And We Stay (2 page)

Before Boston, before ASG, Emily had wanted nothing more than to be loved by a boy. When she was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, she had watched girls on the cheerleading squad sprout wings with each boyfriend. They became more beautiful, the beauty of confidence. For four months, Emily had it, too.

But here at ASG, she is surrounded by girls more self-assured than she, clean-looking girls who sleep next to photographs of their boyfriends and talk to them daily on the phone in the hall. Boys are kept at a safe distance. The girl who gave Emily and her parents the campus tour was quick to point out that there are dances nearly every weekend with boys’ schools in the area, but Emily wants nothing to do with
boys or dances. She wants nothing to do with poems, either, but in the long shadow of death, they creep in.

When K.T.’s alarm goes off at six-thirty, Emily is already up and dressed in her Harvard sweatshirt, a pair of Levi’s jeans (“unfailingly safe,” K.T. told her), and her one thick pair of socks. The clogs wait by the door as she sits at her desk, doodling.

K.T. rolls over. “Hey, look at you! Let me throw on some clothes. You’ve inspired me not to wear my pj’s.”

When Emily came down the stairs wearing white on the day of Paul’s funeral, her mother told her to go back upstairs and put on black wool pants. Emily told her to go to hell. In the church, she sat hunched between her parents. Enduring the funeral was like wading through a dark-gray fog, the disembodied voice of Reverend Wright cutting its way through:

“Though his time with us was short, Paul Wagoner followed in the footsteps of Christ.… We will never know why Paul did what he did.… With God’s help, and each other’s, we will come to accept the not knowing.…”

Paul.

Paul.

Pall.

On December 12, as the sirens drew closer to the high school, the students were told over the intercom to stay in their classrooms or to get to one. Theories were generated: Mr. Dees, the band director, had a heart attack; Mrs. Ziegler, the ninth-grade geometry teacher, collapsed on top
of the overhead projector after solving an especially difficult proof. No one mentioned Paul Wagoner. No one. Paul was on the football team. He didn’t spend hours in front of the TV. He laughed out loud at his friends’ jokes, even the corny ones. He drank milk at lunch. He didn’t scowl or dress all in black. He was on the way to being handsome, a country boy who hadn’t fully grown into his looks. He wasn’t the most popular boy in the senior class, but he wasn’t the least popular, either. He lived somewhere in the middle, like most teenagers. Practically everyone in Grenfell County went to the funeral. Paul’s teachers and Mr. Burton, the principal, sat in the front pews off to the side. The Wagoners sat front and center: Paul’s mother and father, some other adults Emily didn’t know, probably aunts and uncles. Carey, Paul’s little sister, squeezed in beside their grandmother Gigi. It was Gigi’s gun that had done the job. Paul had stolen it on a Sunday morning when everyone else in his family was at church.

How weird Paul must have felt to sneak into his grandmother’s bedroom and open her bedside table; how sad for him to take what was meant to be an anchor in a sea of loss after the death of Paul’s grandfather. In the long parade out of church, Emily tried to smile at Gigi, but Gigi wasn’t looking at anything—her eyes were closed. Standing at the back of the church was Mr. Jim, the school janitor. Emily had been thinking of him only hours before as she’d stood at her closet, wondering how he got dressed. Mr. Jim had only one arm—his right—and Emily decided she would try getting dressed without using her left one. The bra was impossible, so she flipped it back into the top drawer. The
black wool pants had three buttons, but the white dress had a zipper, so on it went. The shoes Emily had wanted to wear, her Mary Janes, had straps, so the black rain boots would have to do.

Emily bent down, the fingers of her right hand stretching into the dark like tentacles. Those boots were in the back of the closet somewhere. She hummed snippets of made-up songs. (
These boots were made for walkin’ to where a boyfriend lies in a coffin
.) Once she found the boots, she placed them on the floor at the end of her bed, the rubber holes gaping. She was going to stand on her bed and jump into them feet first, but what if she fell and broke her ankle? Her parents would have to drive her to the hospital, and then they’d all miss the funeral. Emily left the boots where they were and rolled herself back on the bed until it was time to go, when she would manage the boots with one hand.

Paul had told her that when he died, he wanted to be cremated. (
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, all our lives gone to rust
.) She wanted to forget that Paul had ever told her anything. She wanted to crawl under the bed, fall through the floor, and forget all the facts.

Paul.

Pall.

In the dim light of the desk lamp, while K.T. is down the hall in the bathroom, Emily opens her dictionary and looks up the word:
pall
.

Pall
, then, as in
pallbearers
. Eight members of the football team—Paul’s friends, and Emily’s, too. She doesn’t want friends at ASG because then she’d have to lie to them. It’s bad enough lying just to K.T., but what other way is there? Mazes grow ever higher when lies beget lies.

K.T. pokes her head in the room and motions. Emily slings her book bag over her shoulder and follows her roommate to the dining room, which is bright and noisy.

“I’m going to show you how to work this system,” K.T. says. “Grab a tray. Now, I like my eggs poached, but only Hilly will make them that way, and you have to ask her nicely when the boss man isn’t around.”

“That’s okay,” says Emily. “I like my eggs scrambled.”

