And We Stay (6 page)

Emily smiles. “Well, I’m not
from
Boston. It’s just where I’ve been living for a while.”

“Look, Emily. Annabelle and Waverley and the girls on the hall keep asking me what your story is. I’m only going to be able to put them off for so long before they begin their own investigation. And that could get ugly fast.”

“I understand,” Emily says.

“Want me to make something up?” K.T. asks.

“Sure, why not?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” Emily says. “I don’t care what they think.”

“I’ll make it good. I’ll make it believable and all, but, oh, my God, this is going to be the most fun I’ve had all year.”

K.T. offers up a high five, and Emily takes it.

“When I first met you,” Emily says, “I thought your name was Katie. But then everyone kept saying it funny, like it was two words—Kay. Tee. So what do the initials stand for? I should have asked a long time ago, but …”

“But you didn’t ask because you didn’t want me to ask you anything back. Am I right?”

Emily nods.

“Keller True. Two age-old family names run together. I don’t have any brothers, so—whoo-hoo! lucky me! the third daughter! the last hope!—I got them both.”

“Well, Helen Keller Too Good to Be True, I wish I could tell you the sad, sad story of my checkered past, and maybe I will someday, but right now, I just can’t.”

“I knew you weren’t from Boston,” K.T. says. “Number one: you don’t sound like you’re from Boston. And number
two: girls from Boston don’t go around wearing Harvard sweatshirts.”

“Why not?”

“Emily Beam Me Up Scotty, you don’t advertise where you’re from. You advertise where you’ve been. And even though it sounds like it, believe me, they’re not the same thing.”

During Trigonometry with the soft-spoken, square-haired Mrs. Frame, Emily imagines all the new identities she could invent. Not a single friend from home knows she got pregnant; not one of them knows she is here. And Dr. Ingold, the headmistress, is the only one at ASG who has been told about Paul and what happened in the Grenfell County High School library, but she has not been told anything about Boston because Emily’s parents didn’t tell her. They didn’t tell anyone.

The day after Paul died, newspaper reporters called Emily’s house. Mr. or Mrs. Beam answered at first, but after the third call, they turned the ringer off. When a policewoman showed up at the door late that afternoon, Emily sat in the living room between her mom and dad and answered the questions. Emily wasn’t any help to the investigation. The gun and the use of it were total surprises—a boy caught in the heat of the moment. He had things to live for, Emily told the officer: he loved the trees under his care, and he was learning how to communicate with bovines.

As soon as the woman left, Emily flew into a rage. Her
mother and father had to grab her, hold her hands behind her back so that she didn’t hurt herself. The police weren’t interested in what Emily had to say about Paul and his trees. The officer had not asked a single question about what kind of boy he was—or what kind of girl she was to have fallen in love with him. The woman had wanted only the
whens
and
wheres
.

Emily’s parents tried to explain that the officer was only doing her job, but Emily was in no mood to be rational. As soon as the funeral was over, the Beams packed the car and left town with their only child crying in the backseat. Emily went through two boxes of Kleenex. Hours and hours later, when they arrived at Aunt Cindy’s little house outside of Boston, her father opened the back door and helped Emily out.

“We’re here, honey,” he whispered. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

It was a lie, of course, but it was the first time in days that her father had been kind, and for a few minutes, the lie made Emily feel better.

When Mrs. Frame turns her back to graph a periodic function on the board, Emily reaches into her book bag for the biography of Emily Dickinson that Madame Colche lent her. Dickinson lived in a time of patriarchs. Men ruled the country, the church, and the home.

His Heart was pure and terrible
, Dickinson wrote of her father,
and I think no other like it exists
. Edward Dickinson pulled her out of boarding school after one year, supposedly because she got sick so much, but Emily Beam wonders if it
wasn’t the father who had made his daughter ill in the first place.

Fathers are paradoxes—Emily Beam doesn’t need a biography to tell her this. All males are. The summer before his senior year, Paul grew two inches. He came back to school with shoulders and wavy hair. He was six one when he started his senior year, and it was these changes more than anything that attracted Emily. She was changing, too. The melancholy that rose during the afternoon thunderstorms of her childhood was rising now in all kinds of weather, and after Terra moved to Ohio, it was much harder to find girls her age to relate to. They all seemed so sunny. Picking out Paul was like picking out the drummer in a band, not as cute as the lead singer or as flashy as the electric guitar player. She chose him to give some rhythm to her weekends, which had begun to feel longer than weeks, and aimless.

