The Different Girl (3 page)

“He wanted to know why I asked why we went on different walks.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I was sorry.”

“But you’re not sorry,” Eleanor whispered, from my other side. “Because I’m not sorry, either.”

I nodded. I don’t think I was ever sorry, really.

“What did
he
say?” whispered Caroline.

“He said it was a good question.”

Everyone thought about that. Isobel whispered, from the other side of Caroline. “It is a good question.” We all nodded and thought the same thing she said next. “That means they don’t know what we’re going to learn, either.”

We heard Irene and stopped whispering. She came in, turned out the light, and bent over each of our cots in turn. First Isobel, then Caroline, then Eleanor, then me, leaning close to my face and whispering, “Go to sleep, Veronika.”

Then she pushed the spot behind my ear, with a click, like always, and I did.

2.

After that
we always started mornings with thirty-minute walks, with each of us going a different direction. At first we just described what we’d seen, but since we had become so good at looking, this began to take up the whole morning. After a week, Robbert and Irene asked us to do things differently, because whenever we got good at something they would decide to change. They had us ask one another questions about comparing smells, or light, or sounds, or times—so we had to think about places we’d been to before as well as the place we’d just been now, and think about both in a way we hadn’t either time. The questions weren’t hard, but they were surprising. Each day we took naps and then helped with dinner. On special nights we went for a second walk with Irene in the dark, and then had an extra-late class to talk about
that
. The island was different at night, so we looked forward to night walks more than anything.

One night we went out after there had been a storm. It almost never rained on the island. Robbert always said that was what he liked about it, even though he didn’t like to go out in the sun, either. We sometimes did see storms—the rain spattering against the windows and tapping on the roof like tiny hammers—but we never went out if it even looked like it might rain. Robbert always checked the weather very carefully on his notebook. For us the island meant sunshine and bright skies.

That night Irene took us to the beach, because all sorts of things could wash ashore in a storm, when the waves went higher than normal. We walked in a line, Irene leading the way with a flashlight. She would laugh and say her eyes “weren’t as sharp as you kids”—but for us the beam became another thing to look at, bobbing in time with Irene’s gait.

The beach path was sandy and soft, which meant we all took careful steps. Then the grass fell away and we stood between the dunes, looking out. The wave crests gleamed in the dark, tumbling onto the sand in lines of boiling foam. Different parts of the water moved at different speeds, and the waves were different heights and each one reached farther or stopped lower than the others. There were so many changes to see that all four of us stood motionless except for our flicking eyes and the wind whipping our hair.

Irene broke the spell, turning our attention to the sand, pointing out how high the storm had lifted the line of kelp and debris. She told us the tide was going out, so the sand would be dry at the top of the beach. Her feet dented its even surface, and she flicked the light for us to follow. We did, walking slow because sand is tricky. When we caught up, Irene aimed the flashlight at a pile of kelp. She pulled it aside and underneath lay a tennis shoe, the rubber bleached white and peeling. Irene poked at it and said we could keep looking by ourselves, as long as we stayed well away from the water.

We didn’t move. Irene sighed, and then told Isobel to stay with her and the three of us to go the other way, and to separate. She took Isobel by the arm and turned her to the debris. The three of us began to walk without knowing what we were looking for—what was worth studying and what wasn’t. After a minute, Caroline stopped and said she’d look around there. She crouched and began to poke at the kelp with one hand, like Irene. Eleanor and I kept walking until we’d gone the same distance as between Irene and Caroline, and then Eleanor said she’d stop, too. I kept walking by myself until the distance to Eleanor was the same as the distance from her to Caroline, and from Caroline to Irene. When I looked back, I saw that the beach curved more than I’d noticed. I couldn’t see Irene or Isobel at all. I couldn’t even see Caroline. I looked at Eleanor. She was crouched, but looking at me. I waved.

I turned around, careful not to look at the water, because if I looked too closely it would be hard to look away. Robbert called this pattern fixation. He laughed like it was a good thing, but always made an entry on his notebook, too. So I aimed my eyes at the sand, at what the storm had washed ashore: kelp, driftwood, plastic bottles, colored nylon rope, netting, lumps of Styrofoam—the usual things, but more of them than normal. I kicked at the bigger kelp lumps to see what was underneath—mostly more kelp. When I looked back, I couldn’t see Eleanor.

