of East Anglia. Thank you all for your support, and for giving me that most crucial of early feedback: asking to read more. To the faculty—to Jean McNeil and Trezza Azzopardi—for advising me as I shaped Wilder Girls into something readable. To Taymour Soomro, for understanding what I wanted to say even before I did, for all your feedback, and most of all, for your friendship. To Avani Shah, for accompanying me to a variety of breakfasts, for sharing my correct opinions on bread, and for reading version after version of Wilder Girls. I am so lucky to know you.
To my mother. Thank you for every Darwin’s trip, for every movie, for every dropoff at the train station, and most importantly, for texting me pictures of the dog on demand. Thank you for sticking with me. I will always stick with you.
To those girls I met on the internet: Christine, Claire, and Emily. You know just how much writing this pains me, but I’m awfully fond of you all. You are vivid and you are sharp and you are very, very dear, and I am so thankful to have you in my life.
Thank you to my sensitivity readers for your time and feedback—any mistakes this book contains are mine and mine alone. Thank you to the Yarboros, who generously introduced me to Harkers Island, the original inspiration for Raxter. To Sama’s in Middlebury and Sin in Providence, for witnessing the bulk of my Wilder Girls breakdowns. To my teachers, for the extra time you put in reading my work, and for the encouragement you gave me. To my friends, for enduring me as I showed you close-up pictures of parasites, and to my family, for your encouragement even as I changed my mind (again, and again, and again).
And lastly, thank you to younger Rory, who decided to stay. I would not be here without you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rory Power grew up in Boston and earned her BA at Middlebury College and her MA from the University of East Anglia. She lives in Rhode Island. Wilder Girls is her first novel.
itsrorypower.com
@itsrorypower
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