A Map for Wrecked Girls

by Jessica Taylor

  “Trying to get us home, that’s not reckless.” He pointed to the sea. “Relying on someone floating on a ship out there to find us by some miracle, that’s reckless.”

  “Maybe waiting on someone is,” I said. “But how we’re getting home isn’t just your call. We’re supposed to talk to each other.”

  He swept his hand toward the raft, flat, listless on the sand. “The raft was for all of us. You and me and even your sister.”

  “I don’t know anymore. Between the lighter and this and the backpack that’s still practically attached to you, depending on you is feeling more and more like a gamble.”

  He glanced to the backpack sitting on top of the rocks, then to the sky. “I get that the money makes it hard to trust me. Sometimes it makes me not trust myself.”

  It was so much more than trust, even. Surviving on this island was too big a burden for any one of us alone. We had to get us home. “You have to tell me what you’re doing, make me part of the plan—I need you to depend on me, not just the other way around.”

  He dragged his palms slow and rough down his face. “Maybe I’m not good at that, Jones. Maybe I’ve been on my own for so long that I don’t know how to depend on anyone but myself.” He focused on me, his voice building. “But being bad at depending on people isn’t the worst quality a person can have. The other direction isn’t all that appealing either. I’d think you would know that.”

  I blinked. “You’re talking about Henri?”

  “Hell yes, I’m talking about Henri. How’s depending on her working out for you?”

  Something inside me split open, and not because he was wrong. I knew when words were meant to hurt. I knew it from Henri. I expected more from Alex.

  He swore under his breath. “That was harsh.” Alex, with his battered ribs, red eyes, hands shaking, hauled back and kicked the raft. The plastic crunched and deflated. “The reason I didn’t tell you about the raft . . . I didn’t know if I could make it work. After all that rain, I knew we couldn’t survive here forever. You know it too. I saw it in the way you were with the signal fire. The fiberglass. The way you obsess over it.”

  “It was the best chance we had. I thought you agreed.”

  Sunlight shone on a shadowy bruise that ran from his temple to his cheekbone as he turned to me. “At first, yeah. But not when every flick of the lighter puts us a day closer to running out of fluid. Not after days of nobody coming close. Your hopes were so high over that stupid fire. I didn’t want to get you excited about this and then crash on the rocks. Like I just did.”

  “Alex.” My exhaustion and frustration leaked into my voice. “You’ve been disappearing for days, hiding out on the side of the beach where I wouldn’t see you. And you made a decision that should have been mine too. Are . . . are you even sorry?”

  He blinked at me, his wet hair clinging. He opened his mouth, and I thought he was finally going to say something. But he shook his head to himself and bent low to the raft.

  That was it. I was in rough enough waters with Henri to know that whatever I’d been doing with Alex had to stop—if I swam any deeper, I was sure to drown.

  CHAPTER 22

  FOUR WEEKS BEFORE

  Our house was bursting with bodies by seven o’clock that Friday night. Before our mother left for the weekend again, Henri made me ask if we could have a few friends over. If it came from Henri, Mom would know we were planning a rager. I was nervous about the whole thing, but Henri said we could sleep all day Saturday and clean up Sunday morning before Mom got home.

  Because I had done the asking, the party was a go.

  Henri perched on our countertop beside a few jugs of orange juice and a collection of bottles everyone had pooled together from their parents’ stashes. She passed out drinks while Jesse sat on the last step of the staircase, watching her. She wasn’t in her usual party attire—only a pair of jeans and an off-the-shoulder white sweater.

  I dropped beside Jesse.

  He took a long drink from his beer and grinned at me. “Hey.”

  I snatched the bottle and drank. “You know she’s just screwing around with you, right?”

  “What?” Jesse made a face. “Why would you say that?”

  “Well”—I peeled off part of the beer label—“because it’s true.”

  “No, it’s not.” He wrapped his hand around the bottle and moved it beyond my reach. “You don’t know what we have. I know it’s hard for you being the third wheel and all, but this isn’t some fling. I love her, Em.”

