A Map for Wrecked Girls

by Jessica Taylor

  My sister didn’t acknowledge her, so I said, “Thanks, Mom.”

  Keys jangled as Mom hesitated. “Oh, and, um, if something happens and you don’t feel comfortable driving, I’ll have my cell. Henri?”

  “You’ve got it,” Henri said. “If anyone at all drinks and drives, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Henrietta Jones. I mean it!”

  Henri cranked up the music after Mom backed down the drive. Within the chaotic walls of my sister’s bedroom, there were only two volumes to music: loud and louder.

  Laughing, she shouted, “Prepare yourself, Em. This is the year I bring you to the dark side.”

  She pulled me onto the bed, and never releasing my hands from hers, we half danced, half jumped to a Red Hearts song that vibrated inside my rib cage.

  We collapsed on the bed, a jumble of limbs and blankets as the song ended. Christmas tree lights twinkled around us—she’d strung them up three years ago and couldn’t bear to take them down. I could have stayed in our own little world forever.

  But Henri’s attention went elsewhere.

  “Who’s that?” She untangled her limbs from mine and went to her bay window. I crawled off the bed and stared down below.

  A boy unloaded suitcases into the Morenos’ driveway. He was tall and lanky, his face shielded by the brim of his orange Giants baseball hat. He looked up to the window Henri and I were leaning out and waved.

  Henri pressed closer to the window and, with one hand on her hip, waved back.

  The textured wall scraped my back as I slid to the floor and out of his sight. “That’s Jesse.”

  She slipped down to my side. “That’s Jesse? Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.” Jesse’s dad, Eric Moreno, had the same white toothy smile, the same golden complexion. Plastered across billboards around the Bay Area, advertising for his sports recap show on the Latino channel, Eric Moreno’s smile was everywhere. I’d seen his face almost daily in the ads on the BART train to school.

  Henri crossed her arms and tapped a finger against the smile she was trying to suppress. “You obviously think the years have been kind.”

  “Year. Only a year.”

  It had been a year, almost exactly, since Jesse went to live with his mom in Seattle. Rumor at the last block party was that his mom got engaged to a guy with his own pack of kids, so Jesse was moving back in with his dad. Next door again.

  Henri pressed our heads together and said in her sexiest noir voice, “Maybe he’s been pining for you ever since he left.”

  I’d always told Henri everything. There weren’t many secrets I dared to keep from my sister, from my best friend, except for two. First: I wasn’t the Jones sister Jesse had been head over heels for. And second: I really did want him for my very own.

  “He’s like our brother,” I said. “Gross.”

  Something stopped me from telling her the truth, and I don’t know why because me liking Jesse—any warm-bodied boy at all—that was something my sister would understand.

  Henri had enough making out stories for both of us Jones girls combined. In new cars or BART cars or trolley cars, under historic bridges or rusted-out canopies, inside tents or outside in the rain, Henri had done it all.

  She surveyed her appearance in the mirror one last time and applied a thick ring of red lipstick. “You are going to start getting ready soon, aren’t you?”

  Music pulsated from the white two-story Queen Anne–style house at the end of Balzac Drive as Henri searched for a parking spot.

  I’d never been inside before, but I knew the place was Ari Deveroux’s. I’d ridden with our mom once or twice when she picked up Henri after a sleepover. Ari was all at once Henri’s best friend and greatest enemy.

  Henri double-parked Dad’s old sedan outside Ari’s, blocking two cars in the driveway.

  “Really?”

  “What? My heels are high,” she said. “You wouldn’t want me to get blisters, would you?”

  “Is Jake going to be here tonight?” I asked as Henri checked her reflection in the rearview mirror.

  “Who cares?”

  “I thought you were into him.”

  She flipped the emergency brake on the steep Nob Hill street and flung open her door. “I think he’s screwing around with Ari. Good riddance.”

  Jake Holt had been Henri’s weak spot for months. He’d been the only guy who wasn’t chasing her, and that blew away her idea of her world. I hated how Henri couldn’t be honest that he’d hurt her, even with me.

