Wilder Girls: Chapters 1–4

It’s like that, with all of us here. Sick, strange, and we don’t know why. Things bursting out of us, bits missing and pieces sloughing off, and then we harden and smooth over.

Reese’s silver hand on my collar, heat roiling under the scales, but I throw her to the floor, shove my knee against the side of her face.

One of them kicks; I don’t know who. Clocks me in the back of the head and I’m careening onto the stairs, nose against the edge with a crack.

My grip loosens. So does hers, and we scrabble away from each other.

Implementation of a full isolation and quarantine effective immediately. Subjects to remain on school grounds at all times, for safety and to preserve conditions of initial contagion. Breach of school fence, save by authorized crew for supply retrieval (see below), violates terms of quarantine.

Implementation of a full isolation and quarantine effective immediately. Subjects to remain on school grounds at all times, for safety and to preserve conditions of initial contagion. Breach of school fence, save by authorized crew for supply retrieval (see below), violates terms of quarantine.

It’s them I pray for when I pass the bulletin board and brush two fingers against the note from the Navy still pinned there, yellowed and curling. A talisman, a reminder of the promise they made.

A scrape above us, on the mezzanine over the main hall. We all look up.

Now she has a lattice of scars across her cheeks and the beginning of an aura to her hair.

She doesn’t look any different—just a sore throat she can't shake and that serrated ridge of bone down her back, bits of it peeking through her skin—but I remember every second of it.

She’s lying back on the rocks, her eyes closed. Shirt riding up so I can see a pale strip of stomach, stark through the dizzy blur.

I roll my eye, leave the shotgun on the makeshift table, and join Reese and Byatt again by the stable door.

She never saved me a seat, but when I sidled in next to her, she’d smile and let me fall asleep on her shoulder.

Emmy was in sixth grade when the Tox happened, and one by one the other girls in her year have crashed headlong into puberty, their first flare-ups screaming and bursting like fireworks.

There’s a smattering of applause as Emmy dusts off her jeans.

There’s a story going around it had something to do with her girlfriend, Mary, who went feral last summer.

They couldn’t agree on what—one girl said it was hazy and gleaming, moving almost like a person in a slow, measured gait, and another said it was too big for that—but it spooked them enough that they gathered all the Gun Shift girls into the smallest room on the second floor, and they taught us how to crack a bullet open.

I’d have missed home if I were from a family like hers, all blue blood and money.

Dawn breaks quick and cold. A new layer of frost on the windows. Ice collecting in sheaves among the reeds.

It’s boredom, an idleness burrowing deep.

It’s startling, hearing this hallowed process rendered in bitter words.

It’s startling, hearing this hallowed process rendered in bitter words.

Out there it blossoms and spreads with a kind of joy. Unbridled and vicious and free.

It’s wrought iron, the bars close enough together that you can’t slide through, not even if you suck in hard, and it’s been up since the school was built some hundred years ago.

But since the Tox, the trees have crept closer, new saplings springing up, stretching through the fence like they’re reaching for us. Pines, some of them, dead needles dusting the frozen ground, and others, too, scaled and gnarled like nothing else.

I jump, my heartbeat ratcheting up, breath sharp in my lungs.

Another foghorn, and the others look ready, like this is the way it’s supposed to be, and then, out of the gray, like it’s pushing through some great fog, the prow of a ship.

There’s a big orange crane near the back—I can make it out now—and it’s lifting, extending, and we watch it hoist a pallet from the deck, over and out across the water, to the end of the pier.

“Pesticides?” I say, incredulous, but Julia and Carson are nodding, grim expressions to match Welch’s. “We’re starving because of pesticides?”

She’s just another girl left threadbare by the Tox, left worried and worn.