The Different Girl

sorry, either.”
    I nodded. I don’t think I was ever sorry, really.
    “What did he say?” whispered Caroline.
    “He said it was a good question.”
    Everyone thought about that. Isobel whispered, from the other side of Caroline. “It is a good question.” We all nodded and thought the same thing she said next. “That means they don’t know what we’re going to learn, either.”
    We heard Irene and stopped whispering. She came in, turned out the light, and bent over each of our cots in turn. First Isobel, then Caroline, then Eleanor, then me, leaning close to my face and whispering, “Go to sleep, Veronika.”
    Then she pushed the spot behind my ear, with a click, like always, and I did.

2.

    After that we always started mornings with thirty-minute walks, with each of us going a different direction. At first we just described what we’d seen, but since we had become so good at looking, this began to take up the whole morning. After a week, Robbert and Irene asked us to do things differently, because whenever we got good at something they would decide to change. They had us ask one another questions about comparing smells, or light, or sounds, or times—so we had to think about places we’d been to before as well as the place we’d just been now, and think about both in a way we hadn’t either time. The questions weren’t hard, but they were surprising. Each day we took naps and then helped with dinner. On special nights we went for a second walk with Irene in the dark, and then had an extra-late class to talk about that . The island was different at night, so we looked forward to night walks more than anything.
    One night we went out after there had been a storm. It almost never rained on the island. Robbert always said that was what he liked about it, even though he didn’t like to go out in the sun, either. We sometimes did see storms—the rain spattering against the windows and tapping on the roof like tiny hammers—but we never went out if it even looked like it might rain. Robbert always checked the weather very carefully on his notebook. For us the island meant sunshine and bright skies.
    That night Irene took us to the beach, because all sorts of things could wash ashore in a storm, when the waves went higher than normal. We walked in a line, Irene leading the way with a flashlight. She would laugh and say her eyes “weren’t as sharp as you kids”—but for us the beam became another thing to look at, bobbing in time with Irene’s gait.
    The beach path was sandy and soft, which meant we all took careful steps. Then the grass fell away and we stood between the dunes, looking out. The wave crests gleamed in the dark, tumbling onto the sand in lines of boiling foam. Different parts of the water moved at different speeds, and the waves were different heights and each one reached farther or stopped lower than the others. There were so many changes to see that all four of us stood motionless except for our flicking eyes and the wind whipping our hair.
    Irene broke the spell, turning our attention to the sand, pointing out how high the storm had lifted the line of kelp and debris. She told us the tide was going out, so the sand would be dry at the top of the beach. Her feet dented its even surface, and she flicked the light for us to follow. We did, walking slow because sand is tricky. When we caught up, Irene aimed the flashlight at a pile of kelp. She pulled it aside and underneath lay a tennis shoe, the rubber bleached white and peeling. Irene poked at it and said we could keep looking by ourselves, as long as we stayed well away from the water.
    We didn’t move. Irene sighed, and then told Isobel to stay with her and the three of us to go the other way, and to separate. She took Isobel by the arm and turned her to the debris. The three of us began to walk without knowing what we were looking for—what was worth studying and what wasn’t. After a minute, Caroline stopped and said she’d look around there. She crouched and began to poke at the kelp with one hand, like Irene. Eleanor and I kept walking until we’d gone the same distance as between Irene and Caroline, and then Eleanor said she’d stop, too. I kept walking by myself until the distance to Eleanor was the same as the distance from her to Caroline, and from Caroline to Irene. When I looked back, I saw that the beach curved more than I’d noticed. I couldn’t see Irene or Isobel at all. I couldn’t even see Caroline. I