A Map for Wrecked Girls

by Jessica Taylor

  I’d never shared my daydreams with Henri, but maybe on some level she’d known, because that day she’d worn a pair of light-wash jeans and a boho-chic white trapeze top.

  The summer before, we’d been walking down Haight toward Golden Gate Park when a man filled the sidewalk in front of us and said, “Can I interest you girls in some weed or some shrooms? You want to smell colors?”

  Henri just laughed and said, Not today, thanks. Even though my heart was beating in my eardrums, I bit my lips as she tugged me past him, holding my smile inside, and loving how that encounter made my fantasy a little more real.

  I was scanning the street for that man, wondering if he lived nearby, when Henri yelled “Em!” and pushed me up against the brick front of a record store.

  Holding my shoulders firm, she looked at me with an excitement and an intensity she felt for nearly nothing. “That’s Gavin inside.”

  “Who?” I rubbed the back of my head.

  “Sorry,” she said, and then, “Mr. Flynn. He likes his students to call him Gavin. It’s so progressive of him. It puts us all on the same level.”

  “Yeah, until Ari’s mom hears about it.”

  “That woman is all bark, no bite, trust me. But seriously, his name is Gavin. Isn’t that unusual and kinda sexy?” She glanced through the window once more. “I’m going to say hi.”

  “Henri, this is a bad idea.”

  “Why?”

  Her mind was made up, and I knew nothing I could say would reach her.

  “Wait here,” she said.

  The glass door closed and sealed my sister inside.

  Through the windows, I watched.

  Henri strolled into the store, casually at first, running her fingers along a rack of bumper stickers by the door.

  Mr. Flynn’s back was to her, so she traveled behind him and perused the records on the other side of the aisle.

  Pretending not to see him, pretending not to care, that was Henri at her best.

  He pivoted and so did she—she couldn’t have timed it better. He had an album in his hands and he passed it to her, gesturing to the song titles. She smiled, and he ran a hand over the stubble on his chin and smiled back. It was a delicate dance.

  As they moved toward the entrance, Henri knocked her hip against the rack of bumper stickers and sent them fluttering to the floor. They spread across the tiles and both Henri and Mr. Flynn dropped to their knees, grabbing at them. She lost her balance a little and his hands steadied her shoulders. She met his eyes, and her cheeks flushed.

  I’d never seen Henri embarrassed around the opposite sex before.

  She glanced away and looked so pretty with her mascara-darkened eyelashes against her cheeks that most boys would die. I realized the game Henri was playing and the appeal of Mr. Flynn.

  He wasn’t a boy.

  Mr. Flynn collected the last of the bumper stickers and Henri shoved them onto the rack without stacking them.

  They mumbled a few words and Henri headed toward the exit.

  Before she reached the glass door, she looked over her shoulder to make sure Mr. Flynn was watching her walk away.

  Henri wasn’t disappointed.

  We stopped off for a dinner of gelato at a shop on Powell. Our salty popcorn left us craving something sweeter than dim sum and I could tell our brush with our dad left Henri craving anything that could make her forget. Or maybe it was Mr. Flynn that made her want dessert.

  The streetlamps flickered to life as we shut the glass doors to the shop behind us.

  We walked down the sidewalk toward the BART station, scraping our nearly empty gelato cups with our plastic spoons.

  Henri pushed her red sunglasses to the top of her head. “These remind me of birdhouses.” She nodded to the pastel-colored houses. “I want to live in one someday.”

  “They’re too far from the ocean. I think we should live right by the sea.”

  She smiled into the breeze. “I guess we’ll need two houses, then. One for summer and one for winter.”

  I took a few steps before I realized Henri had frozen herself to the sidewalk and wasn’t beside me. She held her spoon in her mouth and pointed her gelato cup across the street to cable cars for the Powell-Hyde line.

  “Hey, you wanna?” she said with her lips still around the spoon.

