I sat bolt upright. What awful thing had happened now—had another classmate died?
My first thought was that it was Anne Marie. But I soon learned it was Avery who was in trouble. Everyone crowded around her; even the boys returned. We tried to make sense of what she was saying through chokes and sobs. Something about being touched. Touched down there. In the light of the campfire, her face was a teary mask of terror. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.
“Calm down, it’s all right now,” Betty said soothingly. “Tell us what happened.”
“I heard this sound, this chittering sound,” Avery sputtered. “And then … and then …”
“And then what?”
“He crawled over my legs. A man. A man got on top of me and tried to … to touch me.”
The final words came out in a spasm.
“I’m so sorry—I took a break. I guess I fell asleep,” whispered Anne Marie, tears streaming down her face.
Mel ignored her. “Are you sure it was a man?” she asked Avery. Unlike everyone else, Mel stood at a distance. “Could it have been a monkey? There are a bunch of them around …”
“It wasn’t a monkey,” Avery spat. “It was bigger than that.”
“You saw him?”
“I didn’t see him. I—I felt him.”
“Maybe it was a gorilla,” Betty suggested. “They’re big.”
Through the firelight we looked to Mel, who shook her head. “It wasn’t a gorilla. Gorillas live in Africa. I don’t know where we are, but I know it’s not Africa.”
“None of you are listening! I said it was a man!”
“I believe you,” Pablo told her gently.
“Listen, Avery,” Betty said. “You shouldn’t be scared. There are a lot of us. Nothing else is gonna happen”
“Yeah,” agreed Pablo. “We’ll take care of each other.”
Avery nodded dolefully, then crawled beside Rittika and laid her head on her lap. Rittika stroked her hair like she was petting a dog. Most of the others gathered around them, talking quietly.
Meanwhile, Mel pulled me aside. She and I whispered about who the man could have been—a native of wherever we were? Warren, stumbling blindly through the darkness?
“But if it was Warren,” Mel whispered, “why didn’t he stop?”
I didn’t sleep after that. I don’t think anyone else did either. We took turns feeding the fire, guarding the area, and comforting Avery. Teary and inconsolable, Anne Marie wandered off. Just as we resolved to go looking for her, she came back. I could tell something else was wrong—she was unfocused, her mind seemed far away. But she wouldn’t open up. The most she said was that she needed to be alone.
Mel, Pablo, Chester, and Rish took the fencing swords and circled Conch Lake, looking for signs of an intruder. They found nothing. By daybreak we were all nerves, keyed up and glassy-eyed. We should have been exhausted. Instead, we were high on adrenaline and fear.
I walked along the edge of the jungle as the sun began to rise. My bones felt brittle, as though I might break if pushed too hard. I started to think about my sister. I wondered if this was the way she felt at home: lost, scared, susceptible to things she couldn’t control.
The early morning light brought a riot of birds. Their fierce squawking sounded like shattering glass. They flapped and whirled overhead, a living rainbow of magenta, neon green, tangerine, and violet—nothing like the drab-colored sparrows, mourning doves, and wrens I was used to. Somehow, their alien beauty put me even more on edge.
I went over to Mel, who was by the side of the lake sucking on a mango skin. Some of the birds began diving into the water, grabbing fish with their beaks.
“Did you get any sleep?” I asked her.
She snorted. “What about you?”
“Not really. Hey, do you still think it was a monkey?”
Her lips, wet with mango juice, puckered. “I’m not sure, Rockwell.”
“So it’s possible it was a man?”
“I looked at the footprints on that little beach over there,” she said, pointing to the same place I’d sat yesterday. “Ours were there, but there was another set, too.”
“Another set?”
“They were so weird—kind of human, but the toes had—I don’t know—claws. Or talons. Tracking with my dad, I’ve never seen prints like that.”
“Maybe it was a yeti,” I said, hoping a joke would offset my fear.
“Maybe.”
“We could finally catch Big Foot.”
She snorted again, then said, “Honestly, it’s not just the prints I’m worried about. Something went missing last night. Chester’s shoes. He took them off after he lay down. But in the morning, they were gone.”
I felt the nausea of yesterday return with a vengeance. “You don’t think it was the monkeys?”
“Rockwell, we can’t blame the monkeys for everything.”
A bird plunged like a bullet into the water, impaling a fish with its beak. As it ascended, the fish was still flopping. I made out a blot of crimson on its gleaming, silvery scales. Mel tossed the mango peel into Conch Lake. It floated like a misshapen ship, drifting in slow circles.
