Wilder Girls

by Rory Power

  What do I do

  “I’ll ask you some questions, and you just answer me and show the board to the camera. Simple as that.”

  Screen flips out, red light blinks on. Paretta sits down on the bed by my feet and props her notepad up on her knee.

  “Before I get to the disease in particular, I noticed something in your chart—a bit of missing information. Can you tell me about your cycle? Has it been regular during the quarantine? I know stress and nutrition can have a big impact on these things.”

  We lost them after the Tox

  Paretta leans forward. “That’s very helpful, actually, Byatt. What about those of you who hadn’t hit puberty before the quarantine?”

  It never occurred to me, really, to wonder. But nobody ever complained when the supplies came without tampons or pads.

  I don’t think they ever got it

  “But they exhibit symptoms of the disease, don’t they?”

  Yeah

  “And your teachers?” There’s a glint in Paretta’s eyes, an eagerness to her voice. “Do they present those symptoms the same way you girls do?”

  I guess I don’t know for sure. But something tells me neither Welch nor Headmistress is hiding a spine like mine under their clothes. They’re sick, I know that. I’ve seen the sores on their skin, seen their eyes glassy and gone when the fever hits. But not like us.

  Not the ones left

  “And they would be your headmistress and who else?”

  Miss Welch

  And they’re the ones closest to normal, aren’t they? They’re the ones who should be here, and I should be back in my room, Hetty next to me, holding on so tight it steals my breath.

  I gesture to the room around me, let some bitterness into my smile. You should use them for your cure

  Paretta reads the board, and I watch a frown furrow her brow. “We do want a cure, Byatt,” she says after a moment. “But there are so many more questions to be answered. I’m sure you understand.”

  I don’t

  She keeps going like I didn’t write anything at all. “I have records of only one person on the island having been assigned male at birth. A Daniel Harker?”

  Reese’s dad. I nod. I’m not sure what else she wants from me. If she wanted to know about Mr. Harker, she should’ve picked Reese.

  “How did he react? Like you girls?”

  And the thing is at first he did. Angry, like some of us. Violent, like some of us. But most of us keep hold of ourselves, and he was on the way to losing it when he left.

  No

  That’s the most I can pin down.

  “Interesting,” Paretta says. She fumbles with the pad of paper, and I watch her jot something down. Most of it too hard to read, but I see the word “estrogen,” and above it, “adrenal,” a word I think I remember from some lecture on puberty in sophomore bio. Maybe that has something to do with the way the teachers died, instead of giving the Tox a home like we do.

  “This might sound strange,” Paretta starts, after staring a beat too long at her notes, “but is your headmistress…past a certain age?”

  Like we can’t just say “menopausal.” Headmistress canceled at least two assemblies during my first year because of her hot flashes.

  Yes

  “And I’m correct,” Paretta continues, “that none of you were receiving hormone replacement therapy, yes?”

  As far as I know yeah

  But I remember one of the lectures Welch gave us when she found a condom in Lindsay’s care package. Be prepared, she said, and know your options, and an IUD might be right for some but for others—

  Wait is the pill

  She’s flicking through the stack of files before I can finish writing. “Charlotte Welch, twenty-six. Ah, I see. Prescribed birth control for hormone management.” She glances up at me, smiling wryly. “I’m guessing she’s had limited access to that medication, which could definitely play a role.”

  Why are you smiling? I want to ask her. That limited access you find so funny is your fault.

  “Right,” she says, closing the medical file. “We’ll have to look into that. Now, as to the rest, I’m here to learn as much as I can from you about the outbreak. The more I know, the easier it will be for us to figure out how to treat it.”

  Do you know what it is

  A hundred questions, but that one’s the most important.

  “We’re not sure,” Paretta says. “Our tests haven’t turned up much. We’ve never seen anything quite like it. You girls have such varied symptoms.”

  You girls, she says, like it’s not something worth talking about. I keep my face blank, file it away. Let her think I haven’t noticed. Better yet, let her think I don’t care.

  “We do know, at least, that it’s not airborne,” she goes on, “and it can’t be contracted off contaminated surfaces, which has helped with containment. But we need your help to know more. So, Byatt. Let’s start with before it happened.”

  * * *

  —

  Before what. Before I got there, before Raxter changed, before I ever found it on the map.

  Here is Boston in my hand, spilling between my fingers. Brick and stone and a handful of streets eating their own tails. I walk and walk and lose my way and always come back.

  And in the other hand, Raxter. No ferry on the horizon, mainland far and farther. Water and shoreline born new every day. Everything what it wants to be. Everything mine.

  I’m buried there no matter where I go.

  * * *

  —

  “Is there anything you can think of in the lead-up? Anything off, different?”

  I shrug. It was normal I guess

  Hetty told me something, though. Some girls had a fight at breakfast the day it started

  “What kind of fight? They argued?”

  No like hair pulling

  But I didn’t see

  “Okay. And who got sick first?”

  Mostly seniors I think and then teachers

  Your age

  Paretta snorts. “I won’t ask how old you think I am.” I start to write, and she laughs outright, holds her hand up over her eyes.

