A Map for Wrecked Girls

by Jessica Taylor

  We went separate ways, canvassing the beach for the driest brush we could find. Tall grass sprouted up from the sand in dry yellow tufts. It sliced my hands as I pulled it up by the roots, but this small stuff would ignite the fastest. I collected piles and piles.

  If we made the signal fire big enough, someone might save us before we had to set foot in the jungle again.

  Henri was the first one back to the life raft. My arms held almost more than I could carry, and I let it all tumble to the sand beside a small bundle of branches Henri’d found.

  “This is all you got?”

  She crawled to the edge of the raft and rested her cheek against the plastic. “This is never going to work, Em.”

  Alex and I used a stone to dig a groove in a large piece of dry wood. With the board propped between our knees, we took turns spinning a stick against the wood to create friction.

  After hours of trying, my palms ached and were covered in swollen liquid-filled blisters that would be agony when they burst. Alex flexed his own hands and winced—his calluses hadn’t stopped him from hurting too.

  “Is driving a rickshaw that hard on your hands?”

  He rubbed the skin at the edges of his thumbnails and cracked his knuckles. “Oh, uh, I restore old surfboards.”

  “For fun?”

  “Well, sorta.” He picked up a stick and started drawing patterns in the sand. “After I moved down here, I couldn’t afford a board. An average one’s like five hundred. But this guy said he’d sell me a single-fin for fifty. I should have known it would be torn–up for that price. It was from the seventies, though, a classic.” I could picture him—Alex on the water, longish hair and vintage board, a silhouette against the sun and waves. “I sanded it, straightened the fin, filled gaps with resin, and re-glassed it. When I finished, I took it out on the beach and, like, five guys asked who refinished it for me.”

  “What was it like—out on the waves?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” He flushed through his tan. “I sold it.”

  “Oh.”

  “To a guy on the beach, that first day.” He laughed in a way that didn’t mask the sadness at all. “He didn’t even surf. He wanted to use it as a countertop for his bar. But it paid a few months’ rent. Now I buy damaged boards, work on them when I can. At night. Or when tourism’s slow.”

  “Do you do it for the money now or is it a hobby?”

  “Both,” he said. “I’m not as bad off as I was when I first got down here, so I can be pickier about who I sell to—girls and guys who are actually going to use them.” And quieter: “Love them.”

  I straightened up—I didn’t realize I’d leaned so close as he talked.

  He looked at me, then away fast, but he glanced back, and gave me a smile that changed his face—embarrassed, real. He seemed younger.

  From the raft under the trees, Henri’s raspy voice cut the silence. “I knew the fire wouldn’t work.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said. “It’s nice to know we can count on your optimism.”

  She lifted her hand. “Anytime.”

  Alex got to his feet, keeping his hands on his knees and breathing deep. His legs steadied and he exhaled, shook out his hair, his smile long gone. “I’m going to look for something better to use for shoes. We can try with the fire again later.”

  As he stormed off, I called, “If we’re all going back into the jungle, we have to do it before dark.” But he disappeared into the trees without answering.

  Henri fished her phone out of her bag. “It came on.”

  I crawled close. “Really?”

  “No bars, though.”

  Alex was right—no reception. If we had to save ourselves, Henri’s phone wouldn’t help.

  Henri clawed at her legs. “The bugs are eating me up. Just what I wanted for graduation—West Nile.” She gave me a sideways glance as she stood. “Hey, look what someone left behind.”

  Casey’s backpack. Alex had left it in the shade.

  “You still think we can trust him, Em? After the water?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he thought he was doing the right thing.”

  Henri crossed her arms, and wearing a smirk, took long steps in the direction of the backpack. “He carries it everywhere he goes. Won’t let anyone touch it. It’s shady.”

  “It was Casey’s. It’s got, like, sentimental value.”

  “He had water, Em—all this time. Water he didn’t tell us about. Maybe he’s got a whole supply of food and water in that backpack. Maybe he’s saving it for after we’re dead.”

