“What color was it?”
“An alluring chartreuse.”
“Green?”
He smiled. “An alluring chartreuse.”
“But you couldn’t even drive it here.”
“It’s a Jeep, Jones. Built for rough terrain. I could drive it down the beach, over sand dunes . . . If I still had it. I sold it to get to Puerto Rico.”
I leaned back, and opened my eyes wide to the shock of the night sky over the beach. Not salt. Stars like clouds of sugar were frozen across the black atmosphere. They were like nothing I’d ever seen before, even though they were the same stars over San Francisco, shrouded by fog, and the same that had glowed dimly above Puerto Rico.
I lowered my chin slowly until I’d followed them to the end of the horizon. San Francisco was oceans away but Puerto Rico was out there somewhere to the northeast. “How far do you think it is to Puerto Rico?”
“I don’t know how much we drifted. A hundred and fifty miles, maybe?”
“A hundred and fifty. So, I guess swimming it is out of the question.”
“Only slightly.”
“Hey, you read that book.” I lifted up, inched closer. “Those prisoners who died swimming out of Alcatraz, how far was that, like two miles?”
“One and a half. Give or take. And don’t be such a dream-crusher, Jones.” He grinned through his fake outrage. “Some people think they made it. That they’re alive and well, eating oysters and playing checkers on some beach in Brazil.”
“Is that the camp you’re in?”
“Well, obviously . . . I like being right.”
In the moonlight, Alex’s cargo shorts looked different. They were striped—a dark color like navy and a lighter gray. This had to be the extra set of clothes in his backpack. I focused harder. Alex wore nothing but his boxers.
He smiled before I looked away. “My shorts are stiff from all the dried salt water. I can’t really sleep in them. Not that I could sleep anyway. I could, uh—put ’em back on if my immodesty is bothering you.”
“No, no. Leave them off.”
Alex’s teeth flashed in the moonlight and he laughed, face tilted to the sky for a second.
“I mean”—heat burned all the way from my forehead to my kneecaps—“you can, if you—”
“Jones. It’s okay. I’m only teasing you.” He draped his shirt over his lap. “So, um, is your sister holding up okay?”
“Henri’s a survivor. She won’t let this or anything get her down for too long.”
“What about you? Aren’t you a survivor?”
I’d never really thought about it. “I want to be.”
He nudged me with his elbow. “You’ve got a lot on your sister.”
“Hm.”
“For starters, you’re a good person.”
“She is too.” His words were a knife in my chest.
“No, she isn’t. It takes one to know one.”
The ache of his voice stopped me from asking more questions.
We sat shoulder to shoulder in the blackness. Before sunset, Alex had dipped in the ocean to keep cool, and I could smell the briny salt on his skin. His shirt—a different shirt, Casey’s, Alex said when he caught me looking at it yesterday—still carried the powdery scent of detergent, of home.
We were far enough from the waterline that the sound of the waves lapping against the shore was faint, and the quiet filled with our own breaths. We didn’t say we were scared—we didn’t have to say anything at all.
Maybe something happens to people who are lost, when death isn’t some faraway possibility. You reach an understanding about when things need to be voiced and when they don’t. Alex and I had reached ours.
As the sky lightened, I yawned into my hand.
“Some sleep would do us both a world of good, Jones.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
He hugged his arm around my stomach and lay down behind me. Into my neck, he said, “Maybe we should try it like this for a while. You know, in the name of surviving and all?”
I didn’t argue. It felt safe and good lying beside him. I needed someone and Henri wasn’t going to be that person. She wasn’t offering anything I could take—at least not at a price. And I didn’t feel small for wanting some comfort. Alex needed it too.
I let my eyes close. I could shut them for a moment and listen to Alex’s breathing.
Sunlight shone over Alex’s shoulder, leaving me in the shade of his sleeping body. His limbs were tangled with mine, but I slipped under his arm and got to my feet.
Up the beach, Henri sat with her arms wrapped around her knees. Her eyes were on me, watching me. Watching us.
Alex and I stood on the highest rocks out in the ocean, on the western end of the beach, with our legs wide and our spears perpendicular to the water. We were starved for anything that wasn’t cacao pods, but after hours of standing on the rocks under the afternoon sun, my shoulders itched with sunburn. Henri’s sunscreen had gone empty after the first two days, and now there was no choice except to let our skin sizzle. We’d tried all morning to fish with Henri’s sewing kit, but the thread wasn’t holding and the fish weren’t biting the safety pins we used as hooks.
I shielded my eyes and looked for Henri on the beach. She said she’d work on building a fire so we could cook anything we caught, but she must have been under the trees. So far, we hadn’t caught a thing.
Algae covered the rocks beneath my feet and it took all my concentration not to slip. I flexed my legs, and hard muscles balled up on the backs of my calves. My arms and legs had grown stronger from pushing through sand. The island made me strong. That was the one thing the island gave me that I loved.
Every time a large fish swam by, Alex would thrust his spear into the water, right over the tops of the fish, and scare all the little minnows into the coral and shadows.
He missed again and groaned before setting his spear aside and taking a break.
