A Map for Wrecked Girls

by Jessica Taylor

  Alex and I were thrown free from the boat before the ocean started to suck the hull under. We came up from underneath a wall of water and into the light, sputtering salt water.

  I couldn’t see my sister anymore.

  Through the tossing waves, I barreled toward where Henri disappeared. My hands drove down, down, down, and just when I lost hope, her fingers wrapped around mine. And Alex, he was freeing Casey’s backpack from the wreckage, slinging it over his shoulder before pulling up Casey, struggling to hold on to him, only to have the waves knock them apart again, for good this time. It didn’t matter—Casey’s eyes were already glazed over and unblinking against the gray sky.

  I don’t know how Henri could think straight, but seeing the way Alex went for the backpack like it was a lifeline made my sister splash across the surface and go for hers too.

  Now I moved past Henri, toward the ocean until cool waves lapped between my toes. Seaweed stink drifted up from the rushing and receding water. There wasn’t much to do, but I could make a mental map of the area around us.

  Miles and miles of blue water stretched out before me. The sun had come up on the right side of the beach, and the day before, it set past the other faraway end. We were facing north—we had to be. Somehow knowing my directions mattered.

  I turned to my left, the sandy beach curved until it disappeared into a formation of rocks that jutted out into the water. To my right, where Alex had disappeared, a tall cliff stretched toward the clouds. The tide rolled out, leaving a narrow path of sand before it crashed against the base of the cliff.

  With my back to the water, I faced the jungle. Scattered along the top of our beach—it had already become ours to me—were flimsy palm trees, and behind them, the sand ended with a thick cluster of bamboo and trees that twisted together in a darkened hush. Somewhere in it, there had to be water.

  “Em, what are you doing?”

  “Trying to . . .” My throat was too raw to yell. I walked closer and finger-combed the tangles out of my hair as I dropped beside her. Our hair was almost the same color, mine a little more like honey and hers closer to sun-bleached wheat, but Henri’s silky strands still looked blowout fresh.

  She draped an arm around my shoulders, and for a few heartbeats, I couldn’t worry about being lost, only that she would move away from me again.

  I’d never told anyone the future I imagined for my sister and me, dreams that had been part of me as far back as I could remember, so long they’d grown roots and wings. Most girls wanted something different; they wanted to be wives and mothers and architects and Supreme Court justices, but I dreamed of my sister and me as little old ladies living together in a huge, dilapidated house by the ocean. We would spend the beginning of our lives having great romantic adventures. My husband would die before me—because men almost always do—and Henri’s lover would perish in some old-fashioned way. He’d get lost at sea or die of Spanish influenza or something. Lost at sea. Maybe the damage I’d done had twisted our futures.

  Plantation shutters with white, peeling paint would cover all the windows, and we’d leave them open, even while the rain and wind came in and tossed our threadbare curtains against the walls. The wood floors would be pitted from long-ago high-heel marks, but they’d still be perfect for dancing. And that’s what Henri and I would do—start dancing at midnight. We wouldn’t stop until the rising sun bathed our washed-out wallpaper and our crinkled skin in the light.

  When our lives were nearly done, we’d only have each other and all the things Henri and I had talked about—scraggly cats and faded curtains and missing marbles.

  “We’ve been gone for almost twenty-four hours,” I said. “I wonder what Mom thinks happened to us.”

  “She probably thinks we’ve been sold to a brothel or something. Blondes—they’d pay top dollar for us.”

  “Not funny.”

  “It wasn’t a joke.” Henri trailed a finger through the sand. “You’ve got to stop worrying. Help will come.”

  My stomach rumbled. “I’m so, so hungry.”

  “Shh,” she whispered. “Think about something else.”

  “Like what?” Everywhere my thoughts ran took me to scarier places—the explosion, the hull of the boat shattering, the dropping and drifting farther out on the waves, no food, no water, just an orange speck on all that infinite blue—but they always landed me back on this beach where we would slowly die of either dehydration or exposure. No time for starvation. “Like what?” I repeated.

