A Map for Wrecked Girls

by Jessica Taylor

  “Alex.”

  “Fine. I’ll sleep here.” He curved himself to the shape of me and laid his bandaged hand at my waist. “If you want to talk, Jones . . .”

  What I’d done to Henri, it wasn’t enough to deserve these games, not after everything. Still, my guilt was constant. I thought about what Alex said after he’d told me everything. How it made him feel free.

  Months ago I’d locked myself in a cage that I thought could only be opened with Henri’s forgiveness. But she wasn’t forgiving me. Maybe not ever.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What?”

  My chest felt like it expanded to the point of almost exploding, and I rolled over to face him. “Henri was dating a boy we both knew—our next-door neighbor. His name was Jesse. One night at a party, I threw myself at him and—”

  “Really?” He smiled down at me.

  I gave him a look.

  “I’m sorry. Proceed.”

  Everything that happened back home came rushing out. Jesse and Henri. Henri and Mr. Flynn. Henri’s therapy our parents forced her to attend. When I finished, I expected Alex to look at me differently.

  He sighed. “Jones, I’m sorry. That wasn’t exactly what I expected. I’m not going to tell you it’s not bad. But is this forgiveness she may or may not give you . . . is it worth letting yourself get trampled?”

  Trampled. The word stung. “I know it’s different, but what if you could . . . what if you thought you could get Casey back?”

  “It’s very different. If Casey came back, he wouldn’t be trying to break my girl’s hand. What you did was kind of terrible. But it’s not unforgivable. The fact that she can’t forgive you—that’s got nothing to do with you. That’s all on her.” He stayed quiet for a long time, sighed. “It’s almost too hard to imagine. Casey’s gone, and I don’t have hope. What happened to him, it’s now beyond my control.”

  Hours later, I listened to the breeze swishing through the palms. Alex was asleep, the bridge of his nose tucked under my chin, his breathing steady.

  Henri was beyond my control. Whatever my sister was going to do—forgive me, hate me, make herself sick, hurt me, hurt Alex—there was nothing I could do to change her. I did have hope. It was a luxury. It was more than Alex had. But my hope was worthless if I let it trample me.

  CHAPTER 26

  THREE WEEKS BEFORE

  Mom hung up the phone and disappeared into her closet while I paced around her room. She came back buttoning her trench coat over her nightgown. “Stay in your room while I’m gone. If Henri notices I’m not here, tell her I forgot I left a file at the office.”

  “Will you tell me where you’re really going?”

  She sat on the bench at the end of her bed, slipping a pair of boots over thick socks with slip protectors on the bottom. “Your dad wants to meet right now.”

  Dad hadn’t even met us at the ER last year when my mom was having horrible stomach pains and might have needed surgery. Henri and I sat in the hospital lobby holding hands as I wondered what we would do if something terrible happened to Mom while it was just the two of us alone at San Francisco General. I called him again and he said if anything happened to call him first thing in the morning.

  Maybe Dad wanting to see Mom right then should have told me about the gravity of this secret.

  Mom stood and she crushed me against her. “You must be so scared. You’re afraid she’s going to know you were the one who told, huh?”

  That made my tears turn into sobs. Henri and I could never recover from this.

  Mom, blurry through my tears, said, “How could I have found out? Tell me, Emma. How?”

  Henri had been careful, and she said nobody but me knew about Mr. Flynn. But those pictures—she wouldn’t have deleted them. “Her phone. She texted him some pictures.”

  My knees dug into my chin as I pressed my back against the wall Henri and I shared, listening to Henri screaming and crying, the thud of a shoe as she hurled it against her door, our dad ripping drawers from her dresser.

  “We’re not angry with you, Henri,” Mom said. “You are the victim, sweetheart.”

  “Mom,” Henri said. “You don’t even get it. I was the one who went after him.”

  Dad spoke up next. “You don’t need to lie for that pervert.”

  He didn’t really know my sister.

