The Different Girl

happened to May we couldn’t get out of the cave. But getting us all in the cave had been so difficult that it made sense to wait until we were completely sure of being safe before we went to all the risk and trouble. May promised to be careful and quick, and she was gone.
    “Besides,” said Eleanor, “if there is trouble, we’d be just as stuck out there as we’d be stuck in here without May.”
    “And May is good at sneaking,” agreed Isobel.
    Since we were good at learning, that was what we did while we waited, thinking of everything that had happened so fast. It was what the three of us had been doing since we came to the cave.
    We had also all taken naps, because a short nap every day kept our systems cycling clearly. May slept longer than we did, curled on her blanket in the back of the cave, but she stayed awake longer than we did, too, for more hours at a time. She spent a lot of time, while we talked and even while she talked with us, carving lines and shapes into the white dust. Sometimes we could tell what she carved—waves, boats, sun, trees—and other times we had to ask: a curve of lines was the wind, and a series of circles was sunlight. May also drew things that, when we asked what they where, only made her shrug. At first we thought she was carving secrets or even that she was still shy, but when we asked, May would shake head and tell us no, she was just drawing.
    “But what are you drawing?” asked Isobel.
    May shrugged. “I don’t know.”
    “How can you draw without knowing what it is?” I asked her.
    “How can you take a walk without knowing where it’s going to end?” she answered.
    “But that’s not the same,” I said. “A walk goes to the place it ends but it also goes to the places in between.”
    “Exactly,” said May, scratching again with her sharp rock. Before I could say I didn’t think it was exactly anything, May stopped scratching and tapped the rock to get the dust off. “And just because I don’t know now doesn’t mean I won’t know ever, either.”
    I almost understood—because we learned by adding one thing to another thing to make a third we hadn’t known before—except May didn’t add things like we did. She felt them, like the weight of an object in the dark of a pocket, hidden but still at hand.
    That was May’s everything. That was May’s heart.
    • • •
    Eleanor had set the satchel on the blanket. May hadn’t said anything about the satchel or the notebook it held, because she was too busy yelling at me for climbing out on my own and then at Isobel and Eleanor for helping. When she’d come back in the cave May had yelled and yelled, with tears on her face, about how it wasn’t going to be her fault if we kept being so stupid. May pushed her way to the back of the cave and threw herself down on the blanket. We didn’t know what to do. A minute later May surprised us all by saying she was sorry.
    “For what, May?”
    “For her . For not saving her .”
    “But you couldn’t have saved her,” I said. “Could you?”
    May shook her head.
    “Caroline’s leg was damaged,” I told the others. “And her arm. And her face. She was damaged all over.”
    “I shouldn’t have let her get near the edge. Aren’t you supposed to stay away from the edge?”
    “You said all that changed,” said Eleanor. “You were right.”
    “We have to deduce and make decisions,” said Isobel.
    “Caroline decided the notebook was more important than being careful,” I said.
    May shook her head. “Don’t you care? Don’t you care about them ?”
    “Of course,” said Isobel.
    “Maybe Irene and Robbert are hiding, too,” said Eleanor.
    “Maybe they are,” said Isobel.
    We waited for May to agree with us.
    “They aren’t,” she whispered. “Believe me.”
    I remembered Caroline’s words. Not that she didn’t know, but that she couldn’t understand .
    I didn’t understand her being gone, either. I had seen her fall. Now her part of any conversation would always be unsaid, and the direction she would have gone walking would always be empty. Her absence extended in lines of numbers made of smoke, backward in memory and forward in futures never to occur.
    “Now there are only three of us,” said Isobel. “We do still have to be careful.”
    I touched May’s knee. “There are four.”
    But May only shut her eyes, which was her way to stop talking.
    • • •
    Though finding the notebook had cost Caroline her life, no one moved to