  She lifted her chin to the clumps of branches overhead where some island birds rustled between papery leaves. “Think about last summer when we went to Six Flags.”

  The day itself, it was perfect, even if those few hours were the beginning of the end.

  Our father took us to Six Flags, only Henri and me. We rode the rides until we were dizzy and ate a dinner of funnel cakes and cotton candy. Three weeks later, he confessed the affair to our mom and moved out of our house. He’d never taken us many places before, and Henri said later that guilt made him do it.

  That was our last good memory of our dad, the last time we looked at him as a man we could trust, someone planted in our world to actually care about our happiness. Maybe he didn’t know that’s who he was supposed to be. Or maybe he just didn’t care.

  All along, throughout the packing of things and the filing of papers, Henri had been by my side.

  I hated myself for what I’d done to her.

  “Henri, you know how much I love you, don’t you?”

  She pulled away and propped her backpack under her head like a pillow. Her lips twisted into a smile. A cruel smile that had once been reserved for everyone but me. “I thought you did.”

  I stood and faced away from her, so she couldn’t see the way a few of her well-timed words could damage me. “This place is too green to not grow anything we can eat. I’ll be back.”

  I made it back to the beach after at least an hour of searching the looser-spaced trees at the outskirts of the jungle, but Henri and Alex weren’t there. As I walked to the ocean’s edge, Henri strode through the sand from the eastern end.

  “What’s down that way?”

  “Pineapples, coconuts, and waterfalls,” she said. “Come on. What do you think, Em?”

  Even if her attitude was the same, I was relieved she was trying.

  Alex moved into sight at the cliff side of the beach hours and hours later. I’d begun to worry. Our eyes connected, but he only shook his head.

  No water.

  The sun had moved up the beach, relentless, and Henri and I huddled in the shade of a palm tree while Alex wandered around the waterline, staring past the cliffs, a place where the limitless sea bled into the horizon, like he could will a coast guard into existence if he imagined it hard enough.

  I left Henri alone and followed the impressions of Alex’s feet in the sand.

  My shadow stretched toward the cliffs, so even though he never turned, he had to know I was there.

  “You were the one who said we should stay out of the sun.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to do what’s good for me, Jones.”

  I took a small step closer. “What’s out there? Anything?”

  “No power lines. No signs of life. Nothing.” He gripped both hands behind his neck, and as his hair fell back down, I noticed he’d left faint red fingerprints. “Go sit with your sister.”

  I stared at his back, lifted my hand—he didn’t turn—and let it fall. The sun scorched the back of my calves on my way back to Henri.

  She perched herself on the edge of our raft, her arms squeezing her torso as she shuddered against a breeze I couldn’t feel.

  “Let’s go through your stuff again,” I told her. “See if we missed anything.”

  In the big pocket, there was a sweatshirt, a bikini, the almost-empty bottle of sunscreen, a pair of shorts, a
travel sewing kit, and a bottle of Evian that had made my heart explode in my throat—until I’d seen it was empty. And this time, at the very bottom, wedged under the folded seam of the bag: a smashed granola bar.

  “Alex! Come over here!”

  He jogged through the sand and dropped Casey’s backpack onto the driftwood.

  I tore the wrapper and divided the bar into three pieces. We shoveled them into our mouths and licked our fingers long after we’d sucked away the last melted chocolate chips.

  The wind had whipped all the texture out of Alex’s dark hair, so it looked soft and flyaway. He sank his weight into the side of the orange life raft and held a rubber band in his mouth, reaching behind his head and tying his hair into a ponytail.

  He rolled his shoulders, winced, and flexed his legs. They were tanned dark and even, all the way from his quads to his long, narrow feet.

  His shoes hadn’t made it—it hadn’t occurred to me until then.

  If he’d been in the jungle barefoot, the only place we were likely to find fresh water, his feet would have been destroyed.

  “Alex, where did you look for water? Did you just stay on the beach?”

