Page 70 of Reckless Girls
“The poisonous ones,” Jake adds. “So yeah. Thus goeth Robbie.”
“Fuck,” Nico says on an exhale. “What are we going to do about it?”
“The ship with the radios gets here in the next week or so,” Jake says, shrugging. “We’ll let them know. I didn’t find any IDin his stuff, and fuck knows where he’s anchored his boat. We’ll let someone else worry about that.”
“Well,” Eliza says, hands on her hips. “I wish I could say I was sorry about it, but the guy was a certified wanker.”
She sounds like she’s mimicking Jake as she says it, her normally crisp inflections sliding into the wider vowels of his Aussie accent for a second.
“How did you two find him?”
Amma is definitely looking at me now, and I make myself meet her gaze.
“We were just checking out the jungle,” I say, willing myself not to blush, for my eyes not to slide guiltily to Eliza.
“A man can only take so much sun and sand before he has to go adventuring,” Jake agrees, nodding, and he’s so casual, so light, giving nothing away.
“God, you poor thing,” Eliza clucks, coming forward to chafe her hands up and down my arms. “That must’ve been awful to see.”
I don’t deserve her sympathy right now, but I take it anyway.
“It was, yeah. But like you said, he wasn’t a good dude, and likeJakesaid, we’ve… we’ve done all we can do, really.”
“Do you know what we need?” Eliza says, wrapping her arms around me from the back. “We need a party.”
“Because a guy died?” Amma speaks for the first time, and her voice is icy. Eliza shakes her head, her hair brushing over my shoulders.
“Nothing that morbid, love. It’s just that… look, can we all admit it’s been a shitty few days? We’ve all been off in our own little worlds, there’s been all this tension, and we’ve still got a week or so to wait here. We can’t keep going like this. So, I say we loosen up a bit, hmm?”
Leaning forward, she playfully presses a kiss to my cheek. “Lux? Party?”
It feels wrong and macabre, but it’s not like anything else sounds better. Besides, it is really appealing to imagine recreating those first few days on Meroe, before Robbie showed up, before everything got so fucked.
A reset.
“I don’t know that a bonfire and a few bottles of wine can help that much,” Amma says now, still looking over at me.
“Oh darling,” Eliza says, winking at me. “We’ve got something much better than wine.”
THAT NIGHT, WE BUILD Ahuge bonfire, so big that as I stand next to it, watching the flames crawl up toward the sky, I’m actually a little afraid.
I imagine an ember, a spark, catching the leaves overhead, fire leaping from branch to branch, all of Meroe Island instantly aflame.
The image is so clear that I can almost see it, which is when I know that I am really fucked up.
I stay away from drugs for the most part, but after a day where my nerves felt like they had been scraped over barbed wire, oblivion had sounded nice. The thick, sweet smell of hash hangs over all of us, and my limbs are heavy with it as I flop onto the sand next to Brittany.
Or who I think is Brittany.
But it’s Amma, her eyes dark and shining in the firelight.
“You,” I say, studying her, and her eyes seem even shinier all of a sudden, like she might start crying.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “About Nico. I… I told you he reminded me of Sterling, and I was telling him about everything, and it just happened, and—”
“Sterling?” I giggle. “Your dead boyfriend was named Sterling?”
I don’t know why that’s suddenly so funny to me, but it is,Amma and Sterling, like something out of a WASP fever dream, and I fall back on the sand, helpless with laughter.