“I do not like green eggs and ham I do not like them Sam I Am,”

K.T. says. “Oh, and by the way, they put dreams in the coffee.” She reaches for a cup and saucer. “That’s why it’s so good.”

“Cream?”

“Dreams.” K.T. smiles. “Good stuff.”

“They put dreams in the coffee.”

“If I’m lying, I’m dying,” says K.T., her brown eyes deep and smiling. “I started drinking it last November, and ever since then, I sleep like a baby, ironically enough. I snore, by the way.”

“So I noticed,” says Emily. “But it’s not very loud.”

Emily reaches for a cup and fills it. She’s only had coffee once before, in Boston.

“Well, according to Hannah, I sound like a freight train, but she was kind of a liar and kind of a bitch. I liked her, though. Follow me.”

K.T. leads Emily to a table in the corner.

“If you sit here,” K.T. says, “no one will bother you. If you want to be bothered, sit in the middle. And if you want to get any studying done, don’t go to the library. It’s where everyone goes to gossip.”

If Emily says it out loud, the word
library
makes her queasy, so she says
lieberry
instead, which sounds like a leafy spot in a sunny garden. On that last Monday morning with Paul, it was damp and cold. Emily was wearing a thick sweater with a pouch across the front, and as Paul led her away from the long tables to an alley of books, she put her hands in the pouch. She did not want to hold hands with Paul anymore. Two days before, on her seventeenth birthday, she had ended things between them.

Halfway into the stacks, Paul stopped, and Emily stopped with him. He seemed at a loss for footing, for everything. A patch of his hair rose up in one spot.

Paul shifted his eyes away to the books on the shelves. “You don’t love me,” he said. “The other day you said that you did, but you don’t.”

“Paul …”

He held up his hand to stop her, and to avoid her gaze, he pulled the book off the shelf and opened it. Emily was sure it was a complete coincidence, the book that he chose. Paul wasn’t a reader. Literature confused him. Emily had helped him once write an essay on
Paradise Lost
, and Paul had been as lost as the Eden depicted in John Milton’s poem.

“Hey, what do you know?” Paul said. “I opened right to a poem about a gun.”

K.T. waves her hand in front of Emily’s face. “Earth to Emily,” she says. “Time for more coffee?”

“Sure,” says Emily. “I could use some more.”

Emily Beam,
January 22, 1995

FOR A WEEK, EMILY HAS WALKED THE HALLS OF ASG. AFTER DINNER
tonight, she will call home just as she promised to do when she stood with her mother at the front gate a week ago, and she will tell her parents that she is doing fine. And in a manner of speaking, she is.
Fine
means no highs or lows.
Fine
means no trouble, no conflicts. She has avoided K.T. and the other girls by hiding out in the lieberry, which looks like a church. During the break between morning classes, after lunch, during the evening study period, that’s where Emily goes, mostly to the top floor, to a carrel by an arched window overlooking the quad. The lieberry isn’t as loud and abuzz as K.T. led her to believe. It’s peaceful, in fact, and that very afternoon, standing by the checkout desk, Emily has what she could only describe to herself as her very first religious moment.

Sun streams in through the high Gothic windows, illuminating the dust. For minutes she watches the motes rise and fall long enough for the rising and falling to become one with her breathing, long enough to see the full extent of the damage. Her damage.

As if being nudged by a hand at the small of her back, she walks to the card catalog and flips to
Dickinson, Emily
. There
are at least twenty books on the subject. When Aunt Cindy first mentioned ASG, she said it was famous because of Emily Dickinson, who had been a student there over a hundred years ago, back when it was called Amherst Academy. It was resurrected as Amherst School for Girls in 1961, a hundred years after it closed, by a couple of poetry-loving sisters who never married.

Emily Beam knows something about Emily Dickinson from her English class at Grenfell County High. Emily Dickinson wrote 1,775 poems, a fact easy to remember because it’s one less than 1776, the year America was born. As Emily Beam makes her way to the shelves of Dickinson books, she hopes that the collected poems contain a subject index; otherwise, she has no idea how to find the one poem she is looking for. Ms. Albright, her teacher, said that Dickinson didn’t title her poems; she, or someone else, numbered them.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, looks thick and promising. “Gun, loaded, 754,” the index reads. Emily turns to the page.

Is it the anger and frustration inside of Emily Beam that causes her to feel the anger and frustration inside of the poem? She doesn’t understand all of it—in fact, she doesn’t understand much of it. “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun” doesn’t sound like a poem that a shy woman, a woman who holed herself up in her bedroom during the day, would write. It sounds outdoorsy and violent: the eye of the barrel, the hunted doe, the volcanic eruption.

For a white-hot second, standing in the lieberry, Emily longs for the controlled chaos of the halls between classes,
the low shouts of boys, the higher laughter of girls, the drumming on the metal lockers. But here, at least for the moment, it is empty and quiet, which magnifies the noise in her head. There are no school bells at ASG, and when she checks the clock on the wall over the circulation desk, she sees that she is going to be late for Sunday dinner if she doesn’t leave that instant.

I’ll be back
, she whispers to the book as she slides it into its place.