  He held up a foot and wiggled his toes. “Can’t go into the jungle without shoes, Jones. If I’d stepped on a poisonous snake or whatever, I’d be dead by now.”

  He eyed my canvas slip-ons and I crossed one foot in front of the other, suddenly relieved and embarrassed my shoes had survived.

  “If you couldn’t go, you should have let us,” I said, surprised at the edge in my voice. “We won’t survive two more days without water. And now it’s too late to search. It’ll be dark.”

  With his chin in his hand, he just looked at me, not saying anything.

  Henri’s words came back to me. He’s a real pillar of strength, Emma. And I hated them.

  Henri unzipped the front pocket of her backpack, where she had our trip itinerary, her passport, a TSA-approved-size bottle of hand sanitizer, and a pen with the name Luquillo Beach Resort—our hotel in Puerto Rico. “Not much we can use here.”

  She flashed a ziplock bag full of tampons. They were still dry. Henri’d counted out her cycle the month before and she’d been complaining for weeks about the unfairness of PMS in the middle of her beach vacation.

  “Except those.” I turned to Alex. “What do you have?”

  He slid the backpack against his thigh before his hand disappeared into the cargo pocket of his shorts. “Just this.” In his outstretched hand was a small pocketknife.

  Henri perked up. “So we can slit our wrists?”

  Alex’s eyes drifted over the surf. “Maybe.”

  It disturbed me, not so much that Henri joked about it, but that Alex didn’t.

  “Casey could have had some food too,” I said.

  Alex tightened his arm around the backpack. “No. There’s nothing.”

  “Should we look?”

  A side of his mouth turned up—almost a smile. “Look, Jones, I already checked. Twice. It’s only extra clothes and shit. Nothing we can use.”

  “But maybe—”

  “I fucking looked! Okay?”

  “Okay. Okay.”

  “Don’t— Just . . . I’m sorry.” The whites of his eyes flushed a bright red that only comes from holding back tears, and his irises went a luminous green in contrast.

  He got up and walked off between the trees and toward the cliff at the end of the beach.

  Henri wiped the surprise off her face and shrugged, as if every harsh word Alex dished out was something I deserved. “Your friend’s being an asshole, isn’t he?”

  “His cousin died,” I said. “We’re all freaked out.”

  But Henri was relentless. “Acting like you’re the one who did something wrong. Oh, what’s the word my therapist uses? Projecting.”

  She hated therapy and loved to remind me I was the reason she was in it.

  “Henri. Help’s not coming soon. I hope you know that now.”

  What I was trying to say was that we were going to have to survive on this island—physically, emotionally—for a while, at least. I needed the old Henri back. We both did.

  She pretended not to hear me.

  CHAPTER 4

  FIVE MONTHS BEFORE

  Henri clung to the safety pole in her school uniform and watched the tunnel walls whirring past as we rode BART to school that Monday. This was the first day of her senior year, and whatever emotion she hid beneath her mask of makeup, it wasn’t excitement.

  If I closed my eyes while the train was soaring under the city, I could almost hear San Francisco moving on above me, and I wondered how I’d make this trip a year later all alone.

  At school, we stopped in the B Wing bathroom and Henri gave her navy skirt a roll at the waist, exposing a forbidden extra inch of thigh that was nowhere near as scandalous as half her weekend closet.

  Henri hated Baird’s uniforms almost as much as our dad hated Baird’s tuition. It occurred to me for the first time, I didn’t know if he’d keep paying it. The law made us his responsibility until we were eighteen, but a private school like Baird would never count as a necessity.

  “Hey, Henri, do you know if Dad’s still paying for school?”

  Her hands stilled, but only for a second before she went back to tucking in her white button-down. “Fuck him if he won’t. We’ll go to public.”

  She knocked her hip into the bathroom door, letting the screech of shoes in the hallway bleed into the bathroom. I moved to follow her outside but she paused and fluffed my hair with her hands. “For body.”

  Before I could check my reflection, Henri laced her fingers with mine and tugged me into the hall. “Don’t worry,” she whispered as uniformed bodies moved around us. “This was the summer you got hot.”