  “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “If there’s nothing in it, why was he so worried we’d touched it?” She stepped across the sand, her fingers dancing toward the zipper. “Could a little peek really hurt anyone?”

  “Don’t.”

  “You’re awfully trusting. Survival of the fittest, Em. Survival of the fittest. What harm could it really do?”

  At first I’d thought Alex was lazy—comfortable to bum around Puerto Rico on a rickshaw, forget college, forget everything. I wasn’t sure anymore. He could have killed himself coming after me in that riptide. But also, if I wasn’t lying to myself, I did want to know what secrets he was keeping.

  “Fine.”

  Carefully I unzipped the outer pocket and Henri’s hand dove inside.

  She lifted out a condom. “Maybe we won’t be totally bored on this island after all. Oh, wait, only one.”

  I felt around inside the pocket and my fingers closed around something. I lifted out two clear ziplock bags, both containing a couple dozen tiny pink pills. “Casey must have some kind of a health condition or something.”

  “Are you serious?” Henri practically howled with laughter. “If there was something wrong with him, these pills would be in little orange bottles with childproof lids.” She opened the bag and spilled a few into her palm. “OC,” she said, pointing to the words stamped on the pills. “Em, this is Oxy. OxyContin.”

  “It’s a prescription drug, though.”

  “Yeah, a prescription drug people buy on the street and take at parties. Sounds like your friend has a problem.”

  “No,” I said. “This was Casey’s. Casey’s backpack. He must have had the problem.”

  “Then why does Alex keep disappearing?” Henri waited a beat. Made a duh face. “To get high—that’s why. It makes sense with all the mood swings. What an asshole too. He didn’t even offer to share.”

  All this time I thought his attachment to the backpack was sentimental. Was he only protecting his drugs? Stuck with Henri was its own kind of torture. If I was also stranded with someone more concerned with fading into oblivion than trying to get us home . . .

  I grabbed the bag roughly and shoved the pills back in, zipping the outside pocket. “I can’t believe you talked me into this.”

  “Oh, come on, Em. You didn’t even look in the big pocket.”

  “Henri, don’t touch that backpack again. I mean it.”

  I curled up in the life raft, hating myself for letting Henri get to me. She could plant a seed of doubt in my mind and water it until it sprouted and bloomed and made me grow into someone I didn’t want to be. Worst of all was when Henri was right.

  Alex bent low, re-tying fragments of his sweatshirt to his bare feet. “Didn’t find anything better, but I’m heading back in. Anyone with me?”

  The way I could feel my heartbeat in my eyelids at just the mention of the jungle was nothing less than terrifying. “I’m—I’m in.”

  “You and Alex go,” Henri said. “Someone needs to stay on the beach in case someone comes looking for us.” She unhooked the neck strap of her bikini top and retied it around her back, the way she would do at home when she didn’t want tan lines.

  This wasn’t the Henri from home, who had the kind of will that woul
d have pushed her across the island three times already, clawing through the jungle and begging—no, demanding—that we find a way home and find it now.

  Whatever had changed in her head since the accident, Casey’s death, I couldn’t imagine. Maybe I didn’t want to.

  Alex and I left without a word.

  We forced our way through the bamboo, hacking away the brush and swallowing the ground without talking. I’d taken Henri’s backpack in case we found anything to carry back, gripping the straps to steady my hands. To my right, the incline increased toward the cliff. “How high do you think that cliff is?”

  Alex glanced back, laboring to breathe. “Maybe two hundred and fifty feet. Give or take.”

  “If we climbed it,” I said, “we’d be able to see more of the island. We might find water. And we’d see if there’s any other land close.”

  He stopped walking, and faced the rising incline. “Jones, I am so clearly seeing the errors of my ways. I should have let you call the shots from day one.”

  We pressed up toward the cliff, sweat soaking my shirt as we wound upward through heavily perfumed flowers and trees with shiny leaves that smelled like citrus. Our island was a beautiful hell.