  Henri sipped from a Perrier and smiled across the room. I glared back and she cocked her head to the side, not understanding. Mick slipped a pair of keys into her palm and she was smiling again. That dark moment between us faded.

  She strolled our way and, hands on hips, stopped in front of us. “Mick’s wasted, so I’ve got to drive Ari home. She’s leaving early to tour UCLA with her fam.”

  Jesse jumped to his feet. “You should let me drive you.”

  She draped her arms over his shoulders and pecked him on the cheek. “Don’t be silly. You’ve been drinking and you need to stay here and keep your eye on Em.” She winked at me and spun. Over her shoulder, she called, “Be back in twenty.”

  She was going to break Jesse’s heart into a million tiny pieces if I didn’t do something and do it fast. Henri wouldn’t even really care—she’d have someone new before the week was over.

  I headed up the stairs.

  Henri kept a bottle of Smirnoff hidden inside a boot in her closet. It was there for sleepovers with Ari or the occasional emergency when Henri’s friends couldn’t find some over-twenty-one guy to do their buying.

  Henri’s bedroom door closed behind me and I crossed my legs on her closet floor. I took a few tiny sips. Liquid courage, Henri called it. I needed all the courage I could find, even if it was synthetic.

  I needed something else too. Henri’s closet held dozens of skirts—sequins, florals, gauzy chiffons, Lurex threading. None of it was me, so I settled on one swipe of her red lipstick.

  Knocking back the bottle one more time, I took a final gulp.

  A few steps down the hallway, I realized I’d overdone it on the vodka. Our family pictures blurred and the music pounded through my chest as I clutched the banister all the way down to the family room.

  Henri wouldn’t be back from dropping off Ari for at least fifteen more minutes.

  Jesse choked on his beer as I made the corner. “Nice lips. Henri’s signature color?”

  I stepped forward and lost my balance.

  His hands caught my arms and held me upright until I found my equilibrium again. “Shit. Are you loaded?”

  “A little.” I swallowed. “Can I talk to you alone?”

  Jesse turned on the back porch lights and shut the door behind us. He shivered in the January air and ran his hands over his arms. I wasn’t cold at all.

  “So what’s this about?”

  “You,” I whispered. I reached past his shoulder and flipped the light switch, shrouding us in darkness. I stepped forward an inch but stumbled into his chest.

  “What?”

  Even the liquor didn’t give me enough courage to do this easily. I’d always thought it was Henri’s impulsiveness—her spontaneity—that drew boys her way.

  I didn’t lean in so much as lunge. My lips were on him, but our mouths wouldn’t line up. My kiss size was so much bigger than his.

  He jerked away. “What are you doing?”

  I pushed against his chest again, but Jesse shoved me backward so hard, I tumbled into the wicker chair by the railing, scratching my thigh deep enough that blood beaded on my leg. Only I didn’t feel any pain.

  “You listen to me,” he said. “This never happened.”

  “Jesse—”

  “No, I don’t care. No matter what happens, you forget this night existed.�
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  Jesse crossed the porch, smoothing down his hair, wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve as if I was disgusting.

  He turned back. “What the fuck, Emma? This would kill Henri.”

  I leaned over the porch railing and vomited Smirnoff onto the grass.

  It was five days before my sixteenth birthday.

  CHAPTER 23

  Henri stacked beach-trash water bottles between two rocks to keep them from rolling away. “These have been boiled. And these haven’t. Two . . . four . . . six to go.”

  She poured one of the yet-to-be-boiled bottles into the metal pot and balanced it above the flames. Again and again, she would empty a bottle, let the water boil, cool, and funnel it back inside.

  Drizzles of warm rain had fallen for a week, dampening the dark ground and brightening the emerald leaves. Feathery orange flowers sprouted from glossy foliage, their scent catching on every breeze that drifted through our clearing.

