The Different Girl Read online

  “Caroline!”

  Her head tipped back to follow a rising gull. In a terrible, silent instant her balance changed and the weight of her body turned on her weak leg. Then Caroline toppled out, straight off the edge and down. She struck the rocks halfway and bounced, spinning like a star, into the foaming sea.

  11.

  We stayed inside the cave until May’s water jug was empty, almost three days. Then she told us to wait and climbed out alone. We sat together until May reappeared, peeking around the edge. She called to us: no one else was on the peak and she was going to take a look farther down. We wanted to come with her, because if anything happened to May we couldn’t get out of the cave. But getting us all in the cave had been so difficult that it made sense to wait until we were completely sure of being safe before we went to all the risk and trouble. May promised to be careful and quick, and she was gone.

  “Besides,” said Eleanor, “if there is trouble, we’d be just as stuck out there as we’d be stuck in here without May.”

  “And May is good at sneaking,” agreed Isobel.

  Since we were good at learning, that was what we did while we waited, thinking of everything that had happened so fast. It was what the three of us had been doing since we came to the cave.

  We had also all taken naps, because a short nap every day kept our systems cycling clearly. May slept longer than we did, curled on her blanket in the back of the cave, but she stayed awake longer than we did, too, for more hours at a time. She spent a lot of time, while we talked and even while she talked with us, carving lines and shapes into the white dust. Sometimes we could tell what she carved—waves, boats, sun, trees—and other times we had to ask: a curve of lines was the wind, and a series of circles was sunlight. May also drew things that, when we asked what they where, only made her shrug. At first we thought she was carving secrets or even that she was still shy, but when we asked, May would shake head and tell us no, she was just drawing.

  “But what are you drawing?” asked Isobel.

  May shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “How can you draw without knowing what it is?” I asked her.

  “How can you take a walk without knowing where it’s going to end?” she answered.

  “But that’s not the same,” I said. “A walk goes to the place it ends but it also goes to the places in between.”

  “Exactly,” said May, scratching again with her sharp rock. Before I could say I didn’t think it was exactly anything, May stopped scratching and tapped the rock to get the dust off. “And just because I don’t know now doesn’t mean I won’t know ever, either.”

  I almost understood—because we learned by adding one thing to another thing to make a third we hadn’t known before—except May didn’t add things like we did. She felt them, like the weight of an object in the dark of a pocket, hidden but still at hand.

  That was May’s everything. That was May’s heart.

  • • •

  Eleanor had set the satchel on the blanket. May hadn’t said anything about the satchel or the notebook it held, because she was too busy yelling at me for climbing out on my own and then at Isobel and Eleanor for helping. When she’d come back in the cave May had yelled and yelled, with tears on her face, about how it wasn’t going to be her fault if we kept being so stupid. May pushed her way to the back of the cave and threw herself down on the blanket. We didn’t know what to do. A minute later May surprised us all by saying she was sorry.

  “For what, May?”

  “For her. For not saving her.”

  “But you couldn’t have saved her,” I said. “Could you?”

  May shook her head.

  “Caroline’s leg was damaged,” I told the others. “And her arm. And her face. She was damaged all over.”

  “I shouldn’t have let her get near the edge. Aren’t you supposed to stay away from the edge?”

  “You said all that changed,” said Eleanor. “You were right.”

  “We have to deduce and make decisions,” said Isobel.

  “Caroline decided the notebook was more important than being careful,” I said.

  May shook her head. “Don’t you care? Don’t you care about them?”

  “Of course,” said Isobel.

  “Maybe Irene and Robbert are hiding, too,” said Eleanor.

  “Maybe they are,” said Isobel.

  We waited for May to agree with us.

  “They aren’t,” she whispered. “Believe me.”

  I remembered Caroline’s words. Not that she didn’t know, but that she couldn’t understand.

  I didn’t understand her being gone, either. I had seen her fall. Now her part of any conversation would always be unsaid, and the direction she would have gone walking would always be empty. Her absence extended in lines of numbers made of smoke, backward in memory and forward in futures never to occur.

  “Now there are only three of us,” said Isobel. “We do still have to be careful.”

  I touched May’s knee. “There are four.”

  But May only shut her eyes, which was her way to stop talking.

  • • •

  Though finding the notebook had cost Caroline her life, no one moved to take it from the satchel, much less turn it on and look inside. For Eleanor and Isobel, using the notebook for ourselves meant May was right, and Robbert and Irene were gone. But I remembered that finding the notebook had come from Caroline’s dream—which made me think of how Caroline was different, and how I was different, too. I made my own decisions about time. I made decisions about May. Where the other girls, given an assignment, pursued a result, I had learned to see possibility.

  So I pulled the notebook from the satchel and set it on my lap, where everyone could see. The keys were made for more—and thinner—fingers, but I could still make it work, one touch at a time. While the notebook powered up, Eleanor took everything else from the satchel and spread them out, like we’d spread the things from May’s bag: Robbert’s crumpled shirt, two pencils, a plastic sharpener, an empty case for his glasses, a scrap of cotton he used as a handkerchief, the notebook’s charging rod, and a little flat wallet. Eleanor unzipped the wallet and folded it open. Each side held a row of metal rods, with different tools at either end.

