The Different Girl

about the rest of her life, the part that had disappeared in the storm.
    But when I woke it was the next morning, with Irene’s hand on my shoulder.
    “Are you with us, Veronika?”
    “I am, Irene,” I said. “Just like normal.”
    “Good girl. Get dressed now.”
    In the brightness of morning Irene’s world of rain seemed very hard to believe. Our walk with Irene was an exact repetition of our walk the day before with Robbert, where he’d laid out the plastic tubs of rice. One by one we visited the tubs, from the dock to the beach, to the meadow, and finally up the hill. The tubs were just where we’d left them, with the rice inside. Irene picked each one up and put it in her own satchel. But when we got to the spot on the cliff path—of the last tub we’d actually set down, since Robbert had done the final two farther up—the tub was gone, along with the jug of water.
    Irene had us make sure it hadn’t been taken by an animal—which really meant by one of the rats that lived in the palm grove—so we searched the tall grass around the path in every direction. No one found either the tub or the jug.
    “All right, then,” said Irene, and we kept walking up.
    • • •
    Robbert must have told her where he’d put the other tubs, because twice Irene had us wait while she went forward, first stepping closer than any of us would have liked to the edge of the cliff, and at a second spot climbing up the rocky peak in the direction of the aerial. Neither place had a plastic tub. We shouted out for her to be careful, especially on the peak when she went up on her toes to peer around, and her toes were perched on very small spaces in the rock. Finally she came back down. She brushed off her hands and told us not to worry. Then Irene cupped both hands around her mouth and aimed her voice up so it would carry.
    “There’s food waiting whenever you want, May! Don’t be afraid!”
    Then she took two of the other tubs of rice from her satchel and set them on the path, waving us to be still when we began to look for rocks to build a pyramid.
    It took us longer to walk back, since—because of how worried we’d been—all five of us held hands in a line. The path wasn’t always as wide as we needed and so sometimes one or even two of us had to push through the tall grass. By the time we reached the woods Irene had us back in groups of two and three.
    “What is May afraid of?” asked Eleanor.
    Before Irene could ask us what we thought May was afraid of, I said, “The angry people can’t be why she’s hiding now, because they aren’t here. She must be afraid of something that is on the island.”
    At once we began to think of possibilities. Birds? Crabs? Rats? Trees? Machines?
    Isobel looked up at Irene. “Is she afraid of you ?”
    “She doesn’t need to be,” said Irene.
    “You saved her life,” said Eleanor.
    “She knows that,” said Irene. “She’s worried about something else, I think.”
    We waited for Irene to say more, but she only sighed. When we reached the courtyard she told us to wait while she went into the classroom. Even from where we stood we could hear the clicking of switches and Irene’s voice.
    “She is trying to call the supply boat,” said Caroline.
    “The boat is so late,” said Isobel. “Did they lose their clock?”
    “Maybe they lost their receiver,” said Eleanor.
    We heard Irene moving in the classroom, and then more switches.
    “Why would May be frightened of Irene and Robbert?” asked Eleanor.
    “What happened to make her frightened?” said Caroline. “She wasn’t before.”
    “Maybe May made a mistake,” said Isobel. “If she isn’t smart.”
    “She isn’t stupid,” I said, “just different.”
    “She calls us stupid very often,” said Isobel. “ That is stupid.”
    When May had first arrived, Robbert and Irene had kept her away from us, and us away from her. We knew now May wasn’t one of the people who had caused the explosion, but had they known that when she arrived? Robbert had said the four of us would scare these people more than anything. I remembered how May had first seen my face and screamed.
    “They wanted to send her away,” I said. “On the supply ship. But now they can’t, because she’s seen us. They think she’ll tell people, and those people will get frightened and angry and then they’ll come.”
    “She would tell people,” said Isobel. “Even if she promised not to. She would get angry or scared and just spit