And We Stay (5 page)

“I do?”

“Yeah. It’s the color of horses. The pretty racing ones.”

Emily walks over to the full-length mirror in between the closets and takes her hair out of its messy ponytail.

“You should wear it down more,” K.T. tells her.

“Okay,” Emily says. As she packs her book bag for a night of homework in the lieberry, she sees a book on her desk that wasn’t there before, a biography of Emily Dickinson.

“Is this yours?” she asks K.T.

“Oh,” says K.T. “Madame Colche stopped by after dinner. She said keep it as long as you like. She doesn’t need it back anytime soon.”

Emily opens the book to the slick pages in the middle. An image of Emily Dickinson, the one that Ms. Albright showed her class last fall, stares her straight in the eye. When Emily Beam shifts her head to the right, the eyes—bottomless pools—follow. When she shifts to the left, they follow. Emily Beam cannot escape. She reads the caption, which notes that the daguerreotype was taken when Emily Dickinson was sixteen or seventeen. The future poet looked sad and thirsty.

Thirst was the first sensation that returned to Emily Beam when Ms. Albright appeared behind Paul and demanded the
gun. Paul did not give it to her. He lunged away, deeper into the stacks, leaving his backpack and the volume of poems he had pulled from the shelf in a lump on the floor.

Emily’s mouth had been so dry that she couldn’t speak.

“Help,” she had managed to croak to her AP English teacher in a voice as tiny as a tree frog. “Help us.”

Emily Beam,
February 3, 1995

SINCE MADAME COLCHE GAVE HER THE SHEET WITH THE GUIDELINES
for the poetry contest, the poems won’t stop bursting in air. Like bombs, they blow up Emily’s brain with images as she’s walking along, just innocently walking over the little pebbles in her new black boots. Sometimes the words neatly arrange themselves into a Dickinson-like pattern.

But if Emily can get the light to fall in just the right way, she can turn the bombs to blossoms. If she squints in just the right way, she can leave winter behind and arrive at a clearing, sunlit and green, where she stretches out on the grass, a bouquet of words gathered in her hand, and looks skyward.

Even at breakfast, poems rise into being, and sometimes Emily has to force herself to pay attention to K.T., just as she’s doing now. It’s the day before Valentine’s Day, which, at ASG, is apparently almost as big a deal as Christmas. It doesn’t seem to bother K.T. not to have a boyfriend, and it certainly
doesn’t bother Emily, who has sworn off boys. Plus, she has homework to worry about, way more homework than she ever had at Grenfell County High—three times as much.

“I’m glad Hannah isn’t here,” K.T. is saying. “She had, like, five boyfriends, and she’d enlist me to help her figure out which one to obsess over.”

Emily has heard girls on the hall refer to Hannah as a ho-bag. “Five? Really?”

“Well, at least three. I liked her and everything, but she got around.”

“Was she your best friend?” Emily asks.

“She kind of was, and she kind of wasn’t. I mean, we did a lot of stuff together, but I don’t know—it wasn’t like we told each other our deepest, darkest secrets or anything.”

Emily looks down at the remains of her scrambled eggs.

“I’m not sure I’m the ‘best friend’ type,” K.T. says.

“Me either,” says Emily.

“I might just like animals better than I like people. My mom and dad think I should be a veterinarian.”

“Don’t you have to go to vet school for that?”

“Yeah,” K.T. says. “Which does not bode well for Yours Truly, who made a C in biology last year.”

“College is a clean slate, though, isn’t it? At least, that’s what I’m hoping for.”

“Why do you need a clean slate? You had to have had really good grades to get into ASG in the middle of the year like you did.”

“Straight As,” says Emily. “Except for a B-plus in tenth-grade biology.”

K.T. raises a palm, and Emily high-fives it.

“I guess I could be one of those ‘country veterinarians,’ ” says K.T. “You know, the crotchety type that thinks medical school is bullshit and teaches herself everything she needs to know. Did I tell you about that cat I used to have named Pablo? My mom and dad named him after Picasso, which was pretty ironic because at the time, we didn’t know he spoke Spanish.”

“Shut up,” says Emily.

“No, I’m serious. Pablo liked to nap on my bed after dinner, and one time, when I was doing my homework—and before you make some smart-ass comment about that, yes, I actually do homework every once in a while—Pablo said
‘pollo.’
Not ‘meow,’ like he usually said, but
‘pollo.’
 ”

“Maybe he was hungry,” Emily says. “Maybe you forgot to feed him dinner.”

“I swear to God,” says K.T., pushing her wild curls back from her forehead. “When I turned around, he was gazing at me like a sphinx.
‘¿Cómo está, Pablo?’
I asked, but he didn’t answer. Not that I expected him to, but, hey, stranger things have happened, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would say.” Emily nods. “Yes, I definitely would.”

“Tell me one.”

“Tell you one what?”

“A stranger thing that’s happened.”

“Well,” she says slowly, “I saw a dog get hit by a truck once.”

“That’s not so weird,” K.T. says.

“No,” says Emily, “it was weird. Because it was like the dog
wanted
to get hit. It actually backed up onto the road. If it had kept moving forward, it would have been safe.”

“Were you driving?”

“My boyfriend was. Ex-boyfriend.”

“Did he cry?” K.T. asks.

Emily shakes her head and takes a long sip of coffee.

“I’ve never seen a teenaged boy cry,” K.T. says. “Have you?”

“He didn’t cry.”

“Did the dog die?”

“Yeah,” says Emily.

Emily had seen Paul cry, twice. On December 10, her birthday, the day she broke up with him, and two days later on the last day of his life. With her memory, she has tried to erase his tears, but no one could edit what she went through, not even her own amazing brain. What had happened on December 12, 1994, is stamped on there for all time exactly as it happened. Paul had tears on his face, tears in his voice, when he dropped the book he had pulled from the shelf onto the floor and grabbed Emily Beam’s hands out of the pouch of her sweater.

