The Different Girl

volunteered her smock, so we untied it and asked May to use it to wipe the dust from our bodies, and especially our hair. May wiped us each twice a day and said it was just like waxing the deck of the Mary , except without the wax. Once we wiped off the dust, each of us sat with our hair in the sun for at least an hour, taking special care because that meant sitting near the edge. Since we could each go many days without sunlight, this was less about survival than being responsible with our time. But we all agreed that schedules and survival went together.
    Taking care of the dust was the first cooperation we had all done since May had helped us into the cave, but we ended up being able to help her, too, even though it took a lot of explaining on her part. When she’d lived in the cave by herself, May had been able to climb back onto the peak and use a nook in the rocks for her toilet, even though it wasn’t a chemical toilet like Robbert and Irene had behind the kitchen. But when she tried to climb out now we all wanted to know why, and even when she explained we all agreed it was too dangerous, so we worked out a way for us to hold her arms while she squatted over the edge of the cave. When she was done we pulled her in. We were all very curious about what she was doing—questions Irene had never been interested in answering. May wasn’t any different, except to say it was always easier on the boat for Will and Cat, but she wouldn’t explain why that was either.
    May wouldn’t explain a lot of things, just like she didn’t want to talk about what had happened that last day. Whenever we turned to her for answers she would only shrug. But three days is a long time to hide your thoughts and eventually May did talk, or at least stopped trying not to listen. I watched how her face changed, especially when we talked about our parents, because what had happened to them could help us understand what had happened on our island.
    But what I realized most by watching May was what it meant, even if she came from a different, bigger world, that she’d spent almost all of it on her boat. The more we wondered about the angry people who’d swept like a storm across our island, the more I saw—in what May didn’t know, either—that her uncle Will had made his own rules for being careful, which had kept May out of sight, especially when they met other boats or stopped in port, especially ports with schools that might have taken May away. It was just like how Robbert and Irene, we now realized, had hidden us—from the supply boat, from the rest of a changing world.
    That was when I remembered the head. I had set it to the side in my thinking, but when we recalled that last morning and our walk on the beach with Irene—to the very moment when we’d seen the boat—we saw what we’d all forgotten: the trail of Irene’s and Robbert’s footsteps, that earlier in the morning they’d found something important enough to make them go back right away.
    When I told them what I’d found in the classroom, Isobel and Eleanor had my same questions. Who was it? What had happened to her? What did the red paint mean? When May didn’t ask any questions I asked if she could answer ours. She shook her head. I asked if she’d ever seen anyone else like the head—like us—ever before. She shook her head again.
    “That’s why May was so surprised to see us ,” said Isobel. She made me describe the head again, especially all the differences—the shape, the color, the differing style of hair, the mouth.
    “Who could have been her parents?” asked Eleanor.
    We couldn’t know. May shifted, tugging at the blanket.
    “There are stories,” she said.
    “Stories of what?” asked Isobel.
    “About—” She stopped and found another word. “About girls like you. People tell them in towns. On the wire.”
    “So you did know about girls like us,” said Isobel. “Then why did you scream?”
    “I didn’t know anything,” said May. “I’d only heard, but hearing isn’t real—and everyone knows not to trust it. And nothing like that—like you—is tolerated, not any more, not in any towns. Will didn’t like any talk about it, especially not me, because that gets you seen, and we lived quiet.”
    We waited for her to say more. May shook her head.
    “But once . . . once there was a boat that left Port Orange.” May wiped her nose on the back of her hand, and then the hand on her shorts. “That’s all I know.”
    But it