A Map for Wrecked Girls

by Jessica Taylor

  “The storms might not be here for weeks.” I stood and swung my legs up into the hammock and stroked his stomach. He was warm and safe and we never hurt each other, only helped.

  “It could be days. We just don’t know.”

  Getting off the island meant leaving Henri all alone. If we couldn’t get back to her, or we came back to the island and she hadn’t survived, my world might as well quit turning. But no longer could I live for Henri. I had to live for me.

  CHAPTER 33

  Sparks rained down like fireworks. They stung my arms, my legs, my cheeks. I blinked myself awake to the orange-soaked walls.

  Our shelter was on fire.

  I gasped. Shot up. My hands were burning.

  I wiped my palms on my shorts. The melting fibers of the hammock clung hot and sticky. My skin wouldn’t stop stinging. The hammock creaked and collapsed. Flaming walls spun, spun, spun as we went down. We struck the ground, and Alex jolted awake.

  I inhaled scorched bamboo and bubbling plastic, my own singed hair. Smoke filled my mouth and nose. The stabbing pain in my throat throbbed in my ears and teeth.

  Alex’s skin glowed red through his thin white shirt. We had to get out.

  Blackness climbed up the frond-covered walls. I glanced to the door. It was still clear.

  Before we could make it, a ribbon of fire caught on the shifting breeze. It dragged across the palm-frond floor, to the foot of our piles of firewood and kindling. So dry, so flammable, they didn’t just ignite, they exploded.

  The air inside the shelter crackled, and the force blew me back. Liquid heat sizzled over my skin.

  Waving away the thick black smoke, I staggered. I slipped. Got my balance. Rushed through the heat. Which way—the heavy gray smoke was too thick to show.

  “This way, this way!” I heard Alex shout.

  Our hands, they found arms and backs and pulses that raced against our fingertips. Alex stumbled.

  I squeezed him close. “I’ve got you.”

  White-hot heat shot up my bare legs. Alex and I carried each other through the sagging shelter door and into the clean air outside.

  We dropped. Alex lay flat on his back, with his chest constricting and expanding. Too fast. Too hard.

  Wooziness overtook me. My eyelids grew heavy, heavier. The air in my chest thick, thicker. Everything went weightless.

  The world came back a second later, brighter, more vibrant.

  Henri, she stood over me, shaking my shoulders, pushing water to my lips. “What happened? Are you okay? Em, open your eyes.”

  I choked on a gulp, which only made me cough. Breathing was a knife in my back.

  “Em, your lips, they’re literally blue.”

  I lifted up on my elbows. A wave of heat stung my cheeks as the shelter’s dry palm fronds and soft grasses erupted in flames. Sweat beaded on my skin.

  Alex glanced to us, then back to the blaze. “I’m going back in.”

  Henri whipped to face him. “Do you have a death wish?”

  My heart rate climbed. I coughed and coughed. My voice refused to come. My fingers stretched toward him. He pushed himself up from the dirt and out of my grasp.

  “I’m going.” Without hesitation, he stepped through the fiery debris.

  Why, why, why? I coughed again. Couldn’t stop. But Henri, she knew. “The backpack,” she whispered. “The money.”

  Maybe I was destined to only love people who wanted to destroy themselves.

  I rolled to my side, knees to my chest. My throat stung—and not just from the fire—I’d told him he needed that money. I told him that money was a life. He’d been ready to let it go.

  I did this.

  Keeping my eyes on the shelter, never leaving the shelter, I coughed up a handful of blood. It was thick as honey and scarlet by the light of the fire. The contents of my stomach rushed up next. Vomit seared my already-burning throat.

  Henri tried to tug me farther away, but I wiped my mouth and held my ground.

  The burning shelter was still, no signs of movement.

  I managed, “Please, Alex, please.”

  Squeezing my hand, Henri stared at the fire now shooting out of our tarp rooftop. Her lips, they mouthed, Come on, Alex.

