A Map for Wrecked Girls

by Jessica Taylor

  I shouldn’t have asked. Henri, right there by my locker at the bottom of the music room stairs, told me everything I needed to know.

  Jake Holt swung his arm over Henri’s shoulders. “Well, Henri Jones, it’s your lucky day. Where’re you headed, because I’d love to offer my services as your escort.”

  She picked up the hand stroking the shoulder of her blazer and dropped his arm. “Um, no thanks.”

  “Well, which parties will we be crashing, then? I haven’t seen you around lately. I’d love to be the one spiking your Diet Cokes tomorrow night.”

  “You’ll have to spike the Coke of some eager freshman. But if I get bored, I do believe I still have your number.”

  He froze in the hallway. “Henri,” he yelled, grinning with his arms spread wide as we kept walking. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  As I started to look back, Henri pressed her fingers to my elbow and guided me on.

  “You’ve been into Jake Holt forever,” I whispered.

  “Well, maybe I’m through with boys.”

  Half the lights were blown out in our train car as we rode BART home from school. Shadows ran across Henri’s cheeks as she stared out the window.

  Only once the train burst into the sunlight did I see the smile twisting her lips.

  With my arms crossed in the seat facing hers, I thought about Mr. Flynn in the music room. He was an adult and even though a part of me knew it was his place to say no, the rest of me knew that when it was over, he was the one whose face would be on the evening news.

  With my thumbnail, I scratched the nail polish off my pinkie and watched fuchsia flakes fall against my navy skirt. “Would you tell me if you were doing something dangerous?”

  Henri relaxed into her seat and closed her eyes as if she were so unaffected by my question, she was falling asleep. “Stop being so intense, Em.”

  “Would you, though?”

  “If you’re asking what I think you’re asking, don’t worry.”

  “It’s Mr. Flynn’s life that will be ruined if you get caught.”

  She scooted forward in her seat until our knees touched, and dropped her voice. “Hey, he’s twenty-two. I’ll be eighteen in six months. There are less than five years between us. If I was a little older, it wouldn’t even matter.”

  “But you’re not a little older. And he’s a teacher.”

  “There are seven years between Mom and Dad—”

  “And look how well that worked out.”

  “Stop.” She dug her fingers into each side of her scalp. “You’re probably wondering, Why him? And I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. Gavin went to Baird and his parents split too. He knows how it is to be nothing like anyone else you know.”

  I died a little when she said that. I felt she was the only person like me in the whole world.

  “And Em, you should hear him play the guitar. It’s the kind of music you can lose yourself in.”

  I didn’t want Henri to lose herself in anything this risky. “You better be careful. What if Ari found out? She’d destroy you.”

  “Nobody knows but you. I know this is hard for you. You’re different—and I love you for it—but this isn’t your thing. I get it. You’ve never been into someone before.”

  That showed how well Henri knew me. She didn’t know about my feelings for Jesse, who’d been a part of our lives since his parents bought their house next door when I was in first grade. With Henri, in just weeks, I saw right through to her feelings for a brand-new teacher. There weren’t many ways I could compete with Henri, but in this contest, I was the clear victor.

  The train came to a stop, and as I stepped onto the platform, I tried so hard to feel satisfaction in knowing her better than she knew me, but I didn’t feel like I’d won.

  Henri swayed onto the foggy sidewalk, the intro to a Red Hearts song humming between her lips. It occurred to me: In any game involving my sister, we were all destined to be losers—even Henri.

  CHAPTER 13

  Sixteen days of collecting everything the sea washed up meant we had enough to build a shelter. Henri wanted three small shelters, but we only had enough for one medium-sized.

  The next problem became where to build it. None of our debris was that big. We’d have to rely on some existing structure for our base.

  Alex and I hacked our way inland, through the humid air, deeper into the darkness. A caiman roared in the distance and I went stiff. But I took a deep breath, dried my soaking- wet palms against my shorts, and moved farther.