“Rittika thinks we’ll be rescued this morning,” I said.
Mel shrugged noncommittally.
“Do you think we will?”
“Like my dad says, ‘Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.’ ”
I, too, remembered Mr. Sharpe’s words. But I never thought they would apply to someone like me, in a situation like this.
“Get something to eat,” she told me, squeezing my wrist. “Who knows what this day’s gonna be like?”
When she left to attend to the fire, I scouted for a couple of bananas. Then I joined Pablo and Anne Marie. They were sitting on some big pink boulders, eating their own fruit. I was struck by how quiet they were, as if they were waiting. For rescuers? For someone to tell them what to do?
Anne Marie gave me a bashful smile when she saw me. When I returned her smile, though, she abruptly turned away and stared into the jungle. By the look on her face, I’d say she was mesmerized by it. Wordlessly, Pablo broke off pieces of a peeled mango and handed them to me. I offered him half a banana in return. Together, we gazed at Conch Lake.
“It’s kind of beautiful here,” he said, “if you don’t count the mosquitoes …”
“Or the madman on the loose,” I added.
He chuckled. “I can’t believe how untouched it is. I didn’t even know places like this existed.”
“Me neither.”
“It’s kind of reassuring, given how messed up the rest of the world is.”
I understood where he was coming from. Pablo was the guy on the fencing team who was always reminding us to recycle our soda cans and to stop buying plastic water bottles. Sometimes he handed us petitions to sign. Stop offshore drilling. Urge your legislators to outlaw pesticides. Save dolphins from being tangled to death in fishing nets. He was pretty intense when it came to environmental stuff. So it was surprising that he and Chester were good friends and roommates. Chester was all about having fun and goofing off, while Pablo was serious, someone who thought deeply about the world. Most of the time when I saw Pablo, he was reading, lost in information and the music coming out of his earbuds.
“I heard there isn’t a single place left in the world that hasn’t been touched by pollution,” he said. “But maybe Conch Lake is the exception.”
“Maybe,” I replied, eating another piece of mango.
We continued to chew and stare at our surroundings. I noticed the clouds above Conch Lake start to turn gray and fat. Minutes later, lightning crackled and the jungle grew curiously quiet. A raindrop fell on my knee, followed by ten more. The downpour that followed extinguished the fire in an instant. It drenched our hair, our clothes, our food, our voices. The storm had come on even faster than the one yesterday.
Mel scurried to tuck her backpack inside a horizontal crevice between the rocks. Anne Marie squeezed shut her eyes, as if she could will the storm away. Rittika and some of the other girls held their school jackets over their heads, but it didn’t matter. Wind lashed the rain in all directions. There was no way to stay dry. To be heard over the pelting wet, we had to scream.
“Number one priority is exploration—finding Warren, finding equipment, and finding out where the hell we are,” Mel yelled. “Number two is shelter. Dry shelter.”
“I think we should stay where we are,” Rittika screamed back. “All of us. When help comes, they’ll find Warren.”
“But when will help come? Yesterday, you were scared Rish might be injured. What if Warren is?”
They went back and forth like this for what felt like forever, until Rish intervened, siding with his sister, motioning to the sky, as if the rain were a sign from heaven that we ought to stay put. Mel wouldn’t have it. She said she was going, even if no one else would.
“I agree with Mel,” Chester shouted, water ricocheting off his face. He wasn’t wearing his shirt, and drops flew off the hard planes of his body, too.
Pablo added, “I’m also with Mel. Warren could be hurt. What kind of friends are we if we don’t look for him?”
Rish and Rittika whispered to each other intensely. Finally, they agreed to go with Mel’s plan. But judging from Rittika’s sour face, she wasn’t happy about it.
Mel assigned search teams: Rish and Rittika would travel east, Mel and I west, and Chester and Pablo north, up a mountain in the distance. When Rittika complained that she didn’t know which way was east, Mel explained how we could inspect tree bark and look at the location of anthills. Rittika’s response was to roll her eyes. She didn’t understand—and neither did anybody else.
Fortunately, the rain began to ease up. When the sun was out again, Mel showed us how to tell direction with a “shadow stick.” My teammates observed her closely as she made a kind of natural compass with a long, straight stick stuck in the ground. I figured I didn’t have to pay much attention since Mel was my partner.