  Born yesterday

  “How kind.”

  For most of the teachers, the end came quick. Our nurse was ancient—I think she died even before the Tox got to her—and a few of the others went out into the woods and never came back. To spare food for the rest of us, that’s what the note they left said. But the rest, women my mother’s age, gray just starting to thread through their hair, they died like it was a fever. Just dropped, their fingers not even turning black like ours.

  “And how many of you girls would you say are left?”

  The stack of files is looming. So many names, so many girls long gone. I stopped counting after a while, pulled the borders of the world in tight so only the three of us were inside.

  Maybe 60 but not sure

  “Your friends? Hetty and Reese? Are they okay?”

  I never said. I would never say. I let the warmth drain away, jaw set, eyes narrowed.

  How do you know them

  She waves a hand. “We know all of you.”

  There it is again. Said lightly, like it’s nothing, but the pill she gave me was labeled “RAX009.” And if I’m 009, will one of my girls be 010?

  No. They’re mine, and I’m not letting them go.

  She’s fine

  We’re all fine

  I know Paretta wants more. She can’t have it.

  You’ve asked questions my turn

  Paretta shifts on the bed, almost uneasily. She looks like the therapists my mother used to send me to when they realized I wasn’t going to open up the way they wanted. “Sure.”

  Why me

  I’m watching her closely,
and when she smiles at me, I can spot the sadness underneath.

  “I’ll tell you the truth, Byatt,” Paretta says. “There’s really no reason at all.”

  I think she expected me to be hurt. But it’s a relief more than anything else. I’m not special. I’m not immune. I’m not better at fighting this off, and that’s good, because I don’t want to.

  Right place right time?

  “Sure.” She gets up. “Something like that.”

  * * *

  —

  It was Mona who started it for me. She came down from the infirmary and I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe she was still alive. I asked how she was and I asked what had happened, and she barely said anything.

  I was going to leave when she laid her hand on the inside of my arm. And then, in a wry voice: “They’ll ruin it.”

  When I turned around I saw Headmistress talking to Hetty. Watching me.

  That night, after Gun Shift, after Mona’s flare-up, I snuck out of the bunk I share with Hetty. When I came back I told Reese I’d gone downstairs, and she was Reese, and she didn’t ask, and I needed it that way because it wasn’t true.

  Really, I went to Mona’s room. Her friends had moved in together and left her alone, so she was sleeping in the single at the end of the hall. Her door was unlocked. I went in. There was barely any light from the window, but I could see her prone on the bottom bunk.

  “Hey,” I whispered. “You still alive?”

  She didn’t answer, so I went over, shook her until her eyes opened. She looked awful, the gills on her neck fluttering slowly, their edges frayed and bloody.

  “Go away,” she said.

  Instead, I knelt down in front of her. I wasn’t going until I got what I wanted. “What did you mean? In the hall this morning.”

  She sat up. So slowly, like it was the hardest thing, until at last she was looking at me, her legs crossed underneath her, red hair shining so dimly I almost didn’t notice. She took a long breath, and by the end of it, I thought she’d forgotten I was there. But then she reached up, ran one shaking finger over the scalloped lips of her gills.

  “You’d keep it,” she said. “If you could. Right?”

  I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know what she meant. Hetty cried when she lost her eye, and I even caught Reese sometimes looking at her scaled hand like she’d rather just cut it off. Me, I never minded. Bled, and screamed, but that’s the cost of sleeping easy.

  “No,” I lied. “Would you?”

  She looked so tired. I almost felt bad for her. “Go to bed, Byatt,” she said.

  But I couldn’t face my room and my bunk, so I went downstairs, wandered the length of the main hall, walking the cracks between the boards. And I thought about Mona, and I thought about me, and of course I would keep it.

  Because I think I’d been looking for it all my life—a storm in my body to match the one in my head.

  That’s where Welch found me. I told her I had a headache, and she felt my forehead, led me up to the infirmary, and took my blood—for good measure, she said, just in case—and then sent me back to my room. And when I got there, I climbed into bed with Reese, Reese who wouldn’t force a lie out of my mouth.

  If I hadn’t spoken to Mona. If I hadn’t left my room that night. There are a million ways coming here doesn’t happen, but none of them feel possible. I was always on my way. This has always already happened.

  CHAPTER 12

  “And how have you been feeling?”

  I shrug.

  “No stress? Anything you felt a particularly pronounced emotional response to? Because you’ve been through quite a lot.”

  I’ve never seen this woman before now. She came in after Paretta. Didn’t tell me her name, just pulled a wheelchair over to my bed and sat down like the room was hers.

  “Is there something you’re uncomfortable with?” she asks.

  She’s dressed the way Paretta usually is, that same protective suit and a surgical mask. Only her mask is clear plastic. So I can feel connected to her, I think, but it only distorts the bottom half of her face.

  “Byatt?” she says, leaning forward.

  I look away, hunch over the whiteboard. I’m not uncomfortable, I want to write. I’m just bored.

  Instead I settle for No

  “No?”

