A Map for Wrecked Girls

by Jessica Taylor

  Thunder crackled and the drizzle became a downpour.

  “We’re getting soaked,” Alex yelled over the roar. His fingers reached for mine and I took them.

  Hands slipping together and apart and together again, we leaped across rocks with water ricocheting off our legs. Our clothes sucked against our skin. Rain like this—drenching, blinding—was new. An adventure.

  Pelting water blurred my vision at the shore. “Back to the shelter?”

  “No, this way. We’ll wait it out.”

  Our feet sinking in wet sand, tripping and laughing a little, we ducked under a small ledge at the bottom of the cliff.

  Alex threw the backpack in first, diving in behind it. I leaned back against the rock wall that had been carved smooth by higher tides. Alex settled into the sand next to me. So still under there. Sheets of rain slid off the overhead ledge and pounded a few feet past our toes as our breathing evened out. Wet, ropy curls clung to my face and I scooped them back.

  “This hair—it’s wild. I love it,” he said, tugging gently on a strand. “Incidentally, I’m in need of a little style advice myself.” He gathered his wet hair at the nape of his neck. “This. It’s a pain since I lost my rubber band. My neck gets sweaty. So, my only options are I hack it off with my knife or . . . man bun.”

  “A man bun?” I smiled and squinted at him. “I was never into it back home—but then, I used to be into shaving my legs and using a blow dryer. Out here”—I nodded—“the man bun works.” I threaded my fingers through his loose hair. He looked at me as if weighing something, green eyes dark. There was some warring feeling in them—wariness, I realized, and maybe hope. I took his hand and kissed his palm. His lips parted. That faint line down the center of his full bottom lip, I gently pressed it with my fingertip. I leaned in and kissed the same spot. He pulled me against him and we stayed that way a long time. “Don’t cut it,” I said, “your hair,” and he leaned us back onto the sand and kissed me, a slow, deep kiss that tugged at my breath as he pulled away. The back of his fingers skimmed over my shirt, down my ribs. My stomach fluttered. He watched me carefully as he caught the hem, slid his warm hand against my skin. My T-shirt slipped higher, and he untied my bikini top. Raising my arms, I helped him lift both off.

  Alex’s breathing picked up. He looked at me. Put his hands around my rib cage. Pulled me closer. I leaned in. “Come here,” I said, pushing his wet shirt off his shoulders, his skin warm and smooth beneath, my hands wanting to explore. I kissed his shoulder, the shadowy bruises that still covered his ribs. His fingers worked through my hair, cupped the back of my head, then brushed my lips. They moved soft and sure against my body, dizzying and maddening and everything and . . . too much. I drew a shaky breath. He pulled a few inches away, smiled, eyes drowsy but intent.

  We sank down to the sand again as rain further darkened the beach beyond.

  Alex brushed his fingers against my collarbone. “You haven’t before, have you?”

  “No.” I held my breath.

  “I wasn’t asking you—”

  “I want to,” I said. Because I did. But wanting Alex and being ready were different. Part of me was still afraid. Boys had ruined Henri. “But there’s only one condom. One chance and—”

  “Emma,” he started. Then laughed. “Of course you saw the condom.” He shook his head and kissed me, his mouth smiling against mine. “This is really nice.” His hand moved to the nape of my neck, sliding down my skin, and stroking slow circles on my breasts. “Just like this.”

  I arched back, then pulled him closer, felt all of him against me. Not an inch of space between us, and no longer did I want to live for the days when Henri and I were little old ladies in our house by the sea. I wanted this—the here, the now.

  Alex ran his hand over my calf as we kissed. He broke away, and mouth skimming mine, he stroked the crease behind my knee. Eyes asking for each inch, his fingertips traced up the inside of my leg, higher, higher, higher. He touched me, and a breath shuddered from my throat. His hand stilled, and he looked at me. “Okay?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  His fingers trailed up, then down my navel, making my stomach flip. Watching me, he moved his hand lower, carefully beneath my swimsuit bottoms, slow and achingly deliberate. His lips glided across my breast, and my shoulders lifted off the sand.

