The Girls of No Return (12 page)

I stood there dumbly, the toilet scrubber dangling from my hand. Suddenly, the Bathhouse seemed dark, the other girls very, very far away. I walked over to one of the stalls and knelt, trying to look busy.

But Boone heard the question I was too afraid to ask.

“Whatever,” she said. “You'll hear about it in Circle Jerk, anyway. The lumberyard office,” she said. “I burned the bastard down. I waited until old Lenny the caretaker left the counter for a smoke break, and I torched it.”

“So, um, what. Like with gasoline?” I imagined Boone heaving a jug of kerosene toward a run-down building. I imagined the lighter in her hand. The way her eyes must have lit up.

“Nosy, aren't you,” she said. “Simpler than that. Matches and empty cigarette cartons. I built a little campfire in the middle of the office. It didn't take long to burn. An hour, tops.”

“It's always over too fast,” I said without thinking.

“Yeah.” Boone was staring at me now. “That's right. But what do
you
know about it?” She took a step closer to me. “You've been to some dark places,” she whispered, “haven't you?”

The door to the Bathhouse suddenly opened and two I-bankers flounced in, giggling wildly. They stopped when they saw us. Boone pointed the mop handle toward the door, and they hustled back out, but the moment had passed. I was saved.

That's the thing about secrets. Sometimes you have to keep the sharpest things hidden.

Later, when we walked out of the Bathhouse and into the waning light, the ground around us smelling fragrant and full, Boone swept her arm out in front of her, taking it all in: the pines, the dried needles on the ground, the stumps of fallen trees that were still beaded with sap, the splinter of Bob that we could see from where we stood. “You know,” she began, “the only reason I'm here and not in juvie is because some Mormons took pity on the poor Minster delinquents —
Mill Casualties
they called us — and set up a fund with the Department of Juvenile Corrections to send us to places like this. Can you believe it? All of this,” she said, “for one hour's work. Now that's what I call efficient.”

“You like it here?” I asked. This was surprising.

“Who wouldn't?” she said. “It's our own Eden up here. You'll see. Colder, sure, and the snakes don't talk. At least, not the ones with scales.”

She raised her eyebrows at me and flicked her tongue out from between her teeth, hissing. Then she laughed and walked away.

 

 

AS THE DAYS WORE ON, I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO MAKE OF
the conversation I'd had with Boone in the Bathhouse. She hadn't mentioned the girl she'd killed, and I'd been too afraid to ask. I was starting to sense that there were layers to Boone's anger, her potential for harm. I hoped that our talk had kept me somewhere near the topmost layer, where I was safest.

With Gia, though, it was different. With Gia, I wanted to dive to the depths.

I was used to the general transparency of high school. Girls like Jules, Karen, and Gwen were as familiar to me as cutout paper dolls: the Cheerleader, the New Ager, the Goth. Boone was a special case, but I was beginning to feel like I had her number too. I would say that I had a five percent chance of guessing what she'd do or say at any given moment, and that was a huge improvement from the way things stood when I first got to Alice Marshall.

But Gia. Everything she said was new and unexpected. It was like I was being offered a delicate gift every time she spoke. And she
got
me. I saw that the first time we talked. When she said she sometimes felt like she was narrating her life, like she was standing outside and watching herself, I knew what she meant. And when I told her I felt vacuum-wrapped, she understood what I meant too. Sometimes, late at night as we rolled cigarettes next to each other on the beach, we'd be speaking so quickly, interrupting each other with words that overlapped and blended — almost into their own language, it seemed — that I felt light-headed.

We still didn't hang out during the day, though. Gia was always surrounded by her cabinmates and a loud group of Fifteens who clearly idolized her, and I didn't want to crowd her. Plus, I thought she was probably still shielding me from Boone's wrath. For at least a month, Boone and Gia did a pretty good job of managing, aside from meals and the occasional campfire, to never be in the same place at the same time. It was quite a feat, really. The only time that they were forced to be in the same room together was during Circle Share, which gave our particular session the gritty allure of a Spanish bullfight.

They never spoke to each other, but sometimes they would say things to other people that sounded like thinly veiled messages. Once, while a girl named Sara was talking about how her mother clearly preferred her sister, Boone interrupted. “It sounds like your sister's a prissy little bitch,” she said, looking directly at Gia. “Does she think she's better than you? She's not. We all walk the same road.”

“Sara,” Gia interrupted smoothly, “I would worry about your own issues, not your sister's. Envy is an unattractive accessory.” She looked at Sara sympathetically when she said this, and Sara blushed, worrying the frayed cuff of her jean jacket.

This kind of skirmish didn't happen every day, and it was subtle enough that Amanda never knew what was really going on. Those of us who were looking for it, though, could see exactly how much Boone hated Gia. It was palpable: a heavy, humid hatred that practically radiated from her skin. I wasn't sure how Gia felt. Sure, she gave back everything Boone threw at her, but her voice held less vinegar, her eyes less fire. Sometimes, it seemed like she couldn't care less. And that was the most impressive thing of all.

The nail that Boone had pushed Gia up against on that first day was still sticking out of the wood by the door, like those historic battleground markers you pass on the side of the road. I never saw Gia look at it, but I caught Boone staring at it once from across the room. Her look was hard, like she was accusing the nail of failing her in some way.

 

It was early August, that time of the summer when it's not yet dark at dinner but no longer light as you brush your teeth before bed. Dusk stretched across the grounds for hours, bathing everyone in a gray that was sometimes murky, sometimes luminous. On the evenings when the light around us was clean and the shadows were kept at bay, Margaret would involve the whole group in a post-dinner game of Capture the Flag or a scavenger hunt. The days would shorten quickly, she said. We had to take our nights while we could still get them.

