A Map for Wrecked Girls

by Jessica Taylor

  She glared at Mick until he realized there wasn’t room for me.

  He jumped up, tripping a little. “Oh damn. Sorry, Emma.” He sat on the stair beside the bleacher and nodded to his seat.

  I wasn’t really paying attention, though. I lifted my hand when Sareena smiled and waved at me, but my eyes were already scanning the crowd. Someway, somehow, I’d be able to distinguish the shape of Jesse’s head from everyone else’s—I knew I could.

  My eyes roved over the backs of the heads of the student body. Jake Holt’s white-blond buzz cut in the front row, nuzzling a freshman’s neck, wasn’t hard to spot. No Jesse.

  Jesse and I had our moment years ago.

  We were thirteen years old in the closet of Kristi Wong’s parents’ basement, on deck for a not-so-arousing game of seven minutes in heaven.

  Other than a ribbon of lamplight filtering beneath the basement door, we were in the dark. Jesse’s hands gripped my hips as the warmth of his breath moved closer. I swallowed and closed my eyes. His lips felt wet and slippery. I peeked and watched him kissing me.

  His hand slipped under the hem of my shirt, over my navel, my rib cage, reaching the cup of my bra. I jerked away so fast my head slammed into the closet shelf.

  “Crap. I’m sorry.” He ran his palm over my throbbing skull. “Emma, I thought you wanted to.”

  “No, I—I do.” In a way, I did. I liked Jesse. And I was supposed to like this.

  I decided to try again. This time, at least I knew what to expect. I moved my mouth against his, and thought about everything I liked about Jesse.

  He had braces and a little bit of acne, but he was funny and when we had to pick softball teams in PE, he made sure I never got picked last.

  He pulled away, smiled, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “It’s okay. We’ll be friends.”

  Henri studied her schedule, ignoring me still standing there. “Who’d you get, Em?”

  I slid into Mick’s still-warm seat beside my sister and unfolded mine in my lap. “No surprises. You?”

  She leaned over to read. “Ugh. Paxton for trig. You’ll be lucky to get a B.”

  “He gave me a C.” Mick rifled through his backpack for his schedule, and an Altoids container dropped out. He fumbled to zip it back inside before his weed and rolling papers fell out, and straightened his tie. “What’d he give you?”

  “An A minus,” Henri said, squinting at her schedule. “Flynn. Who is Mr. Flynn? And why do I have musical theory for fourth period? I didn’t register for this.”

  “He’s new,” Ari said. “Mrs. Ostroff checked into rehab in late August. Admin really struggled to find someone . . .”

  Even though nobody was listening, Ari kept talking. She got off on letting us know Vice Principal Deveroux had loose lips, so when it came to Baird gossip, Ari heard all, knew all, and repeated all.

  The first-period bell rang and the double doors flew open. And there was Jesse, darting through the doors and scanning the crowd. Serendipity must have been on my side, because I could have sworn he looked right at me. Or maybe it was Henri. Maybe for Jesse it had always been Henri.

  Dr. Nielsen, our principal, moved to the podium. “Mr. Moreno, please kindly take a seat.”

  Jesse blushed and took a small bow as he snagged a seat on the bottom row.

  Dr. Nielsen cleared his throat into the microphone. “Teachers, faculty, and Baird students, welcome to the first day of classes. Matriculating at Baird is not only a privilege but also a responsibility. I trust you’ve all refreshed your recollection of the honor code, and if you haven’t, might I suggest you do so at your leisure.”

  As Dr. Nielsen gave his prepared speech, my thoughts went to Jesse. The back of his head, his short and straight dark hair, wasn’t so different from any of the other boys at Baird. Whatever it was that was so special about Jesse, I couldn’t pinpoint a reason for my fascination.

  Something about not knowing made a dark feeling wash over me.

  “Em,” whispered Henri, picking a stray hair off my navy blazer. “What are you thinking? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” I smiled and faced forward.

  “This year,” Dr. Nielsen continued, “we welcome a talented professional to our stable of educators. Mr. Flynn, would you mind standing?”

