Wilder Girls

And it’s long, could run maybe from the tip of my middle finger to my wrist. A parasite. It was inside me and I didn’t even know.

A violation, but a gift too. It let me find a reason for everything I felt, at Raxter, in Boston, and every day in between.

I don’t know until I see it, but then it moves. Glistening, thick like a muscle. Twitching softly and radiating heat. A worm

For a moment I’m back there in the dark, my life in my hands. There was no other way. It was kill or be killed. And it feels like tearing my own heart out of my chest the way I did Mr. Harker’s, but I say, “Nothing, I guess.”

Reese narrows her eyes. I brace myself for whatever’s coming next. I’ve never met anyone who likes fighting the way she does, never met anyone so good at it. B

“He was going to kill us,” I say, frustration building. I had to save us. Why doesn’t that matter to her?

“Better me than him,” she flings back at me. “Better us than my father.”

I don’t know this version of her. Even at her angriest, Reese is always contained, always whole. But this girl, this Reese in front of me, is in pieces. Edges torn, heart scattered.

write a list. Mona’s gills. Hetty’s eye. Even try to draw Reese’s hand, and there are a hundred more flare-ups I can’t remember from a hundred other girls. It startles me, seeing it all laid out. How the Tox models us after the animals around us, tries to change our bodies, push them further than they’re willing to go. Like it’s trying to make us better, if only we could adapt.

Did they teach you about Raxter Blues at school?” she asks. “About what makes them special?” I nod.

You mean the lungs

“And the gills,” Paretta says. “It’s pretty amazing, right? So it can survive anywhere. And I think it’s pretty amazing, too, that you girls are part of it now.”

Part of it. The way our bodies alter and bend. The way our fingers darken just before we die, pure black spreading up to our knuckles. I used to stare at my hands in the dark, Hetty asleep next to me, and try to will them to change color.

“Imagine how we could use this.” Her voice is urgent, confiding. “Imagine the people we could help.”

But sometimes I didn’t. Anger, depthless and black, and I couldn’t cut it out of me. Growing and growing until it was all I had room for.

Part of me really thought it would be that simple. A locked door, somewhere deep in the house, and Byatt on the other side of it.

Part of me really was an idiot.

Part of me really thought it would be that simple. A locked door, somewhere deep in the house, and Byatt on the other side of it.

Part of me really was an idiot.