A Map for Wrecked Girls

by Jessica Taylor

  I stuck out my tongue to lick it away, but Alex took my hand and touched the drop. He moved it between his fingers and shook the hair from his eyes, looking from it to me. “No way.”

  The drops multiplied into a steady drizzle. Alex fumbled with his buttons and stripped off his shirt. He stood in the rain with his arms stretched wide and his mouth open to the sky.

  Perched on the edge of the life raft, Henri opened her empty water bottle and held it above her head.

  “Get up,” I said.

  Her weight barely lifted off the plastic before I pushed the life raft out from under the trees and into the rainfall.

  Rain came down so hard it ricocheted off the life raft and stung my skin, but soon water pooled at the edges. We crowded around, cupping handfuls of it, drinking as much at a time as our hands and mouths would allow.

  CHAPTER 8

  FOUR MONTHS BEFORE

  Our mother picked us up the first Friday in October and drove us to Los Cilantros, our favorite Mexican restaurant in Berkeley.

  Henri and I dipped our chips in a side of jalapeno ranch while our mom perused the drink menu.

  “I think I’ll have a sangria,” Mom said.

  Henri squeezed my knee under the table and sat up in the booth. She gave the waitress her most mature, don’t-even-think-about-carding-me voice. “Make it a pitcher.”

  “Nice try. Give it five more years.” Mom lowered her menu only enough for her eyes to show over the top. “Six for you, Emma.”

  Like anyone else with the slightest grasp on the girl Henri truly was, our mother never took her attempts too seriously. Others had tried—like our dad—to untangle the delicate strands of Henri only to end up with a ball of grit, fire, and comebacks.

  After we decided on two orders of fajitas and a taco salad, Mom folded up our menus in a neat stack at the edge of the table. “Girls, I’m sorry I haven’t been around much the last few months. Work’s been a nightmare, but it’ll get better.”

  I had a mouthful of chips and covered my lips to speak. “Why is it going to get better?”

  “Your father and I will get the money side of everything settled soon.” Now that the actual divorce was set in stone, what my dad seemed to value most came second—the money. “Until his lawyer and my lawyer get it together, I need more cash flowing in to make the mortgage, the car payments, the lawyer bills, half of your father’s boat payment that he’s saddled me with—” She cut herself off and brought the back of her hand to her lips. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—”

  “It’s fine,” Henri said. “I think most of the dirty details have made themselves apparent.”

  “Well, I’m sorry for that.”

  Mom turned her face toward the sunlight streaming in the restaurant windows. Fine lines etched around her mouth, faint gray hairs peeked out of her roots, and sadness filled her hazel eyes and didn’t lessen even when she caught us watching her and forced a smile that made me want to fold in half.

  Divorce was hell, and my mother’s appearance was proof.

  She reached across the table to dip a chip in our jalapeno ranch. “But I do have some news. The company is sending me to the Puerto Rico Investment Summit in February, over your break. It’s only for five days.”

  Henri propped her elbows on the table and leaned forward enough to show her teal panties over the waistband of her uniform’s skirt. “You mean, we have the house to ourselves?”

  Mom chased down her chips with a long drink of sangria, eyebrows raised at Henri. “No,” she said, swallowing. “I have to meet some clients in Puerto Rico, and I’ll barely be able to check in. Your dad’s been working on a room for you girls to share at his place. He said he and Simone would love to have you.”

  Henri pressed her lips together. “If it’s going to be there, then I won’t be.”

  “Please, Henri, you don’t need to make this any harder than it has to be. It’s only for five days. Besides, it’s time we all start healing.”

  After Mom paid the bill, Henri called shotgun and got the keys. My sister hugged her headrest and frowned into the backseat at me. “Five days of Dad and it. Really?”

  “At least we have each other.”

  “There’s nobody else in the world I could do it with.” She swapped Mom’s iPod out for her own. “Oh, gawd. Can you imagine Mom in Puerto Rico all by herself? How sad is that?”

