A Map for Wrecked Girls

by Jessica Taylor

  My tongue went dry, and I put down the knife and walked to our raft. I dipped my hands under the surface of the water and drank. I scooped another handful, and as I lifted it to my mouth, I gagged.

  Dead mosquitoes floated in a thick layer on top of the water. Acidic chunks of my cacao pods rose from my stomach to my throat. I coughed into the crook of my elbow. Water rushed up my esophagus and into the sand.

  “If we keep drinking this”—I wiped my mouth with my sleeve, kicking fresh sand onto the mess—“we’re going to get sick.”

  We knew we were taking a risk, letting the raft stay full with still water, but we were too afraid to dump it out. Even though the rains were fairly steady for now, we couldn’t count on anything to stay constant.

  Alex rubbed my back and focused on me, chapped lips parted. The way he looked at me with such focused intensity—like not even a rescue ship careening into the shore could distract him. I wasn’t used to it. But I liked it. And that scared me.

  He cleared his throat and knotted his fingers together. “Somehow, we have to find a way to build a fire. We’ve gotta boil out the impurities.”

  The intermittent rain showers gave us water, but with drizzles keeping the brush damp and green, we’d given up hope of creating a fire.

  “We could fill those water bottles that keep washing up. Wedge them in the sand to catch rain. I mean, we’d still have to drink some raft water, but it wouldn’t be as bad as”—I lifted my chin to the raft—“that.”

  “Yeah, that would help,” Alex said. “And if it starts raining, we could dump the raft and let it refill. Really makes you wish you hadn’t taken plumbing for granted at home, huh?”

  Home, I missed it, and not just food and cold water from the tap. Things like a sweatshirt still warm from the dryer, the pulse of a familiar song coming on the radio at the right time, running through the BART station and darting through the doors a second before they shut.

  My visions of Alex at home were hazy.

  “Where was home?” I asked him. “In Puerto Rico, I mean.”

  He glanced to Henri. Turned his back to her. “Casey had this little one-bedroom. No air-conditioning,” he said quietly, “usually hot as hell. No cable. I had to go to an Internet café just to check e-mail. When he told me to come live with him, I didn’t expect much. But after, maybe, uh, a month or so, I felt really solid.” He furrowed his eyebrows and concentrated on something I didn’t understand. “It was soulful, being shut off in a new place. Kind of beautiful. Does that sound stupid?”

  “No,” I said simply.

  Henri got up from the shade and sank into the sand right in front of Alex. “Well, then, this should be paradise.”

  Alex cringed. There was no hiding anything on this island.

  “So, a plane flew over today,” she added.

  I perked up.

  Henri shook her head. “It wasn’t looking for us. It was a big commercial thing, and even if it had been, it was entirely too high to spot us. I thought about all the people up there, their bags in cargo and magazines in their laps. Where were they going? I was wondering about it. And then I realized, wherever it was, I didn’t want to go. I don’t want to go home.”

  “Henri,” I whispered.

  “I don’t want to go home and I don’t want to stay here. This island is purgatory.” She got to her feet, working her hands through her hair and letting the mess of it tumble down her back. She shot us a cold look and headed toward the far end of the beach.

  Alex sighed. “Where are you going, Hank?”

  She spun around and took a few wobbling steps, walking backward. “Away.”

  Once she was out of earshot, he said, “I swore I’d never lay a hand on anyone, not after years of my dad beating the shit out of me. A week ago, on the beach—I almost hit her.”

  “She can bring out the worst in people.” I hesitated, then brought my fingers to the bridge of my nose. “Did your dad . . .?”

  Alex mirrored me, touching the bump. “Yeah, a few times.” His cheeks flushed and he kept his hand held over it. “I never got it set right.”

  In the two weeks since I’d met him, he’d never seemed self-conscious about his looks before—and now I hated that I’d made him feel that way. I knew what it was like to be uncomfortable in my skin.

  “I like it,” I blurted.

