The Different Girl

think of the bleached tennis shoe. Robbert and Irene worked mostly around the girl’s head, but after a while Irene leaned over her feet and rubbed the feet with a cloth daubed with alcohol. Once she washed off the sand, we could see the scuffed skin was actually bright red.
    They worked for two hours, and we watched the entire time. Mostly Irene’s and Robbert’s bodies blocked our sight, but sometimes when they reached for a tool or medicine we would get a wondrous flash of this girl’s different skin, whether smooth brown or torn raw. Finally Irene noticed us through the screen. She whispered to Robbert and came onto the porch, all of us backing up so she could open the door. Before we could say anything she whispered, “Let’s go to your bedroom.” She led us down the stairs and across the yard. The moon had come out, and the stars were bright. We followed her in.
    Irene pointed to our cots and wouldn’t say anything until we were ready for bed. Usually we had to untie our own smocks and fold them and make sure about the folding, but tonight, her fingers much faster than ours, she had the other smocks untied before the three of us could untie Eleanor’s. Irene gathered them up as we lay down on our cots. She finished her folding and looked at us. We all looked back. Irene smiled, and spoke very carefully.
    “The girl Veronika found in the grass is alive, and should be alive tomorrow. If she is, then she should be fine. She is probably from a ship, but whether she fell overboard, or whether it was wrecked in yesterday’s storm, we don’t know.”
    “I don’t like accidents,” said Isobel. We were all thinking of the accident that had killed our parents. We didn’t know much more about what an accident actually was, only that they took people away and left others behind, just like this girl in the grass.
    Caroline asked about the girl’s skin being a different color, and Eleanor asked about her different hair, and I was about to ask about her parents when Irene held up her hand.
    “She swallowed a lot of water, and she’s been banged up by the rocks. We’ll know more tomorrow.”
    She stood. This was her signal to turn off the light and put us to bed, but Isobel spoke again, in a whisper. “Do you know her name?”
    “No. We don’t know anything.”
    “Do you know how old she is?”
    “We don’t.”
    “Old as us?”
    “We don’t know, Isobel.”
    “Why does she look so different?” asked Caroline.
    “Everyone looks different. I look different from you, and we all look different from Robbert. There’s nothing strange about it.” Irene turned off the light.
    “What was under her skin?” I asked.
    Irene looked at me. I almost thought she was angry, but then realized she didn’t know how to answer my question, or couldn’t decide.
    “You’ve seen me cut my finger in the kitchen, Veronika.”
    “But this was different. It was more. And more different than a look.”
    Irene frowned. “What is a look?”
    “A thing you see. On a surface. This was something else, wasn’t it? Something more.”
    Irene watched me for a moment. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
    • • •
    When we woke the day was hot and the clock said two in the afternoon—at least five hours past our normal time, maybe because we’d stayed up late the night before. Irene’s hair was pulled back, and her face looked puffed and tired. I put on my smock and traded ties with Caroline. Irene waited on the steps, sitting with her teacup in both hands. When we were all behind her, she stood, but instead of leading us to the classroom, she went the other way, deeper into the island.
    “Robbert is asleep. He was awake all night. The girl is asleep, too. We think she’s going to live, though it’s too soon to tell how badly she’s been hurt. All that means is we’re not going to have school in the classroom. We’re going on a walk, and then the five of us will talk about what we saw, just like a normal day. I’m going to wait here, and each of you will go a different direction. Come back in forty-five minutes.”
    She sat on a palm log and took another swallow from her mug. Forty-five minutes was a very, very long time.
    “Go,” said Irene, with just a flick of impatience.
    Without thinking why, I went toward the beach. Eleanor wanted to walk that way, too, but I didn’t stop, and after a few steps she shifted to the woods. Normally I would have stopped, or at least thought about stopping, but this time