PHILOMEL BOOKS
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Copyright © 2018 by Jenny Torres Sanchez.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Torres Sanchez, Jenny, author.
Title: The fall of innocence / Jenny Torres Sanchez.
Description: New York, NY : Philomel Books, [2018].
Summary: Sixteen-year-old Emilia DeJesus struggles to overcome the aftermath of assault when new information about what happened to her eight years before awakens her memories.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017040890 | ISBN 9781524737757 (hardback) | ISBN 9781524737764 (e-book)
Subjects: | CYAC: Child abuse—Fiction. | Memory—Fiction. | Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. | Family life—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.T6457245 Fal 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040890
Edited by Liza Kaplan.
Image of crows © 2018 by Shutterstock/Novikov Alex.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Jacket photo © 2018 by Arcangel/Lisa Howarth, Jacket design by Kristin Boyle
Version_1
For Nando
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE: Early December 1994Strange Puffs of White
Emilia Woke to an Empty House
Emilia Washed
Earlier That Day
He’s Hiding
The Next Morning
Emilia Was Staring at Him
Emilia Turned into a Bird
After Emilia Left
PART TWO: Mid-December 1994It Was Early Morning
In the Chilling Cold
The Old Elementary School
Emilia Searched
The Next Night
What If
Emilia Couldn’t Wait
The House Was Dark
PART THREE: Late December 1994Several Miles from Emilia’s House
The Day After Telling Emilia
The House Felt Heavy
Emilia Jumped
Who Is It
Emilia Closed the Door
Emilia Was Crying
Tomás Was Jolted Awake
The Morning After Christmas
I Can’t Get over It
You’re Home
Emilia Came Home
Emilia Tried Not to Look
The First Day Back
Emilia Flew
PART FOUR: Early January 1995Some Days
Detective Manzetti
Emilia Walked Home
Ian Didn’t See Emilia
That Night, Ma Came into Her Room
Ma’s Words from Last Night
Emilia Replayed Everything
PART FIVE: Mid-January 1995I Need a Favor
The Next Morning
The First Thing She Saw
A Guy in a Black Leather Jacket
Emilia Was Cold
Sam DeJesus Sat in the Hotel Lobby
The House Was Cold
The Crows Watched Emilia
Detective Manzetti Promised
What Did I Miss?
When They Saw
Red and Blue Lights
PART SIX: Spring 1995The Cold Months
Sam DeJesus Was Flying
Nina Never Felt
Tomás Held On
Author’s Note
Resources
Acknowledgments
I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes—
I wonder if It weighs like Mine—
Or has an Easier size.
I wonder if They bore it long—
Or did it just begin—
I could not tell the Date of Mine—
It feels so old a pain—
I wonder if it hurts to live—
And if They have to try—
And whether—could They choose between—
It would not be—to die—
—Emily Dickinson
PART ONE
Early December 1994
Strange Puffs of White
Strange puffs of white trailed like smoke in the curiously blue sky. Emilia stared at them from the passenger-side window of her boyfriend’s car. They made her think of a rocket shooting into outer space. She reached for the radio knob to turn down the music.
“Hey, you remember when the shuttle exploded?” she asked Ian as they drove to school. She unwrapped a piece of Bazooka Joe bubble gum and offered him the ridged pink square. When he opened his mouth, she popped it in and watched him chew, resisting the urge to lean over and kiss his jaw.
“The Challenger?” His words were garbled as he struggled with the hard piece of gum. “Jesus, that was forever ago.”
They came to a stop sign and he looked at her as she tucked her long black hair behind her ears, a habit. She looked over at him, her eyes dark and serious. Then he turned onto the main road and the high-pitched screech of metal against metal that his car made filled the air.
“Remember how Mrs. McNary made us write letters to the families of the astronauts?” he said.
Emilia unwrapped another piece of gum for herself, studying the package and focusing on Bazooka Joe’s eye patch. She’d seen the image a thousand times, but it was the first time she’d really noticed or thought about it. “Nope, wasn’t in school for that,” she said.
“That’s right.” He shifted in his seat. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” she told him. She put the piece of gum in her mouth and chewed until it was soft and flexible, and then she started blowing a huge bubble slowly, so as to not break it. Her eyes widened as it got bigger, and she smacked Ian on the shoulder. He laughed and then a small tear in the stretched-out gum caused it to deflate.
“That was good,” Ian said.