  “She said she’ll be working while she’s there. I guess she’ll only have to suffer through the dinners alone.”

  I hated the image of our mother sitting alone at a table overlooking the beach at night, glass of wine in her hand, and that same sadness flooding her eyes.

  Someday she’d be old and there’d be no one by her side. Not even a sister to share a house with by the ocean.

  Henri twisted her neck at the restaurant doors. “Shit. Here she comes.”

  Mom climbed behind the wheel, and Henri cranked up the soundtrack to Wicked. Henri always took the role of Elphaba and left the Galinda/Glinda parts for me. As my sister and I were defying gravity at the top of our lungs, Mom dialed down the volume.

  “Have you girls done more thinking about next year?”

  She shot a look at Henri as she drove, but I knew my sister would never answer.

  Henri was graduating in eight months with no plans. She was tired of high school, but not quite ready for anything more. My sister lived for glitter and bubbles and golden tans and boys in fast cars—she was never cut out for institutions.

  Finally I piped up from the backseat. “I’ve been researching colleges. I think I’ve found seven. Four reaches and three safeties—”

  Mom’s stare was serious in the rearview mirror. “That’s excellent, Emma. I’m glad one of you is applying herself.”

  “Give it a rest,” Henri muttered.

  Showing up Henri wasn’t my plan, even if that’s what she thought. I only wanted to create a distraction to take the heat off my sister.

  “Henrietta Katherine Jones.” Mom’s whisper was always more terrifying than her scream. From the backseat, I held my breath. “You either need to be going to school or you need a J-O-B.”

  “Jaaaa . . . Jaaaawb.” Henri pretended to sound out the word and popped her lips at the end on the B. “Can you spell it more slowly? I’m not sure I got it.”

  My mother removed her sunglasses and stared across the car to where Henri sat tousling her hair in the passenger seat. “Come on, Henri, give it some thought. Right now it’s your choice. You don’t want it to be mine. There’s still time to put a deposit down on NYU. Not much, though—the early-decision deadline to accept is in two weeks. And if it’s not NYU, I have no problem enrolling you at BACC myself.”

  Bay Area Community College—Henri’s worst nightmare.

  I pressed my temple to the cool backseat window, ready for an explosion. Only, my sister stayed quiet. Henri’s reflection filled the side mirror, her lips sealed together as she followed the white line on the side of the road.

  Mom always underestimated the strength of Henri’s will. That was a mistake I never wanted to make.

  Our mother parked the car in front of our house, and Henri threw open the car door and headed inside. While Mom and I collected grocery bags from the trunk, Henri slammed the front door so hard, the front porch vibrated.

  Mom shook her head as our house settled. “She’s a walking catastrophe.”

  “She’s just having a hard time.”

  Mom hoisted a reusable grocery bag higher in her arms. “Because of your father?”

  “I think so.” But I didn’t really know what had happened to Henri in the last few months—if it was our dad walking out or my sister discovering worlds I hadn’t yet imagined.

  I shut the trunk, and as my mother shouldered past me, I could have sworn she said, “Damn him.”

  I traveled up the stairs inside, follo
wing the noises overhead from Henri’s room—drawers sliding open, hangers being flung, the crack of thrown shoes landing on the wood floor—and found Henri on her knees in front of her dresser.

  “What are you doing?”

  Handfuls of bright lacy bras from the bottom of her underwear drawer spilled onto the floor as she sifted through them. She relaxed with relief when her fingers closed around a green strapless bra. “Ari texted me. I’m going out tonight and so are you.”

  I used the toe of my boot to scoot some dirty clothes away and make a spot to sit.

  She grabbed a bottle of nail polish, slipped my wool-lined boots off my feet, and began to paint my toenails tangerine.

  I tried to pull my foot out of her reach, only Henri wouldn’t let go.

  “You just did them.”