  I hadn’t ridden a cable car since a third-grade field trip. I’d taken a seat on the inside and squeezed my eyes shut while the car bounced down the steep hills. The Powell-Hyde line was the steepest street in the city.

  “I thought you said those were for tourists.”

  “It’s getting dark.” She tucked the sunglasses into her cleavage and held her hand out to me. “Let’s be tourists for the night.”

  We looked both ways and—even though no cars were coming—we ran too fast across the street to the ticket booth.

  Henri paid for our tickets while I held a place in line. Only about a dozen people stood ahead of us, so the next cable car that pulled up was ours.

  As I headed toward the innermost section, Henri caught my hand and stopped me. She grabbed on to the side rails and stood on the narrow platform on the side of the cable car. My legs quivered as the line moved ahead of us and tourists filled seats I desperately wanted for myself.

  The cable car started off with a slow clank down a steep hill that made me lock my knees around the safety bar. Momentum picked up and sent the cable car gliding down the slanted street.

  Henri grasped the bar with one hand.

  She leaned far from the car and arched her back toward the speeding asphalt. The wind picked up the hem of her top and beat the cotton against her bare waistline as she faced the sky. She didn’t even bother to tug it down.

  I almost yelled out for her to stop, but she was cinematic under the glow of the streetlights, with the scenes of the city passing behind her like a film reel and her hair flying. Never had I been so mesmerized by Henri—she was electric. My sister made people flock to her, no one more than me. Henri was a habit I wouldn’t kick, a drink I shouldn’t have drunk, and a party I couldn’t crash.

  She opened her eyes and caught me watching her. I looked down at the road passing under my feet. Henri smiled a little and cupped her hands over mine. She squeezed and anchored me to the bar. Wordlessly, she told me to tilt back.

  Even though I knew—and she had to know too—that the feeling couldn’t last, for just a minute or two, I could be just like her.

  My legs shook as I dropped my shoulders and leaned outside the cable car. Still, I kept my eyes shut.

  Tightening her grip around my hands, she whispered, “I won’t let you fall.”

  That was when I opened my eyes to the lights of the city soaring around me and the faint stars twinkling above. The city felt too small to hold everything inside me.

  Only when the cable car came to a stop at the end of the line did Henri let go of my hands.

  CHAPTER 7

  Now every little sound from the jungle made me hug my arms and imagine walls stacking, a staircase rising up, a roof clicking into place—all the pieces to a house by the sea. Whatever was beyond those trees, real or imagined, I couldn’t turn my back to it for more than a few seconds.

  Henri and Alex had gone separate, sluggish ways around the island—Alex determined to search the stagnant water source for something drinkable and Henri changing her bikini. We were surviving, barely, on juice and fruit from cacao pods. Alex and I were. I don’t know what Henri was surviving on. Malice maybe.

  Humidity mixed with my sweat made my body a sand magnet. My legs, my hands, my forearms were coated in a fine grit. I gathered my hair, ungluing strands from the back of my neck and winding it into one big mass that I didn’t have a way to tie back. Alex had made it to the island with a rubber band, but he’d lost it in the ocean. The smallest of luxuries were the ones I missed the
most. I kept my eyes on the beach, but even they felt gritty.

  Like Alex, I found myself staring at the sea, ready for help to come that never materialized. After three long days, I wasn’t sure it ever would.

  Something small and red bounced across the ocean waves. Sun glinted off the blinding sand, and I shielded a hand over my eyes.

  It was the ice chest we’d had in Casey’s boat. My legs trembled as I stood. It couldn’t be. But maybe it was.

  I darted across the sand. It didn’t matter that it was a chance in hell—right now that ice chest was our best chance at staying alive. As the sand ended, I took the deepest breath my lungs could hold, and I dove.

  The sea sloughed away my dirt and sweat as I glided through the water. I came up for air to hone in on the ice chest. Where the ocean water got colder and darker, I swam out.