  “What about over here?” Alex stood in the middle of a clearing, between two tall trees not too far apart. “We’ll prop something between the forks in the trees and add branches to fill in the roof.”

  The thinner tree on the right seemed flimsy. “Do you think it’s strong enough to support all that weight?”

  He shook the trunk, and the treetop wobbled back and forth. “If it breaks down, we’ll move.”

  “What if it happens when we’re inside?”

  “Point taken.” Alex passed me his water bottle—it had caught fresh rain—and I took a sip. He drifted away from me, through the thick brush of the jungle. I moved the opposite direction, stopping in a smaller clearing, maybe fifteen feet wide, at the base of a steep hillside.

  A tree with a solid trunk had fallen with one end propped between the branches of a squatter, fatter tree. The triangle it formed made a perfect frame for our shelter. Its highest point was a couple feet directly over my head.

  “Alex! How about this one?”

  He ducked into the little clearing, looked around at the protective ring of trees, at the hill rising steeply on one side, at where I stood beneath the frame. His eyes stayed on me, and mine stayed on him. Spots of sunlight slipped between leaves, casting patterns across his face as he smiled up to the canopy of trees. “Jones, you’re a genius.”

  Dragging all of our supplies from the beach to the shady alcove of the shelter site, about ten yards deep into the trees, took three days. Five more and we’d stripped the bamboo down into cordage—that’s what Alex called it—for lashing the roof together. We needed at least another week to finish that part.

  The space between the two trees formed the frame of our shelter, so we built our walls outward from the trunks until we had a solid oval-shaped enclosure. Even though the shelter’s ceiling wouldn’t be done any time soon, we layered soft leaves and palm fronds on the floor to create some cushion and keep us out of the dirt and sand.

  Hidden away inside the glowing green pocket of jungle trees and mesh of vines and branches, I didn’t think about the caimans as much. I almost felt safe.

  When the afternoon sun moved overhead and soaked through the leaf awning at the hottest part of the day, we cooled off in the ocean or lounged in the shade.

  Stretched out on our stomachs in the sand, Alex and I faced each other while Henri strung ropes of seashells.

  Propping his head in his hands, his lashes dark with ocean water, he watched me. The corners of his mouth turned up. There was a slight line down the center of his full bottom lip. I wanted to touch it. “Tell me what you want, Jones.”

  I blinked, my eyelids heavy. The heat of the beach was thick against my skin, even under the canopy of palm trees, so I said, “A Thai iced tea. Super cold with extra milk. The kind with so much caffeine, my eyelids twitch for hours.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but Henri’s whisper interrupted. “Honey lavender gelato.”

  Sand clung to Alex’s chest as he rolled onto his side to face her. “What?”

  She rested her teeth against her lips, staring down at her shells. A little louder, she repeated, “Honey lavender gelato. From the shop on Powell.”

  My throat tightening, I nodded. “After a movie in the Haight.”

  Alex glanced to me, the tears shining in my eyes, and he smiled at
her. “I’m more of a mint chip guy.” Even though this game was ours, Alex would let her play. “What else, Hank?”

  Getting to her feet, she said, “It’s not my turn,” and headed toward the water.

  Henri made herself scarce once it was time to build the shelter. She claimed she was out scouring the jungle and searching for pieces to layer onto the roof, but twice I found her with handfuls of tiny seashells she’d collected.

  Alex scowled when he saw her, but I didn’t say a word. At least Henri had something to do.

  “You have to stop babying her,” he said, once we were out of earshot.

  “She’s my sister.”

  “But she’s—”

  “Don’t.” If there was one thing worse than Henri hating me, it was Alex hating Henri. He didn’t know Henri before I’d ruined her.

  Something was wrong with my sister, wrong in worse ways than I’d first imagined—she didn’t want to go home. My sister, whose entire existence was live bands, expensive clothes, loud engines, strong liquor, and dangerous boys—she was willing to never have any of that again. Or what was beyond it.

  Whatever secret she was hiding from me, I might never know.