To tell you the truth, it was always this way—Mel talking, me taking a backseat.
Once the teams knew where to go, Mel advised Avery, Betty, Ming, and Anne Marie to stay behind and get the fire going again. She handed one of Chester’s swords to each of them.
“Gather more food and whatever else might be of use nearby. Do your best to build a basic shelter.”
Avery and Ming nodded skeptically. I could tell they didn’t feel up to the challenge.
“Are we clear?” Mel asked.
“We’ll do our best,” Betty replied, raising her chin.
“Good. We’ll meet you back here before sundown,” Mel said.
“Back here at Camp Summerbliss,” Rittika said with a sniff.
Camp Summerbliss.
I couldn’t help but smile. Obviously, Rittika was being ironic—bliss was hardly a word that jumped to mind under our circumstances. Even so, the name stuck in my head, the same way Conch Lake had.
One by one, we took long drinks from the outcrop, then set off. I followed Mel as she charged into the jungle. She kept a brisk pace but, after a few minutes, stopped in front of a tree. It had a distinctive double trunk, forking into a V. Mel gestured to a mark carved neatly in the bark.
“Who made that? You?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“To keep a tally of the days we’re here.”
“Is that really necessary? I mean, we’re going to be rescued …”
“I’m keeping it just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“In case no rescuers show up. Days can start to blend together when there’s no record of them.”
That wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear.
Mel took the fake eye from her sock and dropped it carefully between the tree’s forked limbs. It sat there comfortably in a little indentation in the bark. I don’t know why Mel decided to put it there. I wished she hadn’t. Out in the open, that eye gave me the creeps. I’d never admit it to Mel, but I wondered if it could see us somehow, if it was full of magic, or worse, bad luck.
We kept going, calling out for Warren. Our westward journey seemed to be taking us up. I sensed the perpetual, gradual elevation in my hamstrings and calf muscles. After a couple of hours, we began to leave the jungle behind. The trees and canopy thinned, and the air tasted different—less chokingly muggy. Here and there, pink crags poked out of the earth like stalagmites. Like the rocks around Conch Lake, they were a mishmash of minerals.
“Mica, quartz, and feldspar,” Mel said knowledgeably. I remembered the rock and mineral collection in her father’s study.
Threaded around the crags were thickly knitted creepers. Mel and I moved carefully. We had to stop frequently to untangle our feet. After a few stumbles, I tripped, scraping my knee. On the ground, I was face-to-face with the impossibly dense undergrowth, a labyrinth of roots and stems.
Mel crouched beside me. She touched a bead of blood on my skin with her finger and wiped it on her blouse.
“I wish we had hiking boots.”
“I’d rather have a machete,” I said.
“Maybe time for a break?”
“Definitely.”
We ate some fruit she’d put in her backpack. We weren’t really hungry, though, just thirsty. The rain already felt like a distant memory. The sun sizzled through the last wispy clouds. Today would be another scorcher.
When we continued, we kept our eyes focused on the ground to avoid further stumbles. Here and there, we noticed narrow paths in the undergrowth. These were neat and tidy, as if made by a miniature plow. They were just large enough for Mel and me to eel through, but most didn’t extend very far. They seemed to start and end at random points, without planning or purpose. I couldn’t make sense of them.
I walked more confidently in the paths, without fear of stumbling, but Mel looked uncertain. When she stopped in front of a small brown mound, her uncertainty turned to worry.
“What is it?” I asked her.
“Scat.”
“What?”
“Scat. It’s another word for poop.” She gestured toward the mound.
“I blame the monkeys.”
“You always blame the monkeys.”
“ ’Cause I don’t want to think of the alternative.”
“Whatever made this was bigger than a monkey, Rockwell. Way bigger.” She kicked at the scat with the toe of her shoe. “It’s fresh,” she added.
I didn’t know what to do with this information. All I knew was that it was bad, and that Mel was concerned. She was no longer marching, but treading slowly. Watchfully. The mystery animal was still on our minds when we came to a bluff. Before us was a spectacular view of water glistening in the sunlight.
Ocean. It surrounded us on all sides. We were on an island.
“Crappity crap crap,” Mel gasped.
My jaw dropped as I stared. Along the shoreline, the water was crystal clear. I could make out pearly, rippled dunes on the ocean floor. Farther out, a shadow, probably a reef, encircled much of the island, and at the outer edges of that shadow, long fingers of sea foam tapered into deeper water. The South Pacific. It was endless, inching to the horizon.