  “Look,” said Isobel, pointing to one of the tools.

  She extended her arm to show the tiny crescent-shaped spot in the crook of her elbow—in all our elbows. The tool’s tip was perfectly shaped to fit.

  “What else is inside there?” asked May.

  “The three of us,” I said. “And all we’re made of.”

  But once the notebook came alight, nothing was different from how it always looked—certainly there was no new note that told us what to do. The little windows that tracked weather and sea currents had frozen, because they depended on satellites and needed the aerial, but nothing else had changed. I saw the same large archives, one for each of us, and partitions for the many different subjects, like cognition or syntax or energy, that went beyond any one girl. But none of that was new, none of it now.

  “Is there a message?” asked Isobel. “Does it say when they’ll find us?”

  I shook my head but still began to open the archives, though I didn’t know what I hoped to find. The others stared closely at the screen, and even May scooted nearer to look over my shoulder, but all I found was what we knew was there: diagrams, numbers, diaries, pictures, charts. After a few minutes May leaned back on the blanket. The rest of us searched on without saying a word, for hours, until the sun began to set. At last I darkened the screen and returned the notebook to Eleanor, who slid it gently into the satchel.

  One of the three of us always kept awake in the cave for our hearing. But it turned out there was nothing to hear—no voices, no whispering, no more crashing or loud bangs. Only the waves below and the squawking birds. We came to recognize their different calls pretty quickly, until we could tell which birds were around the cave or wanting to come in—because they did still
think of the cave as theirs—without having to see them. We asked May if any birds had come in, when she’d been in the cave alone. She said she’d found a few one morning, but that as soon as she sat up they’d been scared away. She imitated herself sitting and then raised both arms at once, making a loud flapping sound like an explosion of wings and feathers. May laughed out loud and made the sound again.

  “That was the last of those birds. They’ll think twice for a long while. Especially if they think I’m hungry. Because I’m a lot bigger than they are!”

  “Robbert and Irene never ate birds,” said Eleanor.

  “Do you eat birds on a boat?” asked Isobel.

  “Hell no,” said May. “Too many feathers, no meat, and you’d have to cook ’em forever. And you can’t cook here at all.”

  “I’m sorry there’s no more rice,” I said, because May had eaten the rest of the rice our first night in the cave.

  May shrugged. We sat for a moment, and May’s stomach started to make noises. No one said anything, because we had heard those noises before, but May slapped her stomach each time and told it to be quiet. Then she laughed in the back of her throat. “Maybe I’ll try seagull after all.”

  • • •

  Aside from naps, we found other ways to divide the time. Since my incident with sand I was extra cautious about all the dust in the cave. May wrinkled her nose and shrugged, but I explained that the smell was less important than the particles in the air being small. Eleanor volunteered her smock, so we untied it and asked May to use it to wipe the dust from our bodies, and especially our hair. May wiped us each twice a day and said it was just like waxing the deck of the Mary, except without the wax. Once we wiped off the dust, each of us sat with our hair in the sun for at least an hour, taking special care because that meant sitting near the edge. Since we could each go many days without sunlight, this was less about survival than being responsible with our time. But we all agreed that schedules and survival went together.

  Taking care of the dust was the first cooperation we had all done since May had helped us into the cave, but we ended up being able to help her, too, even though it took a lot of explaining on her part. When she’d lived in the cave by herself, May had been able to climb back onto the peak and use a nook in the rocks for her toilet, even though it wasn’t a chemical toilet like Robbert and Irene had behind the kitchen. But when she tried to climb out now we all wanted to know why, and even when she explained we all agreed it was too dangerous, so we worked out a way for us to hold her arms while she squatted over the edge of the cave. When she was done we pulled her in. We were all very curious about what she was doing—questions Irene had never been interested in answering. May wasn’t any different, except to say it was always easier on the boat for Will and Cat, but she wouldn’t explain why that was either.

  May wouldn’t explain a lot of things, just like she didn’t want to talk about what had happened that last day. Whenever we turned to her for answers she would only shrug. But three days is a long time to hide your thoughts and eventually May did talk, or at least stopped trying not to listen. I watched how her face changed, especially when we talked about our parents, because what had happened to them could help us understand what had happened on our island.

  But what I realized most by watching May was what it meant, even if she came from a different, bigger world, that she’d spent almost all of it on her boat. The more we wondered about the angry people who’d swept like a storm across our island, the more I saw—in what May didn’t know, either—that her uncle Will had made his own rules for being careful, which had kept May out of sight, especially when they met other boats or stopped in port, especially ports with schools that might have taken May away. It was just like how Robbert and Irene, we now realized, had hidden us—from the supply boat, from the rest of a changing world.

  That was when I remembered the head. I had set it to the side in my thinking, but when we recalled that last morning and our walk on the beach with Irene—to the very moment when we’d seen the boat—we saw what we’d all forgotten: the trail of Irene’s and Robbert’s footsteps, that earlier in the morning they’d found something important enough to make them go back right away.

