And We Stay (12 page)

In French II that afternoon, Madame Colche hands each girl a map of the United States.

“You are going on a train trip,” she tells them in French. “You will begin here in Amherst, and you can go anywhere that the train goes, as long as you travel to a place you’ve never been. Once you arrive, you will have an adventure. And you are going to tell the class about that adventure.”

“En français?”

“Oui, Catherine, en français.”

“Mon Dieu,”
says a funny girl named Lauren Dunlap.

“And,” says Madame Colche, “you will take this trip with a friend, another girl from this class.”

“I’d rather go with a boy,” Lauren says.

Madame Colche ignores her. “I have assigned traveling companions according to birthdays. The girl in this class whose birthday is closest to yours will be your traveling mate, and, together, you will create an adventure for two.”

Emily takes notes. Madame Colche has to repeat the instructions a few times until everyone in class understands the assignment in French. Unlike Emily’s French teacher
back home, Madame Colche uses her hands when explaining, which helps Emily understand better.

“We’ll begin with January,” Madame Colche says.

Emily sits and waits. She was born on December 10. As she watches everyone pair off, she knows no one wants to get stuck with her, the new girl with the halting French accent. By the time Madame Colche reaches October, there are only four girls left, and Emily sees it coming even before the announcement is made—she and Amber Atkins are going on a trip together.

But Emily does not want to travel with Amber. She knows in her gut that Madame Colche designed this whole game just to push the two of them into each other’s paths. She thinks about asking if she can go to the bathroom and then not come back, but then she’ll get Hashes (ASG for “demerits”) and lose her sign-out privileges, which means no smoking after dinner, and Emily has been looking forward to a cigarette since breakfast.

So, slowly, she packs up the things on her desk and walks to the back corner of the room where Amber is waiting. Amber, who was born on December 11.

“Well,” says Emily, “where do you want to go?”

Amber leans forward so that her hair veils her eyes and says, “Wherever they have the most drugstores.”

“Ha, ha.”

“Chicago, definitely,” says Amber. “There’s this famous art museum there, and I want to stand in front of two paintings:
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
, a giant canvas composed of thousands and thousands of tiny dots of color, and
American Gothic
. Do you know it?”

“I’m not sure,” says Emily.

“It’s the one with the farmer holding a pitchfork, standing next to his sour-looking wife.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“I painted a version of
American Gothic
,” Amber says. “The woman and the man have switched places, and instead of a pitchfork, the woman holds a small white flag, like, for surrender. And I put this red hole, like, from a bullet, through her heart. And the man is younger. He’s bare-chested and wears dog tags. And guess what I called it?”

“No idea,” Emily says.

“
American Toxic
. Is that brilliant or what?”

“It’s pretty brilliant.”

“I gave it to my mom for her birthday—she was born on Halloween, which is way cool. It was in the school exhibit last year. The guy in the painting is my half brother Brandon. His dad and my mom got divorced before I was born. They got married in Las Vegas, and they took Brandon with them—he was three—and hired a stripper they met in a nightclub to babysit him. She’s the one I’m named after.” Amber paused. “True story.”

Emily doesn’t feel like arguing. “Okay,” she says, “Chicago it is.”

Emily Beam,
February 27, 1995

ALL AFTERNOON LONG, THROUGH TRIGONOMETRY AND FITNESS FOR
Fun, where Emily walks fast around the oval dirt track on the playing fields, she thinks about Chicago. She has never been, but she knows that it’s windy and next to a big lake. It was also home to many criminals, such as bootleggers who operated drugstores.

Emily has no desire whatsoever to go to Chicago. What was it K.T. said? It’s not about where you’re from; it’s about where you’ve been. If K.T. is right, Emily should go to Las Vegas because she has gambled. That’s what she should be advertising; that’s what her sweatshirt should say. Yes, as far as high stakes go, Emily has certainly been there.

On the morning of December 10, Emily sat on her bed with her box of stationery and tried to put into words why she and Paul couldn’t be together anymore. She still loved him, but it could not be. Emily’s parents had sat her down after dinner the night before and had told her they would be leaving in a week for Boston. After school on Friday, the last day of the semester, the three of them would get in the car and drive to Aunt Cindy’s. Emily and Mrs. Beam would stay with Aunt Cindy for the abortion, and Mr. Beam would fly home and then fly back to be with them at Christmas. Then
the three of them—father, mother, and child—would drive back to Grenfell County sometime before the start of the new year.

“Before you go,” her mother told her, “you’ll want to explain things to Paul. It’s only fair to him.”

“Fair?” Emily screamed. “Fair?”

Her father shook his head in disappointment. Disappointment in her.

“Take a deep breath, Emily,” said her mother. “Take a few.”

Emily calmed down and said quietly, “I’m doing it in person. At least have the common human decency to allow me that.”

Her mother turned to her father, and he jerked his head into a nod.

“Do it tomorrow, then,” her mother said. “Best to get it over with so that we can all move on.”

