Page 15 of Reckless Girls
“Back the fuck off,” she says, her voice sharp and too loud in the silent room, and the girl above Taylor or Hayden from South Carolina sits up, too.
“Les nerfs!”
Amma’s French is shitty, stuck somewhere in eleventh grade, so she doesn’t know what that means, but she’s assumes it’s telling her to calm down or shut up. Or maybe it’s some uniquely French phrase that conveys both.
But Brittany is already sliding from the bunk, her purple plaid pajama pants riding up one slender leg as she mutters,“Je suis désolée, je suis désolée.”
I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
That, Amma does know—she’s always thoughtdésoléeis a weirdly intense word forsorry.But as Brittany slinks from the room, still sniffling, her pillow clutched to her chest, it’s the only word that fits.
Desolate.
It’s the feeling that she and Brittany have both been trying to outrun. With each new destination, Amma keeps thinking that maybenowthey’ll have escaped it. On the first flight from Atlanta to London, she’d imagined all that sadness, all that grief, slipping away from them to pool on the runway, a sludge of loss theycould leave farther and farther behind with each stamp in their passports.
But it slips back in at night, and no sight, no experience, seems able to exorcise it.
The floor is gritty beneath Amma’s feet as she follows Brittany into the hallway. As she leaves the bunk room, she hears a murmur of voices and she knows they’ll leave tomorrow. This first night has already marked them as the Weird Ones—the “girl who cries” and “her psycho friend”—and that is fatal in these kinds of places where words likevibeandchillare paramount.
Fuck them,she thinks, crossing the empty living room as she hears Brittany unlock the back door.If they only knew, if they only understood…
The hostel has a small back garden with wrought-iron furniture and a few potted plants, and Amma finds Brittany standing in the middle of it, her face tilted up to the sky as she sucks in deep breaths, her pillow lying in the grass at her feet.
Her hair is pulled back from her face, and Amma notices the sharpness of her chin, the hollows underneath her cheekbones. She’s getting thinner again, though she’s still not as thin as she was when Amma first met her. Sitting in folding chairs in a church basement, Amma had thought Brittany looked sick. Beautiful, sure, with all that dark hair and those big hazel eyes—but brittle and insubstantial, like the slightest thing would break her.
Brittany is tougher than that, even with the midnight cry-fests. Amma knows that now.
She turns, sensing Amma’s approach, and she wipes at her face. “I’m sorry,” she says immediately, and Amma shrugs.
“You said that already. But in French, so I guess it doesn’t count.”
Brittany gives a watery chuckle before groaning and plunging her hands into her hair. “God,” she sighs. “Am I going to cry all over Europe?”
“You’re entitled to it,” Amma says, stepping closer and putting an arm around Brittany’s shoulders, hugging her against the side of her body. The night is warm, but Brittany’s skin is cold, and she shivers a little as she presses in closer to Amma.
“I thought it would get better,” she says, her voice quiet, and Amma feels her own throat grow tight.
She’s not like Brittany—crying doesn’t come easy to her, nor does it seem to help. Tears never leave her feeling relieved or soothed, just exhausted and vaguely ashamed, like she gave in to something she shouldn’t have. A guilty purge rather than a cleansing catharsis.
“It will,” she tells Brittany now. “I mean, we’re only on the second week of this thing. You have to give it time.”
Brittany steps away from her, scrubbing a hand over her face. “You sound like Dr. Amin.”
Amma knows she does, and she kind of hates that, but the leader of their grief group is the voice in her head at moments like these.
Give it time.
Nothing you feel is wrong.
There will always be abeforeand anafter, and you have to learn to live in the after.
That was the one Brittany liked the most. “In the After” is tattooed in curling script on the inside of her wrist now, slightly hidden by the beaded bracelets she’s currently wearing. She’d gotten the tattoo just before they’d left on this trip, a pledge to enjoy life again.
That’s what traveling around Europe was supposed to be about: seeing new things, exploring new places, and cementing the bond between them with new memories. Otherwise, they were only friends because the same horrible thing had happened to each of them. They wanted to be friends because they’d chosen each other. They wanted to have a story they could tell that wouldn’tmake people wince, their eyes widen, their lips wobble with sympathy or, worse, pity.
We’ll tell people we met in college,Brittany had said.Instant best friends.
In the same history class,Amma had added.Maybe a sorority. Did the backpacking thing our senior year.