  A long-legged teacher got to his feet and turned to the bleachers full of students. He wore a pair of dark-wash jeans, even though teachers were only supposed to wear jeans on Fridays, and a rumpled navy blazer over a plaid shirt.

  “Mr. Flynn was a Baird student himself just four years ago. Now he’ll be teaching various music classes. He also brings with him some interesting hobbies. Let’s see . . . Several years ago, when the band’s drummer took ill, Mr. Flynn once played the drums for the Red Hearts at the Great American Music Hall on O’Farrell.”

  The Red Hearts was a San Francisco–based band that broke into the mainstream a couple years ago. They also happened to sing Henri’s very favorite song.

  A grin spread across my sister’s mouth as she leaned forward in her seat and glued her gaze to the new teacher.

  Mr. Flynn lifted his hand toward the bleachers, but didn’t force a smile. Something about the honesty of it made me think more of him than Dr. Nielsen or Ari’s mother or any other teacher at Baird.

  When Dr. Nielsen excused the student body for second period, while I was once again searching the crowd for Jesse, Henri snatched my schedule out of my hand and held it side by side with hers. “Meet me outside B Wing at lunch. That’s halfway for both of us. We’ll walk to that falafel place.” She folded my schedule in half and handed it back. “Hey, are you going to be okay?”

  “Yeah, you?”

  “Absolutely.” She smoothed her skirt and shifted her book bag to the other shoulder. “I’ve suddenly developed an interest in musical theory.”

  CHAPTER 5

  We tasted like salt, our mouths, our fingers. I darted my tongue across my cracked lips and fantasized about cherry ChapStick and cotton-candy-flavored gloss. Two days lost and I almost couldn’t remember their taste anymore.

  We were no longer flesh and blood. We were dried sweat and salt water.

  Henri had sleepily rested her feet against mine. Even though everything was blazing hot, her feet were cold as always.

  I shook a little ocean water into Henri’s coconut-scented sunscreen to make the bottle last longer and applied some to my peeling arms, trying to work up the will to break away and explore the jungle, look for water.

  Alex came trudging down the beach. Even he was sunburned now. He held the bottom of his shirt away from his body and bent low to the raft to let something tumble out. Red, shiny orbs with deep grooves slid across the plastic.

  I jumped onto my knees with my stomach growling. “What are they?”

  “Breakfast, Jones. Cacao pods.”

  “Cacao as in chocolate?” It felt light in my hand and smelled more like an orange or a flower than a candy bar.

  “Don’t get too excited. They don’t taste much like chocolate—okay, they taste nothing like chocolate—but they’re full of fat, so we’ll get full.”

  We wouldn’t starve to death. That was our only consolation. Maybe we’d die of dehydration or typhoid fever, but we wouldn’t starve.

  I needed to search for water. Three days—that’s all we had. But I didn’t realize how bad the hours leading up to that point would feel.

  Henri picked up a cacao pod and held it out to Alex. “Crack this for me, s’il vous plait?” she rasped.

  He thumped it against his knee and I did the same. Mine burst into a dozen pieces like a broken pumpkin, but I could still eat the parts not covered in sand. We both popped the pieces of white flesh into our mouths.

  They were the texture of lima beans and bitter, but if I closed my eyes, they tasted like plums. I hel
d mine out to Henri, but she gagged and dropped it into the sand.

  Tiny worms were twisting through the fruit. My stomach convulsed, and I pressed my hands into my abdomen.

  Alex went gray and his shoulders heaved, but he swallowed it back down. He gave us a small, watery smile. “It’s just more protein.”

  Henri inched away from the cacao pod. She dotted runny drops of sunscreen down her nose and across her cheeks, touching her fingers together as if she noticed the thinner consistency. “I’d rather starve.”

  “Well, Hank.” Alex popped another fleshy piece into his mouth. “If we’re here for much longer, you probably will.”

  “It’s Henri, you half-wit.”

  “Hank is a nickname for Henry.” He shrugged. “It suits you.”

  I kind of loved it that Alex made my name sexier and Henri’s less sexy.

