“Or Dr. Keene’s office,” Amanda said.
Blythe’s dad, Dr. Keene, is the town dentist, so I guess he can probably get drugs. But I thought it was really weird that Amanda would say that. I was glad Blythe wasn’t there. Everyone started shouting then, arguing about whether Dr. Keene was giving Blythe and Claire drugs and if there was a point in trying to guess and if it was slander to say Dr. Keene’s name and did Amanda know something and how you could get drugs anywhere, on any playground, including at Lake Main, and blah blah.
Finally, we were all wrung out and deflated and everyone was shouting about Zach and David’s fight and the stupidity of our having decided to meet here again, and I was just trying to ignore it all when Logan grabbed my hand and pulled me out the door and into the thick trees. I walked quickly, with my face down, holding Logan’s hand and Spark’s leash, breathing as evenly as I could. I had to lift my legs high to come down safely on the bed of twigs and leaves covering the ground. When we emerged onto the highway, I heard gasping and realized Logan was crying. Unlike the rest of us, Logan never cries. I stopped walking and hugged her.
“That was horrible,” I said. “I’m sorry. We’ll never do it again. This whole idea was—”
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s . . .”
“Carl and David are complete assho—”
“No, it’s just . . .”
“What? Amanda? Claire?”
I wanted to keep cutting her off. I must have had a sense that whatever was bothering her was going to be trouble for me, too. And I was right, because as soon as I was quiet for three seconds, she said, “Remember how Zach asked Trey about the Cannons show?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, Emma,” she said, and started crying again.
“Yeah?”
“I ended up kind of going.”
“What do you mean?” My voice sounded sad and far away, and I saw the words appear in a speech bubble about my head. Then they floated off.
“Well, Zach called?” Lo continued.
I decided not to talk anymore.
“He called to see if I still wanted to go to the concert with him and Trey? But he only had one extra ticket?” Why was she telling me this like there were questions in it?
We were in the middle of the sidewalk, frozen, leaves swirling around our feet. The date came at me, the time: December 7, 5:49 p.m. I turned on my GPS and it told me where I was standing, even though I already knew. It smelled like winter, and I knew I had to be home that second; that I couldn’t stay, couldn’t listen, couldn’t speak, couldn’t see. I had to be in our kitchen, smell whatever my mom was cooking, touch Benj and Jenna and Naomi, hear Leah’s voice, eat my mom’s dinner, answer my dad’s barrage of doctor questions, and listen to whatever shouting and crying and wild drama was taking place there. I thought suddenly and clearly of Seb, took a breath and got my white cane ready, bent my knees like a sprinter at the starting line.
She had gone to a concert with Zach. Okay. I could feel my mind trying to file this information in the right place—1. Let go, try not to suffer over it; 2. Deny this until much, much later, maybe even decades from now, when you won’t care anymore; 3. Panic fully and cry uncontrollably, etc.—when Logan said, “So, um, Em, there’s something else.”
I still said nothing.
“Last night? When Blythe and Nicole and I sneaked out of Deirdre’s, we went over to Trey’s for a minute and Zach was there, too, and we were drinking a lot, and, well, Zach and I kind of—we’ve been kind of, I don’t know . . .”
I didn’t help her.
“So, okay. So I wanted to tell you, but, okay. I should start with—I lost it.”
It took me a minute to recover, but then I said, “Congratulations, Lo. You . . . last night, you mean? With—? I mean, that’s great. I’m happy for you.” It fell to the ground like a body. I was shuddering.
And she said, “No, no, not last night, not—it’s kind of complicated. I mean, it’s a disaster, actually.”
“What’s a disaster?” I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral, trying to imagine what it would be like to be Logan, to be having secret sex with Zach Haze, gobbling up the gorgeous world with my eyes.
“The sex thing,” Logan said. We’d been planning this conversation for years, planning to fall in love at the same time, with best friends (Trey and Zach, for example), losing our virginity on the same night, feeling identical, telling each other everything. Did anyone have that friendship? How did other girls work out their secret differences?
