The Different Girl Read online

  “They used fuel.” May wrinkled her nose. “You can smell it.”

  To get all the machines outside, the classroom had been knocked to pieces. Because of the big cells on the roof, more fuel had been poured on the floor and set alight. A lot of what made our buildings didn’t burn very well, but even so the classroom now reminded me of the dead girl’s head. The head itself had disappeared. It must have been thrown on the pile.

  The kitchen looked almost as bad—the door was smashed and the windows kicked in, though it still had walls and a roof.

  We walked down to the courtyard. Gray ash rose in puffs around our feet. We just stared, blinking. Each place we looked only showed another thing gone.

  “There’s a lot of work,” muttered May.

  “We need to take naps,” said Eleanor. “We need a safe place from storms.”

  “I know,” said May. “There’s a lot to do.”

  “But it’s destroyed,” said Isobel. “We can’t live in the cave. We can’t.”

  May left us, all staring at the burned pile, and climbed onto the kitchen porch, stepping carefully.

  “Don’t hurt your feet, May!” I cried.

  May held out a hand which meant she wanted us to watch. She bent over and lifted a corner of one of the windowpanes—a wide square of scuffed plastic—sliding the rubbish on top of it into a pile. She held the window high for us to see, May herself an opaque shape behind the plastic, because of the scuffs and soot.

  “See?” she called. “It isn’t broken, just knocked out of the frame.”

  She shook the plastic between her hands, so it made a noise. May set it down and her face had a grim sort of smile.

  “We can put it back. We can take care of ourselves.”

  “How?” asked Isobel.

  “Just like that.” May waved at the kitchen. “It’s more broken than destroyed. We can fix it up. Come on.”

  May heaved the broken railings off the steps to clear a path for us to climb. We studied the size of the plastic square and the broken window and saw that she was right.

  “It will take nails,” said Eleanor.

  “Or glue, or ties,” said May. “But look at the door—same thing. Handle’s gone, but we don’t need a handle.”

  We turned our attention to the broken door, already thinking about what spots didn’t fit anymore, all of us crowding around. May picked her way inside and shouted to follow. Again, at first it seemed like only debris, but May kept pointing out the difference between tipped over and actually ruined. The machines had been pulled out, and the stove. But May squatted under the cupboards and called out that the pipes and wires were all still in the wall. She stood again, with her hands on her hips.

  “On a boat you fix things.”

  We stood where the kitchen table had been—it was tipped against the wall with two legs snapped off—trying to see the difference between how it had been, and how it was, and what was possible.

  “But this is a house,” said Isobel. “Do you know how?”

  May nodded. We waited for her to say more. We needed to know. When she spoke May’s voice was soft.

  “Will told me. It was a night when Cat was sad, after too much drink. Will knew I had heard Cat being sad, and he came down to my bunk and told me something to remember.” May tossed the hair out of her eyes. “He told me that one day he’d be gone.”

  “And he is gone,” said Eleanor.

  May nodded. “But he told me not to be sad.”

  We knew that May had been sad, that she was sad now from her shining eyes, but no one said so, because we knew May knew it, too. She let her breath out.

  “He told me to remember what was good. He said it would make me sad—he said it was how much you loved things that made you saddest—but that I should remember him anyway. Then he talked about that very day, which wasn’t special, but he told me about it like I hadn’t even been there, like a story. And in the story I saw us. Us. I saw our lives.”

  I looked at the littered floor and noticed the metal knob on a drawer that had been smashed to pieces. With both hands I pulled the knob free.

  “What are you doing?” asked Isobel.

  “We do need a handle,” I said, “because our hands are different. But we don’t need the same one as before.”

  The knob ended in a metal screw that seemed as big as the hole left in door. I stuck it in and felt the sharp tip catch. May came over to help and held the door, so I pinched hard and turned the knob, four times. When I let go it stayed in place. May let the door swing shut and opened it again, using the new handle. Then Eleanor and Isobel each tried it for themselves, pulling the door open and pushing it closed.

  “A different handle works very well,” said Eleanor, blinking.

  “Wait!” I went to Robbert’s satchel, which May had set down to pick up the window. I carried it back inside and Eleanor and Isobel used their flattened hands to clear a space on the countertop. I set the notebook where everyone could see.