  My hunger winning out, I tore into my fruit, biting and sucking until what little juice there was slicked down my chin. If I didn’t think about the worms, it was delicious.

  The pods weren’t water, but they were enough to keep my throat from absolute misery. And at least hunger and thirst were a reminder I was still alive.

  Henri stood and slipped her shorts down her legs. She kicked them toward Alex and strode toward the water. “I’m going to get wet.”

  He cupped his hands around his mouth and threw his voice down the beach. “Don’t drink any.”

  Over her shoulder, she batted her eyelashes. “Did you think I was talking about a swim?”

  As Henri’s body crashed against the surf, Alex moved beside me. “There’s something seriously wrong with her.”

  “No, she’s—” She was furious with me, but I didn’t know she could carry it this far. Henri at home was bitter and hateful, slinging comebacks and slamming doors, but the tiniest catastrophe—like the Wi-Fi going down—would revive her enough to ask me for the network name and security key, even if her civility didn’t last beyond the time it took for the router to reboot. This lost version of Henri—she was relentless. “She’ll come around.”

  Part of his sunburn flaked away as he scratched his cheek. “What about you? Are you okay, Jones?”

  “Honestly?”

  “No, I want you to lie to me.” He smiled. “Yes, honestly.”

  My whole body felt like it would burst into flames, my heartbeat was a drum in my chest, my temples pounded from dehydration, and it’d only be a matter of time before my mouth felt stuffed with cotton again. “I’m okay.”

  “No, I mean really okay? This isn’t only bad. This is—”

  “I know.”

  “Good. Because I’m not sure I am.” From the sand, he grabbed a beer can we’d found—Casey’s brand, he’d told us—but Alex’s hands trembled as he sliced off the top.

  Pieces of the boat had started to wash against our shores. We didn’t know how to use everything we found, but we’d drag it all back to the tree line anyway.

  “What could have made the boat explode like that?”

  “I know. I keep wondering too. Maybe a battery. Or a fuel leak.” He picked up another can and cringed when the aluminum cut into his thumb. “So you know, you’re right about water—what you said yesterday. We don’t find it soon and we’re done.”

  “We’re not doing enough. We have to try harder.” I had to try harder. “Maybe there’s water—or help—out there in the jungle.”

  “We’ll use up all our energy doing that. It’s a delicate balance.” He sucked blood off his thumb and inspected the cut. “Finding food and water burns calories. Makes us sweat.”

  “But you just said—we can’t make it much longer without water. At this point, it’s do or—” I thought about Casey just in time to stop myself.

  Alex sighed and used his pocketknife to split his sweatshirt up the back. “You’re right. If we’re going, we go now.”

  “What are you doing?”

  He wrapped and tied the two pieces of sweatshirt around his feet. “They’ll get shredded out there. It’s the best idea I had.” He finished tying them, a hint of a smile on his lips. “What do you think? Good look for me?”

  I paused putting on my own shoes and looked him up and down, trying to smile too. “You could start a trend.”

  Drops of water darkened the white sand as Henri wrung her straight blond hair between her hands. She stood over me, watching me put on my canvas shoes. “Where are you going?”

  “Into the jungle. To look for water.”

  Henri grabbed her own shoes. “No way in hell are you two leaving me here alone.”

  The air was darker and denser under the tangles of branches. Each time I inhaled, the thickness caught in my lungs. My body didn’t know whether to breathe it or drink it.

  With a piece of driftwood, Alex hacked through the vines and bamboo ahead. I stayed close to his back while Henri trailed behind. She didn’t believe in breaking a sweat unless absolutely necessary. Maybe she finally understood what was at stake.

  We passed under trees with cinnamon-colored trunks, and a spicy citrus breeze hit me. I looked up at the fruit—the cacao trees. As I paused to tie a piece of Alex’s sweatshirt around a low branch—markers we might need to find our way back—a vine twisted around the trunk. As it dragged itself onto a high branch, I realized no—it was actually a snake. Henri would have lost it, so I didn’t say anything. Just rushed past.

