Smoke billowed up from the jungle clearing in warm, gray gusts that filled me with more excitement than Christmas morning.
Henri warmed her hands and face, feeding little bits of dry wood and green leaves into the fire.
We built it only about eight feet from the shelter door, at the center of the clearing, where the branches above were spaced loosest for ventilation. Flames danced around the small pile of wood and dried the humidity from the air. I inhaled, pulling deep inside the scent of the musky smoke and fresh, wet earth. It had been so long since I’d breathed anything like it.
The island wasn’t cold—it was never cold—but something about those flames drew us in.
The heels of my hands were blistered and burning. The rock I’d been using as a hammer to beat a piece of scrap metal into a bowl had ripped my skin to shreds. My bowl was wide and shallow and wouldn’t catch much water, but we could boil small amounts at a time.
Henri pressed her hand over mine. “You should take a break, Em. That looks pretty good.”
We’d been listening for hours to the sound of Alex’s ragged breathing. I’d already speared us a fish, cooked it just beside the fire in a wet leaf. The bowl was something else to keep me busy. “Not yet.”
Henri followed my gaze back to the shelter for the hundredth time. “Hey, Em, if he’s not okay—”
“He’ll be okay.”
I knew she didn’t believe that. Henri hadn’t said much about the lighter, about what it meant—it wasn’t like her to give someone grace. Dying, I supposed, meant he got a reprieve.
“Well, if he’s not okay, then, well, you and I will be fine. We’ll have each other. I— Emma, everything back home . . .”
I looked at her. “What?” I thought she might say something important, something that would let the weight of my guilt float away.
“Never mind. I’m sure he’ll be fine.”
I didn’t know what shifted the balance between us, if it was Alex being sick or the two of us working on the shelter or her sensing something was happening between him and me, but I started to see a side to Henri I hadn’t seen since long before Puerto Rico. I wanted her back more than anything. But now that she was within reach, I couldn’t be happy.
All I could think about was Alex dying on this island.
Henri threaded another blue shell onto her string. Forty days. I was finally breaking through her icy exterior. It should have thrilled me. But I felt only tired, jittery.
She opened her hand and let a palmful of seashells spill onto the wet ground she’d cleared in front of her. She separated them by color, piles of light pink, seafoam green, beige, and baby blue.
“Why do you care about those so much?”
“They’re something to do, I guess. If exposure and hunger won’t kill you, the boredom will.” She set down the strand she’d been weaving. “I never thought too much about what I might want to do someday. I didn’t really think college was for me, but you were going and I would have gone with you. I always thought I’d be better off finding a way to backpack around Europe for a few years or something.”
“That wouldn’t have been too hard. I’m sure you could have found some stupid boy to pay your way.”
“Ouch.” Her eyes widened, and she laughed. “I like this bitchy side you’ve picked up.” She placed her seashells in neat rows for stringing, alternating the pinks and the beiges. “I thought it would be cool to make something. I would have been good at making things, like clothes or jewelry. If FIDM wasn’t so close to home, I might have liked it there.”
A couple Baird girls a few years older than Henri enrolled in the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. Now one of them—Faizah—designs costumes for the San Francisco theater scene. The other girl, Penelope, transferred to FIDM’s Los Angeles campus and dropped most of her name. Now Lo dresses Hollywood’s fashion do’s.
“You could go to the L.A. campus. When we get home.”
She dragged her fingertips through the shells, pushing the tiniest ones to the left and the larger ones to the right. “There’s no home anymore, Em.”
“Why do you keep saying that? Why don’t you want to get home? What back home could possibly be worse than this island?”
“Let me work on this.” She took the rock and metal from my hands without answering, then paused. “Em, do you hear that?”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Exactly.”
Silence. Alex’s painful breathing had been constant. I ran into the shelter, falling into a crouch at his side.
His chest moved up and down at an even rate as I pressed my hands to his face. His skin wasn’t burning. His fever had broken. He was just sleeping.
I dropped my head low, my hands still on his face, and looked up when I felt his hand curl around mine.
His eyes fluttered open, and as they did, I remembered the backpack.
I moved to the opposite end of the shelter. “How are you feeling?”
His neck cracked as he stretched his arms high over his head, winced, and let them fall to his sides. “Not too bad. Maybe the worst of it’s over.”
I handed him a bottle of water. “You want this?”
He drank a few inches and lifted himself onto his elbows.
“Some food? There’s fish.”
“Nah. I’m not hungry.” The skin around his eyes crinkled a little as he assessed me. I could practically see him measuring the distance I’d put between us. “Jones, did something happen?”
He smelled the air and concentrated on the space behind me, forgetting his question. Smoke trickled inside the open door flap and tickled my throat.
Alex slipped his arms into his shirt but didn’t button it. I followed him outside, where Henri sat beside the fire.
“You did it?” He grabbed on to his knees and laughed at the cooked bits of fish I saved for him. “And you cooked. We can cook. Holy shit. But how?” He turned to me, face open, incredulous.
Henri gave me a look and disappeared into the jungle. I knew how her mind worked—this was my fight for the fighting.
