A Map for Wrecked Girls Read online

  Dial Books

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Jessica Taylor

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ebook ISBN 9780735228139

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket photos: Rosa Pompelmo/Shutterstock,

  Sam Diephuis/Getty Images

  Jacket design: Elaine C. Damasco

  Version_1

  To all the wrecked girls,

  lost in the messiest throes of love and friendship,

  and searching for your way

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  We sat at the edge of the ocean—my sister, Henri, and I—inches apart but not touching at all. The blue horizon was only beginning to swallow the sun and I was already shivering.

  We’d been so sure someone would find us by now.

  Alex was the first to say help would be coming soon, but I didn’t quite believe him. When Henri said it, though—in that moment—I knew it had to be true.

  Only months before, I’d trusted Henri more than I trusted myself. Wherever she told me to go, I’d follow. If she said something was true, then it had to be so. With nobody to save us in sight, I tied my hopes to the memory of Henri from before, the older sister with the best advice, the one who never started hating me.

  “Rescue crews take time,” I said now. My legs wobbled from the life raft bobbing in the ocean all day. I hugged my knees to my chest, forcing them still. “They probably don’t even know we’re missing yet.”

  A tear ran fast down Henri’s cheek. She wiped it away and with it she took the last of my hope in her. For the first time, I was afraid we’d die on this shore.

  Henri shot a glare down the far end of the beach, where Alex stood with his bare feet in the surf. He kept his back to us, like if we didn’t see his face, we wouldn’t know he was crying. Sobs wracked his shoulders.

  “He’s a real pillar of strength, Emma,” Henri said. “Good job picking him out.”

  Even though Alex had put at least thirty feet between him and us, in some ways, my sister felt farther away.

  The first time I saw Alex gliding down the resort’s sidewalk on his rickshaw, arms tanned and legs muscled from seasons of pedaling through sand, I thought he looked strong enough to be my solution. He was broad-shouldered and shaggy-haired but not too pretty—exactly the kind of boy Henri loved to own. Now, as he turned to face the ocean, I felt like I was violating him by watching his tears fall so hard, he gulped at air and gasped for breath.

  I wanted to make my way down the beach to comfort him, but I couldn’t come up with anything meaningful to say.

  Maybe there weren’t enough words inside me to tell him, I’m sorry Casey’s dead. I’m sorry you dove down into the blue, blue water over and over again, grasping for a part of him— any part of him—and every single time, your hands came up empty.

  I wished I could say, I held my breath every time you went under, because all I could think was that I couldn’t lose you too.

  This was a secret. I’d only met Alex the day before.

  Still, I dusted sand from my damp swimsuit bottoms now and left Henri behind.

  The wavy ends of Alex’s hair, black and still wet with ocean water, didn’t brush his shoulders but sprung beside his ears. I pressed my palm against his bare back, warm, and the moment my skin touched his, he sucked in a breath.

  “Are you okay?”

  He wiped his eyes with his wrist and pushed back his hair, both hands gripping his head before falling at his sides. “No, Jones, I’m not. Fucking boat.”

  Alex never called me Emma. Only Jones. It felt sexier being called by my last name. An androgynous name like Henri’s. Two days ago, nothing had ever made me feel sexy before. Now I couldn’t feel anything but desperate.

  “I’m not sure anyone’s going to find us tonight. It could take”—I checked the ocean one more time, still empty, infinite, heartbreaking—“days.”

  “Weeks. Casey didn’t tell anyone we were taking off. Nobody knew where we were going. It’s a hell of an area to canvass.”

  Salt from the ocean had crystallized on his face, making the few brown freckles on his cheeks sparkle, the small bump on his nose more prominent. I wondered how he’d broken it. A surfboard, maybe. Or a fistfight. I wanted to know.

  His green eyes flicked down the beach toward my sister. “No one would think Casey’d take off this far.”

  Alex wasn’t blaming Henri. Not out loud, at least. But I remembered her stroking up the inside of Casey’s thigh as he stood at the wheel, saying things close to his ear. Things like: Farther, Casey. Out in the middle of the very blue. I don’t want to see land anymore. Take me far, far away.

  “I’m—I’m so sorry.”

  “You got nothing to be sorry about, Jones.”

  He was wrong. He didn’t know he and his cousin, Casey, had tangled themselves in a web my sister and I couldn’t stop weaving, and now, for poor Casey, there couldn’t be any escape.

  “But I do. For Henri. She . . .”

  A shadow stretched onto the sand before us. We turned and Henri stood with her arms looped in the hollow of her back, her head eclipsing the setting sun. She was nearly naked in only her mint-green bikini.

