by Ali Standish
“Gran,” she whispered.
And then she took off running once more.
17
When Boomer and I return from the Spinney, the sun hangs in the watery blue sky like a juicy golden apple, ripe for the picking. And somehow, I feel a little bit lighter. Because for a whole hour, I wasn’t thinking about my skin and my maybe-spreading-even-now vitiligo.
And now that I’ve written a chapter, it’s somebody else’s turn. Will they like what I wrote? Will they write again?
I’m so lost in thought that I nearly bump into Professor Swann, out for his morning walk.
“Morning, Emma,” he says, tipping his hat at me.
“Hi, Professor Swann,” I reply.
“A beautiful day,” he says, his accented words crisp as crunching leaves, “isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“The kind of day you want to share with someone,” he says, squinting up at the sky. “You know, we will miss your gram terribly around here. She always made me feel welcome in Lanternwood, even when other people treated me as an outsider. Always had a kind word to spare. She was a wonderful person. But you know that better than anyone, of course.”
“Yeah, she was,” I say, feeling a bit taken aback. I didn’t realize that she and Professor Swann knew each other that well. But I guess that explains why he seemed so upset after her funeral.
He wipes a bit of lint from his suit. “Well, I’d better—”
“Professor?” I interrupt. “Do you think— I mean, does it get easier? People say it does, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop missing Gram.”
He flashes me a sad smile. “You won’t,” he says. “But it will get easier.”
It’s just, there’s something in his eyes that makes me feel like he doesn’t quite mean it.
The last garden roses are blooming in the corner of Gram’s yard, forming a little crowd of pink, cheerful faces to welcome me through the white gate. Inside Morning Glory Cottage, it’s toasty warm, just the way Gram liked it, and Lily is sitting at the kitchen table.
“What were you doing outside?” she asks. “Mom and Dad think you’re still sleeping.”
“I went for a walk,” I say. “Why are you up so early anyway? Don’t you need your beauty sleep?”
Lily usually sleeps until at least ten on the weekends.
“I have to work on my personal statement. Mom will be mad if she finds out you left without saying.”
“She’ll only find out if you tell her.”
Lily hesitates, then shrugs. “Better take your sneakers off.” She picks up her phone with one hand, a Yale brochure in the other, and snaps some “applying to college” selfies.
I wriggle my feet out of my shoes and kick them over beside the door just as Mom and Dad come downstairs.
“Oh, you’re awake,” Mom says.
“I, um, just came down.”
Lily doesn’t correct me. She’s probably being nice because she feels sorry for me, and I decide that maybe I don’t mind that so much. Because what is the point of contracting a life-changing skin condition if your sister isn’t at least going to be a little nicer to you?
Later that morning, Fina texts me and asks if I want to hang out.
I reply and tell her I do as long as it’s not at my house.
Because I swear, every time I look up, somebody is staring at me, like if they look hard enough, they can actually see my spots getting bigger. It’s starting to make me paranoid.
Fina tells me to come to her house, and Dad drives me into town, which is crowded since it’s Saturday. Fina lives practically across the street from the main Hampstead College gates, in a little lavender house with a neat square of grass in front.
I barely have time to knock before the door flies open.
“Fina?” I say dubiously.
She stands in front of me, wearing some kind of crazy helmet with bars across the face and holding a baseball bat.
“Emma!” she says. “Come in!”
“Um, okay.”
I take an uncertain step into the house as a woman appears from the kitchen. She has bright brown eyes, a smile with dimples, and chestnut hair with purple tips. I try to imagine what it would be like to have a mom cool enough to dye her tips purple. Awesome, most likely.
“Hello there,” the woman says, holding out a hand. “I’m Ana Ramirez. You must be Emma.”
“Hi,” I say. “Nice to meet you.”
“Fina’s told us wonderful things about you,” she says.
“Mo-om,” Fina warns, “don’t be awkward.”
Just then, someone else comes down the stairs, a man in a baseball helmet holding a vacuum cleaner. He’s walking funny, kind of like a crab, and he keeps looking around like he’s waiting for something to jump out and attack him.
