Reckless Girls: A Novel

Lux meets Nico for lunch. He works at a local marina, and his schedule is pretty lowkey, allowing for irregular hours and long lunches. She tells him that she got fired, and he takes the news calmly. Nico is a grounded, friendly guy who is well liked because he is genuine and not easily bothered. He is sure that she’ll find a better job soon, and she’s grateful for his presence in her life. In the years before she met Nico, she nursed her mother through terminal cancer, quit college, partied too much, and felt like she was drifting. Nico brought her stability. He tells her that he met two women earlier who might want to charter him as a boat captain. He agreed to meet them for drinks that night and told them that he’d be bringing Lux.

Lux meets Nico, Brittany, and Amma at a tourist bar. Lux knows how handsome Nico is and wonders if the women are going to try to compete with her. She’s pleasantly surprised to hit it off with them. Brittany even correctly guesses that she was named after a character from The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. The pair have just graduated from college and want an adventure before starting the next chapter in their lives. Briefly, Lux flashes back to her own stalled college degree: When her mother became ill, she dropped out and never went back. Brittany and Amma want Nico to take them to a remote atoll—a tiny speck on the map named Meroe Island, famous for having been the site of a shipwreck and subsequent cannibalism. Nico knows of the island and seems as excited as Brittany and Amma.

After a night out with Brittany and Amma, Nico and Lux talk about the charter. Lux is hesitant to go. She worries about the dynamic and doesn’t want to spend two weeks with two strangers. When Nico tells her that Brittany and Amma offered him $50,000, she realizes that they cannot say no. She tells him that she will go if he makes fixing his boat, the Susannah, a pre-condition of the trip. The experience will be better on his boat anyway, she argues. He is excited by that idea and agrees to the plan.

Lux met Nico at a bar where she worked as waitress, and the two felt an instant connection. Nico grew up in an affluent family but refused to go to law school and join the family firm, wanting to make his own way in the world. Lux had emerged from the tragedy of her mother’s terminal cancer battle with few friends, no sense of direction, and unmanageable grief. When Nico told her that he’d just bought a boat and planned to sail it to Hawaii and beyond, Lux couldn’t help but feel that this was the moment (and man) she’d been waiting for.

The Susannah is nearly fixed. The journey to Meroe Island will take three days, and the group plans to spend two weeks on the atoll before returning. Brittany and Lux go shopping for non-perishable food and other essentials. Lux asks about how the two women met, but Brittany doesn’t want to talk about it. Her evasiveness strikes Lux as odd since Brittany and Amma are such close friends. By the time they return to the boat, Nico is getting ready to set sail. Lux has a momentary moment of unease when she catches sight of Amma looking beautiful, totally at ease, and somehow “right” standing next to Nico. Lux brushes the thoughts aside, however, and brings her bags on board. Nico tries to tell her that she shouldn’t bring so many books and doesn’t need the photograph of her and her mother, but Amma insists that she didn’t bring anything to read and that the stuff can be stored in their cabin. Lux knows that Nico didn’t mean to be insensitive, but she is hurt. She drops the matter, and they set sail.

The boat is small, and Lux feels claustrophobic. She and Nico will be sleeping in the main cabin area, where the table folds out into a bed. Amma and Brittany have a small cabin in the bow of the boat. The four chat over dinner, and Lux reluctantly shares the story of her mother’s cancer diagnosis and quick decline. When asked if her mother was her only family, Lux also shares that her father, who became “a cliché” when he ran off with his secretary, declined to help financially when her mother’s insurance refused to cover hospice care. Lux feels nervous having told them these details, but Amma graciously makes a kind comment, ending the conversation. Lux is relieved. Later, she observes some key changes in Nico’s personality—he’s acting less laid-back. She thinks about his affluent upbringing in La Jolla (a neighborhood in San Diego) with multiple second homes and a family law firm. He’d even said that he put the boat in her name for tax purposes. She realizes that there’s much that she doesn’t know about his life before they met.

One day, during a trip throughout Europe, Brittany and Amma were in a hostel outside of Paris, and Brittany was sobbing. The pair met in a grief group, but they didn’t like to admit that. Instead, they told people that they met in college in a boring Western civics course. They were both trying to leave their unhappiness behind, but Brittany had struggled in Europe. She was not as thin as she was before, Amma reflected, but she was still as emotionally volatile. 

Meroe Island is famous not only for lurid stories of shipwreck and cannibalism but also because of the dangers that lurk on the atoll. Sharks circle in the shallows, there are poisonous fish swimming, there are hordes of biting insects, and there is no potable water. The biggest danger, however, is that people stranded on the island lose touch with reality; a kind of “madness” sets in, and they realize that the biggest dangers are found within.

Lux and Nico wake up to a blazing red sky, a sign of impending bad weather, and Nico consults the radar. He sees a storm and hopes to skirt the edges of it but tells the women that they are in for a rough day. He orders Amma and Brittany to stay below deck and asks Lux to help him steer the boat. They clip themselves into safety tethers and prepare for the worst. The storm intensifies, and Lux feels terrified. The clouds are pitch black, and the wind howls. The boat pitches from side to side, and Nico screams that they have to keep the boat as level as possible. If she tilts too far to one side, she’ll capsize. Brittany surprises them by coming above deck, and as Lux yells at her to go back down, she loses her footing. Her safety tether snaps, and she is nearly washed overboard. She cannot help but notice that she hears Brittany screaming but not Nico. Once the weather clears, Lux gets upset at Nico for not helping her. Brittany and Amma interrupt their fight, and Brittany compliments Lux on how “badass” she was when she saved herself from falling overboard. Lux decides to take the compliment and drop her anger toward Nico.

Lux and Nico had been dating for about a month. She was practically living aboard the Susannah with him. One day, she came back to the boat to find him arguing with a woman. The woman, whom she heard Nico call “Suz,” left in a huff, cattily telling Lux that she had to be the next “project” because she knew that Nico loved a project. Nico explained that he and the woman dated in college and that Susannah, for whom he named his boat, didn’t like how their relationship ended. He assured Lux that he didn’t harbor any feelings for his ex and invited her to come to Hawaii with him.