“We found a lighter.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me.” His eyes lit up, and he grinned, still clutching his knees. “Where in the world did you find a lighter?”
Casey’s backpack hung in the trees a few inches above me, where I’d put it back. If Alex didn’t know the lighter had been in there, if he’d never checked it properly, he’d risked our lives over a bag of money. If he did know, then my sister wasn’t the only one with a hidden agenda.
I yanked the backpack free and hurled it at him, a little too hard because he groaned as it slammed into his stomach.
“Where did I get it? At the bottom. Under all the cash.”
He looked at me. “You went through this?” I expected him to explode—I had violated him, his privacy, Casey’s privacy, the unspoken laws of our island—but he only put out a hand and lowered himself to the ground. “I swear I didn’t know about the lighter. I searched the backpack for anything that could help us, but the—but the money—you know about that—”
“I don’t care about the money, Alex. All I care about is that you were so worried about Henri and me getting our hands on it that you let a lighter sit in the bottom of that bag for weeks while we ate raw fish and drank who knows what kind of parasites that probably made you sick. Ironic, no?”
“That wasn’t why.”
“What?”
“That wasn’t why I did it!”
“Then why?”
His voice rasped in his throat and the whites of his eyes flushed red. “I . . .”
I felt my nose sting, my own eyes fill, and I dropped my voice low enough that my sister couldn’t hear me—she was undoubtedly listening. “So you know, I did want you to ask if you could kiss me again. But I’m glad you didn’t. I might have said
yes.”
That night, I used our metal bowl to catch a crab for dinner. My mouth watered the whole time it cooked. We boiled it in salt water, smashed its body with rocks, and sucked on the empty claws.
Our food situation improved in every way once we had fire. Henri and I heated rocks in the flames for a couple of hours and dug a hole in the sand. When the rocks were flaming red, we dropped them into the hole. We wrapped fish in leaves and placed the bundles onto the flaming hot rocks before covering the fish with sand. An hour later, we had moist packets of flaky fish.
Henri and I dragged three driftwood logs from the beach, one at a time, down the path our feet had beat into the jungle, all the way to the clearing. Warmth, food, and heat meant we could now focus on luxuries like seating.
After dinner, we watched the flames flicker for hours. It kept the bugs away, sort of, and other things too, I hoped. We didn’t know how precious something like fire could be until we didn’t have it.
Most importantly, we could boil our drinking water.
Maybe we’d never know what made Alex get so sick so fast, but more than I could feel the fear of illness, I could see it in Henri’s eyes. We knew now how to find food, boil water, and make shelter—survive without rescue—but the one thing sure to do us in was ourselves.
I found Alex, the next day, sitting at the top of the cliff holding something that looked like netting. He’d kept his distance from me since he’d gotten well. And even if he hadn’t, I’d have kept mine from him. Still, his absence was a dull ache.
Wind beat my jacket against my waist now and I zipped it up. “What’s that for, to catch fish?”
“Oh, it’s so much better than that. This is a hammock—or it’s going to be. It was all tangled up in the rocks under the high tide—I think it’s from our boat.”
In the trees behind us, he’d again hung Casey’s backpack by its straps. All that money and he couldn’t buy a thing on our island. He hadn’t even told me what it was for—what Casey had been planning to do with it.
“But I’ve got some bad news for you,” he said. “I—uh. Fuck. There’s no good way to say it. I tore a hole in the raft this morning. It was swarming with bugs and I tried to dump the water, and when I did, I dragged it over a rock. Ripped a hole clean through it. I really fucked up—I’m sorry.”
The raft water wasn’t even gross to us, not now when we could scoop it out and boil it. The raft itself was also there, a chance, a hope of getting off this island if we could figure out how to do it and survive.
“You’re sure it was an accident? Or were you looking for another way to sabotage us?”
He stilled, squinted at me, the wind beating his hair around his face. “Tell me you don’t really believe that.”
I didn’t know if I was serious or taking a cue from Henri. I sounded just like her. “What would you expect me to believe? You haven’t even mentioned that money, Alex! Or what it was for!”
“You want to know what the money’s for? You want to know? Who the hell deals in cash like that, Emma? You’re too smart not to know what it was. You looked through the backpack, you saw the Oxy.”
I stared at him. I’d wanted him to restore my faith. Maybe not knowing was better.
“It was too easy. Casey, he thought I was good with numbers. That’s why I was down here. It’s not like driving that rickshaw was paying the big bucks. Or moonlighting in surfboard restoration. So we’d take a bag of Oxy or coke or whatever here. Pick up some money there. Casey and I split a small cut each time. Over and over again. I thought I’d just run drugs for a few years, get enough to put it in something—college or an investment—and make it come out clean the other side. But the truth is that I’m the scum of the fucking earth, Jones.”
The hem of my dolphin T-shirt was coming loose and I tugged at the stray threads. “I thought you were just getting high. I looked in the front flap right after we got here and I saw the Oxy. I thought that’s why you kept disappearing with the backpack.”