Lying down next to Paul, Emily measured herself by him. They aligned their torsos and their feet and their hands. Emily was five four then, and she is still five four, too short to be tall and too tall to be short. She is an in-between girl. Emily has always sat, if given a choice, in between other students, not in the front, not in a corner. Her teachers call on her because she’s the one they see when they look out. And that’s okay because Emily usually has an answer, even in subjects she doesn’t care for, such as trigonometry. She is not short of opinions, and she has some ideas about a good many things, but she hasn’t a clue as to how her days with Paul spiraled away from her so fast and so final.

It isn’t Paul’s touch that she misses the most. It’s the smell
of his truck: Old Spice and pine trees and brown leaves and apples. The smell of childhood and adulthood, rolled into one. There are places she needs to see again in the light of day, the graveled lanes and pull-offs where she and Paul had parked and made out. But for now, the walks at dusk through the streets of Amherst will have to do.

Emily wanders into the drugstore on Main Street to buy K.T. a small Valentine’s Day gift. As Emily turns into the makeup aisle, she sees a girl with hair like wheat pick up a lipstick and tuck it in her purse. Emily makes a beeline toward her, and the girl whips around. It’s like a scene out of a Western. Shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.

For the first time since Paul died, Emily feels powerful. She doesn’t know who this pretty girl is, not yet, but she feels like she could kick her to Boston and back.

“I saw what you did,” says Emily.

The girl plays dumb. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Put it back.”

The girl reaches into her purse for the lipstick and returns it to the shelf. As she brushes the curtain of hair away from her face, Emily recognizes her.

“Are you going to rat me out?” the girl asks.

“I haven’t decided.”

“I put it back. The manager might not even believe you if you told on me.”

“But then again, he might,” says Emily.

“Assuming it’s a ‘he,’ ” says the girl. “You’re in my French class, aren’t you? You’re that new girl.”

“Oui,”
says Emily.

The girl makes a quick survey of the aisle. “If you say a word, I’ll get kicked out.”

Emily raises her eyebrows and swivels, but an untied bootlace trips her up, and the girl reaches out to keep her from falling.

“It was just a dumb lipstick,” the girl says. Fear blazes in the girl’s brown eyes, and the way the girl is still holding on to Emily’s wrist—the way a small child would grip a mother—stops Emily from saying anything.

The girl follows Emily out of the drugstore. Why should this thief of a girl get off scot-free? She walks until she gets to the bench across the street from the Emily Dickinson House, and the girl sits down right beside her. It isn’t until she reaches into her coat pocket for the pack of cigarettes and the matchbook she found on the bathroom floor in Hart Hall that she realizes that she forgot to get K.T. a Valentine’s gift. After the wind blows out three matches, Emily finally gets one lit, touching it to the cigarette sticking straight out of her mouth. She inhales and coughs out.

“My name’s Amber Atkins,” the girl says.

“Emily Beam,” says Emily in between coughs.

Amber points across the street. “Were you named after her?”

“Are you kidding? My parents probably never read a poem in their entire lives.”

“My mom named me after a stripper she met in Las Vegas.”

“So you’re a thief
and
a liar,” says Emily.

“We all are sometimes,” Amber says. “Aren’t you?”

Emily inhales, beginning to enjoy the taste of tobacco.

“My mom really did name me after a stripper.”

“I’m not in a talking mood right now, okay? And I would offer you a cigarette, but that would be contributing to the delinquency of a minor. And you’re already delinquent enough.”

“I don’t smoke,” Amber says. “You’re a minor, too, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Yeah,” says Emily, “but in my heart, I am very, very major, so …”

“You don’t sound like most of the other girls at school. Where are you from?”

Emily takes the cigarette out of her mouth and makes a “zip it” sign with her lips.

“Oh, right,” Amber says. “We’re just gonna sit here and stare down the night.”

Emily looks across the street at the stately yellow brick house, the kind of house she had always dreamed of living in. Large but not too large; elegant but not showy. Tall windows. Most of the houses in Grenfell County are small, boxy.

While riding in Paul’s truck, winding through the woods and farms of Grenfell County, Emily began to take the female brain apart and piece it together again. Girls go back in their minds over things they wish they had said or done, or not said or not done, while boys put those things in a box with a tight-fitting lid. Girls think they can save boys in need, and Emily was no different.

The world is easier on boys, simpler. Paul had two choices once he found out Emily was pregnant: he could propose marriage, or he could pay for the abortion.

But the fact of the matter was that there was no choice, no second chance. Paul killed himself, so Emily has to go it alone.

“I guess we should head on back,” Amber says. “It’s almost seven-thirty.”

Emily nods, lighting another cigarette and putting it in her mouth next to the other one. She inhales and coughs out, inhales again and sputters, wishing she could walk and smoke, smoke and walk, walk her mind to the sky, smoke her heart out of her body.

Emily Beam,
February 14, 1995