Wilder Girls

We don't get to choose what hurts us

I think I’d been looking for it all my life a storm in my body to match the one in my head.

She’s never liked us much, not since she complained that there were no boys on the island, and Reese gave her the blankest look I’ve ever seen and said, “Plenty of girls, though.

Some days it’s fine. Others it nearly breaks me. The emptiness of the horizon, and the hunger in my body, and how will we ever survive this if we can’t survive each other? “We’re gonna make it. Tell me we’re gonna make it.

There's no room to feel bad. If I feel that, I have to feel everything else.

Byatt’s carved her initials over and over. BW. BW. BW. She does that everywhere. On the bunk, on her desk in every class we had, on the trees in the grove by the water. Marking Raxter as hers, and sometimes I think if she asked, I’d let her do the same to me.

It's not love, to give your wounds to someone else.

It’s like that, with all of us here. Sick, strange, and we don’t know why. Things bursting out of us, bits missing and pieces sloughing off, and then we harden and smooth over.

Some things don’t belong to other people,” she says, tired and drifting. “Some things are just mine.

I miss the north side cliff and the waves below, and I miss the way the wind steals your breath like it never belonged to you in the first place.

Usually, it was an accident. A lie I never set out to tell. A trick I never meant to play. I’d open my mouth, and something strange would come out, new and not mine. Like there was someone else inside.

See how a body will change, to give you the best chance it can.

I’ve spent every day since I met her telling myself the wrong thing. Telling myself over and over that she was cold, when maybe she was burning the whole time.

And I’ve wanted boys, and I’ve wanted girls, but I’ve never wanted anyone enough to miss them,

I thought something of my old life would still be here. I thought something of us would have survived.

A sparking. I know this feeling. Just before a flare-up, there’s a moment. Hard to describe, hard to pin down, but for me it almost makes it worth it. The pain and the loss, all of it a fair price for this. This strength, this power, this eagerness to bare my teeth.

I should have seen it. I should have seen how she loves as hard as I do. Only I think it pins her down where it picks me up.

It all feels forgotten, like we’re the first people here in a hundred years. No tire tracks left on the road, no sign this was ever anything but what it is now. We shouldn’t be here. This place isn’t ours anymore.

Because I think I’d been looking for it all my life—a storm in my body to match the one in my head.

For a second I can see it all laid out across her. The longing and the resignation and the betrayal, the sting of watching the island she loves steal the people she pretends she doesn't.

Reese says my name once, just once. Stern and strong, and she believes I can do this, so I have to.

We don’t get to choose what hurts us.

I just hope they do it quick, put the bullet between my eyes. I won’t fight it—I’ve earned it, I deserve it—but please, don’t make me wait.

She knew who she was and who I should be, and she fit into all the places in me I couldn't fill.

Reese is trying, but she can’t get it quite right, because nobody’s Byatt but Byatt, not even the girl in these memories. There’s this place in her, somewhere nobody can touch, not me or Reese or anyone. It’s just hers, and I don’t even know what it is, really, just that it’s there, and that she takes it with her when she goes.

I couldn't take my eyes off her the whole night, It was like she made sense, finally, in her father's house, with mismatched furniture and the back door thrown open.

...like she needed to make sure I was happy before she could be too.... That's not how you fall in love. But it's close.

I've wondered. Of course I have. And I love Byatt more than anything, more than myself, more than the life I had before Raxter. But I know the warmth in my heart when I look at her. How it burns smooth and even, without a spark.