  The sound of my parents rifling through her things masked what Henri said next. I pressed my ear against the wall until it ached. All I caught was my dad saying, “Did he make you get these?” And I knew. Henri’s birth control pills—they’d found them.

  Her words were hurried. “I didn’t get those because of him—”

  My dad’s voice roared through the walls. “Then who the fuck did you get them for?”

  “Steven!” yelled my mom. “I took her to get them.” The house went silent for a few seconds. Next came a muffled, “What?”

  I didn’t know—I thought Henri had got them at Planned Parenthood, just like everyone else we knew.

  My dad left Henri’s room, shouting threats behind him: Your phone isn’t your property anymore. Harsher things: You lock this door, you lose the privilege of having a door.

  I waited until Henri’s sobs faded into soft hiccups before I tiptoed down the dark stairs. The only light in the house came from the kitchen.

  “She’s seventeen. What did you expect? In my opinion, those pills were the most responsible thing she was doing.”

  “You don’t think maybe you were encouraging her?”

  From the family room, I peeked around the corner. I held my breath, waiting for Mom to back down.

  The women in our family had a way of ignoring right and wrong when the opposite sex got involved. I had never been like them, not until that night.

  “As a matter of fact, I don’t, Steven. Girls have desires too—she would have done what she wanted with or without. And don’t be such a sexist jackass. I know for a fact you would have bought condoms for a son.”

  Never had I been so proud of my mom.

  I heard my dad grunt and mumble something.

  “We’ll keep the girls home from school tomorrow,” Mom said, her voice tired. “When they go back, they can pretend they were sick.”

  “I’ll take off work and we’ll go down to Baird first thing,” my dad said.

  “It could be worse,” she said as she carried two cups of coffee to the center island, where my dad sat with his glasses in one hand, squeezing the bridge of his nose. “We could have found drugs.”

  My dad stared at the mug she set down in front of him—a white mug with a green airplane. It had been his favorite when he’d lived here. “I think I would have rather found a dime bag of Mary Jane.”

  Mom didn’t laugh. “That shirt, it’s just awful,” she muttered.

  He laughed. “This is my best one.”

  “Your girlfriend may be cute, but you really shouldn’t let her do your shopping.”

  His voice quiet, he said, “I like them. I pick them out myself.”

  The house seemed to go silent.

  It was a punch in the stomach, knowing he’d chosen them—and her. I’d blamed her for so much.

  Mom took the barstool beside him and held her head in her hands. “Oh, Steven, how did we let this happen?”

  “We can’t focus on that. We need to find a way to help her now.”

  “Janine is taking her son, Bryce, to a great therapist. I’ll call her for the name tomorrow and try to make Henri an appointment.” Mom exhaled. “The question becomes what we do about the teacher.”

  “Ten to twenty doesn’t sound too bad.” My dad chuckled, a dark laugh with no humor.

  “No. She said she was the one who pursued him.”

  “She’s lying for the perverted bastard.”

  “I wish I could believe that,�
� Mom breathed.

  Here I’d thought I was the only one who really knew Henri—maybe our mom did too. If we were honest, maybe we both knew the truth about the games Henri played.

  “Besides”—my dad snatched his glasses off the island—“he’s her teacher. It was his responsibility to say no.” Responsibility. He acted like he knew something about that. “He shouldn’t get away with it, Dani. Screwing around with—”

  Mom covered his hand with hers.

  “She’s just a girl.” Dad’s voice was raw.

  “Legally, yes.” Mom sighed. “We have to think about Henri here. We need to ask the school to handle things quietly and make this Mr. Flynn situation go away. Once he’s gone, Henri can move on.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Rain had come down that morning, and no matter how many dry logs Alex added to the flames and how much I stoked the coals, the fire beside our shelter sizzled and died.

  On our knees on the hard-packed earth, shoulder to shoulder, we stacked kindling over dry bark.

