A Map for Wrecked Girls

by Jessica Taylor

  I watched Henri move down the shoreline, the fish momentarily forgotten. But my sister turned around.

  She put a hand on her hip, right above the line of the bikini bottoms she’d tied low. “Emma, I’m going to rinse out my clothes. Let me wash yours too.”

  My stomach tightened. “Henri—”

  “It’s a good time. They’ll be dry before night if I put them out now.” She stretched out her hand and wiggled her fingers. “Give me your shirt and shorts.”

  My hands went still at the hem of my shirt. I wished I could go back to that day we boarded Casey’s boat, when Henri told me to borrow her cobalt bikini. If only I’d said no, I’d be stranded in a comfortable one-piece.

  My body had always just been there. I wasn’t embarrassed by the way it looked, not until Henri. There was an expectation then, for my body to be this sexy thing I enjoyed, the way she enjoyed hers. And an object of desire. Something I didn’t feel at all.

  Henri didn’t know all that, only that it was an issue for me. This was my sister hurting me in the best way she knew how.

  I tugged my dolphin T-shirt over my head—quickly checked that my boobs were still inside the cups—and not daring to breathe, I stared Henri down.

  Alex averted his eyes. I loved him for looking away.

  Henri held my gaze for a long moment before her lips turned into a little smirk. “You know—I think I’ve found a solution to our whole lack of clothing.” Still smiling, she reached behind her back. “We’ve been looking at this whole stranded thing the wrong way. In fact, I’m falling in love with this island. We’re free here. There aren’t any rules.”

  With the tug of a string, the weight of her breasts dropped from her top. Alex sucked in a breath, but he did a double take at me, and stalked off into the jungle.

  Henri threw the top onto the rocks and strutted toward the ocean wearing only her bottoms.

  CHAPTER 10

  FOUR MONTHS BEFORE

  I was blowing away a chunk of hair that kept falling in my eyes, leaning up against the B Wing stairs where I always met Henri for lunch, when she bounded down the steps.

  “Go on without me,” she blurted. “I have something I have to do.”

  “What?”

  She glanced back up the stairs leading to the music room. “I’m hanging out with Ari and Mick. I’ll see you after school.”

  Henri hummed a Red Hearts song all the way to the top of the landing.

  The halls cleared as everyone found their friends and headed off campus, but I stood in place, weighted down to the tile floor, as I thought about the music room at the top of the stairs where Henri had musical theory with Mr. Flynn.

  I wished I could go back in time and find a solid indisputable reason to keep my sister on the sidewalk and out of that record store.

  I almost didn’t hear Jesse say, “Hey.”

  He scanned my uniform, from the white button-down I’d ordered a size too big to my navy swing skirt.

  The tangerine polish Henri had applied for me had chipped off my right big toe and I moved my left sandal in front of it. “Hey.”

  He buried his hands deep in his navy trouser pockets and dropped his backpack beside me. “Are you waiting for Henri?”

  I followed his gaze to the empty stairs he’d seen Henri run down every day for weeks.

  “No, she’s having lunch with Ari and some guys. A lot of guys. I don’t know what they’re doing—it was probably code for something.”

  “Like what?”

  It wasn’t true. And if he knew her at all, he’d know that if it was code for something, she would have told me. But I wanted Jesse to think Henri had this huge life that didn’t involve him. “You know how she is.”

  His shoulders slumped, and he turned to the school entrance behind us. He unhooked a Giants baseball hat from the carabiner on his bag. Jesse’s dad always brought home sports swag from the station, and Jesse was never without a hat unless he had to be—he wore one every day at lunch, and always got in trouble for forgetting to take it off when classes started back. He pulled it low over his eyes and smiled. “So, you want to have lunch with me? Beach Chalet?”

  North Beach was fifteen minutes away, maybe twenty during lunch hour. “We won’t have time to make it back.”

  “Well, if you don’t wanna . . .”

