The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [35]
“Why, is there something wrong with you?”
He meant it as a joke, she knew, but how could she take it as such, knowing that there was something wrong with everyone, sure, it was what made people worth speaking to, but at that moment even more than usual there seemed something bad wrong with her. Her sister knew it. She treated her like she was fragile, always had. Only Woodrow treated her normal, though Woodrow, who knew what he was thinking? Maybe his treating her normal was just his way of making an exception for her foolishness. She’d turned away from Boyd at the mention of the christening, and his hand lay heavy across her rib cage, and the weight of it seemed so constricting that she blinked back tears of pain. Then she went silly to stop herself from crying.
“I’m a leopard,” she said.
“You’re a who?” Boyd said, his last word wavy with laughter.
“Leopard. I escaped from a leopard colony.”
This got away with him enough to derail the subject of her going across with him, but not for long. All week long he kept after her. All week, at his side or alone, she worried about his leaving, and was visited by dreams, waking or in fitful sleep, of a ghost she thought she’d long ago shed.
Growing up, she and Whaley had spent hours playing a game they called Dare, a version of hide-and-go-seek based in historical fact, island lore, myth, and the endless fascination they had for stories featuring female adventurers. After horrid fights erupted over who would get to play Virginia Dare herself—Whaley always claimed her right because she knew the history better, or “the Truth” as she called it, notwithstanding the fact that the story of Virginia Dare and her lost colony was considered America’s longest-running mystery), while Maggie’s claim seemed irrefutable in its simplicity: she was better at being Virginia, she could scamper up dunes barefoot to search the horizon for her grandfather’s ships come to rescue them, she wasn’t afraid of the forest like her sister, she would gladly get dirty and wet and brave bug bite and even jellyfish sting—their mother intervened, demanding they take turns.
The difference in the way Maggie and Whaley understood the world was exemplified not only in how they played Virginia but in what they felt the story was about. Whaley’s version was pitched to people like the Tape Recorders who were all about some stuff happened four hundred years before they were born. So proud even at that age, so convinced of her superior mind, so free from doubt and resistant to the possibility that life was lived mostly in the vague border between right and wrong, certain that the island they happened to have been born on was the only place on the globe for her to live, Whaley’s Virginia was always up in someone’s face (well, Maggie’s face, seeing as how she was the only other one playing the game), lecturing about how she was the first white girl born in the United States of America and her grandfather John White was the true father of this country and to heck with Jamestown and as for the Pilgrims, walking around the woods with buckles on their shoes, they dressed like a nun if you asked her and invented the most good-for-nothing laziest holiday ever where all you do is sit around and eat, what a waste of time. This was just the start of all Whaley’s Virginia had to allow. Whaley’s colony never got around to ever getting lost, because see, she didn’t believe they ever did get lost. She believed the ones who came back for them didn’t look all that hard. She believed she was blood kin to Virginia Dare, that there was not one drop of anything but white blood in her either, all that hogwash about the colonists fleeing the island on account of storms and going across and mixing with Indians, that made no sense, who would ever leave the island? Just because of some wind? Maybe a little storm surge?
The world according to Whaley, unchanged in the decades since they had last played Dare: why in the world would anyone see the world differently than she did?
Maggie’s Virginia was not big on words.