  After, I opened my eyes and came back to the beach, the island, the earth.

  I wanted to do this for him too. I wanted to make him feel this good.

  There was a tremor.

  The ground shook beneath us. I sat up, holding my top against my bare chest with one hand, while with the other I tried to steady myself.

  A roar filled my ears, a crashing.

  Alex’s eyes darted to the ledge above. “An earthquake?”

  “I don’t think so.” I’d felt earthquakes back home in San Francisco. This felt like something else, something in the distance.

  “Henri.”

  Not bothering with my bikini top, I yanked my T-shirt over my head. Rain beating down, slicking my steps, I dashed through the jungle. Alex’s feet hammered behind me.

  A river of thick mud covered half of our clearing. The hillside had crumbled, melted into our space like dropped ice cream. Rain poured down, rinsing clean and exposing gray masses—small boulders—jutting from the mud. Two of our driftwood logs were gone, consumed by the rock and mudslide. Henri. The place where she’d stacked the bottles—it was buried.

  Henri. Henri.

  Rain blurred my vision and I blinked fast over the boulders, searching for an arm, a leg, a shock of blond hair.

  The shelter’s tarp door crinkled. One hand holding it up, Henri peeked out.

  With my hand against my heart, I stood there, the rain dripping down my hair, my face, my clothes.

  Alex overturned our metal bowl over the fire, careful to allow for airflow. It had been protected by the tree cover and hadn’t been completely killed by the downpour. A few of the coals still glowed red.

  He pushed at my lower back. “Go on. Get out of the rain. I’ll try to stoke the fire.”

  I scrambled through the door. The air inside was made more humid by our breath. Other than that, our shelter was mostly dry.

  “You were sitting right there when I left you,” I said. “I thought . . .”

  Henri’s hands were folded in her lap where she sat cross-legged on the shelter floor. I almost reached for them, but she draped her sweatshirt over her legs and buried her hands in it.

  “I got inside as soon as the rain started.” Her blank stare shifted into suspicion. “Where were you, anyway? You could have made it back twelve times since it started raining.”

  “We found a place to hide out.”

  Henri looked from my T-shirt, glued to my chest and hiding nothing, to my hand, where my bikini top dangled from my fingers. Her face hardened, and every bit of the contempt she’d had for me settled back into place. “Sure.”

  The tarp lifted and Alex crouched low in the doorway. I could see our wrecked clearing beyond, the bowl set loosely over low flames. Exhaustion weighed down his eyes in a way I hadn’t seen since before we’d found the waterfall. “It almost crushed the shelter,” he said. “We could have all been inside.”

  A cold breeze slapped the tarp aside and wafted through. My teeth chattered. I rubbed the skin around the curved red wound on my arm. It itched all the time now and the tightening of my goose-bump-covered skin only made it worse.

  Those first dry days before we’d even found water, I never would have thought the rain could be anything but refreshing. Now it was a freezing, soaking torrent that left my teeth chattering so hard, I couldn’t force myself still.

  Alex rubbed his hands fast up and down my arms, creating friction, heat. I shivered. He caught my hands and blew warmth into them.

  Henri did a double take. Lips parte
d, she stared him down—Alex, with my hands inside his. I pulled away from him before she said something spiteful.

  He made a face. I could tell he was tired of the secrecy, tired of her having too much power over me.

  Plinks of water struck the roof. We’d stretched the overhead tarps tight but they’d come loose in a couple of places, making pockets of water sink through the spaces in the palms. The rain wasn’t letting up, and after only a week of drizzle and one day of heavy downpours, the ground was already saturated enough for a rock slide.

  “It could happen again,” I said.

  Henri pulled her sweatshirt under her chin, squeezed her eyes shut.

  Alex massaged his temples. “What if we moved? Somewhere safer?”

  “Away from any hillside that might crumble? There’s nowhere like that. Not on this island.”

