The Wilderness of Girls

by Madeline Claire Franklin

Genres: YA Mysteries & Thrillers

Synopsis

An Indie Next Pick

An unflinching YA debut about a troubled teen who discovers a pack of feral girls in the woods and is swept up in the ensuing mystery: Are the Wild Girls of Happy Valley lost princesses from a faraway land, as they believe, or are they brainwashed victims of a deranged kidnapper?

In her ambitious debut perfect for fans of Sadie and The Hazel Wood, Madeline Claire Franklin crafts a gripping exploration of how the world teaches young girls to cage their wildness—and what happens when they claw themselves free.

After being placed in foster care, Rhi is hungry for a fresh start and begins working at the Happy Valley Wildlife Preserve. While in the woods, she stumbles upon a surreal sight: a pack of wolves guarding four feral and majestic girls. After Rhi gains their trust, they reveal that they’re princesses from another land, raised by a magical prophet they call Mother—and they're convinced Rhi is their lost fifth sister.

Unsure what to believe, Rhi ushers the girls to civilization, where they’re met with societal uproar and scrutiny, dubbed by the ravenous media and true crime junkies as “The Wild Girls of Happy Valley.” Desperate to return to their kingdom, the girls look to Rhi for help. Rhi knows the girls are deluded, but at the same time she’s drawn in by their boldness and authenticity—traits she is afraid she has lost within herself. And when Rhi witnesses strange phenomena she can’t quite explain, the line between fantasy and reality grows blurry.

As the hunt for answers intensifies, Rhi must make a decision that will change the course of her lives and the lives of her Wild Girls forever.

 

Read more

Release date: June 11, 2024

Publisher: Zando Young Readers

Print pages: 363

Sample

In theBeginning,We Were Wild

Excerpted from Savage Castle:A Memoir of the Wild Girls of Happy Valley

ONCE UPON A TIME, deep in the wilderness, in a land beyond maps and borders and human-claimed things, there was a beautiful castle.

This castle was not like other castles in tales you may have heard; it was wild and alive, hewn from the earth itself, grown and shaped over hundreds of years, just for us. Our castle was the hollowed body of an ancient tree, wrapped and latticed in an exoskeleton of vines and magic. It was a giant of a tree. A mountain of a tree.

And it was our home.

The castle protected us: four untamed princesses and, sometimes, a wise old man named Mother. Mother was more than just his name; he was our prophet, our protector, our teacher. He gave us the gift of magic, the truth of naming, the treasure of stories. He gave us the mooring of a past, and the promise of a future. Mother was our heart, the castle our bones. Together, they held us upright through every storm.

In the wilderness, we lived in perfect rhythm and harmony, like the wilderness itself. When we were hungry, we hunted with our wolf-kin, the forgiving earth beneath our hardened feet, the hot slick of the kill on our jaws. After long days of foraging and play, we slept peacefully in the shelter of our castle, with only the stars to light our dreams. We woke with the sun as it broke over the mountain, flooding our forest with the streaming gold promise of a new day. We gorged ourselves on bear fat and tree nuts in the dying season, and crawled through the frozen months in a haze of hunger and dreaming, snowbound days and dogpiled nights. Come the return of green and light, we plucked fish from the streams with our bare hands and ate them raw, errant scales painting rainbows around our mouths.

We were a part of the wilderness and all it contains. We were a part of the magic in the unfurling of new leaves, the power that cleaved the world when lightning cracked the sky. We were a part of the spiral dance of life and death; the wonder of light dancing on the water and leaves on the wind; the mystery of seedlings and cool black earth; the beauty of decay, the violence of life. We were a part of the magic of it all.

Until, one day, the spells were broken.

One day, the castle fell.

One day, we left the only home we had ever known, and our beloved wilderness betrayed us.

ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE was the wilderness. There was violent beauty and devastating calm. There were clouds in migration, the punishing sunshine, the gemstone sky.

Once upon a time, there were four young girls and a man named Mother, the wolves we called family, a tree we called a castle, and the forest we called home.

Once upon a time, we were the wilderness.

And then, we were caged. 