My muscles quivered, and I slid down to the rock beside him and dangled my feet in the water. Brightly colored creatures swarmed around our toes.
His thumb traced a healing cut on the bridge of my right foot. “What’d you do here?”
“Sharp coral.”
His fingers went higher, to the muscle at the back of my calf—my leg that hadn’t been shaved in a week.
“What?”
As much as I thought my unshaven legs didn’t bother me, Alex’s hands on them were unbearable. “My legs aren’t exactly soft to the touch.”
“Au natural.” He smiled and ran his fingers over his bristly jaw, which was growing in more reddish brown than the rest of his dark hair. “I could be into it.”
I pulled out of his reach. “Alex, what do we do if another week goes by? And then another?”
“Jones—I don’t know. I mean, if it becomes months—two or three months”—he lifted his shirt and wiped the sweat from his forehead—“we’ll die for sure, right? The weather will change. Puerto Rico. Hurricane season. We’ll be swept out to sea and we’ll die.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“We get off the island.”
That seemed perfect and impossible and everything I dreamed about every night.
A big fish wove around the rock beneath Alex’s feet, and he stabbed at it.
“The water bends the light. You’re never going to catch anything that way.”
“Well, Jones, no offense, but I don’t see you doing anything with yours.” He gestured at my spear. “At least I’m giving it a go.”
He scratched the scruff on his cheeks, and I remembered how his stubble had felt against the back of my neck in the early morning hours, his soft breaths blowing beneath my ear while he slept. I wondered so much about Alex, his dreams of finishing rich, how he got to Puerto Rico.
“Alex, you�
��” I stopped. He would have mentioned it if he wanted me to know. “Never mind.”
“What? Just ask.”
“How did you end up down here? In Puerto Rico, I mean.”
He rolled his shirtsleeves up to his elbows and splashed a handful of salt water onto his face. “I wanted to go to college. I guess I was saving up.”
“You wanted to go to college?”
He brought his hand to his chest and grinned. “You wound me.”
“It’s just that you have that whole surfer vibe going. Not like in a stupid way—I mean, you’re smart. But you know, you drove a rickshaw—not exactly college essay material. What’s the deal—what were you doing down here? With Casey.”
Maybe it was mentioning Casey, but Alex put his back to me. I thought he was going to shut down, and I wished I hadn’t asked.
But he inhaled, breathed out, and said, “So, Casey came down to the islands to escape life for a while, have an adventure. When Casey said I should come meet him, I thought it sounded like a cool way to make some quick cash and get away from my hometown.” He spoke carefully, like he was saying everything in his head first. “Because my dad, he’d been pounding on me for years, every day since my mom left. Drugs kinda took over his life, and he wasn’t a fun addict.” He pushed his hair back with one hand, glanced at me. “I’d moved out, was living with friends. Wanted to pay for college myself, without asking for anyone’s help. What Casey was offering sounded like a fresh start.”
The bump on Alex’s nose—maybe his dad had done it. I hoped I was wrong, that it was from a surfboard or a jealous ex-girlfriend.
He got to his feet and poised his spear above the water. “What’s your deal with your dad? You said he left.”
“I—I shouldn’t have even complained about mine. It’s not like he hit me.”
“There isn’t some, like, limit line. I don’t hold the monopoly on shitty dads.”
“There weren’t any words either, not that Henri and I were supposed to hear—not, like, verbal abuse. Last July, he just told my mom he’d met someone special. But he said it as if she wasn’t special, as if Henri and I weren’t special. He wasn’t being an asshole—I think he thought it would soften the blow.” I looked up at Alex, his steady gaze, his parted lips. I wasn’t convincing him my dad wasn’t terrible. I wasn’t even convincing myself. “Maybe he is an asshole.”
“Last July,” he said. “Emma, that’s fresh. I mean, I get that you want to accept it, get past it, but it’s not like an overnight thing. Why are you forcing it?”
I hadn’t thought about the why before right then. All I could see was my mom, zombie-like as she moved through that summer. Henri, changing in dangerous ways.
“Well, for my mom. She begged him to stay, to try couples counseling, to take a vacation. But he was just done. And Henri went off the rails. It was easier on both of them if I pretended to be—if I was—I don’t know . . . the well-adjusted sister or something.”
“I think you had that right the first time.” He gave me a sad smile. “The pretending part.”
“No,” I said. But I remembered nodding along when Henri told me he was dead to us, pushing down the feeling that knifed through me. I’d gotten so good at pretending, I’d almost convinced myself. “Maybe.”
A large gray fish rounded Alex’s rock and both of us froze as it undulated in my direction. All the little minnows parted as the bigger fish came through.
I didn’t breathe as my spear broke the water.
The fish twisted and squirmed on the end of my point.
“Shit!” said Alex. “Shit shit shit! You did it!”
He threw down his spear and grabbed me around the waist. As he spun me around, I tipped my head to the sky. Clouds spiraled above me and the green smell of the mossy rocks wafted up from where Alex was turning, not so carefully, on the slippery rocks. For the first time since landing on the island, I felt this familiar rush. A lightness . . . happy.