  “The rainy season is starting. These first rains are only a preview and . . .” Alex wouldn’t say more, wouldn’t fill in the blank. But I knew. If we didn’t find a way off this island, we were going to die.

  We spent the next morning cleaning up the clearing, just Alex and me. We carried what fallen rocks we could against our chests two-handed. My nails broke down to the quick as I combed through mud, looking for our water bottles and our pieces of ship debris. Three days later and we were nowhere near finding our supplies at the bottom.

  This island, with its green and waterfalls and salty-sweet stars, it almost tricked us into believing it wasn’t deadly. But no amount of water or food or fire could make it safe. Or maybe it was me and Alex. Our electric skin and hushed murmurs, our wet eyelashes and secret kisses—stunning, lulling, numbing us to the fact that, just by being stuck here, we were slowly dying.

  A storm was coming. We’d had more rain, the kind of rain that fell until our nails were pliable and the calluses on our feet soft and painful. This, though—the gray roaring sky and fast-moving clouds—this was something different.

  I was collecting dry firewood up near the tree line when my sister yelled, “If you’re not lying to me, then why won’t you show me?”

  The bundle of kindling dropped from my arms as I ran to the beach.

  I should have known this was coming. Henri was gasoline and Alex a flame.

  Alex and Henri had been trying to fish near the cliff before the sea got too choppy. She’d been digging for any sea life buried in the wet sand.

  Now they stood on the high rocks that jutted from the water under the cliff, where Alex and I would spear fish at low tide. His backpack was slung over one shoulder and he had a fistful of Henri’s top as he held her at arm’s length.

  She glanced my way fast before she made a grab for the straps of his backpack. He twisted his body and kept it out of her reach.

  “He’s lying to us, Em,” she said, clawing at his hands, trying to break his grip.

  “Stop it,” Alex said, still holding her off.

  “What’s going on?”

  “The backpack,” she said to me. “We already know it had a lighter. I’d like to see what else it has.”

  “Henri, I saw everything he had. It’s just money. Back off.”

  Alex let go of Henri and took a leap back, still holding tight to the backpack. Bloody scratches covered his forearms. “Listen to your sister,” he said. “You’re going to hurt yourself, Hank. These rocks are slick.”

  “Show me what’s inside and I’ll never mention it again.”

  She stretched for the dangling strap, and Alex lifted his hand to block her. When he did, his finger hooked her shell necklace. The thread broke and Henri caught the end, but not before most of the shells plinked against the rocks, scattering onto the sand, ricocheting and dropping into the waves.

  “See what you did,” Alex said. “Now cut it out before something worse happens.”

  Henri glared back. She ripped the remains of the necklace away and shoved it into her shorts pocket. “I’m not backing down.”

  “Maybe you should just show her,” I said.

  “Really?” The hurt on his face leveled me. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “It’s not that. You know I believe you. But if you just let her look, she’ll shut up about it.”

  “It’s the principle of the thing, Jones.”

  Alex’s upper body was turned toward me, and Henri took the opportunity, lunging for him. He spun just in time to dodge her, but when he did, his pocketknife fell out of his shorts and clattered open onto the rocks. They both reached to grab it, but the rocks were slippery and Alex’s steps were more careful than Henri’s—she beat him to it.

  “If you won’t show me”—she held the hilt of the knife in front of her, blade up—“then maybe I’ll just throw your knife into the ocean.”

  “That would be ridiculous as fuck. You need that knife just as much as I do.”

  She extended her arm, dangling it over the waves crashing below. “Maybe I don’t care.”

  Alex slid the backpack free from his shoulder. All he had to do was let her see inside, then this ridiculous thing would be over. I relaxed, ready for him to do the right thing.

  But a slow grin spread across his face, and Alex said the worst thing anyone could have possibly said to my sister: “You’re bluffing.”

  Henri’s grip on the knife loosened, and Alex went for her.

  Just as his arms came around her, she pulled the knife close. Their feet slipped out from under them, and their bodies slammed onto the slippery rocks.