  Alex grinned, reaching out to a tree for balance. “And now we come to the hiking portion of our island tour.”

  I barely smiled. “I want a refund.”

  This Alex, he was different. But the backpack hadn’t been in his control for the last few hours. Maybe the drugs were a way to numb the pain of losing Casey. Of being lost here. I almost understood.

  We stopped a second to breathe, and Alex asked, “So, who’s looking for you, Jones?”

  I weighed the effort it would take to keep talking with the need to tell him. “Our mom. She has to be wrecked. And our dad. If there isn’t a golf tournament or a wine-tasting at home he and his girlfriend can’t miss.”

  “Sounds like a stand-up guy. And home is?”

  “San Francisco.”

  “Home to Alcatraz,” he said. It was an odd thing to say, and I held up my palms and shrugged. He stood straighter. “Oh, I, uh, read a book about those guys who escaped in the sixties.”

  “Alcatraz, huh? Interesting reading choice.”

  “I found it in the seat pocket on my flight to Puerto Rico. My earbuds broke. It was either that or the flight safety manual.”

  “Good call. Have you seen Alcatraz?”

  “Nope. I’ve never even been to California. Someday, though.”

  The trees rustled above, sending leaves raining as a rat scurried down a branch. I shuddered and started walking again, heaving Henri’s backpack higher.

  “What kind of things do you do in San Francisco?” he asked, falling in behind me.

  After he’d told me about the surfboards, I wanted to say something cool.

  Henri’s hobby for the last year had been boys. The smoother, the sexier, the more likely to ruin her, the better. Me, I guess all I’d ever had for a hobby was Henri.

  “High school,” I said. “And stuff.”

  “Stuff. Yeah, I enjoy stuff sometimes myself. When the mood strikes.”

  I smiled back at him briefly. Kept walking. “Who’s looking for you?”

  “No one.” He said it fast, like he’d been waiting for the question, and the lightness in his voice vanished. “It was just me and Casey. Well, maybe my uncle—Casey’s dad. But he lives in West Virginia. He probably has no idea.”

  Just the two of them. “How old are you?”

  “Almost eighteen.”

  Wind tangled our hair as we reached the top of the cliff. I put my back to the ocean and looked below. Our island was kidney-shaped, with our beach cradled inside the indentation. The whole mass of land couldn’t have taken up more than a few square miles. The sand, gravelly and gray when it was under my feet, outlined the island in a pale yellow against the cerulean ocean. Palms and trees with wild twisting trunks and green tops sprouted around the perimeter, growing into the boughs of larger trees across the island’s middle. I scanned the jungle, searching for any speckle, any glint of blue, but thickets of bamboo veiled everything beneath them.

  “Nothing,” said Alex. I turned to him. But he wasn’t searching the jungle. He was searching the ocean. The water spread out before us, around us, to the very edges of the world. No boats. No help. And no other land.

  “How far can we see from up here?” I asked. “Five miles? Ten?”

  “More like twenty, I’d guess. In the ocean, on a surfboard, they say you can see twelve. But we’re higher. On a calm, clear day, yeah, we can probably see twenty miles from up here.” Alex blinked fast and focused on me before he lowered himself to the dirt. “Sorry, Jones, I gotta rest again. My heartbeat is going wild.”

  “Mine too.” My fingers brushed my pulse point. “Dehydration?”

  “Think so.” He coughed into the neck of his T-shirt and fanned out the fabric. “I’m so damn thirsty I’m about to drink that ocean dry.”

  “Let’s take a break—for real.” I unlooped Henri’s backpack from my shoulders and dropped to the ground. “Talk about something—anything other than water.”

  “Okay. So, your sister’s a real charmer.”

  “She—she feels awful about Casey. She just wants to wait until she has the right words to tell you how sorry she is.”

  “As endearing as it is that you lie for her, you’re not very good at it.”