1

THE NIGHT HER FATHER IS ARRESTED, Eden is sitting on the long side of the dinner table, facing the wall that separates the dining room from the kitchen. Her back is to the broad picture window that looks out onto the manicured backyard that abuts the edge of the forest.

This is her seat. When Eden was a child, her stepmother, Vera, couldn’t stand how Eden would stare and stare into the trees during dinner, so she made Eden face the wall instead. The wall in question is blank; no pictures of friends or family; no commemorative plates or interesting artwork—certainly none of Eden’s artwork from childhood.

Of course, Eden is not a child anymore. She knows how to survive, now. She learned long ago not to remark upon, or even think about, the bare white walls. She learned long ago not to look over her shoulder for a glimpse of the wilderness.

Eden’s father and stepmother are sitting to her left and right, respectively, each at a head of the table. A glass of water and a glass of red wine sits at each place setting. Vera always says alcohol is an appetite suppressant in moderation, and it seems to be true for her. She sips her third glass of wine tonight, her salad sitting mostly untouched as she glares back and forth between the window, Eden, and Father.

Eden is acutely aware of the tension at the table. Father has been on his phone for the entirety of the meal, arguing with one business partner or another. His tone is aggressive and sharp, even though he is not yelling. There is a grilled cut of red meat on his plate that smells divine, but he has barely cut into it. The soft pink of it is so alluring to Eden’s senses, it is almost vulgar.

Eden wishes there was something she could do to distract Vera from Father’s rude behavior; she wishes there was something she could do that would get Father to put his phone away and pay attention to his unhappy wife. But to please either parent would mean potentially angering the other, so instead Eden focuses on her salad of bitter greens and grilled white chicken meat. She discovers their cook, Mariya, has hidden a little pool of herbed olive oil beneath the salad, which Eden carefully dips pieces of chicken into before sticking them to the greens to cover the shine. Vera would be furious if she suspected Eden was going off her “diet.”

Black coffee and half a grapefruit for breakfast, two hard-boiled eggs midmorning. Lean meat and vegetables for lunch and dinner. Protein shake after a workout, but only if the workout is more than sixty minutes. Raw broccoli for snacks—the fiber will fill you up faster. No fats after seven o’clock. And red wine at dinner. It helps with digestion.

That is how Vera lives her life, so it’s how Eden lives, too.

She was only six years old when Vera first started criticizing her body, restricting her food, bringing Eden with her to the gym. She is now sixteen years old and cannot eat even so much as an apple without recalling its caloric density. Vera has made sure of that.

If it wasn’t for Mariya hiding liquid calories beneath her “approved” foods, or her stepbrother, Kevin, sneaking her treats at night when he stayed with them, Eden thinks she might have wasted away by now. She is always tired, always hungry. She fantasizes about food constantly, and not even anything special: furtive spoonfuls of peanut butter, a classmate’s ham and cheese sandwich, butter on her steamed vegetables, a fucking slice of fresh-baked bread.

Staring at her salad, Eden takes a silent deep breath and lets her anger go. Anger doesn’t help. It only makes her suffer more. The only way to keep going—to have any hope of escaping this house someday—is to feel nothing

 at all.

Eden takes a sip of her wine. She likes how it warms her, how it makes her brain soft, open, fuzzy. Eden thinks she understands her stepmother better when she’s had a glass of wine or two. Like she’s tuned in to a different radio station and can finally hear what Vera is really saying.

“This chicken is dry,” Vera mutters, prodding it with her fork. I’m unsatisfied.

“Mariya had better not be using frozen chicken breasts. I’ve told her over and over again that it ruins the texture.” Why don’t I have any control over my life?

“For what we pay her, she should be able to make chicken that isn’t dry.” I have everything I want and none of it makes me happy.

Vera puts her fork down and takes a long drink from her wineglass. She glares hard at Father when she’s done. I blame you.

She glances at Eden, briefly, before turning back to her wine. And you.

When the doorbell rings, Father rolls his eyes heavily, still talking on his cell phone and ignoring his family. Eden tenses, wondering who could possibly be at the door, wondering how infuriated Vera will be at the interruption. She would answer the door herself, but Vera hates it when Eden does the housekeeper’s job for her.