  Alex held his shirt tight and shivered. “What would you think about relighting the signal fire, Jones? Just once more. Giving them one more chance to find us.”

  I didn’t know where this was coming from. I brushed my fingers against the inside of his wrist, waited for him to set down the branch, look up from the ground. He didn’t.

  “I thought you were worried about lighter fluid,” I said.

  “I shouldn’t have let your sister get to me.”

  The lighter fluid was only necessary if we stayed. If something happened on the raft and we could get back to shore without drowning, we couldn’t keep surviving without it. Using it or not using it, they were both gambles.

  But the worry in Alex’s voice, the way he rested his teeth against his fist, he was asking about the lighter as if there was a bigger question at play.

  I sat back so I could really look at him. “You’re worried the raft isn’t going to work.”

  “All day, every day.” He laughed, but the sound fell off in a sad way. “That it breaks up when we’re right off the shore. Like it already did. Or worse: that it breaks up fifteen miles offshore and we drown.”

  I believed in the raft. Now that we’d done it once wrong, we could build it stronger, better. I believed in us.

  “I really think it will work, Alex. But . . . but maybe it would be better if they found us before we ever had to find out for sure.”

  He nodded.

  I went for the lighter, only I didn’t remember where we’d left it. I turned my pocket inside out. But I hadn’t had it—we always kept it by the fire.

  I tore through wet layers of leaves, caking my nails with dirt. “The lighter, where is it?”

  “Are you serious?” asked Alex.

  Henri emerged from the bamboo with her sweatshirt zipped to her chin. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms and stepped into our clearing. “It’s gone? But I’m building my own fire. I need it.”

  I eyed the wood bundled in her arms. “Aren’t we the survivalist.”

  She gave me a fake smile. “We learn.”

  Alex hauled his backpack down from the trees and dumped the money on the ground. Most bills had come free from the wrappers. He plowed a hand through his hair. “It’s not here.”

  I bent to help him, scooping up bills and stuffing them back into the backpack. “When was the last time we used it?”

  The muscles in Alex’s shoulders went rigid. And I knew. Every time the rain had broken since the rockslide, we’d been able to stoke the fire back to life. Until today.

  I turned to the mountain of mud and rocks and sighed.

  I heaved a rock into my arms, squeezing it against my stomach to absorb some of the weight as I added it to the ones we’d already stacked at the edge of the clearing. “Only about a hundred and fifty to go.”

  Alex palmed one, but it was too large to pick up one-handed. Holding his damaged hand at an awkward angle, he rolled his forearm under it and wrestled it to his chest.

  “Stop.” I tried to take the rock, but he struggled. “Alex, you’re going to hurt me if you don’t let go.”

  He released it into my arms. “I can’t just do nothing.”

  “Then don’t. Fish. Or get bamboo for the raft. Do something you can do, something that helps us.”

  Not moving, he stared at the pile of boulders. Shaking his head, he finally grabbed his spear and moved in the direction of the beach.

  Playing with the fraying strings on her sweatshirt’s hood, Henri kept her distance. “You really think the lighter’s under there?”

  “I don’t know. But if you want to be warm, if you want to eat and drink, you better help me look.”

  My arms hung like weighted ropes as I carried another rock to the edge of the clearing and fanned out my shirt. Sweat dripped down and stung the raw, chafed skin of my forearms.

  Henri stripped off her sweatshirt and tied it around her waist. “My back is going to snap in two. Maybe it’s not even here. Maybe we’re killing ourselves for nothing.”

  “You need a break,” Alex said. “Both of you.”

  He’d come back with three fish and had started cleaning them even though we wouldn’t have a way to cook them without the lighter.

  My wrists throbbed. I struggled to lift another. “We’re almost to the bottom.”

  Henri cried out. I snapped around in time to see her drop a boulder to the ground.

  “What happened?”

  She sucked her thumb and inspected it. “It’s cut.”

  My own arms were covered in cuts. “Get over it.”