“I totally regret it,” she added.
“You totally regret what?” I repeated like a feverish parrot, confused, trying to remind myself that this was about Logan and not me. I had walked her up onto an embankment, and she came around the other side of me.
“Losing it,” she said. “I fucked it up, because this guy from Pendleton, Brian, I—”
“Who’s Brian?”
“He’s no one. Just this guy.”
“You lost it to him?”
“Kind of.”
“But then you and Zach—why ‘kind of’?”
“Because I didn’t tell, you know. I didn’t tell . . .”
“Who, Zach?”
“I don’t want any of the guys to know. I was hoping they didn’t know, so they wouldn’t think I’m—But I am. I’m—” She made a noise that was worse than any real word could have been, a collection of a’s, c’s, g’s, and h’s that didn’t belong together. I recognized what it was without effort or thought: it meant disgusting and ruined, and I got it so clearly I might as well have made the sound myself. It was how I felt about my left eye, but I would never have felt or thought or used it about Logan—or anyone other than myself.
She was chewing her hair. “I don’t know. Last summer, Brian and I were—”
I tried to think. Last summer. When I was finishing at Briarly. When she was begging me to come back to Lake Main. When Claire died. Who was Brian? She had had sex with someone last summer? When? Was that what David Sarabande meant when he’d said “like mother, like daughter,” and why Zach flipped out? And if so, did everyone else on the planet know more about Logan than I did? I stopped walking and tucked my head down for a moment, rocked, dug my elbow into my side to stop the weird feeling that was threatening to topple me.
“Emma? Are you okay? Why do you keep doing that?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want . . . It was an accident; it didn’t count.”
I couldn’t help myself. “So you didn’t tell anyone?”
She didn’t say anything. Everyone knew. Except me. She hadn’t told me because I would have been a babyish, jealous PBK about it. I was inexperienced and pathetic; how could Logan confide her tortured, sexy secrets in someone like that?
A tiny switch in me flipped. “Run,” I said to Spark, and I took off, with my white cane bouncing in front of me and Spark by my side, also running. The white cold air hit my lungs like smoke, and froze me from the inside out. But I kept running. I didn’t need to hear the rest of whatever Logan was about to tell me. Once, we had never lied to each other, and now? What did any of it, even our whole history, even mean? The pavement rose up and pounded the bottoms of my boots. Spark galloped, pulling the leash in my right hand taut while my graphite finger scratched furiously in front of me, as if it would save me from something in my way. Maybe it wouldn’t have. But there wasn’t anything.
I made it to my house alive, gasping the freezing air, and feeling, in spite of my tremendous rush of fear and sorrow and the real danger that running put me in, proud. My mom was flying down the front steps as I came up the walkway.
“Emma! Jesus!”
“Hi, Mom.”
“Logan just called, she said I had to come and find you, that you were running by yourself, that you, I was just—”
“I’m fine, Mom. I just felt like running.” I had only been three blocks away, and the fury started to rise up my body. Did she think I couldn’t survive a three-block run alone? Because I could. I just had.
“By yourself? Logan was so worried,” my mom said.
“You mean you were worried,” I said meanly. “But I’m fine. As you can see.”
The phone started ringing and my mom went back inside, hurt. I headed straight into my bedroom and slammed the door. The Mayburg place? Meetings about Claire? How stupid had I been to think that I could do anything, have any effect on anyone? I pulled back the green curtain and climbed into my tent bed, hid. I would never go out again, I decided. Two seconds later Logan knocked, but I stayed in bed, half hoping she would go away and half hoping she would come into my room and never leave and say something that could undo the whole thing, make it all right. Except, what would that be? She came in, pulled the cold lime curtain open, and sat with me. I thought, for some reason, of the moon. Its broken surface and green curtain color. Focus in, I told myself, and please don’t cry.