  Alex’s eyes drifted down my body—to me in my bikini top and shorts. My dolphin T-shirt hung from a tree while I worked. We were covered in scratches and scrapes from carrying and cutting down sharp fronds. Keeping it on would have protected me some, but I was hot and afraid I’d rip it stripping vines and not have a shirt at all.

  “Hey, Jones, I’ve been wanting to say . . . to tell you—you’ve got nothing to be ashamed about.”

  Heat moved from my chest to my collarbone. This feeling . . . it was new, confusing. I crossed my arms, but I wasn’t embarrassed he’d been looking, only that he might realize my body had responded in a way I couldn’t control.

  He dropped his gaze to my flushed skin and tore his stare away. “Not that I was looking.”

  “I don’t— I don’t mind you looking,” I said to the dirt, to the sky, to the achingly green trees around us. “I’m just”—I couldn’t tell him I’d been living underwater and had just been pulled into a sunlit world—“surprised.”

  “You’re surprised?” He stepped closer and bent his head and searched my face until I met his gaze. His eyes were greener under the leaves, his freckles vivid in the gloom. I could feel his nearness like the wavy haze of heat off the sand. “Jones, I’ve wanted to touch you since the first time I saw you.”

  The warmth in me intensified, pulsing through me until now, alone with Alex in this deeper part of the island, I knew I’d been lying to myself.

  I wasn’t broken. I wasn’t above it. I’d just never felt this—struggling to breathe, catching on fire—nothing like this.

  “You don’t think you look bad or something, do you?”

  “It’s not like that—” I cleared my throat and stared at the vines I’d stripped. “It’s . . . I guess I’ve spent too much time watching people stare at Henri.”

  Alex reached for me. I went still as his hand brushed my face and moved to the soft spot under my earlobe. He dragged his thumb across my lower lip. “You’re wrong. Henri’s looks are so obvious. You—you’re subtler. Much”—he leaned in, not quite touching me, letting only the prickle of his facial hair graze my skin—“sexier.” I felt the brush of his eyelashes across my cheek, smelled salt and sawdust and sun and rain. Then his teeth, a gentle tug on my lip. And I kissed him.

  We laid thick palm leaves at the sides of the shelter. I focused on the palm leaves. The roof was too high to reach, and we weren’t sure if the trees could hold Alex’s weight, so I climbed up and he handed me pieces of thatch to weave together. I focused on the weaving.

  The kiss. We hadn’t mentioned it. But I wanted to take it back. All of it. My hands wrapped at his neck. The soft sound I made against his mouth. The way we pressed close as if we could put our hearts inside each other and keep them safe until we needed them back.

  I skidded down off the lowest branch, steadying my hands against Alex’s shoulder blades. Heat radiated through the cotton of his shirt and onto my hands. His skin was on fire.

  “Alex.”

  Little beads of perspiration stuck to the skin around his hairline and his breathing was ragged as he stared up the tall, spindly trunks. “What?”

  “You don’t look so hot.”

  I pressed my hands to his cheeks, then his forehead. The temperature of his face was even warmer.

  His lips slipped into a crooked smile. “Out of everything we have to worry about, my sunburn isn’t one of them.”

  “I don’t think it’s a sunburn.” I’d seen Mick and Ari high out of their minds once, sweat pouring. “Did you, um, take anything?”

  “Take anything?” His eyes snapped wide and he laughed. “What the hell would I have taken?”

  “Never mind.” I walked a few steps away, hating what a good liar he was.

  His feet slipped out from under him as he tried to sit on a wet bed of leaves.

  “It couldn’t be anything you ate,” I said. “We’ve eaten the same things.”

  My stomach constricted as I thought of the last fish we’d eaten, even though it had tasted fine. Contracting some deadly food-borne illness on the island was unimaginable.

  “So, I ate something else.” He looked up, rubbing the back of his neck. “Before the coconuts, I found some mushrooms in the jungle.”

  Leaves crunched as I moved closer. “You didn’t.”