  “Alex, what do you think’s out here?”

  He kicked away the brush at his feet and pressed forward. “We’ll find out,” he said, “if we’re stuck here long enough.”

  Suffocating heat pressed down as we cut right through the middle of the jungle. Maybe the temperature was truly unbearable or maybe I was feverish from dehydration.

  I scanned the areas to the right and left of me as we moved. So many times I thought I saw a trickle of blue. But I’d blink and realize it was only my desperation.

  Stings erupted on my bare legs, waves of them. All the island bugs seemed to live in the jungle, and now they were feasting on me.

  “How far is it to the other side?” Henri said, sounding bored.

  Alex whipped around. “You know, Hank, it wouldn’t have hurt my feelings in the slightest if you’d skipped this excursion.”

  She took a sharp breath. “Alex, you know that cliff down the beach? Why don’t you go jump off it?”

  “Stop it,” I said. “Both of you.”

  For miles and miles, we pushed our broken bodies over fallen trees, through thick patches of brush, and under draping tangles of growth. I ran out of sweatshirt to mark our way and improvised by crossing stray vines across the path behind us. We walked until the ocean air was masked by the scent of the musky earth. My tongue wasn’t dry; it was sandpaper.

  “We’ve been at it almost two hours. Must’ve covered three miles.” Alex had taken off his shirt, and the muscles and tendons on his back shook with each breath. “If I wasn’t such a stubborn bastard, I’d say we turn back.”

  The dry ground crunched beneath my shoes even though the trees were lush with thick, waxy leaves. Those trees could be surviving off the sheer humidity in the air and deep groundwater.

  “We’re not going to find water, are we?”

  The effects of dehydration were etched around Alex’s eyes and in the small cracks on his full lips. “I don’t think so, Jones.”

  We moved into a small clearing and Henri plopped down into the dry leaves beneath us. She looked fragile, sitting on the jungle floor, hugging her knees up under her chin. This situation—like so many in the months before—had spun out of my sister’s control.

  And mine. She wasn’t the only one to blame.

  The way she’d flirted with Casey, daring him to take us farther from land, had everything to do with the delight she took in watching me cringe.

  My hands ached. I wanted to reach out
and touch her. But I knew better.

  Alex shrugged off Casey’s backpack and lay flat on his back. His hip bones jutted over the top of his low-slung cargo shorts. “Not a spring, a brook, not even a puddle. I can’t believe it.”

  I sat beside them and closed my eyes. Minutes or hours later—it was hard to tell—the dim shadows of the jungle had darkened. “Should we head back before it gets dark?”

  Alex’s knees cracked as he stood—between the wreck and our dehydration, our bodies had taken beatings. “Give me a minute. I’ve gotta pee.”

  Given our worsening dehydration, I wondered how he still could.

  “Did one of you touch this?” Alex lifted Casey’s backpack by the top handle. He pointed to a spindly tree at the edge of the clearing. “I left it propped here. I just found it on its side. Did you touch it?”

  “Of course not. It probably just fell over.”

  Alex rubbed a hand down his face and focused his bloodshot eyes. “Hello? Hank? Did you?”

  “Yeah, I was so glad you left it alone so I could fondle all of your things. I’ve just been waiting for the opportunity.”

  “Whatever.” He slipped the straps onto his shoulders and pushed through a cluster of trees. “Stay together.”

  If he felt half as sick or one-tenth as weak as me, he could have collapsed at any minute, and I wouldn’t have blamed him for abandoning my sister and me. We were poison. To each other and everyone around us.

  Henri watched me staring at the spot where Alex vanished. “If one of us dies, what should we do with the body?”

  I looked away. “Don’t think like that. And if you do, don’t say it.”

  “It’s a legit question. Like if Alex died, I don’t know if we could carry him, and we don’t have any tools to dig a grave. We’d have to let him rot.”

  The first time I saw Alex, he glided his rickshaw down the gritty sidewalk separating the beach from the hotel swimming pool. Henri wore black sunglasses that covered half her face as we lounged in the shade of a poolside cabana.