  With the wind tangling my hair, the rickety cable car bounced beneath my feet just like that day with Henri. This time the sides of my hip kept bumping into Jesse’s. Little touches that should have been electric. I wanted to press closer, but I didn’t want to cross a line that couldn’t be recrossed.

  He came back as something more. I saw what I’d known was always there, hiding under that too-wide smile and floppy hair that turned up around the edges of his dress-code-defying baseball cap.

  We picked up speed on a downhill slope, and the ocean air slapped us in the face all the way to the Beach Chalet restaurant.

  Frescoes decorated the archways inside. I stopped to stare at the paintings of people swimming beachside in old-fashioned, high-waisted swimsuits. I hadn’t been to the Beach Chalet since my dad took us out for brunch on Henri’s birthday the year before.

  The glass front of the restaurant gave a view of the ocean that mesmerized me. Fog didn’t block the ocean for a change, only clear sunshine all the way from the building to the faraway horizon.

  Henri and I would live in a house with a view like that.

  We ordered some Chalet Beignets and coffees and headed onto the beach. The fall air was chilly, but the sun glinting off the sand made us brave the cold.

  Jesse paused at the end of the sidewalk to tug off his tennis shoes. He hooked his thumbs into the laces and his bare feet stepped onto the beach. I yanked off my sandals and followed his path through the sand.

  It wasn’t unusual for Jesse and me to do something alone. He was a senior like Henri, but even though they were the same age, she’d always been more worldly. When we were kids, Henri wouldn’t have a thing to do with him—which wasn’t so different from now—and I always ended up being Jesse’s playmate when Henri wasn’t around—which also wasn’t so different from now.

  If the three of us ever did anything together, Jesse only got invited because I’d done the inviting. That didn’t mean he wasn’t madly in love with Henri, even back then.

  He tore the lid off his macchiato and sipped. “That’s a rough break about your dad.”

  “Yeah. Henri’s having a really hard time with it, I think.”

  Jesse bit into a beignet and scattered powdered sugar down the front of his shirt. He could never eat anything without wearing it. “What about you?”

  “It’s a good thing in a way. He was making my mom miserable, even though she would have done anything at all to make it work. It was the way it all happened—that woman. I guess there’s no good way, huh? No Hey you, we’ve spent like twenty years together but I’m gonna move out and love somebody else now.”

  With his mouth full of beignet, he said, “Parents are the absolute worst.”

  I paused. “That sucks about your mom too.”

  “She’s happy now. I guess that’s what counts. I was going off to college next year anyway. And it was weird being with my mom—Colin, her boyfriend, had one of those no-shoes-in-the-house rules. Does he not realize how much bacteria is on bare feet? What a douche.” Jesse sighed and leaned back, resting his forearms against the sand. “So, is Henri dating anyone right now?”

  “Did you seriously drag me out here to ask about Henri’s love life?”

  “It’s only a question.” Laughing, he socked me in the arm so hard, I was sure I’d bruise. “Is she?”

  “Henri is definitely dating someone. In fact, she’s dating everyone. Why, are you still into her? I thought that was some weird, hormonal puberty thing.”

  He peeled the sleeve off his ma
cchiato. “Nah. I’m not into her anymore. I was just asking.” He nudged my ankle with his big toe. “I miss our games, though.”

  The summer before Henri and Jesse started high school, she used to make the three of us play her favorite game: choose a way to die and explain why. Jesse always said there was only one way to die, a gun to the head, quick and over. Henri said that was stupid—she heard about this kid who shot himself in the head and the bullet lodged in his skull or something. He ended up living, sucking the rest of his meals through a straw.

  I could never commit to an answer. Henri always said she didn’t care how she died—she just didn’t want to do it alone.

  Jesse and I raced through the empty halls of Baird. We were beyond late.

  My feet got ahead of me, and I stumbled. As I lurched forward, Jesse caught my hand and we kept running, his fingers twisting with mine. I wished he’d never let go, that I could keep him forever and ever.

