The Different Girl (11 page)

Irene took my hand, too, then, and we were quiet the rest of the way. At the crest of the path we saw the kitchen windows with a light already on. At one point Caroline stumbled, kicking sand. Irene held tight, steadying her as if nothing had happened, and I looked to find Caroline staring at me. Then she nodded past me at a break in the dune grass, and started blinking. I almost turned to look in the same place but knew enough not to. No one stumbled the rest of the way.

• • •

After dinner we watched Robbert change the bandages on May’s feet and sat outside to see the stars. May fell asleep on the steps, leaning against the rail, and Robbert carried her to bed. He came back a few minutes later and stood listening to the rest of us sing about clouds.

Fluffy and puffy so high in the air,

We drift on the wind with nary a care.

Tall as a castle and white as the snow,

Where the wind takes us, that’s where we go.

Robbert said he felt like walking to the beach, and that he would see us in the morning. We waved good night and then Irene stood with her teacup, and we all went to get ready for bed. When we were on our cots with our smocks off and folded, Irene turned out the light and leaned back against the counter. She pulled out her clip and shook her head so her hair came loose around her face.

“You know that before sleep I sometimes tell you something—something to think about and wake up to. Tonight, I’m going to tell you all a story. It’s a real story, something that really happened, a long time ago, that I think you ought to know. Something you can think about.”

“Is tonight different?” asked Eleanor.

“Tonight is tonight,” replied Irene, “and not last night.”

“And not tomorrow,” said Isobel. “But tomorrow we’ll be able to think of the story.”

“That’s right. Lay back now.”

Irene poured herself a cup of water from the filter. We all got settled. Irene finished her water and put the cup in the sink. I could hear the night outside. I could hear Irene breathe.

“Once there was a girl—”

I wanted to know how old the girl was and what color her hair and if she had a name, but once we lay down interruptions weren’t allowed.

“—and she lived in the part of the world where people knew things. Now, everyone knows something, but in this part of the world some people knew more. Invisible things, secrets a person couldn’t see without learning, without
school
. Like your school. The people who went to those schools mixed together with the people who didn’t, the people who believed—well, who just believed. Sometimes that worked out but other times, and eventually most of the time, the school people had to keep themselves as hidden as the secret things they knew.”

Irene stopped talking for long enough that I wondered if it was the end, but finally she kept going.

“Eventually people didn’t know who knew things and who didn’t, because those people were hiding, because those people who didn’t learn became frightened of what they couldn’t see, frightened about what was real—what was possible. And people who get frightened become angry. So the girl who knew things also knew she had to stay hidden. Because if anyone saw her, they would hurt her for the things she knew. So she left her home to find another. She sailed away. She even flew in an airplane. Just to make sure. But you can never be sure. You can never be sure. And that’s what the girl learned, and she never forgot it, no matter how old she got, or how happy she was.”

Irene sighed, and pushed herself up from the counter. The story was finished, even though I still had all my questions. She came to Isobel, then Caroline, then Eleanor. Her shadow passed over my face, and I felt her hand behind my ear. Irene dropped to a crouch and whispered.

“I watched you, Veronika. I saw you stand. You did so well, honey. You didn’t need me at all.”

I wanted to tell her it wasn’t true, that I needed her forever, but by then I was already gone.

7.

It was three days
until I could visit Caroline’s spot in the dune grass. The days in between went almost like always, with smocks and breakfast, and walks and class and naps and more class and dinner and the porch and finally sleep. The difference was May, whether she was at breakfast or still sleeping, whether she sat with us on the porch, or whether she went walking alone to the woods. Most of all, the four of us felt May’s presence from Robbert and Irene.

They would go in the other room or walk outside and close the door, but sometimes the words came without warning, unexpected even to them. Irene would give Robbert a look and he would snap, just like he’d burned his finger on a wire.

“Look, I haven’t heard anything.”

“But what does that
mean
?”

“Irene—it could still be the storm. It could be their receiver—”

“You’re sure about ours.” All four of us remembered where Robbert had been with the tools.

“I am.”

“And what if it’s something else?”

And that was when Irene’s gaze went through the window to the classroom where May lay still asleep.

We spent that morning talking about words and how May’s words didn’t sound like Robbert’s or Irene’s, or ours. It wasn’t anything we had noticed, because we’d been able to understand her perfectly well, but today Irene focused on all the variations. One example was how May didn’t pronounce the
g
in words that had “ing” at the end. Another was how her letter
s
was spoken with an invisible
t
in front of it, so “sad” became “tsad.” Irene explained where May’s tongue was placed inside her mouth to make each sound, and showed us with her own mouth how it happened. Robbert’s questions were about how our hearing turned a wrong sound into a right one. He made up sentences as if May were saying them to test our making sense.

Irene explained that ways of speaking came from different places, and that each way was like a sign announcing who a person was and what their life was mostly like and what they were most likely to believe. Isobel asked what May’s way said about May, but before Irene could answer, Eleanor asked what Irene’s way said about Irene, and then Caroline asked why, if there was an agreed upon best way—the way we spoke, for example—anyone spoke a different way at all?

Irene held up her hand, which she did when we asked too many things at once. “May’s life has been different. She hasn’t been to the same kind of school.”

“Why not?” asked Isobel.

“Because she lived on a boat. She wasn’t in one place.”

“Why didn’t her uncle Will teach her?” asked Caroline. “Or his friend Cat?”

“I’m sure they did,” Irene replied. “But they had their own work. And our school here is special. You all know more than May does. Just because she’s lived in places you haven’t, it doesn’t mean that what she thinks about things is right.”

