The Different Girl

time.
    • • •
    I reached the yard almost exactly when Eleanor and Isobel did. Robbert rose from where he’d been sitting on the kitchen steps, swatting dust off the seat of his pants. When he saw Caroline wasn’t there, he looked off toward the beach, then climbed onto the porch and looked again.
    “Stay here.” Robbert jumped off the steps and broke into a jog. “Stay!” he called over his shoulder, and disappeared.
    We stood in the yard, thinking about where he’d gone.
    “If something was wrong he would have called for Irene,” said Eleanor. “But he didn’t. That’s because of Veronika not coming back before. Caroline might have decided something new was more important, too.”
    “Except Robbert is also afraid of the water,” Isobel said. “He told me to stop at the end of the path, before I reached the dock.”
    “Did you see a boat?” asked Eleanor. “Maybe the two men in the picture have come looking for her.”
    Isobel shook her head. “I saw a storm petrel.”
    “Maybe the two men drowned,” said Eleanor.
    We turned at the wheeze of the classroom screen door. “Where is Caroline?” Irene called.
    We pointed to the beach. Irene went to the edge of the porch and craned her head, but you couldn’t see the beach path from there, so she came to us—none of us saying anything, since she wasn’t saying anything—and went on her toes. Irene dropped to her flat feet and frowned.
    “Go sit on the kitchen porch, all of you. Stay there.”
    The kitchen steps meant we still weren’t using the classroom, where the girl was sleeping. We got halfway to it before we realized Irene was gone. We stopped to watch her disappear, as if Irene’s leaving had become another problem we’d been set to solve.
    “Caroline is the parrot,” said Isobel. “And there’s something else on the beach.”
    “Or the beach is the parrot,” said Eleanor. “And something happened to Caroline.”
    We couldn’t know which until Robbert or Irene came back and told us.
    “Did you go to the cliffs?” I asked Eleanor.
    She told us what she’d seen: different colors of Styrofoam, plastic bottles, plastic bags, and one shoe, all floating near the rocks. Isobel asked about the shoe, but Eleanor said it was too far away to tell the size. She asked me about the trees, and I described going to the window instead, and the picture of bones.
    “Why did you go there?” asked Isobel, but then she answered her own question, both eyes blinking. “You decided the parrot was the girl.”
    When Robbert asked why I’d stayed at the dock instead of coming back on time, I’d known what I’d done, but not why. The why felt like a little hole somewhere inside, and now, even though I couldn’t name the feeling, it was happening again. The three of us ought to have been sitting on the steps, but we were all standing in the yard. Then, like three birds keen on the same crab, we turned to look at Robbert’s porch.
    “They could some back,” said Eleanor. “I’ll see them sooner from the kitchen porch.”
    As if this decided everything, Isobel and I crossed the yard. At the top of Robbert’s steps we looked to Eleanor, who stood on the kitchen porch, staring out. She shook her head—no one was coming.
    Very carefully, quietly, we pressed our faces against the screen.
    Right inside was the empty classroom. The room was dim, dotted with blinks and blips from different machines. The bed was against the wall, the shape upon it still. Isobel opened the door so slowly that the squeak turned to a long soft sigh.
    Bottles and wadded towels cluttered the table by the bed. The girl’s clothes were heaped on a countertop, and Robbert’s desk had been cleared to make room for books, left open next to the keyboard and big screens. On top of the books lay a glossy stack of dark pages, more bone pictures.
    We crept to the bed. The girl had rolled toward the wall, so we couldn’t see her face. Her breathing was a faint, clogged whistle. Her hair was damp on the nape of her neck. One arm lay flung out, wrapped round with white stripes of tape and gauze.
    “Zebra,” whispered Isobel.
    The girl’s breath caught, as if she’d heard. We didn’t move. The machines hummed quietly, hives of sleeping bees. We never woke up without Irene rousing us, and since this girl was so extra tired, we decided we were safe. But just then we heard Eleanor across the courtyard, high-pitched and shrill.
    “They’re coming back! They’re coming