  Henri shouldered through the stream of boys spilling onto the wraparound porch as I followed her up the twisted walkway. She wore a gold top with straps the width of angel hair pasta. It dipped low beneath her scapula and draped there, revealing every bit of her back if the fabric moved just so. You had to look twice to make sure the gold shimmer wasn’t hand-painted onto her body.

  On her right wrist hung a gold men’s watch with a too-big strap that slipped down her forearm with every lift of her hand. It was eye-catching, and so obviously on purpose. To anyone else, it was a fashion statement, but I recognized the watch as our dad’s. One of the many things he left behind when he moved out last July.

  Henri said Coco Chanel’s fashion philosophy was to take off one accessory before you left the house. Henri Jones’s philosophy was to add something—something spectacular.

  I had borrowed a black cropped leather jacket from Henri. That was my statement piece for the night.

  We’d barely graced the threshold when Henri caught Aaron Moser in her net.

  Every other party before, Henri would turn to me before she took off with someone and mouth, Are you okay? It didn’t matter if I was or I wasn’t, I always nodded.

  That night, with Aaron slipping his hand into her back jeans pocket, she walked on without a single look.

  The party wasn’t all seniors. There were juniors—my class—there too, but everyone’s conversations seemed so solid, so involved, I didn’t want to interrupt.

  In the dining room, I found a punch bowl with stacks of red Solo cups and filled a cup to the brim.

  Someone hovered beside me. “You realize it’s spiked. Does Henri let you drink now?”

  Without turning, I knew that voice was Jesse’s.

  The alcohol smelled strong. Watching myself in the mirror above Ari’s parents’ sideboard, I lifted it to my lips. And I lied. “Henri’s not the boss of me.” I took a small sip. “How’s your mom?”

  “Getting married—some prick who wears a fanny pack. I didn’t think she needed me much anymore.” He dipped a glass of punch for himself. He’d always had these thick eyebrows, and over the last year, the rest of his face had grown into them because somehow they now worked.

  When Jesse left, I wasn’t that sad because it would be no time before I saw him again for Christmas and spring break. But our parents decided to take us to visit our grandparents in Maine for the week of Christmas vacation, and when spring rolled around, we noticed his dad packing up his SUV. He rented a cabin near Yosemite for the week.

  So a whole year went by without seeing Jesse, and over the year that feeling in my chest had started to fade away. Now it spread through me with an intensity that reached my fingers and toes.

  “What’s been going on with you, Em?”

  “Nothing.” My reflection swam in the mirror—I should have said something sexy and interesting.

  “So your dad moved out, huh? I’m sorry. Really sorry.”

  “Yeah, last July. We didn’t have any idea. About that lady, I mean.” We also didn’t know we weren’t making him happy anymore, our house wasn’t good enough, and a loft in the city was the kind of home he was after.

  Now our father lived in a world where we didn’t belong, with a needy girlfriend who didn’t look much older than Henri, a saltwater pool in need of daily skimming, an
d a flashy Porsche that needed to be raced around the roads of wine country.

  Fortunately, we didn’t need him either—that’s what Henri said.

  “How’d you hear?”

  “My dad told me when I got back. Your dad’s car wasn’t in the driveway for a couple days and . . .”

  “And what?”

  “I sort of asked.”

  “Why would you ask because my dad’s car wasn’t there?” I stared at him, into his brown eyes as if they hid the answer. “You knew something, didn’t you?”

  “People talk.” Some of his drink sloshed from his cup onto Ari Deveroux’s Oriental rug as he shrugged. He gaped at the punch pooling on the surface of the carpet.

  I rubbed my shoe against the stain until it absorbed. “Don’t tell Henri any of this.”

  He nodded. He knew us well enough, I guess, because he didn’t ask why.

  “So . . .” I didn’t know what I was going to say next, but I had to change the subject. “You haven’t invited me over for fort building yet. I’m kind of hurt. We used to make some masterful creations with a few sheets and a couple of chairs.”

