as unsinkable as i can be // the wilds

chapter three.

"Rae-"

"How long have I been out?" I asked Toni, then looked at the other girls. I noticed her exchange a glance with a Native American girl who sat on the other side of her, and the girl nodded, just once, very small. That was Martha.

Toni sighed. Hesitated. My heart thumped in my chest. It couldn't have been long, right? It felt like I had closed my eyes for two seconds, and then suddenly, there are new girls, a fire...

"About a day. I found you for the first time yesterday afternoon, but soon after, you fell back asleep."

I shook my head, shocked, trying to register what that meant. A full day... I don't think I'd ever slept for a day straight in my entire life. Had they deemed me unhelpful? I could be helpful. I knew CPR, I knew how to pitch a tent... I didn't want them to think that I was some faint little girl. I could do things.

"Did-didn't you try to wake me? Why did no one wake me!? What happened?"

"We tried to, we really did," a white girl with short, dark waves and piercing ocean blue eyes said, her voice low and husky. She was clutching a book that had been waterlogged pretty badly close to her chest, fingering the pages nervously. "You didn't wake up. You would think you were... dead, if you didn't have a pulse. You didn't move, you didn't shift, nothing. You... you were like a corpse or-"

"God, Leah, I think that's enough," Toni snapped, cutting her off and then turning her attention back to me.

"Rae, it's okay now. You're safe," she said quietly, her eyes and tone softening. She brushed a piece of my blonde hair out of my eyes and behind my ears, pulling me in for a hug and letting me just collapse against her.

At this point, I cried my eyes out. I cried my eyes out when they told me about the phone dying without any contact. About how they had tried every number they could think of, yet no one responded, not a single person. 

I cried harder than I've ever cried when they told me about Jeanette. She hadn't even lasted an hour. According to Dot, who was the rough girl who seemed to know a crap ton about surviving in the wilderness, she had been bleeding internally, most likely from the crash. She had been buried the previous night down the beach, so... so the body didn't attract animals.

And I did all of my crying into Toni, who just held me and tied my hair up and let me have one of her Diet Cokes from her stash, because apparently, Diet Cokes have artificial sugar, meaning that they floated up to the surface and washed up on shore because sugar is dense, according to Nora, the girl with the journal, who only talked when something needed to be explained. I noted that her twin sister, Rachel, just seemed to roll her eyes at that, but I couldn't focus on that, not at the moment. I couldn't focus on anything other than that stupid island.

A girl was dead.

We were alone.

No one was coming for us.

Other girls, like the stupid-rich girl Fatin, or the die-hard Christian Texan Shelby... none of them seemed to believe that we would be out there long. Martha, the sweet Native American girl who was best friends with Toni, was convinced that we would be saved in no time, instead busying herself with helping a little tortoise every time it flipped over on its shell.

But I couldn't shake the feeling that something was off, and for some reason, I could tell that Leah believed it too. I could see it in her eyes, in the way she ran her fingers through the wet sand like she had a gut instinct that something was off.

Like the place had been... touched.

But I clung to Toni, and I hardly ever spoke for the rest of the night, and I avoided Jeanette's grave at all costs.

Nothing in my life had ever prepared me for this. I could prove that a triangle is, in fact, a triangle, or I could dissect a frog and label its insides, or annotate Shakespeare, but I didn't know how to build a shelter from nothing or find water or keep a fire from dying within seconds.

Why had no one in my life prepared me for this?

In that moment, within the first day of me regaining consciousness, the arms that I slept in that night did nothing to stop me from feeling more alone than I had ever felt in my life.