The Girls of No Return (9 page)

 

WHAT BOONE WANTED, SHE GOT. YOU WERE LUCKY IF SHE
bothered to ask. No one had ever defied her before. So after the incident with Boone, Gia became legend.

What we knew about her was nothing and everything. She had gone to school in Switzerland/India/Las Vegas/Maryland. She received daily, coded love letters from her German/Spanish/Icelandic/Colombian boyfriend — who was, everyone suspected, a freedom fighter, nationality notwithstanding. She could swear in three or nine languages, had escaped from a boarding school or detox center, and — despite Bev's thorough search — she managed to smuggle in both cigarettes and weed in the lining of her pillow.

I watched Gia. In the Mess Hall, around the campfire, walking toward the Waterfront. There was something about her that seemed bright and hard, like a star. It made me want to keep looking. So I did. And I began to notice things.

She cut her oranges in half and spooned the flesh out like she was eating a grapefruit.

She never sang, and spoke only when spoken to.

She walked languidly, hips first, as if daring her legs to catch up.

When she caught me watching her, she would close her eyes for one beat, two, and then open them again and look straight at me.

I was not the only girl staring at Gia. But I was the only girl she stared back at. Sometimes she would nod at me, as though we were two travelers on the same road.

Still, I couldn't bring myself to talk to her. I mean, why would I? What could I have to say to a girl like that? More important, what could she have to say to me? I was better off not even trying.

 

Margaret had been teaching us about orienteering in Outdoor Ed, and we spent a lot of time wandering around the school grounds with our compasses out, trying to decipher whether the Mess Hall was north or south of Bev's cabin. But compasses wouldn't get us very far, Margaret told us, unless we knew how to read maps.

“Maps are an accessory to movement,” she said one morning as we all lay stretched out on our bellies in the Outdoor Ed classroom, studying the five or six copies of a topographic map of the Wilderness Area that she had spread out in front of us. “They can keep you grounded to a particular place, but they can also lead you on other journeys. Once you know how to read a map, you will know how to root yourself so that you can stretch and grow. It's good to have a point of origin to wander away from.”

I saw Gwen raise her eyebrows at Karen. Her look plainly said
More new-age bullshit
, but I liked what Margaret was saying. “Point of origin.” I liked the sound of it.

“But more literally,” Margaret said, “a topographic map can show you not only where you are, but also how far above sea level you are, how to get to a major road, where the nearest town lies, what rivers you might fish in if you get hungry. Maps can save your life.” She let that sink in. “You've all noticed that each time I lead you on a hike, no matter how short, I have a map and a compass with me, right?”

There were some halfhearted nods. A good three-fourths of our Outdoor Education classes had consisted of hiking into the woods that the school backed up against and following a series of trails, some better maintained than others.

“This is because it's easy to get lost on even the shortest hike. If I know how to read a map, know north from south, I can get us home. Simple as that.” She walked over to a group of I-bankers, who had set up a little makeup display on their map, and who were tensely trading pots of blush and eye shadow in much the same way that their parents traded stocks. “Darcy,” she said, tapping one of them on the shoulder while sweeping the makeup off the map with the side of her shoe, “what do the brown lines mean?”

“Fuck!” said Darcy, diving for her makeup. Some other girl had gotten to it first, though, and the little pots were gone in an instant. “Damn it, Chandler, that was —” She started to complain, but then she saw Margaret's expression and stopped. “I don't know,” she mumbled. “How am I supposed to know?”

“Good question.” Margaret was unfazed. “Paying attention will help.” She moved over to where I was lying near Karen and Gwen and Jules. “Thoughts?” she asked the four of us.

There was a long silence. Karen closed her eyes as though she was thinking, and Gwen stared at the map, intense concentration clouding her face. Jules looked at me.

“No clue,” she said.

“Lida?”

I sighed and scooted closer on my belly. I looked at the map carefully. There were little numbers written alongside some of the brown lines, which often took the shape of circles within circles. The smallest circle in the middle always had the highest number. “Elevation?” I asked.