  Tears poured out of my eyes. My vision clouded. Sobs wracked my body so hard, my hands couldn’t stifle the sound.

  I couldn’t lose Alex like this. I had grieved for Henri as if she’d died. But she was living and breathing, and I didn’t know it until now, but that wasn’t real grief.

  I crawled to my knees. My bones ached as Henri crushed my knuckles and anchored me to the ground.

  Coughing, I tried to speak.

  “I’m going in.” Henri jogged toward the shelter and looked back. “If you come in after us, Em, I swear I’ll never forgive you. If anyone knows the strength of my will, it’s you.”

  Before I could say anything, Henri too was gone in smoke and flames.

  I held my knees to my chest and stared at the blaze.

  Seconds dragged by. No movement. Alex and Henri were my world, all I had, and all I’d ever have if I didn’t get off the island.

  Fire crackled and popped and smoldered and took away everything. Everything.

  The shelter leaned precariously. I saw a shadow inside. Movement.

  Henri emerged, legs stepping through a ring of flames. She had Alex under his arms.

  “He passed out inside.” Henri dragged him out of the fire, through the brush, and to my side.

  A crack built to a roar and the roof caved. Heat blanketed us as what was left of the shelter imploded.

  Coughing and choking and rolling through the brush to extinguish her burning clothes, Henri collapsed.

  My muscles heaved and screamed, straining against waves of weakness. On my hands and knees, I pulled myself through the dirt.

  I squeezed Henri so hard, our sharp, protruding bones dug into each other’s flesh. I didn’t care.

  I pulled back. My stare asked, Why?

  She looked into my eyes. “You said it was real.”

  Alex lay motionless in the dirt with his chin tipped toward the black sky. The inferno had taken the money—his backpack wasn’t on his back.

  Breaths shuddered between his lips—he was breathing, just unconscious.

  I pressed my hands to his face. Come on. Wake up.

  His arm had fallen across his chest when Henri had let him go. I threw it off him to give his lungs more room. It struck the ground and his hand unclenched. His fist—I hadn’t even noticed. Tucked inside his palm was the lighter.

  He didn’t go back for the backpack. He’d gone for the one thing we needed on the island to keep going. And miraculously, it had survived. The plastic ridges were caked with dirt—it must have fallen to the ground, saving it from the rising heat.

  I forced my voice into my ragged throat.

  “Alex, wake up!” I slapped his cheek, then harder, and then with enough force to sting my palm.

  I crawled to our water—our last boiled bottle—and even though my throat ached to guzzle every drop, I dumped it in his face. With wide eyes, he sputtered and gasped awake.

  The larger tree sprouting from the roof of our shelter cracked along the trunk. It crashed into the smaller tree, downing it in a gush of heat that slapped against my exposed skin. I covered my face.

  Fire spread up the finer branches—I inched backward. If the fire was going to take the whole jungle, we desperately needed to get to the beach. A deep, gutting sense of loss hit me at the thought of the island’s incineration. Flames licked against the boulders around the clearing. That rock wall we’d built snuffed out the fire’s edges. Unless the wind shifted, unless that tree ignited, only our shelter would burn.

  Light and heat doused over us as the fire overtook what was left of the shelter. Henri wrapp
ed herself so small, she almost looked like a child.

  There was nothing left to do but watch as what was once our home—the one Henri and I had slaved over, finished with our own four hands—smoldered and burned.

  Smoke still spiraled up from the debris as morning light flooded the jungle. We picked through what was left, throwing into a pile our knife that had melted shut and wouldn’t pry open. Except for Henri’s things, in her own shelter, it was all we’d had that survived.

  Alex hadn’t said anything about the money. After everything, the life I’d claimed the money would give him hadn’t mattered more than the lighter, more than survival if the raft failed. More than us.

  He’d been looking for redemption, and maybe he’d found it.

  Henri’s skin was black with soot except for the red burns that covered her legs. Her hair had singed above her shoulders. I ached for a small hint of her perfection. The island had finally wrecked my flawless sister.