  “Practice, Em.” She touched our foreheads together until my smile matched hers. “What if I paint your nails tangerine and you decide your wardrobe would look better with coral? Or what if we find the perfect shade of turquoise?”

  She brought the back of her hand to her forehead in the most dramatic, most Henri-like way before her brightest grin lit up the whole room.

  Her act would have been convincing enough for most. Not for me.

  As my nail polish dried, Henri draped herself across her bed and opened a magazine. “We’re going to pretend it’s not even there, okay? It’s just us—me and you and nobody else.”

  “At Dad’s house.”

  “Everywhere.”

  I touched my fingertip to my toenail. The polish was still sticky.

  “You’re going to ruin them.” She licked her finger and flipped a magazine page. “You’re the only person I’ve ever really loved, do you know that, Emma?”

  “That’s not true. What about Mom and—” I knew what Henri would say if I said Dad. “What about Mom?”

  She shrugged. Henri’s greatest strength and greatest weakness was how easily she could turn on and off her love. I always wondered if she was born that way or if it was a skill she’d learned to keep her safe from a world that might not love her back.

  Maybe I’d never know.

  “Henri, you love Mom. You’re just mad at her over BACC.”

  “I mean”—she rolled onto her back and hung her head off the bed, staring at me upside down—“I guess I do love Mom. But it’s not one-hundredth of how much I love you. Like, you know when we were little and we’d say we loved each other to the moon and back. Well, let’s say I love you to the moon and back—because I do. Now take Mom. In comparison, like, maybe I love Mom to Nevada and back. Or to the street corner and back.” She flipped around and folded her legs beneath her. “Does that make sense?”

  “Sure.” I had to fight to keep the horror off my face. “But she just wants you to make some plans. You have to have something in mind.”

  Henri pitched her magazine aside and crawled to the edge of the bed. “Mom thinks I’m really screwing things up. But I’m not. I’ve got plans. Mom doesn’t know about them, but whatever. I was supposed to go to college far, far away. I did get accepted into NYU, you know.” She held her chin high and laughed.

  That acceptance letter had been stuck to our fridge with a magnet for two weeks. Until one day when I went to get some orange juice and it had disappeared. I didn’t know how long its absence had gone unnoticed. All I knew was that it was gone and Henri had been the one to take it—for some secret reason nobody else could understand.

  She fluffed up her hair, leaving it messy. “I’m not saying this to make you feel bad or anything, but the reason I didn’t go is because I didn’t want to leave you behind—not with everything that happened with Dad.”

  I covered my eyes. “Henri.”

  “No, stop.” She peeled my hands away and dropped off the bed right onto me. Her knees pressed under each of my armpits as she forced me to look at her. “This is a good thing. I don’t regret anything at all.”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to wait until you’ve graduated, then we’ll use our graduation money to rent a car and we’ll spend weeks driving cross-country. That’s when we’ll go to school together, anywhere you want to go. Okay?”

  “Henri—”

  “I’ll have to find a way to hold off the dragon—Mom, I mean—until you’re legal.”

  “It’s a long time away, though.”

  I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving Mom all alone, even though I’d never tell my sister.

  “No, it’s not. It’s going to be Christmas, my birthday, and before we know it, spring break. We’ll have my big graduation blowout in the spring. We’ll only have one tiny little year before we can run far away from here. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” she repeated, breathing the word and making it into something bigger than it was.

  CHAPTER 9

  Henri slept too soundly that night while I listened to the noises outside the tarp. Now that our raft held our drinking water, it wasn’t easy to sleep on the hard sand.

  The air still carried the earthiness of rain, even though the sky had closed up a few hours after it began. In those cool, drenched hours after the storm passed, when my stomach stuck out from being so blissfully full of water, thirsty snakes and rodents twisted through the bushes.

  Now the island came alive after dark. Screams and cries of something wild scrabbled at the edges of sleep, chasing it from my tired limbs, and I could hear the crunching gravel of the caiman’s roar.

