The Girls of No Return (30 page)

 

The hand on my shoulder shook me awake. This was a couple of days after Boone got the news. I was bleary-eyed and groggy, but I could still make her out as she leaned over me. Her braid slapped me gently in the face.

“Get up, Townie,” she whispered.

“Nungh,” I mumbled. “Go 'way.”

“Let's go have some fun.”

“Don't wanna.”

“Get. Up.” This time, it wasn't her braid slapping me.

“Jesus!” It wasn't a shout, exactly, but it was close.

“Shhhh.” Boone stepped toward the door. “I'll wait.”

I figured I lost nothing by getting up and following. It wasn't like I'd been enjoying my beauty sleep, anyway. I hadn't had a solid night of sleep since Gia left me on the mountain.

I was still shrugging into a sweatshirt when I met Boone outside the cabin. It must have been three in the morning, a moonless night. I could barely see her hand as she waved it in front of me, snapping her fingers in the cold.

“Wake up,” she said. I could see the clouds of her breath more easily than her face in the dark. “It's time to bid this place adieu.”

“What do you mean?” I rubbed my eyes, hoping that I'd be able to see better. Still nothing. “You're not leaving tonight, are you?”

“No, Einstein. You heard them — I've got two more weeks. And when I do go, they'll be pulling me by the ankles. No, what I have in mind is more like a parting gift. Lots of parting gifts.” I couldn't see, but I knew she was smiling. Boone grabbed my arm to pull me after her, and I yelped.

“What the hell?” she whispered, letting go. “You're going to give us away.”

I rubbed at the place where she'd grabbed me and said nothing. Scabs were just beginning to form over the two raised lines on my forearm. I may not have had my knife, but nature had provided other implements. A stick. A chiseled rock. The sharp, pointed end of a pinecone. The pain, when I felt it, had been a relief.

There was a scuffling sound to our left, and Boone whipped out a flashlight and turned it on quickly, illuminating a porcupine as it shuffled quickly into the trees.

“Shit,” she said, flicking the flashlight off again. She marched ahead. I exhaled heavily through my mouth and followed.

The Rec Lodge was unlocked, which was odd. Bev made the rounds herself each night, making sure that the school buildings were impossible for us to break into. “How —” I started as we entered, but Boone shushed me.

“Mysterious ways,” she whispered, pulling something out of her pocket and jangling it in front of my face. “I've been awake much longer than you. Done some prep work. We'll just leave these keys here for Bev to find, shall we?” She set them down on the fireplace mantel, and shone the flashlight around the room.

Prep work indeed. Boone had amassed a small arsenal in the middle of the room. There in front of me, heaped in some places and spread out thinly in others, were hundreds of weapons of questionable destruction: flasks, pizza cutters, pipes, bottles of Wite-Out and Robitussin, butter knives, steak knives, needles, bags of weed and one small bag of white powder, tiny airplane portions of vodka, tequila, and rum, and one lone hammer, its handle weathered from use.

“Recognize anything?” Boone shined the flashlight into my face and I turned away, blinking. “Look closer.” She handed me the flashlight.

I walked around, peering down at every object. Some of them seemed harmless. A walkie-talkie, for instance. A stuffed rabbit. I picked it up and squeezed its plush body. Tiny plastic bags inside crackled against one another. When I turned it over, I could see the seam along its back that had been opened and then sewn hastily shut over the bunny's new narcotic organs.

I continued looking. Crouched down and moved away a plastic bottle of gin. There, looking fairly innocuous among the other items, was my X-ACTO knife. I rocked back on my heels, keeping the light trained on the knife. “Where did you get all this?”

Boone's laugh echoed around the lodge. “Didn't you know? Bev doesn't trust throwing anything remotely dangerous in the garbage. She's got a little padlocked shed behind her cabin where she stores it all.”

“Maybe she keeps it for a reason,” I said. “Maybe she offers it back when we leave, just to test us all.”

“Not a good idea. I bet there'd be some takers.”

We laughed quietly and then fell into silence. I kept my eyes on the knife.