“Emma, I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you about Brian. I know it broke the rule, and it was totally wrong of me, but please, I’ll tell you now. It was just because I was embarrassed, or . . .”
I didn’t tell her that I had lied about Mr. Hawes’s pen, about actually thinking her mom was a terrible mom, about Seb or the way his face felt. I didn’t say I wished for last year again, to be back at Briarly.
Had we both changed so much that we couldn’t know each other for real anymore? And either way, why shouldn’t she get to be the love of Zach Haze’s life, someone I couldn’t know, let alone be?
“Are you in love?” I asked, hoping this was a deeper question than the one burning at the surface, which was whether they had had sex last night while I sat in a pool of my own chills at home, too scared to sleep over at Deirdre’s, a blind crybaby? When had they started? Just now? Last night? At the concert? Last summer? Right after Brian?
She paused, then asked, “Me and Zach?” in a quiet way that reminded me more of my voice than hers.
“Yeah,” I said, too loud. “Are you in love with Zach Haze?”
“What do you mean by in love?” she asked.
I did the math fast. “That’s fine, that’s okay,” I said. “I don’t like him anymore anyway. My thing was just . . . whatever.”
“Really?” Logan asked, and the relief in her voice almost made me take it back.
“Yeah,” I said. “I like someone else.”
“Seriously?” she asked, fake happy.
“Yeah. I have for a long time.”
We both sat there. She didn’t ask me who, and not even because we both knew it was a lie; just because she didn’t get to ask for my secrets anymore.
And that’s how the L&E rules shattered into a web of windshield glass. Because even if we hadn’t both been lying to each other unstoppably, our other big rule was we had to tell each other what we were thinking and feeling. Which I could obviously no longer do—ever again.
-10-
For the two middle weeks of December, it snowed all over Sauberg, just like last year. And just like last year, I couldn’t see the flakes as they twirled and blew around, as they landed on the frozen surface of the lake, Lake Main, our yard, the Sauberg cemetery, everyone’s eyelashes—or, in my case, sunglasses. I’ve been wearing plastic ones because my metal pairs are too cold now.
I listened to everything everywhere go silent; the listening gave me images of the places I couldn’t see. I thought and tasted white. Hanukkah happened, and I performed the motions, which my parents and Dr. Sassoman giddily called progress. Progress was me, at sundown, smelling candles without blacking out, opening presents: audiobooks, a deck of braille playing cards, a new collar for Spark, a beaded necklace Naomi and Jenna made me, fur boots from Leah. Progress was me handing my sisters presents my mom had bought and put my name on.
Days, I went to school in a numb white daze, one that felt like snow. Nights, I lay awake listening to Naomi’s sleepy breathing, thinking how a steady diet of tragedy teaches you to rank what matters. I told myself that how I felt about Logan mattered more than how I felt about Zach Haze, and that fifty years from now, unless we’re dead, Logan and I will still be friends, and neither of us will be dating Zach Haze. So who cares which one of us gets to date him now? Because even though I’m young and most people think that being young means you have no perspective and are stupid about what things will matter in the long run, I’m aware that Logan and Zach being in love isn’t the end of the world. Because I’ve seen the end of the world twice—when I stopped seeing and when Claire stopped being alive. So I can fake that it’s okay even though it’s not. And I can try to convince myself that my experiences—even the accident and Claire, and Zach loving Logan—will eventually add up, the way dots in their proper cells do, into a structure I can understand. Maybe even something “worth it.”
I was in my room, working on my clay memoir, when my mom confronted me. The sculpture was now a clay dog and a disposable chopstick that I’m turning into a white cane with surgical tape and a small marble. I was sitting at my desk, surrounded by my treasures: a rock I had found once in the lake and spun in our rock polisher until it felt like a jewel; some plastic, hollow rubber grapes that Leah had popped off the string they had hanging over the produce in the supermarket and that she had then given to me. They feel green and purple, give me colors. And Mr. Hawes’s pen, my journals, my L&E notebook, some notes Logan had written me over the years, even the Zach valentine. Two pictures: one of me holding Benj when he was first born, and one of me and Leah and Sarah in a play garden that was outside our apartment in the city. I can’t see them, can’t tell which is which, but I also can’t give them up.