  My scalp screamed as someone yanked a fistful of my hair. Arms came around my waist and heaved me backward. I grabbed the sturdy wrist—it was Alex’s, not Henri’s. And I shoved at him, kicking my feet against the water. “What the hell!” I spluttered.

  But he was too strong and dragged me toward the shore. He had the advantage being so much taller—he was walking across the ocean floor before my feet found bottom.

  Finally, I touched down on slick rocks and scanned the horizon. The ice chest was gone. “What are you doing?” I yelled. “That ice chest—”

  “I don’t care!”

  “But it had water—”

  “Thirsty is better than dead!”

  “Thirsty like this is almost dead.” I shoved him, but he hauled me from the waves and planted our feet in the sand.

  “Did you not notice the riptide, Jones?”

  My mouth opened, and I stared out at the ocean.

  “See the ice chest dragging out to sea?” He pointed to the horizon, where the ice chest bobbed, a faraway dot of red. “You could have been that far out by now. Being caught in a riptide is like . . . it’s like— Imagine being trapped on a treadmill you can’t turn off. It’s like that. If you don’t know how to get out, you wear yourself out and you drown.”

  “I—I’ve never seen one.”

  “Now you have.” His shoulders slumped as he looked at me, his clothes soaked and dripping. “It’s fine—you didn’t know. I only know because I was caught once. Learned my lesson.”

  I pulled myself onto the beach. “What do you do?”

  “I was surfing. My leash broke and I lost my board. I swam parallel to the coast until I got out. That’s what you do. But damn. You scared the shit out of me, Jones. The surf’s been crashing in wild all morning. Then it went calm. Flat as a pane of glass. And I saw you. And the foam on the water pulling away from the beach. You were far enough out—it was just starting to catch you. I was fifty feet away when you went in.” He faced the beach, and as he turned his back on me, his voice cracked. “I wasn’t sure I could—”

  Behind him, I reached up and squeezed his shoulders, but Alex turned and blinked down at me through wet eyes. Slower this time, prepared for him to jerk away, my arms circled his waist. This time, he relaxed and wrapped his arms at the dip of my lower back.

  Nobody except my parents had touched me—not with any meaning—in months. With my sunburned cheek against his shoulder, I pressed back.

  But the opposite sex led to tragedy for Jones girls.

  I wouldn’t be shattered like my sister and my mom.

  I broke away and headed for the top of the beach.

  “Did I do something wrong?” He followed me through the burning sand.

  “No, I just need to get out of the sun.”

  Back in Puerto Rico, when I’d decided Alex would save our vacation, I thought there were only five days to play before we packed up our suitcases and headed home without so much as a good-bye. Out here, he was inescapable.

  My hands seemed to leave trails through the air as my sister and I lay on the raft that afternoon. The water source hadn’t panned out like we’d hoped—all Alex found was a spring that barely broke the surface and dribbled into the stagnant, caiman-filled water. My eyes wouldn’t focus, no matter how hard I blinked. I was almost unconscious when Henri whispered my name.

  “I have eyes,” she said. Sunlight peeked through the trees but did nothing to warm Henri’s icy stare. “I can see the way you look at Alex, and I know what’s happening.”

  “Nothing’s happening, Henri.” I whispered it. My throat hurt too much. If I was looking at Alex any way, it was because of the solitude, and the fact that the only other person stranded with me was trying to crush the leftover pieces of us.

  Her fingers were splayed on the raft between us. I wrapped my hand around hers, but her bones stayed stiff, never curling around mine.

  “I’ve been thinking about that day.”

  “What day?”

  Her silence said everything. I looked down at the nail polish I’d had to apply myself the night before we left.

  “I wished I was dead,” she said. “When I found out what you’d done, for a second, a heartbeat, I wished I was dead. I should have been more specific with my wishing, though. Like if I was going to die, it should be fast. Not like this.”

  I picked my polish until bits flaked away. “I’ve told you I was sorry so many times.”