  She noticed me staring, and her hands went to her hair. Her fingers closed around the ends that were gone. Her lips parted.

  Alex grabbed a handful of Henri’s shirt and tugged her close. “You fucking started the fire, didn’t you?” I couldn’t blame him. We didn’t know where Henri’s sabotage began and ended—and he didn’t know the full truth.

  Tears left white lines across Henri’s blackened skin. Snot leaked from her nose as she sobbed. “I didn’t. I didn’t.”

  “She didn’t do it,” I said. “The wind. It must have carried the sparks from our fire.”

  He shook Henri like a doll, like he didn’t even hear me. “What’s it going to take to satisfy you? You want to see us all dead, is that it?”

  “Alex,” I said. “She was the one who went in after you. Henri pulled you out.”

  He stared at me. His arms went slack, his mouth opened, but no sound came out. He looked back at Henri. Took a step away. He staggered toward the beach.

  Henri let out a scream so shrill, the birds in the trees burst toward the sky. “You both spend all your time trying to make me feel like the terrible one, but you two are the absolute worst! What have I done that’s so horribly bad?”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to.

  “Oh, Alex’s hand? What part of I’m sorry did you not hear? Believe what you want, Em, but that was an accident. I didn’t want to hurt him—well, not badly.” Henri shrugged before she snapped to me and her voice climbed higher. “Am I totally innocent? Of course not. Yeah, so I burned the raft plans because I didn’t want to face home yet. And yes, when you started talking about a signal fire, I hid the lighter. When I realized we could use it to boil water, I planted it on Alex—I couldn’t just pull it out of my bag after you’d searched it with me—but you took for-fucking-ever to doubt him and search his stupid backpack. Does it make me a terrible person if I enjoyed it when you found the money and didn’t trust him? Am I worse than you, Emma, for leaving me behind?”

  She turned to stalk off, and I brought my hands to my mouth.

  At the center of the sweatshirt tied around her waist was a small spot of blood.

  “Henri. I think—you just got your period.”

  Henri turned, eyes stark and blue in her soot-covered face. I took a small step forward, and like a wild animal, she bolted through the trees.

  CHAPTER 34

  Henri shivered inside her shelter with her arms looped around her knees.

  “Are you okay?” I crawled under the canoe and reached out to her, but she knocked my grip away.

  “I feel so stupid,” she whispered.

  “Why? A lot of people would have thought the same.”

  She looked down at her concave stomach and crossed her arms. “I tried to do everything right. It’s not like I was just fucking with you the whole time. I ate the coconuts because I thought they were the only thing safe. You’re not supposed to eat raw fish, you know, when you’re pregnant. And I couldn’t drink that disgusting raft water, Em—I needed the coconut water to stay hydrated. I thought if I could just keep us here for a few months, I’d start showing, and when they found us, me with my big belly, everybody’d feel so sorry for me, they wouldn’t judge me anymore. They’d understand.”

  Henri wasn’t relieved—and I didn’t know why. She wasn’t pregnant. Never was. She didn’t have to worry about what to do and she didn’t have a reason to avoid home.

  “Henri, did you—did you want to be pregnant?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s not like I wanted to be a teen mom or anything like that. But if I was pregnant, that meant it was Jesse’s.”

  “But what were you going to do with a baby? Did you think you were going to use it to get him back?”

  “No.” She smeared tears across her cheeks. “I guess I wanted it, just for me. Until a few days ago, I didn’t have you anymore and I still don’t have Jesse. I wanted something that was just mine.”

  “A baby?”

  She looked at me.

  “A baby to keep you up all night,” I said. “To need you every minute of the day. To feed, and clothe and support. You would have had to explain it to every guy you dated for—for forever. I mean, if it just happened, that would be one thing. But to want it? At seventeen? Someday, yeah. But now?”

  “No.” She shook her head so hard, I felt her tears strike my arms. “It’s—it’s not that I want a baby.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  She blinked as if someone had slapped her. “I just don’t want to be alone. I just—I can’t. I can’t be alone.”