Nearly a minute passes before the noise at the front of the house makes its way to the dining room, before the sound of several pairs of footsteps moving purposefully across bare marble floors registers as aggressive—as an invasion.

Two suited men appear in the archway behind Vera, flanked by four police officers, hands on their guns, ready to draw. She twists to see them, confusion and anger on her brow, but the men flow around her, past Eden, so swiftly that Father doesn’t even have time to put down his phone as shock flashes in his eyes.

“Lawrence Chase,” one of the suited men says loudly as the officers take hold of Father’s arms. “We have a warrant for your arrest.”

Father’s phone clatters to the floor as the officers haul him to his feet and pin his arms to his back. He doesn’t struggle, but he doesn’t make it easy for them, either. Father’s body and limbs are stiff, every muscle clenched as if he believes that if he can just keep his body under his own power, they can take no rights away from him.

But to Eden’s astonishment, that’s exactly what they do. She thrills as they read him his Miranda rights and accuse him of crimes she isn’t surprised to hear he’s committed: embezzlement, money laundering, drug trafficking. Her stepmother, furious at first, soon begins sobbing loudly, picks up her phone to call her lawyer, and hurries from the room without a backward glance.

As Father is maneuvered out of the dining room and toward the door, he looks ahead like a soldier, blank and cool. Never once does he look in his daughter’s direction.

One of the suited men—a detective, maybe?—puts a hand on the back of Eden’s chair, causing

her to jump. He leans down a little to say, “Sorry to interrupt dinner, sweetheart. Daddy’s been a bit of a naughty boy.”

Eden looks up at him with what she thinks is an expressionless face, but whatever the detective sees in her eyes makes him whip back to his full height and snatch his hand away from her chair. Whatever self-satisfaction he had been wearing on his face slips away as he nods coolly to Eden and follows his men out through the archway.

Mariya is standing in the kitchen doorway, twisting a kitchen towel between her hands, her dark eyes tracking the detective as he leaves. When the front door slams shut and quiet settles over the house, she says to Eden, “He will be fine. The system is made for men like him. Here.” She comes around the table and picks up Father’s plate, then sets the steak down in front of Eden. “No sense in letting good food go to waste.”

Eden senses the goodness in the gesture, the affection, the maybe-even-love, but what she wants is for Mariya to put her hand on her shoulder, or to wrap her in a hug. Not because she is sad about Father being arrested, but because she is starving for human touch—to feel just a tiny bit connected to someone in this world.

But Eden has known for quite some time now that the hunger for human touch is the most dangerous appetite of all.

She cuts into the steak with her fork and her father’s knife, like a girl whose father has not just been arrested, who is not starving for human connection, who is not aching for the love that comes easily to those who belong. She is only starving for food, Eden tells herself. Her body only needs food, water, and shelter to survive. That’s it.

That is it.

That is all you need to survive.

2

NOT LONG AFTER THE POLICE drive away with Eden’s father in handcuffs, Vera clambers down the main stairs with two huge suitcases. Weeping, she shouts from the foyer, “I am done with this place!” and shoves her way through the large front door.

Eden imagines Vera tossed her hair dramatically and donned her largest pair of Gucci sunglasses before climbing into her Uber. But her disgust at Vera’s behavior doesn’t spare her from the sting of abandonment; if she ever thought, even for an instant, Vera might have any maternal feelings for her, that thought is now completely dashed.

Child Protective Services knocks on the door before Vera’s Uber has even pulled away from the curb. When Eden answers, the agent, a nondescript white man in his early thirties, who seems nervous to be there, tells her to pack a bag.

“Enough for a long trip. You’ll be away for a while.”

Eden hasn’t been on many trips. She spent a long weekend with her stepbrother, Kevin, in Harlem last summer before he left for his year abroad—but that’s not very helpful to think about right now. This isn’t a weekend away in the city.

This is a turning point. A threshold.