  The rain didn’t keep us inside, just fell lightly against our faces like the last drops from a shower tap. We stacked dry firewood inside our shelter, made our clearing more comfortable, and organized water bottles and the splintered bits of the boat we didn’t know how to use yet.

  “You don’t have to boil all of them now.”

  “Might as well. While it’s not raining.” With a broken coconut in her lap, Henri balanced alone on the driftwood beside the popping fire. She scraped the last of the flesh from the shell and held out the other coconut half. “Hungry?”

  “Thank you.” I took it and sat on the driftwood while Henri slid down to the dirt and took a handful of shells from her pocket.

  The distance between Alex and me had left room for her to inch closer. Still, I knew my sister. I wasn’t sure if she was getting close just to bury her knife.

  As I chiseled at my coconut, Henri untied the ends of her necklace and threaded a single blue shell to mark the day.

  I covered my mouth as I chewed. “What month is it now?”

  “April.”

  “It’s April?” Time wasn’t moving at the right speed on our island, sometimes rocketing past, sometimes slow as a crack spreading across glass.

  “Late April now.” She glanced up at me through her lashes. “Mom’s birthday was last week. It was her fortieth. I keep thinking about what she did that day. She couldn’t have celebrated.”

  Our mom’s devastation had to be crushing. She wasn’t celebrating anything. She didn’t even have anyone to celebrate with. Parents sometimes banded together in a crisis, but I couldn’t make up some fantasy about my dad being any real comfort.

  What Alex said—the pretending—I didn’t feel like doing it anymore.

  “Really, what’s there to celebrate?” I said. “We’re gone and so is Dad. And even with us missing, he’s way too selfish to be there for her.”

  Henri’s lips parted.

  My honesty wasn’t meant to hurt my sister. I almost backtracked, made up something kinder, but she reached up and hugged me.

  She squeezed me, tight, then tighter, and with our faces buried in each other’s hair, I felt us rewinding back, before the music store in the Haight, rooftop parties, broken bottles, and racing engines.

  Maybe all Henri had needed from me was something real. But we’d left too much unsaid for this reprieve to last.

  Alex—before he almost broke himself on the rocks—I thought he was like water. Healthy and good for me.

  Henri’s love was a drug. The highs glorious and the lows devastating.

  I pulled away and carried a stack of wood into our shelter.

  “Where’s Mr. Missing in Action?” she asked as I came out.

  “Fishing.” We had to take advantage of the lulls in the rain, when the ocean went clear and the fish bright, and Alex had said he was heading down to the beach.

  Henri smirked by the fire as she worked her hair into a loose bun. “Kind of hard to fish without a spear.”

  I froze. Our fishing spears were leaning against the shelter.

  I found Alex with his sleeves rolled to his elbows, shirt unbuttoned and gusting in the wind. He balanced at the farthest-out point on the rocks where we fished. The backpack hung by its top handle from his hand, the straps dragging in the surf, rolling in and out on the sea foam.

  I jogged toward the cliffs, down the beach, slowing as my feet found the algae-slick cluster of rocks under the waterline.

  “Alex,” I called as I jumped rocks out to the end of the peninsula. “What are you doing?”

  He squinted at me against the sun. “Putting the money back where it belongs.”

  The saltwater breeze scattered some bills across the water, and I caught his hand. I’d hated that bag of money, what it represented, but now that he was throwing it into the surf, I was suddenly uncertain. All I could think about was his future drifting out to sea.

  “This money’s too important to me—I want it gone. I want to be able to trust myself.” He lifted the bag toward the water. “I want you to be able to trust me too.”

  “Wait—don’t do this to prove something to me.”

  “It’s not just for you.” He shut his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “I want to stop feeling so damn guilty for what I did that day—I want that so much more than this money.”

  “What about your fishing boat?” He could do a lot with it. College, a new car, investments, a life that wasn’t running drugs. “Getting rid of the money—it won’t get rid of your guilt. Alex, this money could buy you a life.”

