The Different Girl

black, and covered in ash.
    “They used fuel.” May wrinkled her nose. “You can smell it.”
    To get all the machines outside, the classroom had been knocked to pieces. Because of the big cells on the roof, more fuel had been poured on the floor and set alight. A lot of what made our buildings didn’t burn very well, but even so the classroom now reminded me of the dead girl’s head. The head itself had disappeared. It must have been thrown on the pile.
    The kitchen looked almost as bad—the door was smashed and the windows kicked in, though it still had walls and a roof.
    We walked down to the courtyard. Gray ash rose in puffs around our feet. We just stared, blinking. Each place we looked only showed another thing gone.
    “There’s a lot of work,” muttered May.
    “We need to take naps,” said Eleanor. “We need a safe place from storms.”
    “I know,” said May. “There’s a lot to do.”
    “But it’s destroyed,” said Isobel. “We can’t live in the cave. We can’t .”
    May left us, all staring at the burned pile, and climbed onto the kitchen porch, stepping carefully.
    “Don’t hurt your feet, May!” I cried.
    May held out a hand which meant she wanted us to watch. She bent over and lifted a corner of one of the windowpanes—a wide square of scuffed plastic—sliding the rubbish on top of it into a pile. She held the window high for us to see, May herself an opaque shape behind the plastic, because of the scuffs and soot.
    “See?” she called. “It isn’t broken, just knocked out of the frame.”
    She shook the plastic between her hands, so it made a noise. May set it down and her face had a grim sort of smile.
    “We can put it back. We can take care of ourselves.”
    “How?” asked Isobel.
    “Just like that.” May waved at the kitchen. “It’s more broken than destroyed. We can fix it up. Come on.”
    May heaved the broken railings off the steps to clear a path for us to climb. We studied the size of the plastic square and the broken window and saw that she was right.
    “It will take nails,” said Eleanor.
    “Or glue, or ties,” said May. “But look at the door—same thing. Handle’s gone, but we don’t need a handle.”
    We turned our attention to the broken door, already thinking about what spots didn’t fit anymore, all of us crowding around. May picked her way inside and shouted to follow. Again, at first it seemed like only debris, but May kept pointing out the difference between tipped over and actually ruined. The machines had been pulled out, and the stove. But May squatted under the cupboards and called out that the pipes and wires were all still in the wall. She stood again, with her hands on her hips.
    “On a boat you fix things.”
    We stood where the kitchen table had been—it was tipped against the wall with two legs snapped off—trying to see the difference between how it had been, and how it was, and what was possible.
    “But this is a house,” said Isobel. “Do you know how?”
    May nodded. We waited for her to say more. We needed to know. When she spoke May’s voice was soft.
    “Will told me. It was a night when Cat was sad, after too much drink. Will knew I had heard Cat being sad, and he came down to my bunk and told me something to remember.” May tossed the hair out of her eyes. “He told me that one day he’d be gone.”
    “And he is gone,” said Eleanor.
    May nodded. “But he told me not to be sad.”
    We knew that May had been sad, that she was sad now from her shining eyes, but no one said so, because we knew May knew it, too. She let her breath out.
    “He told me to remember what was good. He said it would make me sad—he said it was how much you loved things that made you saddest—but that I should remember him anyway. Then he talked about that very day, which wasn’t special, but he told me about it like I hadn’t even been there, like a story. And in the story I saw us . Us. I saw our lives.”
    I looked at the littered floor and noticed the metal knob on a drawer that had been smashed to pieces. With both hands I pulled the knob free.
    “What are you doing?” asked Isobel.
    “We do need a handle,” I said, “because our hands are different. But we don’t need the same one as before.”
    The knob ended in a metal screw that seemed as big as the hole left in door. I stuck it in and felt the sharp tip catch. May came over to help and held the door, so I pinched hard and turned the knob, four times. When I let go