  With my eyes closed, I tried to focus on the crashing waves and imagine the long corridors that would connect the house by the sea that I’d someday share with Henri. Our house would have two wings and we’d sleep at separate ends all day. Almost all day—at some point, Henri would throw open my bedroom’s French doors, climb into my four-poster bed, and press her icy toes against my heels.

  I peeled the tarp back a little. Down the beach, Alex groaned, and reminded me how lost we were. Four days lost.

  The night was humid, still, the darkness through the overhead branches speckled and dense, like salt across black granite.

  The more I squirmed, the worse my back ached. For hours, I searched the starlit sky for some sign of life. As soon as I thought I would never sleep again, I passed out.

  Alex’s sobbing woke me up.

  My eyes adjusted and I propped up on my elbows. Henri slept beside me, one limp hand draped above her head and the other arm tucked against her side. With the moon shining on her white-blond hair and down the slope of her nose, she could have been a porcelain doll instead of a real-life girl. I didn’t know how I looked, but I could feel my filthy waves standing out from my scalp. Catastrophe suited Henri; it didn’t suit me.

  The full moon illuminated the sand as I made my way down to the water.

  Alex cleared his throat where he was lying on his back by the ocean. “Couldn’t sleep, Jones?”

  I shook my head.

  “Yeah, this isn’t what you’re probably used to, huh?”

  “That’s not why I couldn’t sleep.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.” He rolled onto his side and pulled something from beneath him—a book so waterlogged, the front and back covers rolled around and touched. “Hey, I’m sorry if I’ve been moody, or quiet . . . or whatever. I keep thinking—and sometimes it’s easier if I don’t talk.”

  I thought of the Oxy—what Henri had said about its effects. But I didn’t care about the drugs, only the reasons he was sneaking off to take them. “You’ve been thinking about Casey?”

  Alex rubbed his hands down his face. “Yeah.”

  “I only knew him a few hours. I . . . didn’t even know his last name.”

  “Roth. Same as mine.”

  Alex Roth. Knowing his full name, a part of him from outside this place, was comforting, a reminder that all we needed
was rescue to slip back into the versions of ourselves from before. “What was he like?”

  “Uh . . . Kind, I guess. Considerate. Lazy in a way. I was kind of jealous of him—being happy doing so little. But he was good at leading boating tours. We both were. People loved them . . . Present company excluded, of course.”

  “I was saving my complaints for the comment card.”

  He laughed. “No doubt.”

  Something buzzed by my ear, and I swatted at the air. Sleeping in all our clothes only made me hotter and stickier, but it was the only way to protect my arms from bites. “If we had a fire, do you think it would keep the bugs away?”

  “If it was smoky enough, probably, yeah. A shelter would help too. But we don’t have tools to cut down trees or anything. It’ll take weeks collecting whatever washes up before we can start on anything decent.”

  Weeks. Every time someone said anything at all about making plans for the future, my panic built. I couldn’t imagine our four days lost multiplying.

  My hand brushed his book. It was too dark to read the title. “What are you reading?”

  “A success manual.”

  “Like, success in what? Getting girls?”

  “I rely on my natural talent for that.” He smiled, then dog-eared a page and moved it behind him. “Making little bits of money turn into millions. Compound interest. It’s called Finishing Rich in the Modern Age.”

  “Finishing rich? That’s what you wanted.”

  I said it like a joke, but a grimness settled over him. “Apparently more than anything.”

  I hated this shift in him. “Hey, you never answered, when we were on the cliff. What do you want? And please, don’t be boring.”

  “Never.” He smoothed the sand between us and scooted closer. “Okay, back home—in West Virginia, not Puerto Rico—I had a Jeep. A Wrangler. With one of those tops that popped off. I left it open-air until it was too freezing cold not to. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d drive. The headlights on the road, the wind gusting through, when I got home I was so relaxed I’d just pass out.”