The Girls of No Return by Erin Saldin Page A

could she say? She’d packed too much.”
    A chipmunk darted across the path in front of us and scurried up the side of a pine tree, chittering madly.
    â€œWhat else?” I said.
    Jules thought for a minute. “Karen has a retainer. She was always clicking it in and out of her mouth, and it drove us crazy. It’s been ‘missing’ for months. Not that she cares. She’ll just go back to the orthodontist and get a new one when she gets out of here. And let’s see . . .” She chewed her bottom lip.
    â€œWhat’d she do to you?”
    Jules looked at the ground for a minute. Then she met my gaze. Her eyes were too bright, and her face looked redder than usual. “She cut up the only picture I had of Westy.”
    â€œWho’s Westy?” It was a strange name for a boyfriend, I thought.
    â€œMy terrier. I only had the one picture. It was terrible.” For a moment, I thought Jules was going to cry, but then she cleared her throat. “It took almost eight days for my parents to send me another picture. They FedExed it, but it still took forever.”
    â€œOh,” I said. I didn’t feel like mentioning that it would take a lot longer than eight days for me to get my hair back. Somehow, I didn’t think she’d get it.
    â€œAnyway,” she said, “you passed. At least you didn’t freak out.”
    I thought about the way the tears had fallen sloppily down my cheeks while I stood in the Bathhouse in the early morning light, and I thanked myself again for pulling my shit together before I walked back to the cabin.
    â€œSo Boone just . . . gets away with it?”
    Jules threw me a sideways glance. “No one says anything about the things she does,” she said quietly. “Maybe it’s just a rumor, but —” She glanced around quickly. “Well, Andrea — she left before you arrived — she told me that Boone stabbed a girl, long before she came here. Everyone knows about it. She wasn’t caught, or maybe they just didn’t have enough evidence.”
    â€œNot even the girl’s testimony?”
    Jules looked at me. “Dead people can’t testify,” she said. “So in answer to your question, no. No one mentions her little tricks.”
    I remembered how Margaret had described Alice Marshall to me. We’re the equivalent of a misdemeanor. Misdemeanor, my ass.
    We were almost to the Rec Lodge. I could see a few of the younger girls and a couple of Seventeens clustered by the door. If they had been smoking, they would have looked exactly like a picture I’d seen once of poor farmers huddled around the employment office during the Depression. The girls all looked bedraggled and hung dry.
    â€œTime for Circle Jerk, you idiots.” Boone walked up between Jules and me and laid a hand on each of our shoulders. Her fingers dug into the bone. I tried not to flinch.
    â€œShe means Circle Share,” said Jules, “and I don’t mind it.”
    â€œYou only go for the coffee.” Boone rolled her eyes skyward.
    Jules shrugged nervously. “Well, yeah. I guess I do like the coffee.”
    The mystified expression on my face must have been clear enough, because Boone sighed.
    â€œCircle Share,” she said, glaring at me. “Where you reach deep inside yourself and dig up your worst with a bloody trowel. Then you show it to the rest of us.” She released my shoulder and marched inside.
    That didn’t particularly help.
    â€œThis is where you talk about your Thing, if you want,” translated Jules. “But only if you want to.”
    â€œDoes anyone ever want to?” I blurted. I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which I would ever, ever, ever want to open myself up to a bunch of strangers, all of whom had good haircuts and friends in the room.
    Jules laughed. “It’s a free-for-all in there,” she said. “You’ll be lucky to get a word