He glanced up at me. “I wouldn’t have done that,” he said quietly. “After the accident—what I did—I wanted to be numb. But I wouldn’t have put myself in a state where I couldn’t think clearly. Not here. Not on this island.”
“No,” I said. “You just almost killed my sister and me, yourself, all because you were so worried we’d touch the stupid money.”
“I didn’t protect the money because I was worried you and your sister would get it.”
“Then why?”
Tears pooled in his eyes and he fisted handfuls of his hair. “If you saw it, Emma, you’d know what I’d done.” I didn’t think he was going to tell me until he gave me the weariest, most defeated look. “When the explosion happened, I went for the backpack first, before Casey, before you, before your sister. I didn’t even think about it until it was already done.”
All those times he pulled away, all the hours spent staring at the ocean . . .
Alex did blame himself for Casey’s death.
We weren’t so different, Alex and me.
“It’s a lot of money,” I said. I couldn’t see his face. He wouldn’t look at me. “Most people would have done the same thing.” I didn’t really believe it, but I wanted to. I didn’t want to believe I was the kind of person who could destroy Henri like I did, but I had to. “You could have done worse.”
The wind blew his hair across his face and he shook it back. “Maybe with the drugs and all. But not that day. When the explosion happened, I knew the boat was going down and I went for the backpack because I couldn’t let the money go with it.”
“Casey might have gone for the money if you hadn’t.”
“Casey, oh God.” Alex wrapped his arms around his knees and rocked forward.
I wanted to touch him, comfort him, but I slipped my hands into my pockets.
“I didn’t think about him or you or your sister, Emma. I knew that, no matter what, I had to get that money. It didn’t even occur to me he could’ve been hurt. At first, I told myself I went for the money because it’s what Casey would have wanted—but that wasn’t it.”
“What was it, then?” I asked after a long silence.
“Me, Jones. Me. I did it for me.”
I looked out over the choppy ocean waves. I couldn’t give Alex absolution. Not from this guilt. No one could. I knew this.
I continued to stare out at the end of the ocean, and I imagined something there that couldn’t be true.
It couldn’t be.
It had to be some kind of mirage or a dream.
I shut my eyes hard and opened them. My blurred vision cleared. It was still there.
A ship.
“Alex.” I walked over to him, still looking out at the horizon. “Alex, is that what I think it is?” I started pulling at him to stand before he could answer and waved my arms above my head. “It’s help!”
He stood and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, they can’t see you. They’re too far away. They’re right at the edge of the horizon.”
I kept waving frantically. “Maybe they’ll come closer.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Don’t get your hopes up. See how big that ship looks to us? We’re ants to them. Less than ants. They’re twenty miles away. More maybe. We’re invisible.”
They weren’t even looking for us. Maybe nobody was.
If anyone noticed Casey and Alex were gone, they would have assumed they’d sailed off to another island. Nobody knew Henri and I were ever aboard Casey’s boat—and if they didn’t make the connection, then there never was any search- and-rescue mission and there never would be.
Help wasn’t coming—maybe I’d always known, a quiet place inside me, growing louder and louder. Now it screamed.
“Then we don’t have a choice,” I said. “We have to make them see.”
CHAPTER 18
SIX WEEKS BEFORE
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Henri came into my room with a pair of too-high strappy heels dangling from her fingers. “It’s not too late to change your mind.”
With Mom’s business trip, we were on our own. We had three twenties for pizzas, a gas card, and a list of emergency numbers, but not the one thing Henri needed the most—an adult to tell her no.
I dragged the toes of my slippers through the carpet as I spun my desk chair around to face her. “Why don’t you stay home with me?”
There was nothing I wanted more than a lazy December night on the couch with Henri. She’d do away with all her sequined fabrics and trade them in for worn-in sweatshirts and flannels. I’d make peanut butter popcorn and we’d curl up under a blanket and watch movies about girls who ran up the stairs when they should have been running down them.
“But you said you have to write a paper.” She perched on the edge of my unmade bed and fed the tiny straps of her sandals through the buckles.
“Well, I wouldn’t, like, have to.”
“Then come with me! What better night than tonight? No curfew!”
I couldn’t go to any more parties with Henri.
I couldn’t stand in the corner with a red Solo cup full of warm keg beer while she smiled her glossy, lipsticked smile and pressed her fingertips to the overdeveloped biceps of boys who only wanted to carry her upstairs and violate her. I couldn’t watch Jesse try to play it cool with whoever was on the popularity B-list while his eyes scanned crowded rooms until he found Henri.
I could, but I wouldn’t.
“Hey”—she collected my hands in hers, frowning at the chips in my green nail polish—“I know what this is about. It’s because I’ve been ditching you. I don’t mean to, Emma, you know that. It’s just that when we get there, you always disappear into some corner. You could talk to anyone you wanted, but you always end up talking to Jesse.”
“I like Jesse.”
“I do too. But he’s . . . boring. He’s like”—she tapped her index finger to her yet-to-be painted lips—“worn-in jeans. Why would anyone wear worn-in jeans when they could wear gold lamé?”
A Map for Wrecked Girls Page 15