  We’d stripped down to the barest of our layers to let our clothes dry. Even though my shirt was sopping wet, when it came down to it, with Henri’s eyes on me—and worst of all, Alex’s—my fingertips froze at the hem of my shirt. Henri gave me a smug smile when I didn’t take it off. As if me standing there in my boy-cut swimsuit bottoms and dolphin T-shirt made her the winner of a contest I refused to enter.

  I was glad she interr
upted. I’d almost admitted out loud that Henri hadn’t said a word when Alex finally reached Casey and turned his ashen face to the sky. That Henri just swam for the life raft and never looked back when we saw Casey’s forehead was split open to the bone, a thin trail of blood marbling the water.

  Maybe Alex hadn’t noticed—he was too busy struggling to keep Casey’s body from being swept under the waves.

  Henri held her phone now and frowned, sinking her coral-painted pedicure deeper into the sand. “Well, my phone is trashed.”

  Our phones—mine was at the bottom of the ocean, but if Henri’s survived, then— “Your phone,” I said to Alex. “Did it make it?”

  “It—it was on the deck.” He tensed as I nodded to his backpack. “This is Casey’s—his was on the deck too.”

  Henri shook her phone and smacked it against her thigh. “Stupid thing won’t even turn on.”

  “Don’t.” I took it from her, and with the front of my T-shirt, wiped away drops of water that had been trapped under her gold snakeskin case. “Wait till morning. Maybe it’ll dry out by then.”

  “Morning.” She sighed. “Okay. Are we going to figure out sleeping arrangements soon or would we rather stumble around in the dark?”

  Alex faced the ocean. “Give me a sec.”

  He was looking for something. Rescue or Casey, I didn’t know which. Only that neither would appear any time soon.

  “Alex.” My hands circled his arm and squeezed above his elbow. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  He shrugged me off and sprung away. “What did you say to me?”

  “I said it wasn’t your fault.”

  “Of course it wasn’t my fault.” He grabbed his clothes off the rocks and yanked the shirt onto his shoulders. Leaving it unbuttoned, he turned to me. “Why the hell would you even say that?”

  I opened my mouth to tell him I didn’t know, that it was just something people said, but Henri pulled me away and led me back to our end of the beach.

  As the sky went from blue to gray, the ocean got choppier and the tide washed debris to our shore. Some items we recognized, some we didn’t. A piece of scrap wood here, an empty Coke can there. Nothing that mattered.

  The shock lifted and I knew we had to do something to get through the night. My toes squished in the wet sand as I stood. “It’s getting dark.”

  Motionless, Alex watched from down the beach as Henri helped me carry the life raft up the rocky shore. The coarse sand under my feet was nothing like the white sand we’d lounged on for the last three days in Puerto Rico. We wedged the raft between two dry, grassy shrubs, steps from the palm trees dotting the top of the beach and far from the waterline.

  Our eyes met, Alex’s and mine. We held the stare until something registered in him and he set his body into motion. He fished an old tarp from the surf and shook out the water before he tossed it over the top of the waist-high shrubs. The thin layer of plastic gave me a sense of protection I pretended wasn’t fake.

  My sister draped herself across the raft first. She stretched her arms over her head as if sinking into the down mattress at the hotel, not inflated orange plastic. As if she didn’t care Casey died today. As if we weren’t lost.

  I waved Alex over, and with my hip, nudged Henri closer to the edge.

  “No.” He dropped to the sand a few yards away. “You two take it. I’m fine down here.”

  “Come on. There’s plenty of room.”

  “No,” Henri said. “There isn’t.”

  “But you won’t be comfortable.” I looked from Henri to Alex. “You’ll—”

  “Jones, stop.” The way he said it, all raspy and soft, made me seal my lips. “I’ve slept in worse places than this.”

  Before I could say anything, Alex lifted up again from the sand and moved toward the beach. At the water’s edge, he dropped to his knees and hugged Casey’s backpack to his chest.

  “I’m worried about him,” I said.

  Henri made a face in the moonlight and closed her eyes. “Worry about yourself, Em. Survival of the fittest.”

  I watched her for the slightest bit of regret before I lost it. “Casey died today. Alex’s cousin is never coming back. What part of that don’t you understand?”

  She opened her eyes, but didn’t look at me. “Whatever, Emma.”

  I sighed. My white jacket, scratchy with salt water, was mostly dry, so I bunched it under my head. But the harder I tried to sleep, the more my body ached and swayed with the motion of the waves, my thoughts spinning even though we were now still.

  Our mom wouldn’t even know we were lost. She would’ve come back to our hotel room on Luquillo Beach at the end of her work day, a couple hours ago, and realized we weren’t there. She wouldn’t worry at first. She always said teenage girls were wild at heart and the only way to make them wilder was to try to cage them.