  I didn’t believe her.

  I was short but sturdy with a stubborn jaw and a long neck, and it wasn’t like I had a bad body, but I wasn’t Henri. And it wasn’t like I didn’t have boobs. I mean, they were there. They just didn’t brag about their thereness the way Henri’s did.

  The warning bell rang and we squeezed through the double doors to the MPR, which smelled like a combination of basketball rubber, Axe body spray, and cheap pizza.

  Assemblies were always held in the MPR—the multi-purpose room. Periods two through four, that’s where they taught freshman/sophomore PE. At lunch, they rolled out some tables and called it the cafeteria. For five and six, juniors and seniors exerted the minimum amount of energy required to pass PE.

  Henri didn’t release my hand as she elbowed us through the crowd, not even when we got in the H–N line to retrieve our schedules.

  Mrs. Petrakis, the sometimes attendance lady, sometimes school nurse, sat hunched over a file box on the folding table. “Name?”

  “Jones,” my sister said. “Henrietta and Emmalyn.”

  Mrs. Petrakis assessed Henri over the top of her bifocals and nodded to me. “You mute or something? Which one are you?”

  I shook my hand free from Henri’s. “I’m Emma.”

  There wasn’t a good reason for me letting Henri lead me around, only that she was willing and when I felt like I was drowning in high school, having a sister like Henri was a necessary breath of air.

  Henri smiled at Mrs. Petrakis and, oozing sarcasm, said, “Have a blessed day.”

  She collected our schedules and handed me the one with my name: Emmalyn Jones.

  My mother didn’t want to saddle us with names bigger than we were, but our father insisted we have family names. So I was Emmalyn and Henri was Henrietta. We were named after two great-aunts of our dad’s who owned a house together in Maine, where my dad used to spend every summer when he was a kid. Someone might have thought Henri got the worse deal with a name like Henrietta. Anyone who thought that didn’t know my sister at all.

  Be
autiful but not too girly, sexy but not too slutty, she was everything every girl at our school aspired to be.

  Henri said our names were fitting because we were destined to be together in our old age, like our great-great-aunts. Two gray old ladies in the bodies of teenage girls. Someday we’d live in a big house with faded curtains, a dozen or so cats, and a handful of our marbles long ago lost.

  On all accounts—our destiny, her clairvoyance, and our soon-to-be missing marbles—I believed her.

  Henri pointed to the top right bleacher in the MPR, where Ari stood and motioned for Sareena Takhar to join them. Sareena was in my grade—a year younger than everyone else—but Ari was working to recruit her into their circle. The truth was that Sareena, with her velvety black hair and perfect skin, was prettier than Ari. Henri thought it was a friends-close, enemies-closer thing.

  “There’s Mick and Ari.” Henri smiled. “And no Jake. Boo-hoo. I think Ari’s already been dumped.”

  Our shoes clicked against the bleachers as we climbed toward our friends.

  “Well, this is fantastic,” Ari said without looking up from the inside of her purse. “I left my lip gloss at home.”

  Henri reached into her book bag. “You can use mine.”

  Ari held her compact mirror in front of her and smoothed out her asymmetrical haircut. “No, thanks. I’d rather not look like I just sucked on a Popsicle.”

  My sister’s face shifted. This game Ari liked to play, Henri played it better. “As opposed to whoever—I’m sorry whatever—you were sucking on last?”

  “Ouch.” Mick tried not to laugh, which made his blond dreadlocks shake against his shoulders.

  Ari looked like she’d been slapped, but she recovered quickly. Girls like her always did. She pointed to Henri’s skirt. “You better unroll that before my mom sees. She said she’s not putting up with any shit this year.”

  Her mom was vice principal, which meant Ari loved to remind everyone of the rules, even if they never applied to Ari.

  Only a small space remained between Ari and Mick, not enough room for us both. Henri hiked her skirt a little higher and filled the bleachers between them. “I’ll take my chances.”