  I felt like that day when she was in my bedroom and told me I didn’t have any friends. The realization knocked the breath out of me.

  I’d seen the way Henri would latch on to the nearest person when I couldn’t be at her side. When a boy hadn’t landed her attention, she was mine, and usually I was so thrilled to have her back that I didn’t notice the obsessive way she demanded I drop everything for her.

  “It’s why I didn’t want you to leave the island,” she whispered. “It’s why I asked you to stay. And everything back home—all the boys, running from Jake to Gavin to Jesse. I couldn’t stop.”

  I knew then why Henri felt differently toward Mom after Dad moved out. Those fears that had always been inside her, the way Dad left so abruptly, so casually, he only made them rise to the surface. Henri saw in Mom exactly what she didn’t want to be—someone who got left.

  “How Dad left,” I whispered.

  Henri didn’t blink her tears away. She let them roll down her face. “It’s why I told you I wasn’t going to college. I wanted you to think I was doing something nice for you, that I was waiting for you—but that wasn’t it. I just couldn’t leave by myself. I needed you.”

  All that time, she’d made me think it was the other way around.

  “The house by the sea, the dozen cats, the faded curtains—I told you that story when you were like four or five, when Mom told us we were named after Dad’s aunts in Maine.”

  “What?” I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Maybe you planted the seed, but I—I needed you just as much as you needed me. I embellished that story. I added to it. I loved it. With Jesse, I did think I liked him, but when you started dating him, it wasn’t him I wanted. I think I just—I was afraid you’d love him more. More than me.”

  “Impossible,” she said. “I’ve never loved anyone like you—that’s why this year ripped me apart. But it’s a different thing anyway—the way I feel about him, the way I feel about you.”

  Henri held herself as if only her arms could keep her pieced together, and I saw that behind all her fake control—throwing herself at a teacher, carving our dad out of her heart—was something fragile. I wish we’d seen it sooner—my dad and Mr. Flynn, they had a responsibility to see it, to do better. Those moments were my sister spinning out.

  With the heel of her hand, she gr
ound viciously at her tears. “We’re all kinds of screwed up, aren’t we?” She laughed and wiped a hand under her nose.

  “How did we do this?”

  “We didn’t mean to hurt each other—at least I don’t think you did. Or maybe a little. But I never meant to hurt you—not before. After Gavin, okay, yes . . . I was kind of out for blood. I just couldn’t believe it. But even in the deep, dark pit of me being my absolute worst—I couldn’t hate you. I didn’t even know that about myself until I saw you with Alex. At the waterfall.”

  A weight built in my throat and sank through me. I stared up at her, bracing myself.

  “You kept sneaking off together. It was so obvious. So one day I followed you. When I first saw the two of you, wading into that clear water, it made me so raging furious—that you’d kept it from me, lied to me. But then Alex swam close, and the way he looked at you—the way you looked at him. I couldn’t ruin it. I wanted you to be happy so much more than I’d ever wanted to hurt you.” She closed her eyes, pushed her forehead against mine. Then looked at me and locked her hands over my shoulders. “Even if we loved each other in the wrong ways, Em, it doesn’t mean we loved each other any less.”

  I wrapped my arms around her, and we sank into each other, not letting go.

  “So, what if this is all true?” she said into my ear. “Where do we go from here?”

  “Home? Come home with me and we’ll figure it out.”

  She pulled back and said, “Okay.”

  A breeze blew through Henri’s shelter, taking with it our stray cats, our faded curtains, our missing marbles. I was sorry to see them go. But then again, I wasn’t.

  CHAPTER 35

  Alex said we should get started at sunset and sail through the night. We needed our first few hours free from the sun beating down on us.

  Henri cut tarps into pieces and sewed little bags using the last of her sewing kit. We filled the bags to their brims with coconut and cacao pods and caiman jerky. It felt safe having all that food—we had enough to last longer than our stamina ever could.