Emilia smiled, chewed some more while she looked at the pack of gum. A kid with an eye patch as a mascot. So weird. “What do you think happened to Bazooka Joe’s eye?” She held up the packaging so he could see.
“Who knows,” Ian said.
“A nasty encounter with a bazooka, perhaps?” Emilia squinted one eye. He glanced over again and laughed. She loved it when she made him laugh.
Just when she’d forgotten about the space shuttle, Ian said, “Man . . . those astronauts, though. Can you ima
gine being in that shuttle? Knowing you’re going to . . . explode?”
“No . . . ,” she said, her voice trailing off as she looked out the window. The puffs were faint and disappearing, but her mind filled with an imaginary shuttle. With panicked astronauts. With calls for help.
“What made you think of that, anyway?” Ian asked.
When Emilia was eight, she’d watched the shuttle explode over and over again on the television from her mother’s bed. The image was seared into her memory because she’d watched it happen at least a hundred times. Smoking bits and pieces of shuttle going in different directions, white puffs trailing behind each of them. These puffs made her feel like she was back on her mother’s bed again, like she’d stepped back in time. She didn’t want to go back to that time in her life. Not now. Or ever. Better to stay in the present.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Emilia threw the pack of gum into the glove compartment. “Same thing that made me wonder about one-eyed Joe, I guess.” She smiled, trying to forget it all.
They neared the street that led to their old elementary school, the one they passed every day and Emilia was always curious to go down. It was next to Hofstra University, and Emilia remembered walking over to the campus for symphony and theater field trips. Today, before she could stop herself, Emilia yelled, “Hey, turn here for a minute.”
She thought this almost every time they passed the school, but she’d never said the words aloud. Today, those puffs and Ma’s bed and that day and this school and even the chill in the air were suddenly so present in her mind that the words just slipped out. She felt like she had when she was little and turned at that corner every morning.
Like no time has passed, she thought.
“Here? Why?”
“Just . . . come on.”
Ian flicked on the turn signal and the screeching sliced the air again. He shook his head, cursing and complaining about “this piece-of-shit car” as the school came into full view. He stopped at the corner and they stared at it.
She didn’t tell Ian she hadn’t been there in years. It felt surreal to be there now.
“Looks kind of small, doesn’t it?” she said. Her own voice sounded foreign to her. “I used to think it was so big.”
“Yeah, me too. It’s kind of weird seeing it like this. So empty.”
Emilia nodded and glanced at a boarded-up window. The school had closed last fall when the district decided there weren’t enough students in town to keep it running, and since it was the oldest, it was the first to go. When Emilia heard about the closing, she’d been happy no more kids would come to this school.
Let’s go inside.
The words crossed her mind quickly, out of nowhere. For a moment she almost said them out loud. She imagined herself and Ian in those empty hallways, sneaking into abandoned classrooms. They could skip school and spend the whole day together like they had last week when they’d kept driving and ended up in the nearly empty parking lot of a museum.
Emilia’s stomach fluttered at the memory of kissing Ian in the car so much that day her lips had felt raw long afterward. Of Ian saying if they kept doing this he was going to explode. So they’d gone inside and walked through the galleries. She’d never been to that museum before, and Emilia remembered how Ian kept coming up behind her, kissing her neck, every time she wandered to something that caught her eye. She made fun of him each time because he was “going to explode” and turned her attention back to the pictures, statues, and paintings, all of them arranged so beautifully.
She looked at the school now and her stomach fluttered again. Somehow it looked strangely alive, even though it was shut down and abandoned. Those windows looked like eyes. The double front doors were a red gaping mouth, now closed and locked and silent. It looked like . . . it was waiting for something.
Or someone.
Emilia didn’t want to go inside. She didn’t want to walk those hallways again, even with Ian by her side.
“What do you think they’ll do with it?” Emilia asked. There was still a flag on the flagpole.
But Ian had turned his attention to the house nestled at the dead end next to the school, and then he quickly said, “We should get going. We’re gonna be late.”
Emilia looked past him toward the group home for mentally and developmentally delayed kids. It had been there for as long as she could remember. There were a few kids and adults on the lawn, speckled by the sunlight shining through the leaves and branches of the trees that towered over the home.
They’re waiting for the bus, Emilia thought. It will come and pick them up and carry them to another school, on the other side of town, away from this one. Just like it always has.
Emilia remembered how the bus seemed to arrive at the same time she did when she was younger, back when she walked to school with her older brother. And she would see kids walk, run, or stumble to catch it.
