The Different Girl

wasn’t with them. I looked behind me, down to both buildings and the courtyard. She wasn’t anywhere.
    “Where did she go?”
    “To find you,” said Isobel. “To find the notebook.”
    I shook my head. “She didn’t come to find me. She went somewhere else. Didn’t she say?”
    “She just went,” said May. “By the time we noticed she was halfway back.”
    “She said it would only be a minute,” said Isobel.
    “We’ve been waiting for you both,” said Eleanor.
    All three of them—the other two imitating May—were crouched in the rocks, and I realized I’d crouched down, too. I looked down the hill. How could Caroline be out of sight so quickly?
    “We have to go ,” said May. “It’s too late. Didn’t you hear the shots?”
    “You should keep going and hide,” I said. “I’ll find Caroline. Maybe by then Robbert and Irene will be back, too—”
    “ No .”
    May burst from the rocks. She grabbed my arm, spun me toward the hill.
    “We’re all going ,” she grunted, “and we’re going now . You don’t understand.” She called ahead, still angry, to Eleanor and Isobel. “Move!”
    They hurried in front of us, holding hands for better balance, while May pulled me after. There were more sounds behind us that I didn’t know.
    “What’s all that?” I asked May.
    She was too caught up with hauling me to reply. We were almost to where the path turned, the point beyond which someone standing in the courtyard couldn’t see. I looked back. The kitchen blocked my view of the beach path, which was where the sounds echoed. They were voices —far away, speaking loudly, but with words I couldn’t understand.
    “It’s people!” I said.
    “Get down!”
    May dropped to her knees, and I did my best to crouch with her. Isobel and Eleanor had stopped ahead of us. May furiously waved for them to keep going. She peeked back herself and either decided we’d come far enough to stand or that there wasn’t enough time not to. We caught up with the others.
    “What are they saying?” asked Isobel.
    “Do you understand them, May?” asked Eleanor.
    But May only let go of my arm and pushed to the front. Her face had changed, jaw stuck out and eyes all hard, like when she was angry, but I knew she was also scared, even mainly scared. This was how people were able to do things when they didn’t want to—they made themselves feel something else, like anger, more than the fear. May must have learned it from her uncle, the way we learned deductions from Irene, which made me think of deducing what had happened to Caroline.
    She’d woken from a dream where Robbert had said to take his notebook. I thought of my own dream, the only one I’d ever had: May’s eyes and the round holes in the plank, and somehow knowing that May’s past would tell me what had happened in the storm. Since Caroline’s dreams weren’t a random matter of sand so much as direct results of what Irene whispered before bedtime, or questions Robbert asked her when they were alone in the classroom, with time I could guess what the different connections were. But there was no time. I looked back. All I saw were rocks and palms and, higher and higher around us, the bright blue sky.
    But if I couldn’t deduce her dream, perhaps I could deduce Caroline’s waking. She woke slowly after dreams: she’d said to find the notebook, but it wasn’t until later that she knew I wasn’t looking in the right place. But why didn’t she come tell me, so we could look together? Because there wasn’t time—which meant Caroline knew more than anyone what was wrong.
    She had asked Irene not to send her to sleep.
    Why did we know things when we did? When did the knowing settle in, like a circling bird to the earth? Caroline hadn’t known what to do until she was on the path. But she hadn’t gone back to the courtyard. She’d gone somewhere else.
    “Robbert had the notebook with him,” I said.
    Isobel and Eleanor turned to me. “What?”
    “That’s what she knew from her dream.”
    We had stopped walking, which brought May rushing back to us. “What are you doing—come on!”
    “Caroline went to find Robbert,” I told her.
    May just stared. Her voice was raspy, like when we’d found her.
    “Then she’s not coming,”
    • • •
    May led us higher than we’d ever been, near where Irene had placed the second tub of rice. Robbert’s aerial stuck out above us, a pyramid of gray rods rising from a metal box bolted to the