  He looked at me doubtfully. “Jones, you don’t have to—”

  “No, I do. A lot. I don’t like how it happened. But it’s part of you.” I had to stop talking. “It gives you character.”

  “Thanks.” He dropped his hand away and smiled. “I guess we’ve all got things.”

  I nodded, and he inched close enough for me to feel the warmth radiating off his skin.

  He traced a fingertip along the place where my shorts met my thigh. I felt suddenly dizzy, hot, my breath quick and the beat of my heart too. “But if I’m being honest,” he said, “I don’t understand why you’re afraid to take off your shirt and shorts.” He moved higher, to the neckline of my shirt, where my swimsuit peeked out, and he hooked his finger under the blue neck strap. “I’d be lying if I told you a good part of my day wasn’t spent thinking about this bikini.”

  I exhaled a shaky breath as his fingers grazed the nape of my neck and settled there, a good weight.

  Our hair flew in my eyes as the breeze picked up. He leaned close.

  “Don’t,” I breathed. I grabbed his wrist and moved his hand from my neck.

  My sister materialized at the edge of the jungle, and Alex nodded. He thought she was the reason. He didn’t know that Henri ran from one boy to the next hoping they could save her. I wanted to save myself.

  Late in the morning, I pushed onto my elbows after an uneasy rest and dusted away the sand the breeze had flown against my arms and legs and face.

  The palm trees danced back and forth, like always. Everything on the island was constant. The sand, the sun, the ocean, our desperation.

  I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes as I tried to pinpoint the day. Thirteen. Or fourteen. I’d lost track of time—the one thing gone that I could have kept within my reach.

  Alex wasn’t around, but Henri’s arms were scissoring through the waves. Her bare shoulders twisting in the water reminded me of how she’d stripped off her top in front of Alex that afternoon. I could survive the island, but I didn’t know how to survive a naked Henri strutting around like a giraffe with breasts.

  She emerged from under the surface, letting the water lap against her neck, her shoulders, her clavicles, and finally, the mint-green of her bikini top. She wasn’t naked—she’d tied it into a strapless.

  Wherever her energy came from, I didn’t know. But I worried. The way she loathed me—and Alex too—maybe burning up calories and letting her body feast on itself was the quickest way for her to leave us behind. That or drown.

  Stop it.

  But I couldn’t avoid the thoughts any more than I could extinguish the sun.

  Henri plopped down beside me and a few drops of ocean landed on my arm.

  “Where’s Alex?” I asked.

  She pointed at the jungle. “He’s looking for something.”

  The jungle was silent behind me. I felt its eyes, yellow and slit-pupiled like a caiman’s. It was all I could do not to turn around.

  Henri stretched out her legs to examine them in the sunlight. “I’ve never been this dark. And you’ve never been even close.”

  The wind overhead swayed the trees and moved the shadow lines up our tanned legs.

  My sister and I spent most summers the color of caramel, but she was right, we’d never been this tanned. Our mother swore we’d be covered in melanoma by our thirtieth birthdays.

  I never believed her. In our big house by the ocean, our skin would match our crinkling wallpaper. We’d mourn our long-dead lovers and stay up all night p
laying Italian music and dancing through our empty halls. Even with gray hair and folds of skin draping her thin arms, Henri would still be beautiful.

  I scooted backward until every inch of my skin was in the shadows.

  She flinched. “I meant it’s pretty, Em.”

  “Oh.” It had been so long, I didn’t know how to take my sister being kind to me. I wished she’d be kinder to Alex.

  “Henri, when the boat went under, what were you doing? Why did you leave us behind like that? Did you see Casey? Did you see his head—”

  “Of course I saw,” she snapped. “But he was gone and Alex was falling apart and excuse me if instead of wasting my time on a lost cause, I decided to get my still-breathing sister into a life raft.” She blinked fast, surprised or regretful she’d said it—I couldn’t tell. Her stomach made a loud growl. “I’ll be back.”