Margaret smiled at me. “Pretty much,” she said. “Those are called contour lines. They show the shape of the land, as well as the elevation. Each line typically represents a hundred feet. If you can ‘read' them, you can pinpoint the exact elevation of any given place in the wilderness.”

“And why would we want to do that?” Darcy wasn't about to play along.

Margaret crossed her arms and looked up at the rafters of the Rec Building. She got that Zen look on her face that I had slowly come to recognize as the expression she wore when she'd rather be swearing at someone or worse. “Ah, Darcy,” she said, “once again, you have gotten to the marrow of the question.”

“What?”

Margaret continued as though she hadn't heard her. “It may seem hard to believe now, but winter closes in quickly here. You might want to know if the hike you're about to take in, say, November, is going to lead you straight into avalanche territory. Closer to home, you might want to figure out how far you'd have to walk, and over what kind of terrain, if you were thinking about leaving the school.” She smiled at Darcy, who I'm pretty sure had been wondering that exact thing.

We spent the rest of the morning identifying rivers, finding the school on the map, guessing at elevations, and figuring out how far it was from one place to another. Answer: far. In the River of No Return Wilderness Area, nothing — and no one — was close by. Even the airstrip at Runson Bar was a good twelve miles away, and that's as the little toothpick plane flies. We counted the lines around Bob, and realized that we were sitting exactly seven thousand feet above sea level. I pretended to be as disinterested as the other girls, but secretly, I kind of liked looking at the map. It was like trying to learn a language, but without past participles and future conditionals and all that. I would never speak French. I knew that much. But I thought I might be able to speak Map.

“Boone,” Margaret said toward the end of the class, “can you find Elk City on that map?”

Boone had fallen asleep on top of the map she was studying. She'd been drooling, because I could see the faint imprint of a river on her cheek when she raised her head.

“What.”

“Elk City.”

Boone stared at Margaret for a minute, her eyes hard. “Why don't you just ask Meriwether Lewis over there?” she said, jutting her chin in my direction.

I blushed.

“Boone.” Margaret placed a fist on her hip and stared her down.

“Fine. Elk City,” Boone repeated. “North Pole?”

Margaret sighed. “A brilliant guess,” she said, “but not a place that you have on the map in front of you.”

Boone stared at the map as though she was looking for Elk City, but I knew she was just trying to look busy. She may have even known where the town was, but she wasn't going to say, and Margaret knew it.

“Okay,” she said. “I see how it's going to be.” She paused. I could picture the cogs turning in her head, and I knew she was about to throw something new at us. “It just so happens that you're in luck. We're going to try something different. Approach this from a different angle. You all have journals, right?”

We stared at her. This didn't sound promising.

“Good. We're going to begin a long-term project,” she said. “The whole school is doing it, actually: Mapping Your World.”

Mapping Your World, as Margaret explained it, meant that we had to think of creative and interesting ways to depict our lives and the world we lived in. Our maps didn't have to have pictures. They didn't have to be true to scale. They could have contour lines, she said, but we could distinguish between the lines however we wanted. Counting the years instead of feet, for example. Letters to people we knew, stories, pasted-in photographs, poems — we could put anything we wanted on our maps. All they had to be was true to us. “This is your chance to be creative,” Margaret said, as though no one in the room had ever used her imagination.

I thought about the different ways I'd wielded my creativity, but I didn't think they'd represent well on a map.

So that's what I was attempting to do when Gia finally talked to me: Map My World.

I had quickly realized that most of the other girls at Alice Marshall smoked too, and most nights, after Bev finished her rounds, I followed the others down to the beach behind the cabins, where Gwen, Karen, and a handful of others perched on their heels and formed a wavy line in the sand, staring out at Bob. Sometimes Boone sat there too, holding her cigarette tightly between her thumb and forefinger like it was a joint. Most times, she stayed away. I learned that cigarettes were mailed inside of care packages: hidden in hollowed-out books, boxes of tampons — even, in one particularly brilliant maneuver, inside of twenty fat mechanical pencils, their lead removed. The rule was that whichever lucky girl had gotten the goods distributed them evenly, and no one argued. Nobody seemed to mind that a few of us didn't get care packages and never added to the till. Then again, there was never a lack of cigarettes.