  When I told them what I’d found in the classroom, Isobel and Eleanor had my same questions. Who was it? What had happened to her? What did the red paint mean? When May didn’t ask any questions I asked if she could answer ours. She shook her head. I asked if she’d ever seen anyone else like the head—like us—ever before. She shook her head again.

  “That’s why May was so surprised to see us,” said Isobel. She made me describe the head again, especially all the differences—the shape, the color, the differing style of hair, the mouth.

  “Who could have been her parents?” asked Eleanor.

  We couldn’t know. May shifted, tugging at the blanket.

  “There are stories,” she said.

  “Stories of what?” asked Isobel.

  “About—” She stopped and found another word. “About girls like you. People tell them in towns. On the wire.”

  “So you did know about girls like us,” said Isobel. “Then why did you scream?”

  “I didn’t know anything,” said May. “I’d only heard, but hearing isn’t real—and everyone knows not to trust it. And nothing like that—like you—is tolerated, not any more, not in any towns. Will didn’t like any talk about it, especially not me, because that gets you seen, and we lived quiet.”

  We waited for her to say more. May shook her head.

  “But once . . . once there was a boat that left Port Orange.” May wiped her nose on the back of her hand, and then the hand on her shorts. “That’s all I know.”

  But it wasn’t. We waited for her to go on and she finally did. “Will traded with them. He and Cat went over and I watched. It kept outside the harbor, just like us—and big, with a dish, and weapons—rockets, and that’s business. When Will and Cat came back I asked what it was like, and they said not to worry, they’d made a good trade. I wanted to know about the boat, how big it was, what it did. Cat said they made things. Will told him to be quiet. I never knew what Cat meant, but maybe now I do. That was the last time we went to Port Orange. Someone saw us trading and we had to scoot.”

  “What is scoot?” asked Eleanor.

  “We had to go.”

  “Where is the big boat now?” asked Isobel. “Did that girl fall off it?”

  “She must have,” I said, “because she washed up. But that doesn’t explain the paint.”

  No one spoke. While the others might have been thinking of paint, I thought of how rarely Irene ever showed us what she felt.

  They had found the head. They saw what had happened to that girl and knew what might happen to us. It must have made them sad and angry and scared, but all we had seen was Irene with her same smile and same voice waking us up and going for a normal walk. And if the boat hadn’t come, what would she have said about their footsteps coming to a stop? Would Robbert have buried the head like he buried the plank, to preserve our ignorance?

  I looked at May, crouched with her knees up to her chin, my story weaving through her thoughts just like her story weaved through mine. Did her silence reflect an Irene I’d never known?

  • • •

  When May came back the rest of us were ready.

  “I looked all around,” said May. “I think it’s safe.”

  “Did you find Irene?” asked Eleanor. “Did you find Robbert?”

  But May only wanted to know who was coming first, telling everyone else how to help and how to be careful and how we could see everything for ourselves when we were finished.

  I went last, as I had been the last to arrive, waiting alone in the cave while May made a special trip with the satchel and blanket and the plastic tubs. The birds glided past outside, waiting to get their cave back.

  “Come on,” May said, swinging into view. “My arms are wobbly.”

  But she was smiling, a tired
smile on a dusty face. I followed every direction until I was around the curve, clinging to the rock with May’s free hand to brace me. Isobel and Eleanor waited on the peak, well back from the edge, and waved when I appeared.

  “Don’t wave back,” grunted May.

  I tried to say that of course I wouldn’t, but she just told me to put my hand there. Soon I was next to the others, watching May pull herself to safe ground. She slapped the grit from her hands and sighed.

  “That’s enough of that.”

  The rocks above us were scratched where the aerial had been torn from its perch and dragged down. May began to walk, but the three of us stayed where we were.

  “There’s nothing to see,” May called. “Come on.”

  But we had to look. To be careful we held hands and took small steps toward the edge. The tide was out, so the black rocks were exposed, hard and sharp, but May was right. I picked out the jagged spur where Caroline had struck halfway down and where she would have landed, searching for even the smallest sign. There was nothing. The waves had taken every part of her away.

  “Come on,” called May, and she started down.

  • • •

  The high grass had been flattened on either side of the path, and we passed spots where it was burnt. I remembered the column of smoke, which was like listening to Irene, when we could predict her whole sentence just by the first few words. The burnt grass and the memory of smoke were the same first hints of what we knew we’d find below.

  We stopped in the meadow.

  “O no!” cried Isobel. All three of us were blinking. “O no!” cried Eleanor and I together.

  That the sky was vast and blue made what we saw so clear, and all the normal sounds of the island seemed like an acceptance of what had happened. Was everything this temporary?

  “We’re lucky the fire didn’t catch across the whole island,” said May. “I don’t think they cared—they just piled things on and let it go.”

  In the center of the courtyard lay a great burned heap of ruined things. It looked like everything from both buildings had been hauled into a pile and set on fire. What hadn’t been burned outright lay twisted and blistered and melted and black, and covered in ash.