Afterward, her classroom is full of newcomers. The sixth graders crowd in and the fifth graders shrink to accommodate them. Ms. Landers, the young teacher with pink gums and a wide smile that is often genuine but today is fake, looks overwhelmed. “I wasn’t expecting to…um, merge the grades, so you’ll have to bear with me. I think we’ll do two curriculums still, and just try and…share. Somehow. We’ll figure it out.” Her students, new and old, are all thinking the same thing: It’s only a matter of time before she leaves them, too. Ms. Landers instructs the fifth graders to quietly read a chapter in their history books about the Seminole Wars while she holds whisper-conferences with the sixth graders, trying to figure out where they left off before Valerie.
Initially, Wanda is relieved by this assignment—she likes it when they all read quietly at their desks—but today she is having a hard time concentrating and this chapter confuses her. Phyllis has already started teaching her about the Seminoles, and tribes who might have lived in Rudder even farther back. The Jeaga, or possibly the Tequesta. Or maybe, with Gulf Coast territories ranging all the way to the Atlantic in some places, the Calusa people. And even farther back than that—so many thousands of years ago no one remembers what they called themselves.
Wanda turns a page to find a painting of white men in crisp blue uniforms valiantly fighting and tragically dying, while a menacing horde of Seminoles bears down on them in the distance. Examining it, she has questions, but she’ll save them for Phyllis. Over the top of her book, she watches Amanda and Brie and Corey wait their turn to talk to Ms. Landers. Mick is absent—he’s been gone for a few days now. Hopefully for good. This is how her peers slip away to new lives; they just disappear. When her lone friend, Jules, left last year, the two of them had a few days to say goodbye, but that was all. When people decide to go, they go. The homes here are so worthless the banks don’t even bother foreclosing. Once the decision is made, all that’s left is to pack up their cars and drive away. There is a contagious panic running through the town lately, a fear that if they don’t get out now, they never will. Wanda feels it—how could she not—but she also knows she’s not going anywhere.
From this vantage point, her three remaining tormentors from the Edge look smaller than she remembers. They seem almost vulnerable up there at the front of the room. Corey’s hair is uneven, as if he cut it himself, and he can’t stop fidgeting, putting his hands in his pockets and then taking them out, again and again. Amanda wears an old pair of pink jelly shoes with glitter sprinkled in the plastic and she keeps bending down to scratch bug bites between the straps. Her shorts are frayed and too big in the waist, a hand-me-down. They look anxious, exposed up there at the front of the room. Brie, at the end of the line, is…different somehow. She has the same underfed, overtired shadow on her face, like many of the children here, but she wears it with some kind of grace. She is liquid, poured into her body, her clothes, this room. None of the ill-fitting awkwardness applies to her. Everything fits her perfectly, even her tangled ponytail and the deep red of her sunburned shoulders and her raggedy cutoffs and her once-white sneakers, now brownish-gray. She catches Wanda looking and Wanda’s eyes dart away, back to her textbook. She has never been comfortable in this room, but when the sixth graders arrive, whatever ease she has managed to eke out through the passage of time leaves and does not return.
As the weeks go by, biking to Phyllis’s house after school becomes a celebrated part of Wanda’s routine. It gives her something to look forward to, a way to shake off the anxiety that permeates her school days even more now that the sixth graders are a permanent fixture in her classroom. It is pure terror to be so close to Corey every day. She can still feel his hand on her scalp, holding her under the waves. She tends to her fear in small ways: sitting in the back of the room so there is no one behind her; keeping her questions to herself; eating her lunch alone in the mildewing library, where the windows smashed during Valerie are covered in plastic and all the books are beginning to rot.
Being so close to his twin sister, Brie, is a different feeling, one she can’t quite place—not terror exactly, but…not safety, either. The rest of her peers blur together, a mass of familiar faces: bullies at worst and complicit at best. She keeps her head down and gets through it as quietly as she can. But after the last bell rings, when she hops on her bicycle and glides out of the parking lot, her day begins in earnest.
Sometimes they go to one of Phyllis’s plots and gather data. Other days, they stay at the blue house and work in the garden, or cook, or do various projects around the property: building a new ramp for the henhouse, fixing a broken window box filled with herbs, climbing up on the roof to check the solar panels. Phyllis teaches her to use tools, to measure wood, to plant seeds, to purify water. When it rains, they read together. And Wanda loves every second of it. Survivalism—a term she doesn’t even know yet—comes naturally to her.
Today, they walk through the tangled wilderness behind Phyllis’s house. One of the chickens has gone missing. Phyllis lets them range free in the woods during the day and for the most part they don’t wander too far, but occasionally some of the more intrepid souls lose their way. Bluebell is one of these wanderers, a snow-white hen, just a few brownish-red speckles across her back and wings. She has been Wanda’s favorite since she started helping Phyllis gather eggs. By now, tracking Bluebell to whatever grub-studded log she’s pecking at is a frequent pastime.
The two of them walk softly, careful to leave the undergrowth the same as they found it. Above, the foliage is thick; only the smallest slivers of sky shine through to dapple the ground. The soil is wet but firm. They gather mushrooms as they go, and Phyllis instructs Wanda on the different varieties they find. “What’s the mushroom rule again?”
“If you aren’t sure, go home poor,” Wanda recites.
“That’s right.” Phyllis smiles at her.
The sunlight that slips in through the treetops sends sloping rays of yellow through the shadow. It will start getting dark soon. They go slowly, their eyes sharp on the tangle of growth all around them, and occasionally Phyllis shakes a baggie of sunflower seeds she’s brought, calling “Here, chick chick chick,” in case Bluebell is near. When Phyllis sees something notable that Wanda does not, they play I Spy until Wanda finds it, too.
“I spy, with my little eye…something that begins with ‘F,’” Phyllis says.
“A fern?” Phyllis shakes her head no. “Is it a plant?” Phyllis shakes her head again. “Animal?”
“It is.”
“Is it…oh, it’s the frog!” Wanda finally finds it, resting on a fallen log, almost invisible against the dull mosses.
“Do you know what kind?”
“Um…tree frog.”
“Not quite.”
“Oh wait, we were just looking at it, weren’t we.” She racks her brain. Phyllis quizzed her on the amphibian section of a field guide days before. Reading with Phyllis is so pleasant that she’s not yet aware that this, too, is learning. “Southern chorus frog?”