  He looked at the bag in his arms, his hair blowing around his head. “I don’t— How could I even enjoy it? Knowing I sacrificed my cousin for it.”

  “Alex, you didn’t.”

  “No, I did. There was barely any blood in the water—I get that. It doesn’t mean it’s not my fault. It’s not just because of the backpack. Do you see? He couldn’t have kept things up without me. I knew it wasn’t the right thing. I’d seen what drugs did to people. My dad. My friends. And still I was like, Sure, yeah, let’s do it. Do you see, Jones? I could have saved him from himself.”

  “If Casey were here, you think this is what he’d think? What he’d want?”

  The bag was high in his arms, ready to drop into the ocean below. He lowered it, stared at the bundles of bills. Sighed. His whole body went limp. He zipped it closed.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you something,” he said as he faced me. The bruises on his face were starting to fade. “What I said about you depending on your sister, after I crashed the raft . . . that was a real dick thing to say.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “It’s really not.”

  He opened his arms and even though I was still mad, even though I didn’t know if he was good for me, he needed this. I wrapped my arms around his waist. He winced as I squeezed into his sore ribs, but when I tried to loosen, he pulled me tighter to him. The cool cotton of his shirt warmed against my skin.

  His chin rested on the top of my head, his hands sturdy against my back. “What I told you about Casey, the kid with the bike . . . We were holy terrors just like that kid. The whole neighborhood loathed us, and for good reason. My dad’s sister raised Casey. She wasn’t really any better than my dad—except she didn’t hit as hard. But Casey was . . . I don’t know . . . easier.”

  I pulled back a little. “What made you different?”

  “I don’t know. What made you and your sister different?”

  “We weren’t—” I tried to think back. “We weren’t always so different. I guess I want to blame my dad, and I guess I should, for what he did, how he left. But it was also the way she reacted. That’s when I first noticed a change, a difference. She . . .” Hate for our dad, and now me, pumped through Henri so fast, so fully, I wondered if her heart could keep beating without it. “She despised him. And I saw what that did to her.
I see it in her every day. It’s like she needs it to keep going.”

  Alex blinked like I’d thrown a glass of ice water in his face.

  I realized what I’d said and started talking fast. “But, you—your dad—you have every right to hate him. He—”

  “No,” he said. “That’s the difference. Casey and me. He didn’t hate anyone, not even that kid. With my dad . . . I guess I should work on letting it go.” He smiled a little. “Here I thought maybe Casey was so chill because of all the weed he smoked.” He looked up, at me. I wasn’t smiling back. “Hey, Emma, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It was just a bad joke.”

  “No, I mean—I’m sorry about the raft. Hiding things from you, not trusting you to know. Scaring you. Everything.”

  I took each side of his open shirt in my hands, waited for him to look at me, and said, “I’m too good at giving out passes.”

  We stood still, under a cover of dark clouds pushing down, until he smiled. “Your next life, Jones, you deserve a beautiful one after this. Being stuck here with me and your sister and all our shit.”

  “I’m not as saintly as you think. Just ask Henri.”

  He trailed the back of his hand down my arm. “I’ve told you everything. You know that, right? About the accident, my dad, what I was really doing in Puerto Rico—”

  “Alex, I trust you. I know you were trying to do right with the raft—”

  “That’s not what I mean. What I’m saying is that it feels . . . it feels really . . . free. Telling you, I mean. Jones, what happened between you and your sister—”

  Most of my anger had faded, but his apology didn’t take me back to how I felt at the waterfall. The slender thread of trust that had tied me to him was still loose. I couldn’t feel good about telling him everything.

  “Alex.”

  He nodded. Wearing a small smile, he shrugged, almost sadly.

  A drop of tepid rain struck my arm, then another and another.

  “Again, really?” I looked up at the sky. Alex laughed—it sounded forced, but I liked the effort—and opened his mouth to the rain.