Osprey Island

Brigid heard a few girls come in to use the toilets; she had the water so hot that when they flushed and all the cold disappeared for a minute there was barely a difference. She dried herself inside the stall behind the mildewed vinyl curtain and wrapped her hair in one towel, the other around her body, for the walk across the hall to their room, which she sincerely hoped was empty. There were few people she’d have liked to see less, just then, than Peg.

But, of course, there she was—seated at the desk, penning her eighty-seven thousandth Hi! How are you? I’m fine postcard of the summer. She turned at the sound of the door shuffling open like the lid of a cardboard box, saw Brigid enter, started in horror, looked again more closely, and let out a scream—short and sharp, worthy, perhaps, of an aging Agatha Christie heroine, but a bona fide scream all the same.

“Christ, it’s only me,” Brigid said. She shot Peg a look of deadly annoyance and turned toward her shelves for something to wear.

Peg was practically on top of her in seconds. “My god—oh, god, Brigid, what’s he done? Oh, Jesus god!”

“What is your problem?” Brigid shrilled. She shoved past Peg to the closet, where she didn’t need anything. The room was so tight there wasn’t anywhere to go, and Peg kept coming at her, her hands outstretched as if she were ready to grab Brigid by the throat and throttle her.

“Have you lost your mind?” Brigid screeched. “Stay the fuck away from me!”

Peg stopped, stood trembling, her voice a quiver; “My god, Brigid, your face . . .”

Brigid paused then, for the first time since she’d entered the room. She looked down at the thready fuchsia of her old bath towel, her too-pink legs sticking out from beneath—sunburned, and reddened too from the heat of the shower. There was no mirror in their shoe-box room. She tried to look at her shoulders. She’d been out in the sun a good long while and never had put on any of the sunblock she’d bought. It would be just like Peg to fly into fits over a sunburn. Brigid fixed her roommate with the most patronizing look she had and spoke in a voice so saccharine and mean she surprised even herself: “It’s called a sunburn.” Sunburn: as though it were a new vocabulary word on educational television. “It’s caused by the sun . . . ?” Sun. Is that a word you understand, you stupid, annoying little tool? Sun? Sunburn? “Most victims survive them.” And then she turned from Peg and opened the closet door.

“No!” cried Peg—and Brigid thought for a second that Peg was telling her, No, under penalty of death, please god I beg you don’t open that closet! “No . . . your neck . . . your throat . . .” and Peg dissolved again.

Brigid stood before the open closet door, wrapped in her sister’s hand-me-down beach towel, her back to her roommate and their tacky hole of a room, and it was, in that moment, as though she were naked, completely, in the open and exposed, a wash of shame like urine running down her legs in public, and there was nowhere to run. All she could do in the panic-rush of her brain was scream at the top of her voice, the pitch cracking and breaking as it rose: “Get out of here! Get away from me! Get out! Get out now!” The sound of Brigid’s voice was terrible, and Peg was terrified, and she ran.