The view was one of the most beautiful I’d ever seen. And one of the most terrifying.
“We’d better be rescued, Rockwell,” Mel whispered. “Otherwise, I don’t know how we’ll get out of this one.”
“We won’t be able to walk home, that’s for sure,” I replied.
“We won’t be able to swim there either. There’s no other land in sight.”
We stared at the vast ocean for a long time before turning our attention to the island. It was both scary and fascinating to take stock of it from this vantage point. We were at a high elevation, though not as high as what lay to the north: the mountain Chester and Pablo must by now be climbing. From where we stood, we could make out the island’s major features: pink granite along the mountainside, an emerald forest that dominated its interior, Conch Lake studding its center like a peacock-colored jewel. Mel said the shape of the island reminded her of a fish’s shape: blunt on the “head” end with the curve of the beach, thin on the “tail” end with two forked points. Just beyond those points, a separate outcrop poked up out of the water.
I began to feel dizzy. Maybe the lack of sleep was catching up with me. Or maybe I had gone physically and mentally beyond my limits. I touched the top of my head, surprised at how hot my hair felt. Then again, the sun had been beating on it all morning. My face, too, felt alarmingly warm. As for Mel, she was a walking reminder to wear sunscreen. Her face was the color of a tomato.
We decided to return to Camp Summerbliss. It was hard to say what time it was, but we’d been walking for a long time. It was definitely past noon. Mel suggested taking a different route home. It might be faster. And even if it wasn’t, the scat had spooked her.
I’d hoped the journey back, on a decline, would be easier. It wasn’t. Although my leg muscles no longer throbbed, loose rocks rolled out from underneath my feet, creating miniature avalanches. I had to watch every step. Carefully, Mel and I wended our way through more creepers. To our dismay, we soon encountered more paths. I walked ahead of my friend down a particularly long one. I was staring at the ground, so I didn’t see at first that we had company.
A pig.
Ungainly and wild, it looked both frightened and frightening. It was a bulky, bristly, mangy thing, with curved tusks at the corners of its mouth. Its head was narrow, its pebbly eyes too close together. I froze. The pig let out an unhappy squeal and scratched its hooves fretfully against the ground. As it came closer, I could smell it. Manure mingled with wet dog.
I turned my head toward Mel, looking for help. That’s when it charged at me, hard, hurling its weight into my right leg. For an instant, I felt the squishy, spongy wet of its snout against my bare skin. Then my knee buckled, and the pain seared. I careened to the ground, falling into the spiky creepers. I didn’t know if I’d broken a bone, twisted an ankle. I wished I’d had time to think, but the pig was ready for more. It scuttled back onto the path and scratched at the dirt, aggressively now, sending little puffs of dust into the air. Its eyes were trained on me. Between shock, the pain in my knee, and the way the creepers entangled me, I struggled to move. The best I could do was shield my face.
Through a chink in my fingers, I watched Mel react. She fished around in her sock, producing a switchblade. She clicked it open and whipped it through the air. The steel blade caught the sunlight, and flashed. Then she tore after the creature, squealing and hoofing as it had. It looked up at her in dismay, and I partially pitied it, pitied the terror on its homely face. She swiped the blade across its side as it attempted to turn around, its legs scrabbling, its pudgy body squirming and twitching, trying in vain to push through the dense tangle. Mel had a chance to knife it again—I could see her debating whether she should, but she wiped the bloody blade against her sock instead. The injured creature finally made headway into the creepers. Another squeal, and then its backside and tufted tail disappeared into the undergrowth.
Shuddering, I moved my hands from my face. I stared at Mel. I tried to breathe. The pig’s blood looked bright and alarming against the grimy cotton of her sock.
“Will it die?” I whispered.
“I didn’t get it very deep. I should have killed it. Killed it before it killed you.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat.
“It was a boar,” Mel said. “My father sees them in Borneo. He says the ones there have beards. Funny, huh?” I couldn’t believe how offhanded, how cavalier she sounded, but that was Mel for you.
She helped me to break free from the creepers. I swore they’d already started to twine around me, as if I was just another bothersome obstacle in their way.
“A knife, Mel? You’re full of surprises.”
She shrugged.
“That’s how you carved the notch in the tree, right? Do you always carry it with you?”
“You never know what the day will bring.”
