The Different Girl

looked at Eleanor. She was crouched, but looking at me. I waved.
    I turned around, careful not to look at the water, because if I looked too closely it would be hard to look away. Robbert called this pattern fixation. He laughed like it was a good thing, but always made an entry on his notebook, too. So I aimed my eyes at the sand, at what the storm had washed ashore: kelp, driftwood, plastic bottles, colored nylon rope, netting, lumps of Styrofoam—the usual things, but more of them than normal. I kicked at the bigger kelp lumps to see what was underneath—mostly more kelp. When I looked back, I couldn’t see Eleanor.
    Since I knew she wasn’t far away, I kept going, eyes sharp for whatever Irene wanted to find. I was kicking so much that I almost didn’t notice the prints of someone else kicking before me. I stopped. We’d all been inside, and the tide and the rain had made the sand flat, so any kicking would have had to have happened since then. This meant the prints had been made by Robbert, except he’d been in his room. Hadn’t he? The line of kicked sand began down by the water, and the lowest ones had been half eroded by the waves. Because Robbert hated the water, he wouldn’t have gone near it, so the kicks weren’t his. The marks climbed all the way up the beach, into the grass. I looked behind me, but no one was there. I called to Eleanor but the wind snatched away the sound.
    The grass was thick, but I pushed forward, the air whizzing with insects as my steps stirred them from where they’d sat. I became so interested in how the insects flew that I almost tripped when my foot kicked something soft. Before me lay a shape that didn’t make sense—all angles and bumps—swallowed by the grass like driftwood half buried in sand. I stared down, the spinning insects like thoughts that wouldn’t settle to sense. Then all of a sudden, like with a puzzle, one shape became a leg, another an elbow, and it was a girl.
    In the grass at my feet was a girl. She sprawled facedown, all wet, clothes tangled from the sea, hair flat across her face like a black mask.
    I said, “Hello.”
    She didn’t move.
    I said, “Hello” again. Finally I bent to touch the exposed skin of her arm. It was soft and colder than Irene had ever been.
    I hurried back as fast as I could without falling. When I saw Eleanor I began to wave. She waved back, but then stopped when she heard me yelling.
    “I found her!”
    I don’t know why I expected Eleanor to know what I meant, but I yelled it anyway. Eleanor began waving in the other direction, to Caroline, and when I caught up to Eleanor we hurried together. I told her I found a girl washed up from the storm. When we reached Caroline, Irene and Isobel were coming from the other direction. I was in the middle of telling Caroline when they caught up. Irene told me to start over, slow and clear, telling exactly what I thought I found.
    But I knew it was important, like the kitchen when a pot boils over, when instead of describing putting water in the pot and turning on the heat and putting in the noodles and then at last the boiling, that what you had to shout instead was just “the pot!”
    “It’s a girl,” I told her. “I think she’s dead.”
    Irene told the others to tell Robbert, and then she and I hurried down the beach. Her flashlight stabbed back and forth over our footprints, first three of us, then two of us and then just me. We got to the kicking marks and I pointed up to the grass. I didn’t know I’d gone so far. I started to apologize, but Irene told me to stay where I was. She climbed into the grass and knelt down. I couldn’t see her.
    I could only hear the wind and the waves, the two sounds threaded together. Irene emerged with the girl in her arms. The hair still covered her face, and her limbs hung limp. I asked if she was dead.
    “Not yet, Veronika. Quickly now.” Irene brushed past, faster than me even, carrying the girl, because my feet were so slow in the sand. When I reached the classroom porch the other three were lined up, watching through the screen. I took my place without saying a word.
    They’d put the girl on the big table, Robbert on one side, and Irene on the other. All we could see was Irene’s back, and then beyond her the girl’s bare legs. The light was sharp and narrow, but we could tell the girl’s skin was brown, darker than any of us. The bottoms of her feet were crusted with sand and the skin was lighter, which made me