As she heads to her room, Eden realizes—not for the first time in her life—that she is truly alone. Only this time the knowledge does not sink her like a boulder strapped to her chest. This time, her chest constricts with nervous wonder as she considers the possibilities unfolding before her: Father in jail; Vera gone; Eden legally removed from their house.

She can start over, maybe.

She can forget everything that’s ever happened to her.

Maybe.

Eden grabs a backpack but there’s not much she wants to bring with her into this potential after. Some toiletries. A picture of her mother. She glances at her overstuffed bookshelf, drooping from the weight of tattered pages, stories she has escaped into over the long, lonely years, but decides to leave the books behind. Instead, she throws in her schoolwork, clean T-shirts, bras, and underwear; several pairs of soft well-worn jeans; her phone charger; and her late mother’s old Syracuse University hoodie.

“That’s all?” the agent asks when Eden comes downstairs with only her backpack.

“Yeah,” Eden says, bracing for him to scold her or tell her she’s packed wrong.

The agent only shrugs. “Suit yourself. Let’s get you downtown and processed.”

WHILE EDEN IS SITTING IN the hard plastic chair by the CPS agent’s desk, she tries not to think about the fact that her father is in the same building somewhere, outraged someone has had the audacity to catch him committing crimes, or about how her stepmother abandoned her to go God knows where. (Actually, Eden knows exactly where: Vera will fly to a tropical resort where she will sit by a pool or on a beach all day getting elegantly blitzed on fancy cocktails.) Would Vera even bother to call Kevin? Eden thinks, like a reflex, that she should be the one to tell him what’s happened. But her stepbrother is gone/not an option/studying in Germany for his last year of grad school. Father’s arrest won’t touch him, assuming his tuition is already paid.

He’s far away. Too far away to rescue her this time.

“Good news, kid,” the agent says. “We tracked down your uncle. He’s ready to take you

in—unless there’s a reason you don’t want to stay with him. Just know that foster homes can be … well, let’s just say they’re a bit of a crapshoot.”

“My … uncle?” Eden is drawing a blank.

“James Abrams. He is”—he squints at his notes—“your late mother’s younger brother.”

She straightens. “Uncle Jimmy? Yeah. Yes. I’m fine staying with him.”

“All right then!” The agent grins and shoots two finger guns at Eden before picking up the phone.

It turns out Uncle Jimmy is not only coming to pick Eden up, but dropping everything to come and get her, right now. The agent says she’s lucky. Half the time a new guardian can’t be bothered and kids have to spend the night in the holding cell until CPS can drop them off the next morning.

Eden doesn’t feel particularly lucky right now, but she knows better than to say so. She doesn’t know much about Uncle Jimmy other than that he is her mother’s much younger brother. Eden wasn’t able to visit him after her mother died when Eden was four, and she hardly remembers life before then. She had seen her uncle at her mother’s funeral reception (he’d been a teenager then, and Eden had been too shy to say much to him at all), then again, a few years later, when he came to the house for his first and only visit, when Father wasn’t home. Jimmy had been in college then, at SU (just like Eden’s mother), and Eden had been about ten years old and shyer than ever. It was a pleasant enough visit, considering he was (and is) a virtual stranger to her, but she’d felt his earnestness then. After all, what college student makes the time and effort to visit a ten-year-old niece he’s hardly ever spoken to?

TWO HOURS INTO HER VISIT to the police station, Eden’s phone chimes. She stirs from a half sleep on a chair in the waiting area and pulls out her phone from her backpack.

Message from: NO

Suddenly, she’s wide-awake. Warmth drains from her face as she holds the phone tightly in her hands, debating for a long moment whether she should read the text or not. In the end, Eden swipes the notification away before she even reads the message preview.

She can’t think about that right now.

Thankfully, her uncle arrives at the Saratoga Springs Police Department minutes later, just before midnight, snow dusting his shoulders as he looks around the waiting area for his niece. He is just as tall as she remembers, easily six feet or more, with the same dark eyes and ethnically

ambiguous complexion they both share with Eden’s mother: a honeyed beige in the winter that turns a deep olive in the summer. From what Eden understands, they get their coloring from her grandmother, whose entire family tree was Jewish.