“How did you know I'd have something here?” I asked finally.

Boone knelt beside me, tracking the direction of my gaze. She picked up the knife. “I didn't know for sure,” she said. “I just assumed that you, like the rest of us, would have brought something . . . useful . . . with you.”

“What'd you bring?”

Boone put the knife back down. She reached over and rummaged around in the large pile, pulling out a child's toy gun. “Lame, isn't it?” she said. “It was kind of a joke. I had a feeling there would be a bag check. There were matches too, but Bev threw them away.”

“Why a gun?” I asked.

“Playing to type,” she said. “I knew what they expected me to be — some sort of outlaw, I guess. Minster's had its share of bar brawls, and the ones with guns involved tend to make the state newspaper.”

Like the one your brother was in
, I thought.

“Bought this at the dollar store on my way out of town. They lapped it up. Bev took it very seriously. What was it she said? ‘I don't know what you're used to, but we strive for civility here.' Civility? What — was she afraid I was going to ride in on some horse, wearing chaps or some shit? Hold up the town bank? Jesus. They wouldn't have been half as upset if I'd packed a purse full of coke, like some of the I-bankers.”

“Yeah,” I said, though I was thinking about all of the times when I had pictured Boone exactly like that: the wild cowgirl, straight out of a picture book. “So what
was
your life like in Minster?” I asked cautiously. “I mean, what were you like?”

Boone's eyes pierced me cleanly. “Just like you, Townie.” She twirled the gun in her hands like an outlaw. “I saw it in you the first day you got here: You feel the same way about Bruno as I do about Minster. That town was no home to me. You gotta belong somewhere before it's your home.”

I knew exactly what she meant, but I pressed the issue anyway. “But your family —”

“The only thing that ever kept me in Minster is currently locked up in the state pen on a twenty-year sentence, twelve if he's good. And I doubt he'll be good.” Boone turned and stared into the pile of weapons and drugs, and I could see what she was thinking as though it was lit up on a freeway billboard.
This is child's play.

Outside, an animal snapped twigs as it hustled past the building.

“So,” I said finally, “what are we going to do with all of this?”

“We're going to show Bev that her little school isn't as safe and clean as she thinks it is.”

It struck me that neither Bev nor any of the teachers ever heard about Boone's “welcoming” activities, and that this probably frustrated Boone. When you're an artist of any kind, you want to show off your skills to the world.

We began by decorating the fireplace mantel. I brought all of the liquor bottles over to Boone, where she arranged them by height, forming a semicircle with the largest bottles on each end. She garnished the spaces around the bottles with little buds of weed, and placed the keys to the lodge in the center. It looked like a holiday wreath, and I said so.

“Just like Christmas at your house, eh, Townie?”

Next, we set up the folding chairs in the middle of the room, as though preparing for Circle Share. In the seat that Amanda usually took, Boone placed the stuffed rabbit. We peopled the other chairs with a good variety of items. Some of them looked pretty impressive. The chair that I was most proud of had a stick figure lying on the seat, with steak knives for arms, butter knives for legs, and the pizza cutter for the torso and the head.

“Nicely done,” said Boone, as we walked around the circle together, looking at each finished chair. “You're quite gifted.”

Finally, we piled the remaining objects together in the center of the circle, like a bonfire. I had been scanning the items for anything that could possibly be Gia's, but none of it seemed to fit her. I was disappointed, and then ashamed. What was I doing, still looking for clues, ways to understand her? It was useless.

We stood back and looked at our work. For the briefest moment, I was afraid that Boone was going to light it up, and I wondered idly if I would do anything to stop her. Instead, she walked to the pile and pulled two objects out of her back pocket, laying them gently on the very top.

I stepped closer. The first object was a pair of large crafting scissors with a red plastic handle. Boone chuckled. “They've been under my mattress this whole time,” she explained. I touched my hair and shook my head.

The second object was the one letter she had received, the one everyone had said was from her brother. It lay there, fluttering softly in the draft of the old lodge, its blackened lines impossible to read. The only word that was legible was the name at the top, the letters thin and gangly.
Elsa.