  “Look, I put a piece in my mouth, just to see, but my tongue went numb almost immediately.”

  “You can’t take risks like that, Alex! We all need each other. I need . . .” I glanced away.

  “That was yesterday, Jones. It’s been almost twenty-four hours. Poisoning like that hits hard and fast, right? Not like this. It must be heatstroke or sunburn or . . . or infection.”

  “Infection? What hurts?”

  He clenched his teeth and brought his head between his knees. “My head, my arms and legs, these fucking cuts.”

  Scrapes and cuts—we were covered in them. The palm fronds were sharp enough, but cutting them down meant stretching across the blade-like edges of the pineapple-shaped flowers. “Do any of them look infected?”

  “Can’t tell. I think I messed up my back really bad carrying piles of palm fronds on it.”

  “Take off your shirt. Let me look at you.”

  His long fingers trembled, fumbled with the buttons. I moved close, undoing the bottom button and the next four up before he managed the first. He shrugged free of the shirt, and his skin was covered in a solid sheen of sweat.

  A short piece of rope that had washed onto the beach held up his sagging cargo shorts. Now that he’d thinned so much, his muscles were more prominent under his skin. He wasn’t super built when we’d washed up here, broadest and most developed in his arms and shoulders and legs, probably from fighting waves on his surfboard and driving the rickshaw. He was almost rangy now, narrowing like a triangle from his armpits down to his waist.

  I moved behind him. Thin scrapes marked his back, some as tiny and thin as paper cuts, and some long lines of dried blood.

  I traced each cut with my eyes, from his neck down to his waist. The skin around each was smooth and still flesh-toned. My hands moved over the tendons on his arms as I stepped around to face him. Only a few cuts ran across his upper torso. I placed my left hand against his chest to steady myself until I realized what I was doing and let go. I worked my way from his shoulders down. As my fingertips brushed a cut above the waistband of his shorts, his pulse raced under my other hand.

  I glanced up, met his gaze. “Did that hurt?”

  With bloodshot eyes, he gave me a half smile and whispered, “No.”

  I took a step back. “You’re fine,” I said. “I mean, as far as I can tell. The cuts aren’t inf
ected. It must be something else.”

  I backed up again and he bounced onto his feet. But as he moved into a sunlit patch of underbrush, his skin took on a gray cast. “I’m not sick. It’s a sunburn. I’ll be fine, Jones.”

  As he ducked under a low swinging branch, he stumbled.

  Rustling woke me up on our first night sleeping in the jungle. Whatever tossed through the palm fronds was large. Something had made its way inside our shelter.

  I pulled my knees to my chest and made myself as small as possible, until Alex groaned.

  He’d insisted on sleeping at the edge of the shelter floor, even though he’d taken the spot where the fronds were the sparsest, beyond where the ground sloped downhill and flattened.

  Now he tossed and turned through the leaves lining the ground.

  I went over and whispered, “Get up.”

  “No.”

  I wrapped my arm around his back and felt fever blazing off him. “You don’t need to be down here alone. Sleep next to me and Henri.”

  As I let go, he lost his balance. I heaved him to his feet and led him to our pallet of leaves.

  “You shouldn’t,” he mumbled. “What if I’m contagious?”

  I brought a bottle of water close to his lips and made him drink. “Stop being a stubborn asshole.”

  Choking on water, he dug his fists into his forehead. “It hurts so bad behind my eyes, Jones. Fuck.” He said it like he was angry at himself, as if being sick was something he shouldn’t have let happen. “I don’t want to die a miserable death out here.”

  “You’re not going to die.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “I promise you, you won’t.”

  “You can’t promise that.”

  Adrenaline coursed down to my fingertips. I stood up again, ready to do anything. Everything. Something.

  There was nothing left to do. We didn’t have medicine or soup or blankets. All we had was time and each other.

  I perched on the edge of the pallet, rubbing his back, rocking back and forth to burn off some energy, until Alex’s shaking limbs relaxed and he fell asleep.