  “Oh, man.” He smiled into his cup. “I forgot all about our forts, and I forgot how funny you are.”

  Funny. I was funny. I had his attention, and now I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

  “I missed you a lot.” I lifted my punch and gulped.

  “I missed you too.” His eyes sparkled—they were focused on me. And then they drifted across the room. “Henri came with you, didn’t she?”

  He stepped out of the dining room and through the stairway before I could answer. I stayed close to his back as he searched through the house. We passed by Aaron Moser, who Henri had now abandoned, and Jake Holt, at the dark end of the hallway with his thumbs hooked in the belt loops of Ari’s jeans.

  Like always, Jesse was following Henri, I was following him, and nobody was following me.

  Jesse slowed, and before I even saw my sister, I knew he’d found her.

  She sat on Ari’s parents’ snow-white couch in the back of the formal living room, her legs draped over the lap of a guy with a snake tattoo winding up his arm.

  While Jesse kept moving, I hung back. He approached and bumped his knee on the coffee table. His lips moved—I couldn’t hear what they were saying—and with her hazy half-drunk eyes, Henri glanced up at him. She barely even smiled. The boy said something into her ear and snickered. Henri curled closer to him, and as she laughed, her hair tumbled down her back.

  Jesse turned red and strode out the sliding glass door to the wraparound porch. He didn’t even cut his eyes my way as I set my cup on the railing beside his hand.

  “Nothing’s changed,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  His throat made a funny sound when he started to speak. “I guess Henri’s still trying to destroy herself.”

  I wondered what chapter of the past he was thinking about.

  The childhood we’d shared was full of twisted Jesse-and-Henri memories. The stranger who prowled the wire fence by the jungle gym, the stranger our moms tried to get banned from the playground—Henri loved to rile Jesse up by asking the guy his name. The field trip to the water park when the teachers made Jesse and Henri buddies and she’d disappeared—he’d thrown up his lunch worrying she’d drowned. The time he’d carried her to the nurse’s office when she’d fallen from the swing set after accepting a dare from the boys to climb to the very top.

  I never thought about Jesse as someone who should have been mine until I saw the way he loved Henri. I wanted to be loved like that, and Henri could never love him back. So it was the perfect solution: Jesse would belong to me.

  We would exist in a state of romantic bliss, and because I loved my sister so much, I could live with the fact that he loved her too.

  CHAPTER 3

  With my cheek glued to the plastic life raft, I opened my eyes to the daylight and reached for Henri. But in the space beside me, there weren’t any slim long limbs, no straight blond hair, no biting words waiting for me on the tip of her tongue.

  Henri was gone.

  I scrambled upright and squinted at the bright sun hitting the sand. On the beach below, I found her. Henri lounged by the ocean with her hair blowing in the breeze, like she was posing for some kind of swimsuit edition.

  The life raft’s seams stung my thighs as I shifted. I’d been so focused on finding her, setting one thing right in my upside-down world, I didn’t even realize my skin was on fire. My already-sunburned arms and legs had totally baked as the sun rose up the other end of the beach.

  Wrenching the raft, I freed it from the bushes and dragged it under the shade of the least-sparse palm tree at the top of the sand. Behind the scatters of palms, a jungle of bamboo grew dense and dark.

  “I’d move farther in.”

  Alex stepped from the shadows and watched the surf as he buttoned his shirt.

  “Why?” I wheezed. My throat was so dry.

  “The sand—it’s like a mirror. You’ll still get the reflection of the sun.” He bent down close to my sunburned arms.

  “I guess I slept through that part of Lost and Alone.”

  He laughed, paused, and looked up at me with a weird expression, green eyes flecked with dark brown and yellow. His tan had kept him from burning like I had, but up close, the freckles on his cheeks had darkened.

  He stood. “You’re fried, Jones. I know it’s hot, but you gotta cover yourself up today.”