  She adjusted her swimsuit bottoms as she moved around the rocky side of the beach, her hip bones protruding from her skin. If Henri really was trying to starve herself to death, she had to know I’d stop her. She had to know she would eat some of the fish, even if I had to pin her to the sand and shove it down her throat.

  With the wind at my face, I moved until I reached the place where she’d disappeared half a mile down the sand. The beach curved sharply there, and when I made it around the curve, Henri wasn’t there. She’d vanished.

  A tall boulder stood between the beach and the jungle, and I climbed it to get to a higher vantage point. As I reached, something sharp stuck my palm. I pulled myself up, cautiously, and into a grove of yellow flowers shaped almost like pineapples, with thick, rubbery petals narrowing into sharp-as-glass tips.

  Filtered by brush and flowers, in a small depression inside the jungle concealed by the boulder, I caught a glimpse of Henri’s bright swimsuit as she carried a large rock against her stomach and dropped it in the shade of a tree.

  She propped it between her knees, and picked up something else—a coconut. She brought it down over the rock, and it exploded into five pieces, sending coconut water splashing all over her chest and hair. She swore as she tried to catch the spill.

  I looked up at the cluster of coconut trees shading my sister. All around her were broken shells.

  Everything about my sister became too much and too little in that moment.

  I emerged from the trees. “Are you serious?” I almost screamed it, my chest tight, my face hot beyond sunburn.

  With a mouth full of coconut, Henri squeezed her eyes shut.

  “When did you find this?”

  She chewed and swallowed. “That day we separated. The second day.”

  “The second day. We’re out here eating rancid fruit and spearing fish to eat raw, and you have—you have this?”

  “Em, you just said it—you and Alex have fish and cacao things—and I tried, but I just couldn’t bring myself to eat them. You really don’t need coconuts too. Aren’t you happy I’m not starving?”

  “You can’t rationalize this, Henri. Not to me and not to yourself. If you don’t tell Alex, I will.”

  “Em?” Henri said as I walked away. “Em? Emma, stop.”

  I whipped around. “What?”

  “There’s blood on your shorts.”

  “Here.” Henri held out my damp shorts. “I scrubbed them with wet sand. The blood came out but so did the color.”

  I slipped the shorts—still soaking wet with ocean water—up my legs.

  On top of dehydration, the sleeplessness, the bug bites, the hunger, and the searing sun, I now had my period to deal with. I wondered what Henri had done about hers.

  “Why didn’t you tell me when you got your period?”

  She shrugged. “I did what girls do. I suffered through it and pretended the lining of my uterus wasn’t shedding and giving me agonizing cramps. Sometimes it sucks. Being a girl.”

  She didn’t mean it. Henri loved everything girlish, everything that made her a girl, every bit of power she could exert over the opposite sex.

  I didn’t hate being a girl, but I didn’t love it either.

  The sun dried my shorts to my body within the hour. I flexed my legs to break the stiffness of the fabric.

  Spots were lighter blue denim than the rest, but all I cared about were the eleven tampons left in Henri’s bag. And the humiliating realization we might run out long before we got off the island.

  Alex came back at sunset with his arms empty except for Casey’s backpack cradled to his chest.

  “We’re only making it harder on ourselves,” he said as I marched over to him. He slapped a sand flea on his neck. “We gotta start acting like we’re not getting off this thing any time soon.”

  “Where were you all day?”

  He cocked his head at me. “Just looking. Thinking.”

  “You can’t just disappear on us, Alex. Anything could happen to you alone. It’s reckless. Besides, we have to make decisions together—you agreed.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m trying. I’ll try harder. But this—I mean it. We’ve got enough for a shelter, if we’re creative. We can build it.”

  Alex focused on something behind me and his jaw went slack.

  Henri dropped three coconuts between us. “There’s more too.”

  My sister cracked open the first coconut on a sharp rock. She held it up fast, letting the water trickle into her mouth, then she broke it again to get at the smooth white interior. The second was my turn, and I busted it into jagged pieces. The third cracked almost perfectly down the middle once I had the motion and pressure down. I slurped the sweet water.