  When we weren’t there the next morning, that’s when she would call the local police. She’d never make the connection we were on Casey’s boat, but someone would notice how it never returned to its slip. Even if they didn’t know they were looking for us, someone had to be looking for Casey.

  Either way, Mom would be broken. Within the year, she’d lost Dad and now us.

  I crossed my arms, and giving her a few inches of space, curled my body in the shape of Henri’s. To myself, I said the words I couldn’t say aloud. Something I had to say, in case her subconscious might hear and somehow dissolve the barriers between us. Come back to me, Henri.

  A tear sliced my cheek—the overcast sky and Henri’s SPF 8 hadn’t protected me from sunburn as much as I’d hoped—and my chest shook from trying to hold it all in.

  This trip was supposed to fix everything.

  “Em.” Henri rolled over to face me. “Please don’t cry.” Her touch was soft as she pushed a wispy curl from my eyes. “You’ll just get dehydrated faster.”

  The back of Henri’s wrist grazed my knee. In the moonlight, her open palm waited. I slipped my hand into hers and managed a small smile.

  The abysmal loneliness that had consumed me for months, I felt it ebbing away.

  Maybe everything was fixed now. Just not in the way I’d planned.

  As my eyes closed on their own and my aching limbs relaxed, Henri’s voice startled me awake. “This doesn’t mean I forgive you. So we’re clear.”

  CHAPTER 2

  FIVE MONTHS BEFORE

  The Saturday before school started was always an event to Henri Jones—it was the last party of summer. My sister loved summers of kegs and fireworks, romance and flings.

  She sat cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom in front of her mirrored closet doors. Her short dress hiked high on her thighs as she spread a sea of cosmetics on the carpet around her.

  She ran a streak of foundation under each eye, highlighter down the bridge of her nose, and bronzer beneath each cheekbone—a layer of armor before battle. Because that’s what these parties were to her, a war on all the heartbreaking boys in the San Francisco Bay Area.

  I stretched across her bed on my stomach as Henri blended the whole thing together. I could have watched her apply makeup for hours. Holding my chin in my hands, I waited for something I could confirm as an invitation to the party. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to go, but I wanted to spend Saturday night with Henri.

  She rimmed each of her eyes in royal-blue liner and met my stare in her mirror. “Andy asked me about you today.”

  “What did he want to know?”

  “We were hanging out in the Haight, me and him and Ari and Mick—you know Mick, he’s got those gorgeous blond dreadlocks—and Andy asked if I’d mind if he took you out sometime.”

  I rolled onto my back and stared up at her spinning ceiling fan. “I hope you told him there was no way in hell I’d go.”

  She bit her smiling lips, the way she always did when I slipped in a
word like hell, and recapped her eyeliner pencil. “What do you think I said?” Knowing Henri, she could have told him anything. “Well, of course I told him you’ve been dying to get a piece of him forever.”

  “You didn’t!” I sent a throw pillow sailing at her head. Henri ducked and the pillow thudded against the closet doors.

  “Of course not. I told him not in a million years did I think you’d say yes.” She added another coat of mascara and glanced back at me. “Pass me my purse, will you?”

  The top drawer of her dresser was open a crack, enough for me to see what was hidden between her silky thongs and see-through bras: a package of birth control pills.

  Henri never had to tell me she was having sex. But I knew.

  I’d watched her at a pool party last weekend. With a beach towel wrapped neatly around the waist of my one-piece, I sat in the shade while Henri lounged on the first step of the pool. My wild blond curls were piled on top of my head in a bun she’d styled for me that looked more like an old lady’s beehive. I kind of loved it. In sixty or seventy years, we’d both wear our hair that way every day.

  Jake Holt’s hand stroked through her silky hair, from root to tip, never once snagging on a tangle or a split end. She curled into Jake, arched her fully inflated breasts against his chest. That was when I knew any semi-state of her virginity was a thing of the past.

  I was fifteen, my sister, Henri, sixteen, and I didn’t know what could happen in that one year between our ages, but I was just as worried it would happen to me as I was worried it wouldn’t.

  “Girls!” our mother called up the staircase. “I left some files at the office, so I’m running back downtown for a few hours. The pizza will be here in twenty.”

  Our mother had been busy keeping up with her work schedule and playing the new role of single mother. Too busy to know Henri spent the weekends with her arms and legs hanging out the windows of moving cars and her lips pressed against the mouths of whatever boy had snagged her attention for the night.

  And she didn’t know Henri always brought me along to the parties, a silent witness.