The Different Girl

weren’t allowed.
    “—and she lived in the part of the world where people knew things. Now, everyone knows something, but in this part of the world some people knew more. Invisible things, secrets a person couldn’t see without learning, without school . Like your school. The people who went to those schools mixed together with the people who didn’t, the people who believed—well, who just believed. Sometimes that worked out but other times, and eventually most of the time, the school people had to keep themselves as hidden as the secret things they knew.”
    Irene stopped talking for long enough that I wondered if it was the end, but finally she kept going.
    “Eventually people didn’t know who knew things and who didn’t, because those people were hiding, because those people who didn’t learn became frightened of what they couldn’t see, frightened about what was real—what was possible. And people who get frightened become angry. So the girl who knew things also knew she had to stay hidden. Because if anyone saw her, they would hurt her for the things she knew. So she left her home to find another. She sailed away. She even flew in an airplane. Just to make sure. But you can never be sure. You can never be sure. And that’s what the girl learned, and she never forgot it, no matter how old she got, or how happy she was.”
    Irene sighed, and pushed herself up from the counter. The story was finished, even though I still had all my questions. She came to Isobel, then Caroline, then Eleanor. Her shadow passed over my face, and I felt her hand behind my ear. Irene dropped to a crouch and whispered.
    “I watched you, Veronika. I saw you stand. You did so well, honey. You didn’t need me at all.”
    I wanted to tell her it wasn’t true, that I needed her forever, but by then I was already gone.

7.
    It was three days until I could visit Caroline’s spot in the dune grass. The days in between went almost like always, with smocks and breakfast, and walks and class and naps and more class and dinner and the porch and finally sleep. The difference was May, whether she was at breakfast or still sleeping, whether she sat with us on the porch, or whether she went walking alone to the woods. Most of all, the four of us felt May’s presence from Robbert and Irene.
    They would go in the other room or walk outside and close the door, but sometimes the words came without warning, unexpected even to them. Irene would give Robbert a look and he would snap, just like he’d burned his finger on a wire.
    “Look, I haven’t heard anything.”
    “But what does that mean ?”
    “Irene—it could still be the storm. It could be their receiver—”
    “You’re sure about ours.” All four of us remembered where Robbert had been with the tools.
    “I am.”
    “And what if it’s something else?”
    And that was when Irene’s gaze went through the window to the classroom where May lay still asleep.
    We spent that morning talking about words and how May’s words didn’t sound like Robbert’s or Irene’s, or ours. It wasn’t anything we had noticed, because we’d been able to understand her perfectly well, but today Irene focused on all the variations. One example was how May didn’t pronounce the g in words that had “ing” at the end. Another was how her letter s was spoken with an invisible t in front of it, so “sad” became “tsad.” Irene explained where May’s tongue was placed inside her mouth to make each sound, and showed us with her own mouth how it happened. Robbert’s questions were about how our hearing turned a wrong sound into a right one. He made up sentences as if May were saying them to test our making sense.
    Irene explained that ways of speaking came from different places, and that each way was like a sign announcing who a person was and what their life was mostly like and what they were most likely to believe. Isobel asked what May’s way said about May, but before Irene could answer, Eleanor asked what Irene’s way said about Irene, and then Caroline asked why, if there was an agreed upon best way—the way we spoke, for example—anyone spoke a different way at all?
    Irene held up her hand, which she did when we asked too many things at once. “May’s life has been different. She hasn’t been to the same kind of school.”
    “Why not?” asked Isobel.
    “Because she lived on a boat. She wasn’t in one place.”
    “Why didn’t her uncle Will teach her?” asked