Flashes of those kids from the past came back to her, and she vividly remembered the one who drooled. His spit clung from the edge of his chin to his shirt, and swung in the breeze like the silk of a spiderweb as he half ran, half walked.
Some wouldn’t look up, just walked with their heads down.
Like Jeremy Lance.
Jeremy Lance walked like that, his shoulders hunched, the tallest and seemingly the oldest of all the kids. A teenager, but to Emilia he looked like some kind of monster.
Emilia shuddered, remembering that morning. She’d stopped to pick up a dirty brown bracelet she found just lying there on the ground outside the school. As her brother hurried ahead with some friends, Emilia studied the entwined leather for a moment. When she looked up, a face suddenly appeared in one of the bus’s windows.
He started knocking on it and smiled and mouthed something to her. But his smile scared Emilia. She dropped the bracelet and wouldn’t wave or smile back. She’d looked away, but out of the corner of her eye, she could see him still knocking on the window. And she could hear the thump of his fist as he knocked harder, trying to get her attention.
She shivered with thoughts of the past.
“Hey,” Ian said. “You okay?”
She looked at him, here, now, and smiled. “Yeah, let’s go,” she told him. “You’re right. We’re gonna be late.”
Ian made a U-turn, shook his head at each piercing screech his car made, and Emilia couldn’t help but glance at the house again as it came into clear view on her side.
She was ashamed to admit even now that she was afraid of the kids on the lawn, just as she’d been afraid of the kids back then. Just as she’d been terrified of Jeremy Lance. Even before he attacked her on the school playground one day.
It’s over now, in the past. Leave it all in the past.
Emilia leaned back, closed her eyes, and tried to clear her head of the memories.
Ian drove onto the main road.
“You sure you’re okay?” he asked once they were away from the school. His voice revealed concern and love for her, but somewhere in there, Emilia thought maybe pity, too. She didn’t want to be pitied. And especially not by Ian.
“Yeah, why?” But before he could answer, she went on. “Hey, you know what we should do?” She rushed, trying to get the words out so they would stop any conversation about the school, or the group home, or if she really was okay. “We should go to the museum again!” She gave him a sly look and he laughed nervously. She loved this, the effect she had on him. She loved him. “It’ll be fun. It will be the best day, I promise.” She touched his neck gently, outlining the faint traces of a small fading hickey she’d put there last week. She thought of the one on her own neck, of how she liked to see it in the mirror and think of Ian, kissing her.
But he shook his head and instantly she felt foolish. Maybe the museum was a stupid suggestion.
“Or we could get ice cream at that place we went to over the summer. Remember? I loved
that place. Do you think it closed already?” Of course it had. She knew it must have. Summer had ended and even though she’d give anything to be riding home with Ian on the last day of school, the windows down, the warmth and promise of sweltering summer days ahead, it was so far away.
Emilia was surprised at the fresh pang of sadness that hit her as she thought of another summer over. And she hated the crispness in the air that reminded her of the bone-chilling cold soon to follow, that was already finding its way to her.
“I wish I could. But I have these two tests today and I can’t miss them.”
“Oh,” Emilia said. She sat back in her seat and put her feet against the glove compartment, sighing and resigning herself to a crappy day full of assignments and jarring bells and teachers complaining about students’ lack of enthusiasm.
“At least it’s Friday,” he said. “And hey, Anthony’s coming into town tonight.”
“Anthony! Oh, that’s great!” she said, immediately cheered up and excited. Emilia liked Ian’s cousin. The three of them had often hung out together before Anthony graduated from high school and joined the army. She knew he was stationed a few hours away, but it was difficult to get time off, so she hadn’t seen him since he’d left for boot camp a few months earlier.
“Didn’t I tell you? He’ll be here this afternoon, actually. And he mentioned all of us doing something tomorrow.”
“Of course! Aw, Anthony’s back. It’ll be just like before.”
“Well,” Ian said. “The only thing is . . .” He looked at Emilia. “He, uh, kind of mentioned bringing this girl he met right before he left.”
Emilia shrugged. “So? A double date. Sounds like fun.”
“Yeah, I was thinking we could all see that movie you and I were talking about, but . . . ,” he said, taking a deep breath and looking over at her. “The thing is . . .” A funny look crossed his face. “She’s . . . actually, sort of, a stripper . . .”
Emilia was taken off guard for a minute but quickly recovered. “Ahh, well, like I said, sounds like fun,” she told him. She blew another bubble and sucked it in, making several popping sounds.
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