  Dirt smeared across Henri’s cheek as she wiped away sweat. “Get over it? Get over it?”

  I didn’t know how much I’d wanted this day until right then—when Henri would be the loser of her own game. I inhaled, the moment of silence between lightning and thunder, and then I exploded. “You wouldn’t even be doing this if you hadn’t hurt Alex! You’d be stringing together necklaces or working on your fucking tan or doing anything other than helping us survive. What I did to you back home was awful—I know. I get it. But this—I never thought you’d go this far. I can’t understand why you would go this far.”

  Her eyes wide, she stared at me and said, “You should.”

  The weight of everything on the island crashed down on me. The mind games, the vicious words, Alex’s broken hand. “That you would do this?”

  “You slit my throat, Em. What did you expect me to do, apologize for bleeding on you?”

  Alex and I exchanged a look. Henri and I were really—and finally—doing this. He held up his hands and headed toward the beach.

  “I’ve said I’m sorry so many times, they don’t even sound like real words to me anymore. I am—I’m so sorry. But whether you decide to accept that . . . I don’t care.”

  Saying those words and meaning them—it was liberation, a rush of blood to my head.

  She took a step back, blinked. Then folded her arms and smirked. “So you’re done? When did you decide you were done with me, Em? Today? Last week? When you told Mom about Gavin?”

  “I’m not—I’m not done with you. But even though I love you, I can’t—I won’t live my life waiting for you to come back.”

  “You love me? Then how did you do what you did? With Gavin? With Jesse? You broke me, Emma. Everyone knew. All of our friends already knew what had happened with Jake Holt and those guys, and the embarrassment of that was the worst thing I’d ever imagined. Until that day at school. Until now.”

  I swallowed down the catch in my throat. I’d never tried to explain. “The thing is, I lied to you—I did like Jesse. Back when he liked you, and you ignored him—”

  “And you thought he could be with you? How practical of you. Reallocating the male attention among us Jones girls.”

  It still stung. Hen
ri speaking to me like I was her enemy, and not a sister who used to be her best friend.

  “No . . . yes. I thought I liked him, but I didn’t. You couldn’t really love him, and—”

  “That’s not true. I—” Henri’s clear blue eyes pooled, her lips pulled back, trying to form words. “I did love him.”

  She’d never loved anyone but me. She told me that day in her bedroom and a hundred other times. Those words were the world. “You loved him? Jesse?”

  “I know,” she said. “I didn’t expect it either. I was too embarrassed to tell you. But when I was with Jesse, sometimes other things didn’t matter. That I’d lost Gavin. That Dad left. I never thought I could go for a guy like Jesse—I thought he would bore me. He didn’t.”

  In an instant, she dragged me back to that B Wing hallway when I’d watched Jesse break up with her in front of everyone we knew. Whatever she felt for Jesse, it was something different. Maybe it really was love.

  “Henri, I didn’t know. I thought you were hung up on Mr. Flynn. I’d just seen you that day with him, outside the music room—”

  “You saw that?” she said. “Gavin was apologizing for the way we’d left things. Not for one second would I have done that to Jesse.”

  People always said in moments like these, they wanted to be small. I actually felt my weight sinking into the mud.

  “Em, I asked you if you liked Jesse and you said you didn’t.” She sighed. “Of all people, I should have picked up on it anyway.”

  Henri had done a million awful things, but that wasn’t one of them.

  “No.” I tried to take her hand, but she stepped out of reach.

  “You don’t even care anymore, so I’m probably just wasting my breath . . .” She rolled her eyes, as if me not caring didn’t even matter, but it only spilled her tears. “For everything back home, I’m sorry. And for what you did, I forgive you.”

  We worked quietly deep into the day. Boulders and boulders stacked high around the edge of the clearing, a fortress of rocks as if our shelter were a castle. There was peace in knowing that maybe, just maybe, we’d found our way back to each other. Still, I was terrified I was wrong.