  My burn stung as I slipped on my white jacket. “It’s fine. It doesn’t hurt.”

  With the back of his hand, he rubbed his eyes, still swollen from crying.

  “How, um, how are you today?” I asked.

  He straightened his shoulders. “I’ll be a hell of a lot better when I get us off this island.” He said it with so much certainty. Maybe he was trying to convince me, or maybe he was trying to convince himself. Either way, I appreciated the effort.

  He glanced back my way, and his voice went husky. “But thanks for asking.”

  “Sure.”

  Alex lifted his chin toward the beach, where Henri’d parked herself in the sand. “And maybe you should talk to Malibu Barbie about staying out of the sun. I tried.”

  To only myself, I said, “She won’t listen.”

  The three of us collected driftwood and spelled out SOS along the shore. Even though our throats were raw and our empty stomachs in knots, we made that SOS first. As simple as it was, it was something. Help would come, and if they didn’t see signs of life, they might not hover for long.

  With our signal done, we needed water.

  Last semester, I’d had the flu so bad, it’d kept me home from school for a week. Fever made me too lazy to find the remote. By the time Henri got home, dug the remote out of the couch cushions, and flipped to Cinemax, I’d caught a six-hour marathon of Lost and Alone on the Discovery Channel.

  I remembered almost nothing. Except the rule of threes: Three hours without warmth. Three weeks without food. Three days without water.

  That’s how long the human body could survive.

  Words shredded my throat as I told Henri and Alex, “We have to find water.”

  Alex nodded. Henri had spread out on the sand—this time on her stomach—and resumed her impression of driftwood. A sigh escaped her lips. “Someone’s coming soon, Em. Do you really want to drink some questionable water before they get here?”

  “We don’t know when they’re coming. It could be weeks, and without water, we’ll be dead by then.”

  “Hey.” Alex caught my elbow. “Nobody else is dying.”

  I looked down at where his fingers curled around my arm.

  I liked Alex’s hands. Jesse’s were as smooth as Henri’s. Alex’s—they told stories. Of hammering nails into the boats, tugging on taut fishing
lines, and shoving off surfboards to ride mile-high waves that carried him right back to where he began.

  He cleared his throat and let his hand drop. Then turned to Henri. “Any luck with the phone? Or am I being too tragically optimistic?”

  “Still broke,” Henri said without opening her eyes.

  “Maybe we could bury it in the sand to dry it out,” I said. “Like how you can use rice—”

  She pushed up onto her elbows. “If we had rice, I’d eat it. I’m starving.”

  My last meal was wearing thin too—a big stack of banana pancakes with coconut syrup, a freshly sliced papaya drizzled with honey, and a glass of pineapple juice. All at breakfast the morning before. Henri must have been starving. She’d only gotten half a grapefruit, two cups of black coffee, and a waiter’s number.

  Alex took the phone from Henri and looked it over before handing it back. “Even if it came on, the reception out here would be shit. You’re probably not really that hungry, just dehydrated.”

  “Where are we?” I whispered to myself.

  But Alex answered. “An island. There’s over a hundred out here. Part of the British Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico. We drifted a lot. I don’t know which one.”

  “But someone will find us?”

  He gave me a weak smile. “I’ll see what’s out there and search for a water source. If there’s one to find.”

  The way Alex walked, like he could leave his body behind if he moved fast enough, made me decide not to follow.

  Just before he disappeared around the cliff at the end of the beach, he hoisted Casey’s backpack a little higher. It was suddenly strange he’d had the presence of mind to grab it when the accident happened.

  The memory hit me like a tidal wave, and I remembered what happened after the explosion, when the boat flooded with water.

  Alex’s and Casey’s feet pounding against the hollow deck, their hands fumbling for the life raft. Me scrambling to find the life vests. Casey saying no, he didn’t need one. Throwing one to Henri and one to Alex. We didn’t have time to put them on.

  A second explosion, and nothing but blue, blue water. The kind of blue that mesmerizes before it swallows you whole.