The Different Girl

don’t you tell us?” asked Robbert. His hand slipped under my hair, the fingers probing softly.
    “It was one of May’s photographs.”
    “Which one?” asked Irene.
    “The seventh one, with May on her boat, on the Mary .”
    “But why?” Irene shook her head and started again. “Not why did you dream—what part of the photograph feels important?”
    “Zebra stripes.” They both stared like they hadn’t heard. “That’s what Isobel called the bandages against May’s skin. In the seventh photo she has a bandage on her finger, so that’s one stripe, and the line of freckles beneath her eyes is another darker stripe, and then on the boat, the wood edging the deck is white, but the side of the boat under it is black, so the white is a stripe, too. Then the dark water and the bright sky are stripes, too. And the teeth in May’s mouth and the white of her eyes. Except for May’s green shirt almost the entire photograph is light and dark stripes pointing different directions.”
    “But why is that important? Why did you think about that when you should have been asleep?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Think hard, Veronika.”
    I was blinking, trying to know the right words. “It was May’s eyes. The pupils of May’s eyes. They’re like round holes. Black circles in the whites. I thought if I could look in them—all the way, if she would let me—it would explain where she had been, and it would say what had happened in the storm.”
    “May’s eyes?” asked Irene.
    “They were round hard holes.”
    Irene nodded. But it was only because of the buried plank that the eyes seemed that way—that was the real source of my dream, yet I couldn’t ask why that would happen without telling them where I’d been. Did they know? They looked at me without speaking. I felt how hard it was to have a secret, how secrets made you feel apart and alone. Now May was on one side of a secret and Robbert and Irene were on the other.
    Robbert patted my head and looked at Irene.
    “Am I sick?” I asked. “Like May?”
    “No, Veronika,” said Irene. “We think it was a bit of sand.”
    “I’ve never had a problem with sand.”
    “No,” said Robbert. “You haven’t. So from now on you have to be extra careful, don’t you?”
    I nodded. Robbert and Irene led me into the kitchen. Everyone else was on the porch, waiting to come in, and when they did we all began to make an early dinner, since it didn’t seem like Robbert and Irene had ever eaten lunch.
    Dinner was noodles, but with a new recipe that used half the sauce and half the vegetable protein. We went to bed earlier than normal and there was no time to talk to May or for any of the others to talk to me.
    As I lay on my cot, waiting for Irene, I wondered again if I should say where we’d been. She knelt next to me, her hand brushed through my hair.
    “Irene?” I whispered. “Were you scared for me?”
    “The important thing is that we knew just what to do. Were you scared, Veronika? Are you scared now?”
    I shook my head, because I didn’t know. Being scared of water made sense because it was dangerous. Could you be scared of something invisible, that you couldn’t name? Irene slipped her fingers to my spot.
    “Good. Sleep well, Veronika.”
    • • •
    The next morning Irene used the same tea bag as the day before, and for lunch she made her sandwich with peanut butter. That meant we could expect the supply boat any day.
    But five days later the boat still hadn’t come.

8.
    Since we had never actually seen the supply boat, it wasn’t so much that we expected to see it now. But we kept waking from our naps to find Irene still eating peanut butter and no stack of new boxes in the kitchen, and we began to wonder why, especially when Robbert went to the cliffs with his toolbox almost every afternoon.
    Our walks began to skip the dock, and as the days went on we began to skip everywhere except the woods. I thought this was because Robbert was at the aerial—so we didn’t go to the cliffs. And because of my own accident with sand we didn’t go to the beach. But then we began to just stay in the courtyard, which wasn’t so much of a walk at all and more what Irene called focused study, which usually meant that we watched bugs.
    Isobel found a black centipede and everyone went to look. Irene asked Eleanor to list the different parts of the centipede and the rest of us to make sure she didn’t skip anything. But instead of looking at the