Reckless Girls by Rachel Hawkins

Author:Rachel Hawkins
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

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IT’S LIKE A REPEAT OF our first night on Meroe. There’s good food—Eliza and Brittany cooked together in the Azure Sky’s little kitchen—good wine, too much of both, but now there’s this new person in our midst, shirtless and skinny, smelling like salt water and engine grease and too much time alone.

I really don’t like him.

It feels unfair, like hating a kicked puppy or something, but as I watch Robbie shovel Jake and Eliza’s food into his mouth and down an entire bottle of sauvignon blanc, I wish we could go back to just a few hours ago, when it was just the six of us.

“This place has a really fucked-up history, right?” Robbie says. He’s still holding the bottle of wine by its neck, his knuckles red and raw, and the firelight makes strange shadows under his cheekbones, his eyes. “Sailors eating each other and shit?”

“Sailors were wrecked here,” I say, reaching into the cooler for a fresh bottle of wine. It’s a little embarrassing how quickly I’ve gotten used to treating Jake and Eliza’s provisions like they’re ours. Sure, we’ve provided a jar of peanut butter and the occasional beer, but all the good shit is Jake and Eliza’s. I have the fleeting thought that we should offer to pay for what we’ve been eating, before I remember that of the four of us on the Susannah, I’m certainly not the one with that kind of money.

Outside the circle of light provided by the bonfire, the night is dark, save for the stars and the occasional white flash of the surf as it breaks. I keep my eyes on Robbie’s as I stick in the corkscrew. “I don’t know about eating each other.”

Robbie laughs, a phlegmy, thick sound. “Oh, if there was a shipwreck, there were cannibals. People do what they got to do to survive, you know?”

He looks around the fire, grinning. “Wouldn’t you?”

“This is gross,” Amma announces, getting up, but Robbie doesn’t seem offended.

“Yeah, it is,” he agrees, then shrugs. “That shit still happened, though.”

“We can’t know—” Brittany says, but to my surprise, Nico cuts her off.

“We do, actually. Dude’s right. When the HMS Meroe wrecked here, there were thirty-two survivors. Only eight walked off this island. There was a trial and everything. The stuff about cannibalism didn’t make it into the papers, but there’s no doubt they wouldn’t have made it without eating the ones that died.” He grins, tearing apart a shrimp with his teeth. “Long pig. Apparently tastes just like barbecue.”

My stomach churns, and I look at the still half-full plate of food in front of me. It was fish, grilled and savory and nothing at all like what Nico’s talking about, but I know I can’t stomach any more food tonight.

“But maybe they were just … I don’t know, stronger or something. Tougher.”

That makes Robbie laugh again, only this time, it sounds more menacing. “Oh, they were tougher,” he agrees. “Place like this, it does things to people. Reveals who you really are, when you strip all the bullshit away.

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