  She didn’t move a muscle except to tap her fingers in a staccato rhythm that was so unlike my cool and collected sister. “Sorry’s a childish word, Emma. When you’re a kid you think it’s a cure-all, but now it doesn’t mean a damn thing. Sorry isn’t enough.”

  Not quite sleeping but not quite awake, Henri and I stayed as still as possible in the dark shade of the life raft. A fleeting part of me thought that raft might be our way off the island. Now I couldn’t think that far ahead, only breathing shallow to keep my lips from cracking and bleeding more.

  “I’ve got something.”

  My eyes opened to Alex’s voice. He slicked a hand through his long hair and fumbled with the cargo pocket of his shorts before pulling out a brand-new bottle of water.

  Part of me might have thought it was a mirage because I nearly sobbed when he dropped the weight of it in my hands. “Are you for real?”

  “You two can split it.”

  Henri planted her hands at her waist. “Don’t be a hero. We’ll third it.”

  Alex sat in the sand and drank first, a little less than the third he was entitled before he passed it to me. “Go ahead, Jones. Drink.”

  Each swallow was ecstasy and torture. It wasn’t much. Only a twelve-ounce bottle. But it was heaven against my sunburned lips, and I drank too fast. A trail dribbled down my chin, and I would have cried over depriving myself of that sip—literally cried—if it wouldn’t have meant just losing more water.

  The little bit wasn’t nearly enough to replenish what we’d lost. But we’d bought ourselves at least a little more time before our bodies started shutting down. We’d need gallons and gallons before help came. If it ever did. I looked out at the vast blue. It was surreal to worry about water when miles of ocean water stretched around us.

  Henri wiped the lip of the bottle with the heel of her hand before she finished it off and stared Alex down. “So, where did you get it?”

  He paused. “I’ve had it. I just wanted to wait until we really needed it.”

  “You asshole.” She hurled the bottle at him, but he crossed his arms and it bounced off and down to the sand. “You had this all along and you didn’t say anything?”

  He clenched his teeth, but then relaxed, almost smiled. “If you knew I had it, you would have drunk the whole thing that first night. I was doing you a favor.”

  My sister could be terrible, but in this, I was on her side.

  “You don’t know what we would have done,” I said. “Who says you get to decide when we drink and when we don’t?”

  He stalked down
the beach and retrieved the bottle. “Considering the fact that I’m the one who had the water? I’m the one who says. I was waiting for the right time. And this is it—you, Jones, you seem to have reached your breaking point.” As he twisted the cap back on, he looked over at me. “Look, I don’t want to fight. I just want to get off this island.” He glanced at Henri, then back at me. “I think I know how.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I said.

  “Serious as a shark attack.”

  “Really,” Henri deadpanned. “A shark attack.”

  Alex ignored her. “Jones, if someone’s looking, let’s help them find us. We’ve gotta build a signal fire, something to draw attention. Lots of dry brush and a little green to make it smoke like hell.”

  I trusted Alex, mostly. Even if his thing with the backpack was weird. “Okay, fine. But you have to promise—you don’t make decisions without consulting us. We’re not stupid. We deserve a say.”

  He held out his hand. “Deal.” I took it, but he didn’t so much shake it as hold it, brushing his thumb quickly along my knuckles before letting go. He smiled. “And for the record, I never said you were stupid.”

  Henri turned away. “Unless you’ve found a working airplane, I’m skeptical of your rescue plan.”

  “You can be skeptical all you want, Hank. But if you want to go home, I’d suggest working less on your tan and more on finding dry brush.”

  I eyed the empty bottle sticking out of the cargo pocket on his shorts. “What about finding more water? We’ll never make it long enough for a plane to find us.”

  “We do this first. But then we don’t have a choice—we’re going back into that jungle.” He sighed and plastered on a smile, squinting at us. “What I mean is, I politely suggest we go back into that jungle, and I sincerely hope you both agree.”