When he spots her, Uncle Jimmy gives Eden a hearty bear hug, even though they haven’t seen each other in years. Despite herself, their estrangement, and the fact that she is fine, she is fine, she is fine (if anything, this is going to be for the best, right?), Eden nearly bursts into tears when he wraps his arms around her. She isn’t sure what she’s feeling, but it tries to overwhelm her, flooding her chest and eyes with pinched wet heat. But before the first sob can break from her lips, Eden reels the impulse in, clenching her teeth, barely breathing until the pressure in her throat abates. She doesn’t need to cry about any of this, she tells herself. Especially not in front of a stranger.

“Okay,” Uncle Jimmy says after signing the requisite forms and hearing the CPS agent’s spiel on his legal responsibilities as her guardian. He and Eden are now standing in the vestibule, preparing to step out into the wintry night air. “You got everything you need in that backpack? I don’t generally keep necessities for teenage girls in my home, so we can either stop somewhere and grab you a few essentials, or we can wait until tomorrow. We won’t get back until pretty late either way, but that’s fine. We’re both playing hooky tomorrow. So what do you think?” His voice is forcefully cheerful, his slight Central New York accent not as strong as Vera’s New York City accent, but obviously related. Eden wonders if she has an accent, too, and just never noticed it.

“Whatever you want to do is fine,” Eden says quietly. “I think I’ve got what I need.”

From the corner of her eye, Eden sees her uncle studying her. She doesn’t turn to meet his eyes. She looks instead at the gray concrete steps visible through the clear glass doors of the police station, big lacy snowflakes blowing across them like whorls of the most fragile confetti.

Uncle Jimmy strokes the dark stubble on his jaw. “How about some food? You hungry?”

Eden shrugs. She is always hungry, but she is used to that.

“I heard the cops interrupted your dinner. Pretty rude of them, if you ask me.”

“It’s okay,” Eden says, stomach rumbling at the thought of the steak she didn’t get the chance to finish. Eden hopes Mariya ate the rest, at least. And she hopes she raided the pantry and the wine cellar for all the good stuff before she left.

“Well, I’m hungry. Late-night road trips have a way of working up a person’s appetite, eh? I could go for a meal at a good old-fashioned greasy spoon. How does that sound?”

Eden isn’t sure what that means. Her pinched brow must say as much.

Uncle Jimmy chuckles.

 “A greasy spoon—that’s what they call those old diners with the twenty-four-hour breakfast menus and burnt coffee. There’s a spot between here and Happy Valley that does a hell of a cheeseburger. Do you eat meat? They’ve got vegetarian food too, I’m sure. Or cheese fries, pancakes …” He stops, and when he speaks again his voice is softer, as if he’s made himself sad talking about diner food. “Whatever you want, Edie. It’s on me.”

Eden’s skin feels raw. She hasn’t heard anyone say her name with any true kindness in such a long time, it almost feels dangerous. “Yeah, that sounds good,” she says, because it seems like that’s what he wants her to say.

“All right then,” Uncle Jimmy says, pleased to have a direction to head in.

Or maybe pleased that Eden agreed with him—she isn’t sure. She can’t read him just yet.

He opens the police station door and gestures for Eden to go first. As they walk across the parking lot, lazy snowflakes landing weightlessly upon their hair and shoulders, Uncle Jimmy says, “I think I’ll get myself a chocolate milkshake and some fries. You ever try dipping the fries into the milkshake? It sounds weird, but it’s a classic combination. You like chocolate-covered pretzels? I think it works the same way, flavor-profile-wise.”

Eden hasn’t had a milkshake in years. Or French fries, for that matter. Or pretzels.