  They fell together and Alex cried out. She reached past him and grabbed for the backpack. But Alex, he didn’t get up. He stayed on his stomach, gasping, his eyes streaming.

  The knife, I didn’t see it.

  Alex rolled onto his back and I scanned his torso for blood. Sun glinted off the knife, but it wasn’t jutting from his body, only lodged in a gap between the rocks.

  Pressing his weight onto his hands, he tried to push himself up. But he screamed and vomited on the rocks. He held up his right hand. Two fingers were purple and jutting out at sickening angles.

  Henri had unzipped the backpack, but she dropped it and walked closer to Alex with her hands covering her mouth. “I wouldn’t have let it go—the knife. I swear.”

  Holding Alex’s wrist in my hands, I looked up at my sister. “What is wrong with you?”

  The icy water covered my body like a million sharp pinpricks as I swam over to Alex.

  Since dinner, he’d been standing shoulders-deep near the cool waterfall and soaking his hand.

  My toes barely touched the rocky floor and my arms had to take big strokes to keep the motion of the waterfall from pushing me toward the embankment.

  “At least I’m a leftie.” He lifted his hand from beneath the surface and winced. The whole thing, not just his broken middle and ring fingers, had turned blue.

  “I could try to set it?”

  He grunted, noncommittal. “It’s not like I haven’t broken bones before.”

  I waded closer and rested my cheek against him, my arms circling his waist. “I don’t even know what to say. I’m so sorry. She went too far.”

  He set his chin against the top of my head and sighed. “It wasn’t so different from the last time—they’re both bullies. My dad and your sister.”

  I wondered if he’d noticed the parallel between his dad and Henri all along. Maybe that’s why he’d never had any patience for her.

  “He would have won if I’d stayed,” he said. “That’s why I left. Because I couldn’t let him win.”

  Winning was what all bullies wanted, including Henri, but the games she played only had losers. I didn’t know how to play a game nobody could win.

  “Alex, if you wanted to take the Oxy now, I wouldn’t judge you.”

  “I’d judge myself.”

  I lifted his wrist from the water, inspected the blue fing
ers. “You’re losing circulation. You need a doctor. You need to get home. We all need to get home.”

  All we were doing was waiting, to be rescued, to die. For something, for anything. I wished we just could float away.

  “Alex,” I said. “The bamboo you tied to the life raft—it floated well?”

  “Yeah, it’s hollow. Buoyant.”

  “Maybe we could start from scratch. Build our own raft. Out of bamboo. You’re good with your hands.”

  “Might have worked a few days ago, but come on.” He held up his bent fingers. “Look at my jacked-up hand and think about what you’re saying.”

  “We’d do it together.”

  He sank his hand back into the water, grimaced, and swam closer. “You’re not worried—after the first raft—to take something we made out on the ocean?”

  “Twenty miles. You told me yourself. We’d only have to make it twenty miles before we’re right in the path of the cargo ships. And we’d test it in the middle of the beach, away from the rocks.”

  “That could actually work.”

  Underwater, I touched his wrist, rubbing the tendons as if I could actually soothe the pain away. “But you’d have to talk to me, include me. Really. I’m not doing this if it means I’m going to wake up to find you killing yourself.”

  He looked into the water, my hand around his wrist. “I can do that, Emma. I want to.”

  “Good,” I said. “First break in the rain and you’re on.”

  Alex turned his eyes to the canopy of trees, and the dark clouds beyond them rolling across the existing gray. “The sky looks like hell. We better get back before a storm hits.”

  CHAPTER 24

  THREE WEEKS BEFORE

  Henri threw her body on the middle of my bed, scattering some of my rule-lined homework papers to the floor. She barely glanced at the trig textbook that had fallen open as she grinned to herself.

  She wore comfortable jeans and boots that were basically slippers. She’d traded in tops that looked like Christmas decorations for cozy cashmeres. Every time Jesse would catch her eye, her mouth would curve into a smile she’d immediately wipe away. Like that smile was something involuntary.