  “Is there a message after all?” asked Isobel. “Did you remember something we didn’t see?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing new is in the notebook. Now is what’s new, and how we have to think. We have to find different handles. But the notebook can tell what handles there are to choose from. Look.”

  I opened one of the oldest file archives, whose name hadn’t meant anything: haven. Inside were more diagrams and designs, lists and pictures, all about the two buildings where we’d lived, showing everything about how they were made, and out of what, and why.

  “The files show what fits together,” I said. “Everything left over from the classroom, or what didn’t melt in the fire. Wood and pipe and wire. Even if they didn’t go together on purpose, we can find what fits.”

  “A handle is anything,” said Isobel. “Like cage and parrot.”

  “A handle is anything,” echoed Eleanor.

  I knew May couldn’t read the words, so I opened another file archive, the one named energy.

  “That’s about us,” said Isobel, pointing to an icon of the four of us standing in the sun.

  “But also Robbert’s roof cells. And the cooker and the kettle.”

  “And the lights?” asked Eleanor.

  “And the lights,” I told her. “And all of it together, down to the smallest part.”

  “Down to the thinking,” said May.

  “Is thinking small?” asked Isobel.

  “Small as air.” May tapped my head with her finger. “And just as big.”

  • • •

  We began where we were in the ruined kitchen, picking things up as we talked, setting what wasn’t broken after all off to the side, and going back and forth to look in the notebook to compare what we’d found to its files. May helped move the bigger pieces and wriggled to places and corners we couldn’t easily reach. The stairs to Irene’s room were smashed, but May still clambered up and called back that the roof was still whole, that we’d be safe from the rain.

  We were collecting pieces of our cots when I realized May had gone outside. When I called her name and she didn’t answer I hurried onto the porch, the others crowding after me. How long had she been gone? Had something happened to her? Should we go look? But then I saw her coming up the beach path, carrying a bucket made from a yellow nylon bag that slopped water as she walked. She set it down on a step, right next to a stack of coconuts we hadn’t seen her collect. I looked into the bag and saw it held a dozen colored shells. May crouched to look with me and poked her finger at one of the shells, which spit a stream of bubbles. The others came up to look for themselves.

  “Tons to eat in the tide pools,” May said. “I’ll make a fire later. And the rain barrel’s good, too, tipped over but doesn’t leak.”

  “There are more planks on the beach, May.” Eleanor pointed. “We found them on the rocks. We can reuse them.”

  “That’s the idea,” said May. “We can reuse it all.”

  But the moment of missing May had taken my thou
ghts somewhere else. May noticed I wasn’t looking at the shells. She stood up.

  “We have to make sure, May.”

  “I know we do.” May sighed. “Come on, then.”

  • • •

  The four of us climbed down the kitchen steps—careful because the rail was gone—and walked to the dock. The red dirt path looked no different. Only the planks of the dock showed any sign. The metal cleats had been torn out, and the dock was scraped and scarred across its tar-stained surface, the gouges almost writing, as indecipherable as the voices we had heard on the peak.

  I remembered watching Irene scale a fish Robbert had caught, the rough passage of her knife that pulled the fish skin tight and stripped it clean. Was that what had happened to the dock? Was that what had happened to us?

  Of Irene or Robbert we never found a thing.

  Only afterward, sorting through the mess, could we attach them to objects: Irene’s teacup, whole in a heap of smashed dishes, a hair clip, the little tub of sweet wax for her lips, canvas shoes. Since the classroom had been burned, we had less of Robbert, only what had been in the satchel. We wiped ourselves with the handkerchief and hung his shirt, once it was clean, next to Irene’s blue dress, for May to wear whenever they might fit.

  • • •

  The rest of that first day was filled with work we never imagined doing. We gave up living one now after the next, and turned our days to make tomorrow. That was the only way to fix things before rain, cook food before dark, and make sure everyone stayed safe.

  At night we sat in a line on the steps. The stars rolled past above us, bright stitches on a deep dark blanket. Determined to remember everything, we sang.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book began as a libretto for an opera, many years ago. My thanks to Liz Duffy Adams, Michelle Andelman, Shannon Dailey, Madeleine George, Joe on 23rd, Joseph Goodrich, Markus Hoffman, Todd London, Honor Molloy, Suki O’Kane, Julie Strauss-Gabel, Nova Ren Suma, Anne Washburn, Mark Worthington, and Margaret Young.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Acknowledgments