“Are you guys playing some kind of game?” I ask.
“Kind of,” Fina replies.
“It’s not a game,” insists the man, who must be her father. “It’s life and death.”
“Don’t worry,” Fina says. “It’s only death if you’re a spider.”
“Hi, Emma,” says the man, taking off his helmet. “I’m Luis Ramirez. Fina’s dad and deputy spider catcher.”
“You’re hunting spiders?”
“Yes! We have an infestation of them. And they’re huge!” Fina creates a circle a little bigger than a quarter with her thumb and pointer finger.
“They’re more like animals than spiders,” Ms. Ramirez says, shivering.
“And this here house ain’t big enough for the both of us,” Mr. Ramirez drawls in a funny voice. “It’s us or them.”
Ms. Ramirez rolls her eyes. “And I’m the awkward one. Right.”
“When I went to the bathroom this morning, there was one in the tub,” Fina says, grimacing. “It just sat there, watching me.”
“See, Emma? We can’t go on like this.” Mr. Ramirez offers me the helmet and vacuum cleaner. “And besides, I have to make some lunch.”
“Did they have a red dot on them?” I ask.
Fina shakes her head. “No. They were black.”
“Then they aren’t black widows. And if they’re big, then they aren’t brown recluse spiders. So they’re probably harmless.”
Gram taught me about spiders. She said it was smart to know what the poisonous ones looked like, especially spending so much time in the woods. She wasn’t bothered by the other kinds, though.
Fina is staring at me like I’ve just told her I can fly. “Harmless spiders?” she repeats. “There’s no such thing as a harmless spider. I’ll need years of therapy to get the image of that tub spider out of my head.”
“You know what this means, don’t you?” Mr. Ramirez says to her. “Emma’s working for the other side.”
“You mean she’s Team Spider?” Fina asks, clutching her hand to her heart.
I think we can agree by now that the Ramirez family is extremely weird. In an extremely awesome way.
I look from Fina to Mr. Ramirez and grin before jamming the baseball helmet on my head. “I’m not a spy,” I say. Then I lower my voice to a whisper. “I’m a double agent.”
“Excellent,” Fina says.
The two of us go around the house, sucking up all the cobwebs from the corners and checking under the furniture for more spiders. Every time we move a chair to look underneath, I lift the vacuum nozzle and say, “I’m going in.” Then Fina raises the bat over her shoulder and says, “Copy that. I’ll be your cover.”
By the time we’re done, we have found forty-eight cents, half a chocolate bar, one of those little umbrellas you put in fruity drinks (“I’ve been looking for that everywhere!” Fina says), and zero spiders.
“I think we scared them all away,” Fina says, taking off her mask (a baseball catcher’s mask, I’ve figured out) and flopping down onto the sofa, panting.
“I think your parents tricked us into cleaning your house,” I reply.
Fina’s eyes go wide. “Outsmarted again!” she sa
ys, shaking her fist.
“It’s okay. Your parents seem so cool. Mine would never let me run around the house swinging a baseball bat. And your mom’s hair! I love the purple.”
“She promised me that after my Quinceañera, I can get blue streaks.”
“What’s a Quinceañera?” I ask.
“It’s this big celebration that happens for a girl’s fifteenth birthday,” Fina explains. “There’s a mass and then a big party. Everyone gets dressed up and dances a lot. It’s supposed to mark the transition to womanhood. My grandmother has been planning mine since I was, like, two.”
“Cool,” I say. “I bet my sister would have loved to have one. She made Mom get a room in a fancy hotel so she could have a slumber party for her Sweet Sixteenth.”
“That sounds fun.”
“I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t exactly invited.”
“Well, maybe for your Sweet Sixteenth, you can have a hair-dye party!”
“Not likely. My mom would kill me if I dyed my hair,” I reply, “no matter what age I was.”
“But at least you would be a very stylish corpse.”
We both laugh. Then Fina’s phone chimes.
“Oh, Ruby’s almost here!” she says. “I invited her, too.”