Sometimes, our nightly activity would include wish boats. Since Alice Marshall had rolling admissions, girls came and left at various times in the year. Whenever a girl was going home, we'd all fashion boats out of bark, decorating them with moss and tiny pinecones. Then we'd gather at the beach and send our boats drifting, along with a silent wish for the girl who was leaving. (I have a feeling that most of the wishes sent out on the water had nothing at all to do with whoever was escaping, but more to do with an expected care package, a letter from a boyfriend, maybe a silent hope that charges wouldn't be pressed after all.) In the past, Margaret told us, they used to glue candles onto each boat, but they stopped when they realized how much they were littering. I imagined thousands of birthday candles washed up on Bob's far shoreline and nestled in the dark belly of the lake. I wondered what the birds and bears and fish thought of these candy-colored twigs.

So when Margaret stood up at dinner one night and told us to grab a fleece and our headlamps and meet her by the docks in twenty minutes, I assumed that there was another good-bye ceremony, though I couldn't figure out who was leaving. But when we arrived at the dock nineteen minutes later, our fleeces bundled in our arms, we could see an armada of canoes on the beach, the paddles resting atop each red boat, a life jacket on each of the seats.

“We're going on a little water excursion,” said Margaret. “There's something I think we should see.”

I saw Gwen and Karen look at each other. It was forbidden to be on the water at night.

“We'll be out there a while, so there won't be any campfire tonight.” Margaret waited while a couple of stragglers joined the group, and then she started again. “First things first. I'm going to need a volunteer to be my canoeing partner.”

Some hands went up, though we knew the drill by now. Margaret never picked people who raised their hands. She already knew exactly whom she would choose.

“Boone,” she said, “thank you for volunteering.”

Boone scowled from where she stood near me, her hands stuffed in her pockets. I could tell she didn't mind, though, by the way she rolled her eyes, like it was almost harder to smirk than to smile.

“The rest of you, please get in pairs and get your vessels in the water. We'll reconvene at the end of the dock.” Margaret paused. “And people. Life jackets. They aren't seat cushions. Wear them like a second skin.”

There was the sudden commotion of girls yelling at one another, claiming each other as you would a seat on a bus. Jules caught my eye and smiled, motioning me to come over to where she was standing near an older canoe. I sighed, but was about to step toward her anyway when I felt a hand lightly graze my forearm. Gia was standing next to me. She didn't have a fleece with her, but was instead wearing a black, long-sleeved shirt with an Indian silk scarf wound loosely around her neck. I looked toward the water, where I could see Boone's back in the canoe as she and Margaret started paddling away.

“Ready, sailor?” Gia asked, and it was settled. We walked slowly toward the water together, me matching my steps to hers. I took off my shoes and walked into Bob's shallows, pulling a canoe behind me. Gia stepped in lightly before the boat was entirely in the water, and I pulled it a little farther before grabbing the sides for balance and getting in. I was sitting in the front, but I looked back at the shore before I sat down. Jules was just grabbing a canoe with Lucy, a sullen Fifteen whom I didn't know she was friends with. She caught my eye in the dimming light, but I couldn't tell if she smiled.

Gia and I sat on the bottom of the canoe, our backs resting against the hard edge of the wooden seats. The sides of the boat came up almost to our armpits, and I felt cradled, defended. We lifted the paddles from the water and moved them in graceful arcs through the air before dipping them down again and breaking the dark shell of the lake. A thin stream of water wound its way down the length of the boat, dampening the seats of our pants. We didn't say anything as we paddled — it was enough to listen to the sound the boat made as it cut through the water, following the faded yellow light of Margaret's headlamp in the gathering dusk as she and Boone glided across the lake in front of us. The canoes gradually started to spread out the farther we got from the shore, so that we must have looked, from above, like a scattered cluster of dots — a paper marked in red by an overly zealous teacher. The dark seeped in slowly, and now the outline of Buckhorn Peak rose up like a woodcut to our right.

My arms were starting to ache with the strain of paddling by the time Gia finally spoke. “God, this is beautiful.” Her voice washed over my shoulders and ears like a soft wave. “I love the lake at night. No electricity, no nothing.” She paused. “It gets dark like this in other parts of the world,” she said. “Places where the light never seems to shine. You'd like it, I think. Travel. You'd make a very savvy foreigner.” She laughed quietly.

I listened to the sound the water made, like a splitting melon, as my paddle plunged down into it once again.

“Have you traveled much?” I could hear water dripping from Gia's paddle each time it arced through the air.

“No,” I said. “I mean, you know, just Seattle and Portland. Salt Lake, of course.”

“What's in Salt Lake?”

“Nothing. Terri took me there a couple of times for back-to-school shopping. I hated it.”

“Ah. Terri.”

I'd told Gia all about my stepmother: how she married my dad when I was nine, how having a ready-made sullen daughter hadn't exactly been her plan, how she and I fought constantly when we weren't ignoring each other.

“But,” she went on, “why did you hate Salt Lake? I mean, I don't know much about it, really, but I skied once in Park City, and that's nearby, isn't it? It was gorgeous.”

“Well,” I said, resting my paddle across the boat and letting us float, “we never went anywhere exciting.” I paused, remembering. “There was this hotel that we stayed at, on the outskirts of town. We just lay in our beds after a day of useless shopping —”

“Why useless?”

“Nothing ever fit or looked right. Anyway, we'd just lie there on those beds and click through the cable channels, not saying anything, not even smiling in time with the laugh tracks. Just lying there, propped up by pillows. For hours.”