Since I knew she wasn’t far away, I kept going, eyes sharp for whatever Irene wanted to find. I was kicking so much that I almost didn’t notice the prints of someone else kicking before me. I stopped. We’d all been inside, and the tide and the rain had made the sand flat, so any kicking would have had to have happened since then. This meant the prints had been made by Robbert, except he’d been in his room. Hadn’t he? The line of kicked sand began down by the water, and the lowest ones had been half eroded by the waves. Because Robbert hated the water, he wouldn’t have gone near it, so the kicks weren’t his. The marks climbed all the way up the beach, into the grass. I looked behind me, but no one was there. I called to Eleanor but the wind snatched away the sound.

The grass was thick, but I pushed forward, the air whizzing with insects as my steps stirred them from where they’d sat. I became so interested in how the insects flew that I almost tripped when my foot kicked something soft. Before me lay a shape that didn’t make sense—all angles and bumps—swallowed by the grass like driftwood half buried in sand. I stared down, the spinning insects like thoughts that wouldn’t settle to sense. Then all of a sudden, like with a puzzle, one shape became a leg, another an elbow, and it was a girl.

In the grass at my feet was a girl. She sprawled facedown, all wet, clothes tangled from the sea, hair flat across her face like a black mask.

I said, “Hello.”

She didn’t move.

I said, “Hello” again. Finally I bent to touch the exposed skin of her arm. It was soft and colder than Irene had ever been.

I hurried back as fast as I could without falling. When I saw Eleanor I began to wave. She waved back, but then stopped when she heard me yelling.

“I found her!”

I don’t know why I expected Eleanor to know what I meant, but I yelled it anyway. Eleanor began waving in the other direction, to Caroline, and when I caught up to Eleanor we hurried together. I told her I found a girl washed up from the storm. When we reached Caroline, Irene and Isobel were coming from the other direction. I was in the middle of telling Caroline when they caught up. Irene told me to start over, slow and clear, telling
exactly
what I thought I found.

But I knew it was important, like the kitchen when a pot boils over, when instead of describing putting water in the pot and turning on the heat and putting in the noodles and then at last the boiling, that what you had to shout instead was just “the pot!”

“It’s a girl,” I told her. “I think she’s dead.”

Irene told the others to tell Robbert, and then she and I hurried down the beach. Her flashlight stabbed back and forth over our footprints, first three of us, then two of us and then just me. We got to the kicking marks and I pointed up to the grass. I didn’t know I’d gone so far. I started to apologize, but Irene told me to stay where I was. She climbed into the grass and knelt down. I couldn’t see her.

I could only hear the wind and the waves, the two sounds threaded together. Irene emerged with the girl in her arms. The hair still covered her face, and her limbs hung limp. I asked if she was dead.

“Not yet, Veronika. Quickly now.” Irene brushed past, faster than me even, carrying the girl, because my feet were so slow in the sand. When I reached the classroom porch the other three were lined up, watching through the screen. I took my place without saying a word.

They’d put the girl on the big table, Robbert on one side, and Irene on the other. All we could see was Irene’s back, and then beyond her the girl’s bare legs. The light was sharp and narrow, but we could tell the girl’s skin was brown, darker than any of us. The bottoms of her feet were crusted with sand and the skin was lighter, which made me think of the bleached tennis shoe. Robbert and Irene worked mostly around the girl’s head, but after a while Irene leaned over her feet and rubbed the feet with a cloth daubed with alcohol. Once she washed off the sand, we could see the scuffed skin was actually bright red.

They worked for two hours, and we watched the entire time. Mostly Irene’s and Robbert’s bodies blocked our sight, but sometimes when they reached for a tool or medicine we would get a wondrous flash of this girl’s different skin, whether smooth brown or torn raw. Finally Irene noticed us through the screen. She whispered to Robbert and came onto the porch, all of us backing up so she could open the door. Before we could say anything she whispered, “Let’s go to your bedroom.” She led us down the stairs and across the yard. The moon had come out, and the stars were bright. We followed her in.