After a minute, there’s a knock on the door, and Fina opens it to reveal Ruby. “Hi, guys,” she says. She wrinkles her nose. “Have you been playing baseball?”
Ms. Ramirez comes out before we can answer and waves hello to Ruby. “Lunch is ready, girls!”
All that spider hunting has made me really hungry, and whatever is cooking in the kitchen smells great.
It turns out that Mr. Ramirez has made enchiladas. Highly delicious enchiladas. Only Mr. Ramirez doesn’t seem to think so. He shakes his head as he bites into his.
“Still not right,” he mumbles. “Darn.”
“All his students love his enchiladas back home,” Fina explains. “But he can’t get the recipe right here.”
“The tomatoes are different!” Mr. Ramirez protests. “Or maybe it’s the peppers.”
“It tastes really good to me, Mr. Ramirez,” I offer.
“Me, too,” says Ruby. Then she turns to Fina. “So, what was it like in LA? Did you know any movie stars?”
“We didn’t actually live in LA,” Fina says. “We were in this college town called Claremont that was like thirty miles from there.”
“And unfortunately, we didn’t know any movie stars,” Ms. Ramirez says.
“But we knew lots of history stars!” Mr. Ramirez adds brightly.
“History stars?” Ruby asks.
“You know, stars of the history world. In fact, last year, I was at a conference with Da—”
Fina elbows him just hard enough that he gets the point and goes back to eating his enchiladas.
“What’s your book about, Mr. Ramirez?” I ask. “Fina said you were writing one.”
“No,” Fina replies. “I said he was supposed to be writing one. But I don’t think watching Netflix all day really counts.”
“Last week, I caught him watching Pretty Little Liars,” Ms. Ramirez says, shaking her head. Ruby and I giggle, and Fina lets out a groan.
“I wanted to know what all the hype was about!” says Mr. Ramirez.
“You are so embarrassing, Dad,” Fina groans.
Maybe so, but by the end of lunch, I’m pretty sure I’ve had more fun with Fina’s family than I’ve had with mine since before Gram died. And that makes me happy.
But kind of sad, too.
18
When I look in the mirror on Monday morning, I get a shock.
I’ve been trying to stay away from mirrors all weekend, but I’m sure my face has changed since last week. The spots above my eyebrows, which were the size of pinpricks last time I checked, have now grown into real spots. Some of them are closer to the size of thumbtacks.
Is this what it’s going to be like from now on? Waking up every morning to find someone new staring back at me from the mirror? Before, you couldn’t notice the tiny pale flecks unless you looked really closely. But now the spots above my eyebrows are like a sign that says:
EMMA TALBOT HAS VITILIGO.
If only I could cover my face like I can cover my toes and elbows.
Which actually gives me an idea. I start pulling open the cabinet drawers, frantically searching through all of Lily’s nail polishes and lip glosses until I find what I’m looking for.
Five minutes later, I’m staring at myself in the mirror once again. A groan escapes my lips.
Somehow, I’ve made everything worse.
“Emma!” Mom calls. “You’re going to be late! And don’t forget your sunscreen!”
Over the weekend, Mom bought me this special sunscreen. SPF 1000 or something like that. When your skin loses the pigment, it apparently also loses its ability to protect itself from the sun, which means I can get burned really easily. The last thing I need is for the spots on my face to turn bright red with sunburn, so after I put on my treatment cream, I squeeze some sunscreen from the bottle and slap it on my face.
I take a deep breath at the top of the steps. Then I bolt down them as fast as I can. Because I cannot deal with Mom seeing what I’ve done just yet.
But of course, she’s waiting at the bottom of the stairs, probably so she can smell me for sunscreen. When she sees me, she gasps and says, “Emma, what did you do?”
“I have to go.”
“Wait! Emma—”
But I’m out the door and running. Ruth and Gloria call good morning to me from across the street, and I wave at them without looking up. I keep my head down as I get on the bus and stare at my feet as I trudge to my usual seat. Then I pull out The World at the End of the Tunnel and bury my face in it.