  But his hand slipped free.

  “My class is in here.” Before the D Wing door shut behind him, he grabbed the doorframe. “Hey, Em, sorry I made you late.”

  My PE class had started ten minutes before and I was a good three-minute walk to the locker rooms outside the MPR and still wearing my uniform. My gym shoes—they were still inside my locker.

  My sandals slapped down the hall as I broke into a sprint toward my locker in B Wing.

  The combination failed three times before the locker squeaked open.

  Above me, at the top of the music room stairs, the water fountain turned on. There was Mr. Flynn bent at the waist and drinking from the fountain. I bent low and watched him from between the air vents of my open locker.

  The click-clack of heels echoed between the floor tiles and the fluorescent overhead lights. Vice Principal Deveroux, Ari’s mom, came right at me. I was busted.

  “Hall pass, Ms. Jones.”

  I grabbed my shoes and slammed the locker shut. “I don’t have one. I’m sorry.”

  Henri was always telling me not to say I was sorry. She said it was a sign of weakness and I didn’t need to go around apologizing for myself. Our sociology teacher talked about it too, how girls said they were sorry so many more times a day than boys.

  My sister would have held her head high and said the perfect thing to get her out of detention. Henri would have never been sorry.

  Vice Principal Deveroux folded her arms and tapped her sling-back heel on the tile floor. “You realize that means after-school detention.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Again. “I—”

  “Hey, what’s taking you so long?” came from the top of the stairs.

  She glanced up the stairs. “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, I wasn’t talking to you.” Mr. Flynn jumped the last three stairs and landed beside me. “Are you ready?”

  He was talking to me. “Oh, um, yeah.”

  “Sorry,” he said to Vice Principal Deveroux. “I was in need of some help with the seating arrangement in my room. I’m writing her a note for—” Behind her back, I held up my tennis shoes. “For PE.”

  “Mr. Flynn, you have a stack of hall passes. Use them.”

  The sound of her heels became a soft tap, and I said, “Thanks.”

  “No problem. Gavin Flynn,” he said, as if I didn’t already know his name. As if all the girls at Baird didn’t already know. “You’ll have to call me Mr. Flynn, though. I tried to do the whole call-me-Gavin thing, but administration put the kibosh on that.”

  “Emma.”

  He held out his hand and I had to switch my gym shoes to my other to shake his. I expected a standard hand pump, but it evolved into some weird, complicated handshake I completely screwed up except for the fist-bump at the end.

  “Well, come on.” He pointed himself to the stairs and waved me up. “You’ll have to wait out fifth period with me.”

  Those stairs. The place where Henri had run down for a moment an hour and a half before only to run up again as if something dangerously exciting waited at the top. My sandal touched down on the first step as though it might not be solid.

  I wasn’t afraid of Mr. Flynn. I didn’t think he was some perv or anything like that. But something about crossing into this very adult world Henri had created made my steps uncertain.

  Henri had a way of bending people, slowly, carefully, and by the time they were breaking, they were so enamored by her charms, they didn’t even care. If she’d wanted Mr. Flynn, I had no doubt she could have him.

  Mr. Flynn opened the door to the music room and held his arm out in a ta-da kind of way, like he was pulling back the wizard’s curtain in Emerald City.

  I followed him into Oz.

  “It’s my prep period.” He flipped on the lights. “So it’s just us.”

  Rows of chairs all faced a whiteboard he’d filled with names like Carlos Santana and The White Stripes and Ty Segall. He grabbed two chairs from the bottom row and sat in one backward, straddling the seat and crossing his arms over the back. It was the kind of gesture I’d seen in movies—the “cool” teacher trying to act young and fit in with the students. But Mr. Flynn wasn’t trying to be anything. He was cool. He was young.

  “So, what’s the story?” His hands clasped together seemed so much larger than Jesse’s or any other boy’s at Baird, reminding me he was still too old for Henri. I only wished he knew.