“Em?” my mom said, and it sounded like maybe she’d already said my name several times. I turned toward her.
“Yeah, Mom?” I felt a tumbling in my chest. Maybe she knew something. About the Mayburg place? Or Logan? I wondered how she’d feel about my having set up two meetings at the Mayburg place, one of them in the middle of the night. Probably hysterical. The thought gave me a surge of defensive pride, like the running had.
But instead she asked, “Have you been skipping Ms. Spencer’s class?”
That was it? “Maybe a couple times,” I said. I’d been skipping for a week straight, since we got back and Ms. Spencer assigned us The Inferno, which was clearly as terrible an idea as the Ouija board. It’s typical that no one thought to revamp our educations toward maybe preventing us from dying of fear. I mean, a terrifying journey through hell? During our “memoir” coursework? And when we were already unable to sleep and living in cold-dread fear of death and ghosts and Claire and our town and ourselves and each other?
“Ms. Mabel called me. She’s worried. Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” she asked.
“Nothing’s going on,” I said.
This was so obviously untrue that my mom and I both sat there for a moment, wondering what to do about the lie.
She sighed. “Em?” she said. “If you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to, but please go back to class tomorrow. Please. Spare me a meeting with Principal Cates and Ms. Spencer.”
“Ack, blah, effff,” Baby Lily said, as if she’d been listening the entire time and only now felt that it was appropriate to contribute to the conversation. I reached my arms out gratefully and took her. She felt twice as heavy to me as she had two days ago. My misery lifted a bit.
“Hi, big girl!” I said to Lily. “How’d you get so big? How did you, big girl?”
“Blarp bun doot!” Lily said to me, grabbing at my sunglasses and trying to tear them off so she could shove them in her mouth. I gave her my hand instead, and she put my fingers straight into her slobbery beak and chomped down.
“When will she talk?” I asked my mom.
&n
bsp; “She is talking,” my mom said.
“Right, I get that, but I mean, when do the words become actual words?”
“Benj didn’t talk until he was two,” she said, “but you had words at ten months.”
“So only three months left for you before ark and ack and blurp become English, you big baby,” I told Lily hopefully, and she laughed her fat belly laugh.
“Do you think Baby Lily is like me?” I asked my mom.
“I think she’s the most like you of all my girls,” my mom said. “But also herself.”
“We’re reading The Inferno in Ms. Spencer’s class,” I said.
“I know, honey. I got you the audio—oh.” She thought for a moment. “Is that why you’re not feeling up to going?”
“Ms. Spencer keeps asking what we think of it,” I said.
“What do you think of it, Em?”
Baby Lily was making a pfzzing noise with her drooly lips and stuffing my hand into her mouth. I leaned in for a big baby kiss and then wiped my mouth on the back of my other hand.
I decided to tell my mom the truth, which was that I had listened to the Inferno CD and the words “my heart’s lake” on the first page of the first canto had electrocuted me with terror. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to forget the way those words sounded or felt, and I couldn’t undo them, like the livid of my scar. I didn’t want to talk about any of that in class.
After I said I hated “my heart’s lake,” I added, “I think we’re all shadows. And that we’re vanishing bit by bit, especially me.” I handed Baby Lily back to her. This was the most I’d said to her about my secret inside life since the accident, and the worst and the weirdest. My mom knows I’m weird, and she’s weird, too, and there are good and bad weirds, as she’s always told me. My parents don’t love normalcy, like everyone else in Sauberg, who are all, “My kids are so average, it’s fabulous!” Still, I try not to say things that freak my mom out, now that she’s a fragile person who slashed her own paintings and needs my dad to take care of her. But she’s always asking me everything, and for some reason, lately I feel less like sparing her. Maybe she’s getting better and can take it more. I don’t know.
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