Irene pointed to our cots and wouldn’t say anything until we were ready for bed. Usually we had to untie our own smocks and fold them and make sure about the folding, but tonight, her fingers much faster than ours, she had the other smocks untied before the three of us could untie Eleanor’s. Irene gathered them up as we lay down on our cots. She finished her folding and looked at us. We all looked back. Irene smiled, and spoke very carefully.

“The girl Veronika found in the grass is alive, and should be alive tomorrow. If she is, then she should be fine. She is probably from a ship, but whether she fell overboard, or whether it was wrecked in yesterday’s storm, we don’t know.”

“I don’t like accidents,” said Isobel. We were all thinking of the accident that had killed our parents. We didn’t know much more about what an accident actually was, only that they took people away and left others behind, just like this girl in the grass.

Caroline asked about the girl’s skin being a different color, and Eleanor asked about her different hair, and I was about to ask about her parents when Irene held up her hand.

“She swallowed a lot of water, and she’s been banged up by the rocks. We’ll know more tomorrow.”

She stood. This was her signal to turn off the light and put us to bed, but Isobel spoke again, in a whisper. “Do you know her name?”

“No. We don’t know anything.”

“Do you know how old she is?”

“We don’t.”

“Old as us?”

“We don’t know, Isobel.”

“Why does she look so different?” asked Caroline.

“Everyone looks different. I look different from you, and we all look different from Robbert. There’s nothing strange about it.” Irene turned off the light.

“What was under her skin?” I asked.

Irene looked at me. I almost thought she was angry, but then realized she didn’t know how to answer my question, or couldn’t decide.

“You’ve seen me cut my finger in the kitchen, Veronika.”

“But this was different. It was more. And more different than a look.”

Irene frowned. “What is a look?”

“A thing you see. On a surface. This was something else, wasn’t it? Something more.”

Irene watched me for a moment. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

• • •

When we woke the day was hot and the clock said two in the afternoon—at least five hours past our normal time, maybe because we’d stayed up late the night before. Irene’s hair was pulled back, and her face looked puffed and tired. I put on my smock and traded ties with Caroline. Irene waited on the steps, sitting with her teacup in both hands. When we were all behind her, she stood, but instead of leading us to the classroom, she went the other way, deeper into the island.

“Robbert is asleep. He was awake all night. The girl is asleep, too. We think she’s going to live, though it’s too soon to tell how badly she’s been hurt. All that means is we’re not going to have school in the classroom. We’re going on a walk, and then the five of us will talk about what we saw, just like a normal day. I’m going to wait here, and each of you will go a different direction. Come back in forty-five minutes.”

She sat on a palm log and took another swallow from her mug. Forty-five minutes was a very, very long time.

“Go,”
said Irene, with just a flick of impatience.

Without thinking why, I went toward the beach. Eleanor wanted to walk that way, too, but I didn’t stop, and after a few steps she shifted to the woods. Normally I would have stopped, or at least thought about stopping, but this time I didn’t.

The tide was halfway up the beach, but there was still dry sand where I could walk. I went the same way I had the night before, now under an open blue sky, looking for details. I had come back to finish what I’d started by finding her—though what there was left to finish, I couldn’t imagine. Perhaps it was because I couldn’t imagine that I was determined to look.

Half-buried shells and coral lay scattered by the waves, like the remains of writing mostly wiped away. The sand above the waterline still held a jumble of footprints, mine and Irene’s—her prints pushing deeper when she’d been carrying the girl. I looked for the print of another foot altogether, the girl’s bare, injured foot, but she must have been crawling. That’s why her tracks were odd, which was why I even noticed them.

I climbed into the grass. In the sunlight where she’d lain was a tiny place, just a flattened circle. In a day or two, the grass would spring back and nothing would be left to tell what had happened. Then I saw, half hidden in the grass, a green nylon bag. It was dusted in sand, which fell off like powder when I picked it up. It was the size of a big book, with a zipper and a strap. I unzipped one side and peeked in. Then I sat down in the grass and unzipped it all the way.