I never sat with the other girls, and they never talked to me except to offer me a cigarette (and even that was done silently, by holding the pack out in my direction and nodding). It was an easy kind of camaraderie, one that asked nothing of me. I always made sure to stub out my cigarette before the others had finished theirs. Then I would walk through the dark, no flashlight, listening to the muted night sounds. My feet scuffing against the ground. A twig snapping under my shoe. In the woods beyond, the muffled movements and inarticulate rustlings of the forest at night. Other girls felt frightened by the noises. I felt enveloped.

Gia had been coming down to the beach since the very first night she arrived at Alice Marshall. She smoked a French brand of tobacco that she rolled herself into tight little bullets. Oddly enough, no one ever asked her to share. She would listen to the chatter of the other smokers and laugh when others laughed, although she didn't contribute much to the conversation.

I was surprised, then, when she asked me a question, almost two weeks after she arrived at Alice Marshall. I was sitting on a log, away from the group. Gwen was nearby, talking with a Fourteen about tattoo designs. Boone wasn't there. And I was mapping my world, kind of. At least, I had a stick in my hand, and was drawing pictures in the sand. The stick pushed through the dark, damp ground, and slowly, images began to emerge.
Here
is an outline of my house.
Here
is where the bathroom is.
Here
is the sink, the drawer underneath, the plastic dividers that hold a selection of beauty utensils. Tweezers. Nail clipper. Cuticle scissors. Razor.

I hadn't seen Gia come down until she was sitting right beside me, the sleeve of her sweater brushing up against my windbreaker.

“Nice artwork,” she said. “Paint-by-number?”

It took me a full minute to respond. First, I looked around. There was no one else she could be talking to — I mean, who else was drawing in the sand with a stick? Also, no one seemed fazed by the fact that we were having a conversation. Potentially, that is. It wouldn't be a conversation unless I said something and broke what was threatening to be a humiliating silence.

“Just doodling,” I said, running the tip of my shoe over my drawing in the sand and smudging the pictures. “Margaret says we have to map our worlds.”
Margaret says?
I sounded like a third-grader.
Margaret says everyone is wearing their hair in French braids.
Pathetic.

“Yeah,” said Gia. “She told the Seventeens that too.” I saw her smile out of the corner of my eye. “It's an impossible task. She might as well ask us to make stained glass windows depicting our lives from birth on.”

I considered the bizarre image of a church full of our windows. “Half of them would probably be broken,” I said, surprising myself.

She shook her head. “I mean, it's embarrassing enough that we have to sit around the fireplace sharing our feelings like we're in some knitting circle. Now it has to be a craft project?” Her laugh was low and throaty. “Do we get a badge for it?”

“The Emotional Vomit badge. I can pin it next to my Knot-Tying and Bullshitting badges.”

“Oh, that's good,” she said. “You seem to know what you're talking about.”

“I was a Brownie in kindergarten. I took notes.”

“Ah.”

We were quiet, listening to the chatter around us, the water as it licked the shore. I was nervous talking to her like this, but she didn't seem in any hurry to leave.

“Anyway,” she said, “what's your story . . . Lida, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. I liked the way she said my name, clipping the consonants so that it sounded like she was running over my name on her tiptoes. “No story, really.”

“Impossible. You can't be here without a story.” She nudged me with her shoulder. “It's a prerequisite.” Her smile was warm.

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, I guess you're right.” I laughed — something between a chuckle and a cough. “Well,” I tried again, “what do you want to know?”

“What's important?”

“I guess I have a terrible stepmother.”

“The oldest story.”