After several hours of swinging from the oak tree in their netted trap, Jack and Sarah heard the leaves stirring and then the sound of a saw meeting rope. Before their eyes had time to grow wide, they suddenly found themselves falling to earth.
The bus stops, and Edie gets on. I keep my eyes glued to the book.
Rubbing their backsides and scowling, Jack and Sarah looked around to find themselves surrounded by stubby creatures with gray skin and pointed ears. Clover elves. Each set of long twiggy fingers held a bow, and each of the bows held an arrow. All of these arrows, Sarah noticed with alarm, were pointed directly at—
Just as we pull away from Edie’s stop, I feel something hit me in the back of the head, and—thinking of elves with their bows at the ready—I instinctively spin around.
Too late, I realize it was just a balled-up candy wrapper that Edie threw at me, and now I’m staring at her and the Graces, and all three of them are staring back at me, mouths agape.
“Oh. My. God,” Edie says, a joyful smile spreading across her face. “What. A. Freak!”
“She’s like a zombie or something,” says Grace One.
And because I have the worst luck ever, Grace Two already has her phone out. In the instant before I turn around, she snaps my picture.
I whip forward, cheeks on fire. I mean, I knew it was bad, but are my new bangs really that terrible? And how do they make me look like a zombie?
I sink lower in my seat and fumble in Gram’s satchel for my phone so I can get a look at myself. Before I find it, though, we reach Ruby’s stop and she climbs up. Relief fills me as she sits down next to me.
“What’s with Edie and her friends?” she whispers. “They’re all looking up here and laughing.”
“I think it’s my bangs,” I say. “I did a really bad job cutting them.”
Ruby stares at me, her cheeks going even pinker than usual. “Um, I don’t think it’s just the bangs,” she says. “It’s your face? It’s all white.”
My heart plummets. I thought my bangs covered the spots. Could they have somehow spread even farther since I looked in the mirror a few minutes ago? Do I have some kind of super strain of vitiligo or something?
Ruby lifts her hand to my face a
nd rubs at one of my cheeks with her thumb. “I think it’s sunscreen.”
I turn my phone camera lens toward me and see that Ruby’s right. The sunscreen Mom got me is like chalk against my skin. I look like I’m about to go to a mime convention.
“It’s this new stuff my mom’s making me wear,” I say, breathing a sigh of relief. “It’s really high SPF.”
“Oh,” Ruby says. “It must be the mineral kind. My mom makes me wear it, too, because I burn like crazy. You have to rub it in really well. Otherwise it does, you know, that.”
“Thanks, Ruby,” I say as the bus pulls up to the school. “I’m gonna go to the bathroom to fix this. See you at lunch.”
“Do you want me to come?” she asks in a small voice.
“No. No, it’s okay.”
I keep my eyes on my shoes as I weave through the halls and into the first bathroom I see. I look at my chalky face under my ridiculously crooked bangs in the mirror, then grab a handful of paper towels, soak them in water, and begin to scrub.
“Emma?”
I whirl around to see Ms. Singh standing in the doorway.
“Did you know you’re in the staff bathroom?” she asks gently.
I shake my head. “I’m sorry. I had a sunscreen emergency.”
“A sunscreen emergency,” she echoes, nodding. “Right. Are you good now?”
“Um, yeah,” I reply. “Except my bangs. But I can’t really fix those.”
Ms. Singh takes a few steps toward me and brushes lightly through my bangs, studying them. “It’s not so bad,” she says. “Hold on a minute. Stay here. If anyone else comes, tell them you have my permission. All right?”
I nod, and she disappears through the door. A few minutes later, she comes back holding a small pair of scissors. “Trust me?” she asks, holding them up.
“Should I?”
“My mom was a hairdresser. I learned some things.”
Trying not to think about how weird it is to get a haircut from your teacher in the bathroom at school, I close my eyes.
I feel the scissors snip through my hair, but not in the same way I did it this morning. Ms. Singh has a lighter touch and cuts kind of upward instead of straight across.