“You can’t do this to us,” he said.

When she pulled her hands away, he bent down to the backpack, rummaging for the gun.

Emily watched in shock as he lifted it out. He held it for a moment in front of him, to show to her, then he pulled it in close, staring at it as if it were a creature he’d discovered on the beach. She held Paul’s watery gaze.

“It’s not loaded,” she said. She was certain at first that it wasn’t. If she’d really believed it was loaded, she would have grabbed it or dived for Paul’s feet, something, anything, to keep him from doing what he did.

He stared past her, way past her, and that was when Emily got scared.

“Put it down, Paul. Or give it to me, okay? Give the gun to me.” He didn’t, and her knees shook so hard that she crumpled to the floor.

“It’s our decision to make,” said Paul. “No one else’s. We love each other, don’t we?”

Emily was crying now, too. “But I want to go to college,” she said. “I can’t do that if I have a baby.” She shook her head. “Don’t you see?”

But Paul was gone, sucked up into a black hole.

Emily said, “If you loved me, you would understand. If you really loved me, you wouldn’t be so selfish.”

Paul was now holding the gun out in front of him with both hands. Was he aiming it at her? It appeared that he was. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Was it an out-of-body experience? A time warp? Was her brain completely done in because of all she had put it through over the past three days? She and Paul stared at one another like the trapped animals that they were.

His eyes clouded up, dark as she’d ever seen them. “You’re the selfish one,” he said.

It was the first time in Emily’s life that she opened her mouth to speak and nothing, not even a breath, fell out. It was then, in the devastating silence, that Emily’s English teacher, Ms. Albright, appeared. She stepped up behind Paul, quietly, like a cat.

K.T. takes a bite of poached egg (made by Hilly with love) and asks, with her mouth full, “What kind of dog was it?”

“I don’t know,” says Emily. “A mutt.”

“And your boyfriend wasn’t upset?”

“Oh, he was upset,” Emily says. “He was shaking like crazy. The dog came out of nowhere.”

Paul’s attention had been drawn to the cows in the pasture on the other side of the road, dairy cows not bred for slaughter, soft and slow in the October sun. One of them was mooing. Paul had been explaining to Emily how he was learning to understand the way cows spoke to one another; he had worked that past summer on a farm that raised cattle. As Paul’s truck swept around a curve, a black-and-white dog shot backward out of the tall grass and onto the road.

Paul jerked the truck to a stop, but he was too late.

“Oh, my God,” he said. “Oh, my God.” He looked at Emily. “The dog. Is it—?”

“I’m not sure.”

Paul’s hands were bouncing up and down off the steering wheel. “Will you get out and look? Please?”

Emily opened the door and took a few steps away from the truck. The dog lay on its side.

“It’s not moving,” she said.

Paul slid out from behind the wheel and walked around to where the dog lay, its legs stretched out in front of it. Its eyes were closed. It looked like it was sleeping. He bent down and touched it on the head. Blood trickled from the dog’s mouth onto the asphalt as Paul shook the dog gently to try to revive it.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “It just came out of nowhere.”

“I know,” said Emily.

“It doesn’t have a collar.”

“It’s probably a stray.”

Paul looked up at her with big, blinking eyes. “You’ll be my witness, right?”

Emily nodded.

“I don’t think it was my fault,” he said. “Was it?”

“No,” said Emily. She watched as Paul lifted the dog into his arms and carried it over to the side of the road where the cows were. When he walked back to her, there was a smear of blood on his arm.

“I’ll just leave it there,” he said, “in case it belongs to anybody around here.”

“It’s a stray,” said Emily. “There’s nobody around except us and the cows.”

Paul couldn’t stop blinking. He looked back at the dog. He had laid it along the slope of the shoulder so that its head was higher than its body.

“Poor guy,” said Paul. He covered his eyes with his hands.

Emily reached out and touched him on the elbow. “It’s okay,” she said.

“Nothing is okay,” Paul said, his arms dropping to his sides. “Please don’t lie to me, Emily. I know we haven’t known each other long, but it’ll all go downhill if we lie to each other.”

Emily swallowed. She was about to tell Paul that it wasn’t his fault, but maybe it was, and she didn’t want to ruin the weight of the moment. A boy had never said such a serious thing to her before.

“It’s sad when people have their dogs put to sleep,” K.T. is saying. “The dog’s owners are bawling and kissing all over the dog, and the dog smells their sadness and fear, which doesn’t
make sense to him because the regular kisses smell happy. How can the dog not feel even the slightest sense of betrayal? Better to be taken out by a car, just like that.”

“Are you saying Paul did the dog a favor?”

“Read it however you like.” K.T. shrugs. “So your boyfriend’s name was Paul. I’m a fan of Pauls—Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Paul Revere.” She sips her coffee. “RuPaul.”

“Who’s that?”

“That drag queen who’s on talk shows all the time.”

“I don’t watch TV,” Emily says.

“What? They don’t have those in Boston?”

“Ha, ha,” says Emily.

“Who doesn’t watch TV?”

“I don’t watch
much
TV.”

“Why not?” K.T. asks.

“My parents are kind of strict,” Emily says. “They say I have to study if I want to go to college because they can’t afford to send me.”

“How can they afford to send you here, then?”

Emily treads water. “My aunt’s paying for it. See, she thinks that going here will give me a better chance of getting in to the college I want to go to.”

“What college is that?”

“Harvard.”

“But you’re from Boston,” says K.T. “Don’t you want to spread your wings, expand your horizons, challenge yourself to move out of your comfort zone? Don’t you want to embrace all those clichés the guidance counselors are always throwing out at us?”