  I looked at him quickly. “Well. I’m sorry she’s being rude to you.” I swallowed. “It’s not about you. It’s me.”

  “What’d you do to her?”

  “It’s—” I couldn’t say it. “It’s a long story.”

  His hand grazed his cheek, absentmindedly scraping the dark stubble along his jaw. “We all sell our souls for something.” A vein in his neck bounced. “But yeah, I’d rather have less of her attitude. We wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for her.”

  “You don’t know where she’s coming from.” Or what I did.

  Even with the wedge between us, I’d defend Henri till the end. I could think what I wanted, but that’s because she was my sister. She was mine to love and to hate.

  She’d teased Casey about the boat version of the mile-high club as we sped farther from land, and Casey showed her tricks with his lighter, holding a slim Newport in his mouth, its smoke ripped away by the wind as Puerto Rico fell off the horizon.

  Every press of her body, lick of her lips—I knew she’d done those things to watch me squirm.

  “He wouldn’t have taken the boat out to impress her,” I said. “If it wasn’t for me—”

  “Stop. You’re definitely not to blame for Casey.”

  “No, I am. What she was doing to him, playing with him, she was doing it to mess with me and . . . What?”

  With his chin in his hand, Alex was looking at me with a weird level of interest. “Do you always blame yourself for your sister? Or is this a new thing? If the roles were reversed, do you think she’d be down on the beach, tearing herself up over something you did because she liked getting a rise out of you?”

  I didn’t have to answer.

  “Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” He scooted across the dry dirt of the cliff. In a second he was so close I could almost hear his rapid heartbeat. He touched two fingers under my chin and made our eyes connect. “We’ve got to think about surviving only. Nothing but surviving. We need water, food, and shelter if we’re going to make it. We don’t need to get along, but it’d be easier if we could.”

  I nodded.

  Alex reached behind me and squeezed my shoulder, his thumb working a soothing arc into the sore muscle. “If you could have one thing right now, Jones, what would it be?”

  Henri back. That was what I always wanted. “A satellite phone to call for help?”

  “Boring. This is a game,
Jones. Something from home that’s not on this island that would be perfect. What do you want?”

  My shorts were stiff from salt water and so uncomfortable with my bikini under them. “I, um, I have this pair of jeans I’ve had for years. They’re a little too short, so I roll them up. They’re softer than cashmere and the knees are so thin you can almost see through them.”

  “They sound very sexy.”

  “Trust me, they’re not—”

  A rumble took both of our gazes to the sky. A plane flew over the far side of the island.

  “Shit,” he said. “It’s headed toward the beach.”

  We jumped to our feet and ran downhill, through the brush and bamboo, not even worrying about snakes or caiman or anything else. As we reached the beach, waving our arms over our heads and jumping up and down, the plane was already far over the water.

  My sister stretched out under the shade of the tree line in her string bikini. Asleep. Her tank top and shorts were hung up in a tree.

  Alex grabbed on to his knees, panting and glaring at Henri. “Are you trying to die here or did you not see the plane?”

  Henri sat up, holding her loose top against her chest, and yawned. “Maybe you should take the next watch.”

  The tarp overhead shuddered in the breeze as I waited for Henri to fall asleep. Bug bites coated my body like an inflamed second skin. When we were kids—and even now—I couldn’t sleep until her breathing leveled off. Like Henri had to go first. Where Henri went, I followed.

  As I tried to sleep, I replayed the last four days. I’d lived with an angry Henri for months—she didn’t respond to questions, or responded sarcastically, delighted in embarrassing and one-upping me. This Henri on the island was the same, but also someone different. Someone with a secret.

  A sound startled me from the space between dreaming and awake.

  Soft whistles sifted through the palm trees, almost like the sound of the ocean inside a seashell. The winds picked up, so violently, I shivered and zipped my white jacket.

  The night sky darkened from muted gray to charcoal to black. Alex and I both got up and moved closer to the water. On the back of my hand, I felt it—a drop of rain.