  We drank what we could and used sticks to dig out the white meat. It wasn’t sweet like the coconut candy our parents would buy in bulk for the holidays, but it was a welcome change from fish and cacao pods. Everything is a delicacy when you’re on the verge of starvation.

  Alex popped the last piece in his mouth and smiled at me. “What do you want, Jones?”

  Henri snapped her head toward him. She didn’t understand our game.

  I thought for a second and smiled. “My ceiling fan.” The sweltering, unmoving island air was strangling. “It ticks when you turn it on high, but I stop noticing after a few minutes. It’s right under a vent, so the air it turns out is almost icy.” I twirled my fingers through the sand.

  Alex smiled wistfully, the setting sun slanting through palm fronds and highlighting the few dark freckles across his cheeks. “A triple cheeseburger with bacon and avocado. And a side salad—for balance.”

  “Very healthy of you. I’d have probably gone for fries.”

  Henri smacked her bag down on the sand and took out her sewing kit. “You know what I want? Silence.”

  “These tasted like sunshine, Hank.” Alex tossed his coconut shell down the beach. “Plenty of energy for shelter building tomorrow. You did good.”

  “And what did you do,” she asked, “all day?”

  He ignored her and stared at the raft holding what was left of our water. We’d actually dumped it recently, sure showers would fall and refill it. But the rain stopped and we had to go without water for a panicked day and a half. “Hopefully it’ll rain hard enough too and we can dump this again and catch fresh.”

  I wiped my sticky mouth. “So, where should we build it?”

  “The jungle.”

  The jungle. I felt its eyes on my back. Its rustles, creaks, clicks amplified in the silence. I could hide my fear from Alex and Henri but not from myself. “I vote for the beach. Fewer bugs.”

  He stared into the bamboo. “We’ve been here for like two weeks . . .”

  Henri spun the blue shell necklace she’d wound around her wrist. “Fourteen days exactly.”

  “Jones, the beach is exposing us to the elements— mosquitoes, sand fleas, the pouring rain, the blistering sun—”

  “But how will help find us?�
�

  “Our SOS.” I knew he’d say it. But I was grasping for something—some logic or reason to stay on the beach.

  “We’ll be farther from the ocean. How will we cool off?”

  “We’ll walk.” Alex pressed his fingers over his eyes and sighed. “We’re desperate for a shelter. Look around. What on this beach are we gonna make it out of?” He swept his arm over our collection of scrap metal, fiberglass chunks of the boat, and driftwood—small pieces that wouldn’t provide any structure. When I didn’t answer, his voice softened. “We need a sturdy tree for a base.” He wrapped his fists around the trunk of a skinny palm tree and it wavered. “Not this.”

  I nodded toward the jungle. “There are way more bugs in there.”

  “Come on, Jones. There’s only one choice to make.”

  CHAPTER 12

  THREE MONTHS BEFORE

  After sixth period on Friday, I grabbed the last of my books from my locker and spun right into Sareena Takhar.

  “Emma.” She threaded a piece of hair behind her ear. “Do you happen to have the notes from civics yesterday?”

  I slid my binder from my book bag. “Yesterday?”

  “Ari made me late and with the test next Friday you would kind of be saving my life.”

  “Sure.” I popped them out of my binder and cringed at the handwriting. “Sorry if some of that is hard to make out. Mr. Kaysen wrote a bunch on the whiteboard, told us to write it down, but stood right in front of it. We were scrambling at the end.”

  “Typical Kaysen,” she said. “But these look great. Thank you. For real. Next time you need notes—”

  “No prob.” I glanced at the time on my phone. “Hey, I gotta meet Henri. See you later.” I took off down the hall toward the school entrance where we always met.

  Footsteps struck the tile floor beside me as I passed by a booth selling tickets to the winter banquet.

  “Wait up.” Henri matched her pace to mine in her chestnut-colored knee-high boots.

  “Why aren’t you coming from PE?”

  “I skipped PE to do an extra-credit thing.”