  “The story?”

  “Why you’re late.” His mouth twitched with a smile and he rolled his eyes. “Oh, there better be a good story. If not, you better make one up because I think I deserve a good story.”

  Taking the chair across from him, I crossed my legs at the ankles. “Oh, um, just a long lunch. We went to North Beach.”

  “Cool. Where’d you eat?”

  “The Beach Chalet.”

  “Nice,” he said, dragging out the i and snapping his fingers. “Okay. The next time you go to the Beach Chalet, I expect a bag of their Chalet Beignets. Okay? Then we’ll be even.”

  He launched into a story about North Beach, about him when he was a Baird student. His friends built a bonfire one night—which you totally weren’t supposed to do—but I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about Henri and which chair was hers. She took a seat in the first row for his class, I knew it. I knew everything.

  It was watching a car crash, a fraction of a second before it happened, when the cars were moving too fast for anyone to stop them.

  The moment I’d heard her humming that Red Hearts song, I knew.

  “So is it true?” I said. He squinted, not understanding me. “That you played once for the Red Hearts?”

  “Oh, that. Yeah. Once upon a time.”

  The bell rang and I dragged my chair into place, but I turned back. “So, I don’t get it. Why’d you help me?”

  “Ugh, I don’t know. I went to school here. I know how it is. And you didn’t hear this from me, but maybe Deveroux isn’t my favorite person. Maybe.”

  I looped my backpack onto my shoulders. “Well, thanks. I better get to western civ.”

  “Your sister is Henri Jones, right?”

  “Yeah, Henri’s my sister. How did you know?”

  “Deveroux. She called you Ms. Jones.”

  “Oh, oh yeah, she did.”

  “And you look like her. It was a lucky guess.”

  “Who? Henri?” That was something only my mom’s friends would say and only to be polite.

  “She’s in my musical theory class. Smart girl.”

  He had no idea.

  CHAPTER 11

  There comes a point when you’re so lost, you realize you might not get found. Nobody said it out loud, but after twelve shipwrecked days, even Henri combed the shores every morning for anything we might use to build a real shelter.

  Most mornings brought at least a piece or two of beach trash—water bottles and can
s, mostly. They reminded me there was still a world out there, a civilized one. What Henri and I had done to each other wasn’t all that civilized—maybe this island was where we truly belonged.

  Ribbons of wood fell to the sand as I used Alex’s knife to whittle the point of a branch into a spear. Henri watched from the shade, resting a hand against the sharp clavicle now jutting from beneath her skin. Alex stacked my spear with the rest.

  The protein from the fish had revived our broken bodies, Alex’s and mine. I felt it coursing through my bloodstream. Already our muscles were stronger, our minds sharp enough that we knew one thing for certain—we had to catch more fish.

  “You need to eat a little, when we get more,” I said to my sister. “I swear it’s not bad.”

  The cacao pods were all she’d try, and even then it would take hours for her to force herself to consume one, picking the beans from the white pulp, and carrying them with her on long walks down the shore.

  In a bikini that bagged around her hips, she would move across the sand with a quiet but unwavering determination that some would have mistaken for acceptance. I knew better. Even though she was managing to keep everything together now, the hinges were sure to come loose, and when they did, I only hoped it was me and not Alex swept into her destruction.

  She shook out her saltwater-textured hair. “Thanks. But I’m good with not contracting a tapeworm today.”

  Alex looked out over the ocean, like he did far too often. I thought I knew what he wished for. A ship to carry us back to civilization or somewhere exotic and far away. Or he fantasized about the rolling waves sending Casey tumbling back to us, breathing and alive. Maybe more pills to swallow down and drag him into oblivion.

  I wanted something else from the island, and as the days stretched on, and we lost track of time and our common sense, I hoped someone—or anyone or anything that might be able to help—would give it back to me.

  I wanted Henri. I wanted her like she was before, smiling and happy and loving me again the way I still loved her.

  Nothing would give her back.