He slung me over his shoulder and ran—with me holding my fish on my spear—all the way back to the beach. He plunked me down on the sand, and when he did, he fell over me. The warmth of his sun-soaked skin pressed through my T-shirt and I almost wished I’d dared to wear only my swimsuit, just so I could feel more of him. We toppled over, both trying to keep the fish from touching sand, with our cold feet pressing against each other’s calves, laughing and gasping for air.
Henri glared up from her spot on the beach.
I stood and dusted the sand and the feel of Alex from my skin.
Deadpan, she said, “Good job.”
Alex bent beside the raft and refilled a water bottle that had washed up after the crash with rainwater. It wasn’t totally sanitary to use it to hoard our water. But what other choice did we have?
All around Henri were dozens of tiny seashells. I’d seen them scattered along the shoreline, seashells and sand dollars I’d never seen the point in collecting. She’d strung the tiny shells one by one onto her roll of thread and had already made enough to loop around her wrist five times.
“What are you making?”
She didn’t glance up from her shells. “Jewelry.” A partially filled strand of only blue shells hung from her wrist. She pushed it higher onto her forearm. “Five shells. Five days we’ve been on the island.”
Five days. Knowing it had been that long somehow made it worse; if nobody had found us yet, maybe they weren’t looking.
I scanned the shoreline for any signs she’d tried to build a fire. “So the fire didn’t go well?”
“Nope. I tried.”
It wasn’t even about the fire. It was about the game. It was about control.
Alex muttered, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“She said she tried,” I said.
He rushed past me and grabbed Henri by the upper arms. “Let me see your hands, then.”
She kept them balled in tight fists, pulling them inside the pockets of her sweatshirt. Alex jerked at her arms until her hands came free.
“Stop!” I pulled at him. “Don’t hurt her! You’re going to hurt her.”
He looked my way as he pinned her to the ground. He wasn’t Alex anymore, just rage and desperation. “Why do you care, Jones? Tell me, seriously, why do you care?”
Because anything Henri dished out, I had decided to take.
It was true—I wouldn’t fight with her like she wanted. I had to be the bigger person because for one night I decided to be the smallest, most hideous person alive.
Alex didn’t understand. And I couldn’t tell him. Or anyone. Not even Henri herself.
“What difference would it have made?” She struggled to break his grip. “You and Emma tried and all you have to show for it are blisters. How would it have helped if I ruined my hands too?”
He held her wrist and pried open her right hand. The skin was baby smooth; her palms weren’t even red.
“Well.” She smiled up at him, relaxing into his arms. “It’s good to see you’ve got a little savage inside you. I do too.”
He met her eyes and his face drained of color. In my bones, I felt his shame—I knew what it felt like to let myself become something horrible.
He released her and she backed up in the sand, rubbing a faint red mark on her arm.
Alex tore at his hair. “You know what? Fuck it. We’ll eat it raw.”
We filleted the fish into bite-size portions on a piece of sheet metal we cleaned in the ocean, and divided our meals among three large waxy leaves.
We sat in a circle cupping our leaves in our hands as the fish jiggled. The pieces were white like albacore, not the deep red of raw tuna or even the pink of raw salmon. Alex stared at his like it might spontaneously cook itself if he concentrated on it hard enough.
“Fine. I’ll go first.” I popped a chunk into my mouth, chewed twice—not enough to ge
t any flavor—and swallowed. Eating that fast, I only caught the taste after it was on the way to my stomach. It didn’t taste good but it tasted like survival. “It’s not even fishy. I guess because it’s fresh.”
Alex took some between his fingers, dropped it on his tongue, and swallowed. “Doesn’t get much fresher.”
Henri looked at hers like it was a guy who had driven her to the party and had now served his purpose—she was ready to discard it.
Alex rubbed his forehead and focused on my sister. “Look, it’s simple, Hank—if you don’t eat, you’ll die. Make your choice. I don’t care what you do.”
She picked up a twig and nudged at the fish. “I think I’d choose death over eating this.”
“Come on,” I said. “You eat sushi all the time. And you got on board with the cacao pods—you can do this.”
She moved her fish around inside her leaf. “That’s different. You didn’t happen to find any wasabi and soy sauce while you two were trudging through the jungle, did you? And the cacao pods are gross.”
Alex and I emptied our own leaves, shoveling every bit of fish onto our tongues. Still starving, we watched Henri play with hers, turning the leaf in her palms.
“Here, Em.” She handed me hers and walked a few yards down the beach.
Henri definitely knew she needed to eat, that her body was now cannibalizing itself.
She’d read magazine articles to me back home, as she debated if we were eating enough Omega-3s to keep our skin clear and glowing, about the dangers of crash diets. Before she’d declared we had to eat more salmon, she’d read aloud how fasting and anorexia could make blood pressure drop super low, dangerously low, send vital organs into failure.
She knew all the dangers. Ignored them.
I remembered her telling me she wished she was dead, that she should have been more specific and wished to die fast. Maybe starving herself was a way to end her suffering sooner.
Could she really be doing that?
Had she really slid from betrayed and sad to suicidal?
A Map for Wrecked Girls Page 9