I raised my eyebrows, but I wasn’t truly surprised. Of course Mel would carry a switchblade. I wouldn’t be shocked if the other Sharpe sisters carried bayonets and nunchucks. That was just the way things were in the Sharpe house. Mel clicked the knife back into its bed and tucked it in her sock. It disappeared against the thick bulge of her calf.
When I’d caught my breath, we moved on. Mel walked ahead this time; I limped behind, more scared than ever. We encountered a relatively easy stretch and then, at Mel’s insistence, veered toward a beach. It was as lovely up close as it had been from a distance. The white sand was fine and soft as sugar, flecked with bits of broken shell and coral. There was a surprising amount of washed-up garbage, too. But I didn’t mind it so much when I saw the water.
The waves were inviting as they lapped gently ashore. When they pulled away, they left frothy trails, paler even than the sand. I ran in up to my knees, then dove beneath the surface, keeping under for as long as I could, letting the salt clean my wounds. When I came up, I saw Mel watching from the shore. She was sitting on the sand, shielding her face with a palm frond.
I waved for her to come in, but she shook her head. I stayed, swimming, floating, diving, trying—literally—to wash away some of my anxiety. When I finally hauled myself out, Mel had relocated upshore, to a shady patch beneath a trio of palm trees.
“I’m starving,” I told her. She unearthed a granola bar from the depths of her backpack. Snapping it in two, she gave me half.
“I’ve been saving it for a special moment,” she said.
It was the best damn granola bar I’d ever had.
After I’d eaten, I made a move to get up, but stopped dead when Mel gasped. I had a terrible feeling that another boar was approaching. Slowly, I turned in the direction Mel was staring. Nearby, in the shadow of another clutch of palm trees, was indeed an animal. But it wasn’t a boar.
It was a bird. A huge bird, almost the size of an ostrich. Its proportions were cartoonish: long, sturdy legs and little wings, fat body, and jaunty tail. I doubted its tiny wings could propel it off the ground. They were more like ornamental flippers.
Vestigial. The word popped into my head. Mr. Sharpe would have been proud—he was surely the person I’d heard it from.
“That bird is supposed to be extinct,” Mel whispered under her breath.
“What?”
“Extinct,” she repeated. “It’s an ibis. A Réunion ibis.”
“Oh, yes!” I said, too loudly, for I remembered suddenly what a Réunion ibis was. During one of my summers at Mel’s house, Mr. Sharpe had built a diorama of Réunion island. It was one of a group of islands located in the Indian Ocean, close to the African coast. He had plenty to say about Réunion, which was a favorite from his travels. A beautiful, warm place, perhaps not unlike where we found ourselves now.
Mel, her sisters, and I had helped Mr. Sharpe put the diorama together, molding mountains out of chicken wire and papier-mâché, painting forests, making animals out of clay. Mr. Sharpe told us that hundreds of species inhabited the island, and many lived nowhere else in the world. Unfortunately, some had also gone extinct, including the Réunion ibis. I remember being saddened when Mr. Sharpe showed us a painting of one in a book and told us its story. Waddling and mild, like a dodo, the ibis had been hunted to extinction by the eighteenth century. It had been too gullible, too easy to lure and kill.
“A shame,” he’d said. “Gone before its time, like the mammoth and mastodon.”
And yet, this creature taken for dead was here now, unmistakably. It looked exactly like the image in the book.
Mel opened her backpack and found the other half of the granola bar. A precious resource, but Mel couldn’t resist. She broke off a piece and walked very slowly and quietly toward the bird. It took a step back, but halted when it saw what was in Mel’s hand. Without hesitation, it shambled up to her.
“Here you go, pretty one. That’s it. Come and get it,” she murmured.
The ibis ate straight from her palm. Its beak was sharp; it could have bitten off a finger if it wanted to. But it took the food gently. I wasn’t surprised to see a tear running down my friend’s cheek. I knew why. Mel wished her father could see this.
As quietly as I could, I approached the ibis, too. It eyed me, but made no motion to move.
“This is unbelievable, Rockwell.”
“You’re telling me.”
After Mel gave the ibis the rest of the bar, it peered at us expectantly. It reminded me of a dog waiting for a treat. Mel and I began to laugh. I honestly couldn’t remember a more magical moment. The ibis, the ocean, the lull of the waves, even the graceful shapes of the palm tree shadows on the sand: Nothing could have been improved upon. The only other time I had experienced this kind of magic was at Mel’s house in Maine during summers and school vacations.