“I’ve been learning a lot about flavor profiles lately,” Uncle Jimmy goes on nervously as they approach his truck. It’s big and hunter green, with a white Happy Valley Wildlife Preserve logo on the side: a deer’s head with two mountains rising between the antlers, a pine tree, and a soaring bird beneath a crescent moon. He unlocks the truck with a beep and a flash of headlights, then opens the passenger-side door for Eden before walking around to the driver’s side. “I’ve got a friend who is a chef, really into flavor pairings and the like …”

In the car, Uncle Jimmy continues talking about his chef friend. Eventually, Eden understands this friend is someone he is trying to impress romantically. At first, this makes her cringe, but as he proves himself to be just as earnest as she remembers him, some of the tension slips away and Eden begins to really see him, without the veil of dread over her eyes. He appears to be a genuinely good guy—the opposite of the men Eden has known.

“What’s this chef friend’s name?” Eden asks eventually.

Uncle Jimmy pauses. “Oh.” He chuckles again. “Their name is Star.”

“Star,” Eden repeats.

What a stupid name, she thinks, but that’s not her own voice she hears in her head. It’s Vera’s.

Eden considers the name, tries it on herself. She decides she likes it.

Maybe she should steal it.

“That’s a unique name,” she says.

“Oh, Star is quite unique,” Uncle Jimmy confirms with a grin. “They chose that name for themself when they moved to Happy Valley. To start a new life,

you know?”

Eden doesn’t answer. She stares out the windshield at the black ribbon of highway lit only by the truck’s halogen headlights, but she sees none of it. She is too busy trying to swallow her heart as it attempts to climb up her throat.

Is that an option? To become a different person as soon as you leave behind everyone you know? Is she allowed to just stop being Eden Chase and forget all the pain that girl carries with her?

INSIDE THE DINER, EDEN SHIVERS as she looks at the menu. She knows Uncle Jimmy wants her to eat something, and she wants him to like her and not think she’s a freak with crazy hang-ups about food. She also knows Vera is far away and there is literally no reason Eden can’t order anything her taste buds and stomach desire. But there’s still the nattering of Vera’s voice in her head, warning her about saturated fats and sodium and bloating and acne and cellulite and always, always, warning her against “getting fat.”

I don’t care about “getting fat,” she thinks.

Yes, you absolutely do, she also thinks.

Well, right now I care more about telling Vera to fuck off.

The waitress comes over, a soft-looking woman in her forties or fifties, curvy and short. Eden thinks she looks pretty as the harsh fluorescents bounce off her hair and do nothing to hide the powdery finish of her makeup sitting on the fine peach fuzz of her round cheeks, or the tiny flakes of black mascara speckling the slight bags under her eyes.

Vera would never, Eden thinks, which makes her automatically warm to the waitress.

“Good evening, ma’am,” Uncle Jimmy says. He looks to see if Eden is ready.

She nods but keeps looking at the menu so he’ll order first.

“I’ll get a cup of coffee and the house burger, medium rare, with cheese, bacon, and no lettuce, please. Oh, and fries for the side please.”

“And you, sweetheart?” the waitress asks, turning to Eden as she finishes scratching down Uncle Jimmy’s order.

Eden looks up and notices the waitress’s name tag says Doris. “I’ll have the same, but no onions on mine, please. And a Sprite. And a chocolate milkshake, please.”

“Thatta girl,” Uncle Jimmy says. “Make that two chocolate milkshakes, ma’am. Please and thank you.”

“Of course,” Doris says. “Coming right up.” She dots something on her notepad and smiles at them both before walking back to the counter with their orders.

“Glad you found your appetite,” Uncle Jimmy says, picking up a sugar packet from the plastic tray full of sweeteners at the end of the booth and tapping it against the table. Though his tone is playful, there’s another note to his voice, like the sheer drop of a cliff. Eden can tell he is about to veer into something more serious. “There’s nothing like a good meal to steady you after an ordeal.”

There it is. Time to talk about the why and how of the night. Or at least the what’s to come.

Doris returns swiftly with Eden’s Sprite and pours Uncle Jimmy a cup of coffee. After a whirl of thank-yous and you’re welcome, sweethearts, she is gone again.

“Listen, Edie,” Uncle Jimmy begins, peeling open a thimble of cream and pouring it into his coffee. “I know we don’t know each other very well, but I want you to know—I hope you know—it’s not because I haven’t tried. You’re the only family I’ve got left. I’ve wanted to be in your life. But I think it must have been too hard for your father. ...