“What does she think that isn’t?” I asked, very much wanting to know.

“That depends on the thing,” said Irene.

“It probably depends on the time of day,” said Robbert, “and the weather, too.”

Then he stood up, stuffing his notebook—because he’d been making lots of notes the entire time—into his satchel. He slung it over his shoulder and went off to his machines. We all waved good-bye, and Irene had us all do experiments where one of us left out every other word and the others tried to guess the sentence. It was easy until Irene began whispering in our ears to describe invisible things, like ideas and feelings, but even then we were able to guess because there was nothing on the island that the four of us didn’t know.

As we called out our guesses I saw this was a sign about us, like the perfect sounding of our words. It was a happy thought, because right answers made Irene smile, but also because knowing this about ourselves meant that May’s words—because that was where she lived—were themselves sounds of the sea, every bit as much as the crash of a wave or the cry of a gull.

• • •

More often than not May was with us, partly because she no longer needed so much sleep and partly because she finally decided to become our friend. Now that we knew about her missing school, we wanted her to answer questions, too, and get smarter. But Irene didn’t ask May questions often, and when she did they weren’t about the assignment. For her part, May wanted to know about Irene and about Robbert. What we first tried to tell her—how they ate and talked and moved and worked—wasn’t what May wanted to hear. What she did want to hear, like where Irene and Robbert were born, and why they had left that place and come to the island, we couldn’t say. Sometimes when we were alone, on walks or on the porch, May whispered questions about us as well, about why we were our size, or why some of us did different things. We always did our best to answer: about testing and control, or about being just the balanced size for our arms and legs—just like her—but our answers never made May feel better, at least not the way answers did for us.

Irene was good at not talking about what she didn’t want to, of course, so when she avoided May’s questions the rest of us would change the subject back to school. Even though May and Irene each kept trying to get the other to say something she wouldn’t, we were all still happy to have everyone together, especially with Robbert and Irene being snappy when they thought they were alone.

“I just don’t think we can,” Irene had whispered, standing with Robbert in the courtyard. She had taken him a cup of tea and stood with him while we watched from the kitchen through the screen.

“What are they saying?” May had asked, but we were all trying to hear.

“It probably depends,” said Robbert, talking into his teacup.

“We don’t know where they’d be going next.”

“No, we don’t. That depends on how much they know.”

“Then we can’t.”

“But what else—Irene, we can’t pretend—”

“She’s a child.”

“Who
knows
. If one word—one word, Irene—”

“If we’re not sure, we can’t,” Irene repeated, and walked away. When she got to the kitchen we were in a line by the table, except for May.

“Everyone ready for a walk?” In the time it took to climb the steps, Irene had found her smile, the same we always saw.

• • •

That day we walked to the woods, and the next to the dock, and the one after that to the cliffs. Irene split us up like she had before, into groups of three, with her in one and May in the other. The two of us in each group changed every time, though for some reason I was never with Caroline and May together. When I was with Irene, we always talked about what we had observed. I also observed Irene: when her smile went away, or when she stared out from the cliff tops, or when her hand fell to our heads or our shoulders, patting or caressing us, which she never used to do except when we were going to sleep. In all these moments I felt, like a bone beneath skin, the sadness Irene had shown with the ruined bird.

With May it was more difficult to make observations because May never wanted to make them and, instead of making them, wanted to talk. We wanted to talk, too, but we also wanted to please Irene, so walking with May became like my visit to the dock, where I had two tasks and no rules to choose between them except my own.

Part of me—like a coconut sent rolling down a hill—had been thinking about this problem ever since Robbert had made a point of asking me
why
. I knew that I hadn’t
known
there were two tasks—the second task, my own desire, had just appeared, and somehow I had made it more important. I could be surprised by thoughts I didn’t expect, because the world was more than school. May was proof enough of that—or, even more, proof that our real school was the world.

• • •

I stood in the woods with Isobel and May. Isobel and I were comparing the stiff plates of palm bark with the spiny leaves, needle-tipped and edged with tiny teeth. May wasn’t interested at all. While we squatted, she glanced back at Irene.

“What is she doing?”

Irene was studying another palm trunk with Caroline and Eleanor.

“With
Robbert
,” May said, interrupting me before I could say.

“Robbert isn’t here,” said Isobel.

May blew air through her nose. “You said there was a plane crash. Where did the plane come from? Where was it going? Who else was there?”

“Our parents,” I said.

“Who
were
your parents?” asked May.

“Mothers and fathers who loved us,” said Isobel. May shook her head impatiently.

“What kind of
people
? What did they swear to? Where did they live? Why were they leaving? Who has a plane? There isn’t any place for a plane to land on this island. How did you get
here
?”

Isobel and I both stood. I tried to remember what Robbert and Irene had told us.

“Where they came from it rained all the time,” I said. “And it was cold, and they wanted to live with the sun shining, where it was dry.”

“What is ‘swear to’?” asked Isobel.

May pursed her lips. “That’s
everything
.”

“Our parents are the kind of people who speak just like us,” Isobel told May. “You speak differently.”

“So do you,” May replied.

“We don’t.”

“Well you
sound
different.”

“Did Uncle Will and Cat speak like you?” asked Isobel. “Did they say ‘
black
sand’
or ‘
blok
tsand’
?”

May frowned at how perfectly Isobel had imitated her sounds. Then she shook her head and laughed, but it was a short laugh and she crossed both arms over her chest. She nodded at Irene.