Though I worried about Alexa, those periods at the Sharpe house were the happiest of my life. Being part of the Sharpe household was bliss. There is no other word for it. When Mel’s father was home, back from another exotic place, he’d always summon Mel, her sisters, and me to his workshop.
“Look at the wings of this butterfly,” he’d say, adjusting the lens of his heavy black microscope. “I’ve never seen iridescence like this.”
The girls would get in line, me in the middle of the mix. With Mr. Sharpe as our tutor, we saw so many treasures from nature: honeycomb, coral, snakeskins, vials of pollen, garnets, insects and small animals pickled in spirits. As we took turns admiring the latest find, Mr. Sharpe would share fascinating tidbits he’d learned. Everything from how to extract poison from a blowfish to what to do if a polar bear attacks. I’d never heard him unable to answer a question, or unwilling to look for the answer.
In his workshop, an enormous, gabled room overflowing with curiosities, Mr. Sharpe placed in our hands pelts, bones, fossils, crumbling pieces of pottery, tribal masks, Egyptian scarabs, arrowheads, shells from every ocean and sea. We handled these marvels gingerly, our faces calm even if our hearts were pounding right out of our chests. The workshop was a zoo, museum, curio case, and heaven all at once. In it, I’d petted the hairy legs of a live tarantula, held the bony jaw of a great white shark, and pinned dead moths to a display board. Mel, her sisters, and I were welcome to be whatever we wanted to be: naturalists, geographers, archaeologists, world-class explorers. We’d close our eyes, twirl the globe in the middle of the workshop, and point. Wherever our fingers ended up was where we pretended to go, together. One big all-girl expedition team.
At night in our pajamas, we lay on the flat rooftop above the porch, or we camped outdoors in tents, trapping fireflies in jars and searching for night crawlers. Sometimes we toured Mrs. Sharpe’s greenhouse by flashlight, gazing at her newest sprouts and seedlings. Deep into the evening, Mr. Sharpe told us stories by a campfire. He’d had a million adventures—running for his life from flesh-eating ants in the Amazon, dodging a trampling herd of elephants in India, watching Maori faces being tattooed in New Zealand.
He was a wonderful, animated storyteller. I never tired of listening to him, or watching him gesture and mime his way through a tale. Nor did I find his style of dress “better suited to a younger man,” as my mother had once said. Every day he dressed as if for a journey, with scuffed boots and a satchel tossed over a shoulder. His clothes had pockets for all his supplies: knife, notebook and pencil, compass, magnifying glass, spyglass, one flask for water and another for brandy (“a natural antiseptic,” Mr. Sharpe said). He took these supplies everywhere he went, even if it was just the pharmacy or grocery store.
He called me “girl” most of the time, as in “Come here, girl, look at this!” or “Did you hear that birdcall, girl?” I was never sure, even after a dozen visits, if Mr. Sharpe knew my name. To be fair, he confused his daughters’ names, too. But his absentmindedness didn’t bother me because he made up for it. Mr. Sharpe was the most attentive adult I’d ever met, hands down. He thought nothing of taking off a whole morning to show Mel how to tie knots, or to take Tasman to collect salamander eggs.
Given that he had a house full of girls, I’d once asked Mr. Sharpe if he wished he’d had a son.
He’d chuckled, admitting, “Can’t say I ever thought about it.”
That made me love him even more.
Oh, how I envied those Sharpe girls! What did it feel like to have a father like that? My father spent as little time with Alexa and me as he could. And when he did make time, it was usually to lecture us on something. Or to make Alexa miserable.
Here’s something else I envied about those five ruddy-cheeked Sharpe girls: They didn’t care how they looked. Between them, they didn’t own a single lipstick or hand mirror. One brush and comb satisfied the lot of them. After being around Mel and her sisters, it was difficult for me to go back to my mother, who fixated on her looks through a medicated haze, ignoring the important stuff. Like how Alexa wore only long sleeves. Or how she drank tamarind sauce to disguise the vomit smell of her breath, and sprayed half a bottle of air freshener in the bathroom every time she went in.
I cried for my sister sometimes when I came back from Maine. I cried because I knew there was a different way to live, and she didn’t. I alone had been part of the Sharpe tribe, whooping and hollering and running amok, five blondes and one brunette, all of us clutching birch spears we’d whittled ourselves. All of us ecstatically free.