  Not uncomfortable

  She nods, sits back. I stare down, at where the covers are pulled up over my legs.

  “Do you know my name?” she asks.

  No

  “Would you like to?”

  I point to the whiteboard.

  “Why not?”

  I keep my mouth closed, just blink at her slowly, and she nods like it means something.

  “What about what I do?” she asks. “Would you like to know that?”

  You’re a therapist

  “How do you know?”

  I roll my eyes.

  “Have you been to one before?”

  What do you think

  “Let’s try something else,” she says. I know her. Brand-new, but I’ve met her a thousand times. This is how they look at me when I don’t give myself away.

  She lifts up her clipboard, hands me a thin, bound book she’s been holding underneath. Navy, with gold embossed lettering. I recognize it. A Raxter yearbook. The last one we made before the Tox, the only year I had whole.

  I fumble for the whiteboard.

  How did you get that

  She doesn’t answer. Opens it, flicks through it slowly. “This was your first year at Raxter, yes? The year before the Tox?” I shrug. “You’re not in here very much.”

  Don’t like pictures

  “Oh, look. Here’s one.” She holds the book out to me, and I take it, rest it on my lap.

  It’s me, Hetty, and Reese, sitting in a row on the couch in the main hall. Hetty’s facing me, telling a story or something, and Reese is perched on the arm of the couch behind me, in the middle of braiding my hair. She’s smiling—only a little, but it’s there—and I have my eyes closed, my head tipped back as I laugh. It could almost be Raxter the way it is now, but the couch is plush and full, and in the background a vase of Raxter Irises sits on the windowsill.

  “Who are they? Your friends, I mean.”

  I bend closer to the page. Hetty’s eyes are warm, wide with joy. I’d almost forgotten what she looked like with both of them working.

  “That’s Hetty, right? Hetty Chapin? And that would be Reese Harker.”

  I shut the book as the therapist leans in, tuck it under my whiteboard. Another of Paretta’s crew, asking questions about my friends they have no good reason to ask. I won’t let Hetty or Reese be the next girl in this bed.

  Why do you want to know

  She tilts her head as she sits back, folds her hands in her lap.

  “You’re protective of them. I understand. It’s all right, though, Byatt. They’re safe. Miss Welch and your headmistress are taking care of them.”

  Something inside me snaps its jaws. I lunge out of bed. Too fast, head reeling. The therapist is watching, one hand on the call button at the end of my bed. For emergencies.

  “Byatt,” she says, “I need you to sit back down.”

  The world winnows down. Blurred, shifting, except for the pulse in her neck. I can see it beating. Blink and I’m braced over her. Blink and she’s pressing the call button and an alarm is blaring. Blink and my knee is wedged under her ribs, her forearm gripped tight in my hands, the suit ripped open. Blink and my nails bite through.

  “Byatt!” somebody yells. “What are you doing?”

  Somebody’s arms lock around my waist, and I’m hauled back, into the air. Slammed to the floor, head aching. The therapist is clutching her arm to her chest, blood streaming from it in ribbons. Marks, twin curves, buried deep in her
wrist. My mouth is wet and sticking.

  I start to smile, everything around me so bright and new, and then it’s gone, and I’m alone again. Someone’s hand comes down across my mouth. A prick in my shoulder, and then black.

  * * *

  —

  The crack of a slap to my face, to bring me back. I gasp hard.

  “Get her out, let’s go.”

  Above me, light and flicker. I’m in my bed, my arms strapped to my sides again. My eyes are starting to clear, shapes turning to people, and Paretta’s is the first face that forms, leaning over me with a snarl.

  “Get her legs.”

  Somebody presses down, binds my thighs together. I convulse, something in me thrashing desperately as the straps notch tighter. Another strap at my hips, another at my ankles. My wrists. And for the first time, one at my shoulders, and they’re reaching up to my forehead and my jaw.

  I squirm, try to slide down so there’s more slack across my hips, and Paretta reaches down, slams me back onto the bed.

  The strap hasn’t come down over my chin yet, and I throw my head from side to side. I’ll scream, I’ll do it, and it’ll hurt all of us, but better that than only me.

  “Don’t let her talk!” Paretta shouts. Somebody behind me grabs my head in both hands, and then it’s Teddy, Teddy’s face, and he’s stroking my hair.

  “It’s okay,” he says, over and over. “Relax. I’ve got you.”

  It’s almost all right. But I know what to look for, and I can see it coming. The heat in his cheeks. The way, just for a second, he looks afraid.

  It starts with a heave in his body. Rolling up through him, sweat breaking fresh on his forehead. And then a shiver that won’t stop, and he crumples over me, drool dripping down his chin. He rips off his mask, spits something out, and it lands on my chest. A chip of something white, shining. Bone.

  “Teddy. Oh my God.” Paretta is with him in a second, helping him stand, but his limbs are collapsing one by one.

  “Teddy, can you hear me? Teddy!” And they’ve forgotten about me, they’ve left me on the bed with the restraints loose enough that I can twist over and see where he’s on the ground. Eyes all the way white now. Little tremors running through his body.