“Terrific,” said Emily. “Gee, what a perfect way to celebrate my birthday.”

Emily wrote the letter to Paul three times, three different versions, but she couldn’t decide which one to give him. Before she went downstairs to ask to borrow the car, she folded up the letters and put them in a hat. Life—and this was what she was learning—was not something that could be controlled, no matter how smart you were or how smart your parents were.

The letter she picked out of the hat she copied over on a clean sheet of white paper. If Paul wasn’t home when she got to his house, she would leave the letter for him. If Paul was home, they would go for a walk in the woods, and she would tell him face to face. She would break his heart, and her own,
in the middle of all that nature, under the branches and the gray sky. Under God’s watchful eye.

Emily drove over to Paul’s house unannounced. She didn’t call first. He wasn’t expecting to see her until he picked her up at seven o’clock to take her to dinner, but she did not want to go out for her birthday. It would feel wrong, now that she was pregnant, to celebrate the fact that she was seventeen. It would make her feel like a hypocrite.

As she drove to Paul’s, Emily scanned the sky. The birds and the leaves had flown from the trees. Everything was bare, and about to be bared. Snow had been forecast, and the clouds were heavy and low. Emily loved snow, but she hoped it wouldn’t come until late that night when everyone was safely in bed.

Paul was home. Carey answered the front door and ran upstairs to get him, and Emily and Paul walked out the back door. They made small talk just as they had done on Friday at school, focusing on her birthday dinner rather than the pregnancy. The avoidance, the phoniness, when she and Paul had always been honest with each other, wedged in between them, even though they held hands. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she told Paul the news under the winter trees.

On the last day of February, winter rages. Emily has a bad taste in her mouth after Tuesday’s dinner at her new assigned table. Because of the sleet falling in daggers, she doesn’t sign out for a walk. It’s been a week and two days since Carey called, and Emily is terrified the hall phone will ring for her. She has
to walk by it twice to brush her teeth. When she enters the bathroom, Annabelle Wycoff is standing at the mirror.

“Well, Miss Emily, you’ve made it through. February is the worst.”

“Good thing it’s not a leap year,” Emily says.

“Baby steps,” says Annabelle.

Screw those
, Emily thinks.
Whatever happened to leaps?

“Before you know it, exams will be here, and the seniors will graduate, and then we juniors will rule the school.”

Emily does not want to think about hard tests or ruling the school. She is not a leader. She is a follower, always has been, and it suits her fine.

“Have you joined any clubs yet? We can always use an alternate on the debate team. Getting involved would definitely help.”

“That’s a great idea.” Emily turns on the water full-force and scrubs her teeth so hard that she can’t hear Annabelle talking, though Emily watches her mouth moving in the mirror. As Emily is rinsing, Annabelle’s roommate, Waverley, rushes in but stops short when she sees Emily.

“Hi, Emily,” Waverley says. “I hate that you didn’t go to St. Mark’s with us.”

“Next time,” Emily says.

“There are so many cute boys.” Waverley mock-fans herself like a Southern belle.

Emily forces a smile. “Yeah, K.T.’s going to set me up.”

Annabelle claps her hands together. “Oooo! Who with?”

“Some guy who plays the cello.”

“Sam? Oh, Sam’s adorable,” Waverley says. “Very soulful.”

Emily raises her eyebrows, and Annabelle and Waverley giggle.

“You’re adorable, too,” Annabelle says. “We’re so glad Hannah got kicked out.”

“Oh, yeah,” says Waverley, checking her artfully messy ponytail in the mirror. “She was such a W-H-O-R-E.”

So what does that make me?
Emily wonders. Before she went to her first high-school party, Emily’s mother warned her about being alone with boys. She told her that boys saw parties as golden opportunities to rack up bragging rights. When boys scored with girls, they were called players, but when girls scored with boys, they were called whores. It wasn’t fair, her mother said, but neither was life.

“Hey,” says Annabelle. “The girl who called for you last week. Was she a friend from home?”

“Yeah.”

“She sounded nice.”

“She is,” Emily says.

“I bet she misses you a lot.”

“She does, but she knows I’m at a good place.”

“The best place,” Waverley says. “And don’t you forget it.”

“I won’t. Well, I’ve got homework to do.”

High-pitched goodbyes echo off the tiles as Emily hurries down the hall. She glances at the phone, vowing to call Carey back on the more private phone in the lieberry after study period ends.

But at ten o’clock, another girl is already there in the telephone alcove. “Five minutes,” she mouths to Emily, holding up spread-out fingers. Emily stands at the water fountain taking sip after sip, trying to be patient for five minutes.
What does Carey want to talk to her about? Does she know something new about Paul? If she does, is Emily sure she wants to hear it? Secrets can be more powerful than guns. Sometimes, after secrets are no longer secret, countless lives can be toppled—an entire city of fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles, grandparents, cats and dogs, you name it, blindsided by words.