“They'll know,” I said.

“What are they going to do? Kick me out?” Boone didn't laugh. “Come on. We're finished here.”

She turned and walked toward the door of the Rec Lodge. I followed, though not before I reached into the pile and slipped the X-ACTO knife into the back pocket of my jeans.

 

Boone's interior decorating skills were common knowledge by breakfast the next morning. The word spread stealthily from cabin to cabin. Everyone knew that, as soon as Bev heard about it, the Rec Lodge would be off-limits. But before it was completely light, each cabin had toured the Rec Lodge and seen for themselves what Boone was capable of. These tours were made silently — reverently, it seemed — often with someone standing guard by the door. Jules reported back that some girls were even leaving additional items around the pile: empty cigarette cartons, a pipe that someone had made out of a toilet paper roll. It was as though they were leaving offerings — not only to the shrine itself, which was a testament to our collective badness, but to Boone specifically.
Here is what we've done in your honor,
the offerings seemed to say,
and here is what we will continue doing in your name after you have left.
There was another reason for these gifts, as well: Because there were so many new items on the pile by the time Bev saw it, she wouldn't be able to pick out Boone's letter and definitively say that it belonged to the person who was responsible. And she couldn't just punish us all.

I'm sure girls took things from the pile in the middle of the room, little keepsakes from their time before Alice Marshall, but for the most part, the decorations in the Rec Lodge remained intact. No one wanted to mess up the mantel or the chairs that we had so lovingly adorned; it would ruin the thrill of Boone's victory. Still, I was pretty sure that the next random bag check would be more fruitful than most.

As for me, I kept the X-ACTO in the front pocket of my hoodie all day, wrapping one hand around it from time to time, feeling its reassuring shape and promise.

Breakfast itself was a giddy affair. Each table buzzed with the anticipation of a showdown between Bev and Boone. No one came by our table; it was one thing to know who was responsible, but it was quite another to publicly identify her. (From what I could tell, no one else knew that Boone had an accomplice. And that was just fine with me.) Our cabinmates were impressed too. Gwen said that the chairs in the middle of the room looked like a wagon train circled around a campfire for the night, and I agreed. It was the first remotely pleasant thing I'd said to the cabin in a while, and I watched as Jules lit up like a streetlight.

The Seventeens' table seemed just as excited as everyone else. From the few glances I stole in that direction, I could tell that they were whispering fervently, their heads all inclining toward one another like secret-sharers. Gia's head was lowered too, but I couldn't see her expression. She never turned toward our table.

When Bev entered the Mess Hall, Margaret trailing behind, we all held our breath. Finally,
finally
, we were going to see Bev get mad. Really mad. We couldn't wait to hear what Boone would say in retort.

She walked to the front of the room, where the coffeemaker was located, and poured herself a cup. She was wearing her signature pressed slacks, which looked freshly ironed and stiff as cardboard. She stirred in the milk and sugar slowly. There was no way she couldn't have known that we were all staring at her, but she did a good job of pretending she was unaware that there were other people in the Mess Hall at all. Bev carefully carried her drink to the staff table, where she sat down with a pleasant expression and began making small talk with the other teachers. She didn't look around the room once.

I glanced at Boone. Her eyes were narrowed, and she was staring at Bev intensely, as though trying to teleport herself to the staff table.

“Maybe she hasn't been in the lodge yet,” offered Jules.

“Oh, she's been there,” said Boone. “Bet you five bucks everything's cleaned up by the time breakfast is over. She's just not going to mention it.”

“Ever?” Karen looked disappointed.

“That's her game.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Because she's an adult. It's always a power struggle with them. Bev subscribes to the
If I Ignore Her She'll Go Away
school of thought. In this case, of course, she'll eventually be right.”

“So you thought she might act this way before you ever . . .” Jules began.

Boone interrupted her. “Of course. See, the thing is, Bev doesn't get it. This doesn't have anything to do with her. It has to do with us. She can ignore it all she wants. What matters is that no one else will.”