Tomás looked over and saw Emilia eating the flowers. Her lips turned purple. Then blue. And Tomás panicked as he realized she was choking—she couldn’t breathe.
But he didn’t do anything. He just watched, even though something inside him screamed, Help her, help her!
He just watched, until she was buried and only a mound of flowers. When he finally felt he could move, he scrambled to her, reached to dig her out. But she was no longer there.
The Morning After Christmas
The morning after Christmas, when Ma and Tomás were both at work, Emilia sat in the classroom with her father’s journal. She read the poem she’d read so many times after he left.
Al Frio
Me desperté con frio,
preocupado que la muerte había llegado por mi
y me chupo la vida,
lambió mis huesos,
devoró mis intestinos,
dejando nada.
Esto es lo que puede hacer el frio.
Y pensé,
al frio me iria,
al frio me iria,
si nunca quisiera sentir otra vez.
She had translated it into English using a Spanish-English dictionary she’d found in her father’s office, so she could understand it a bit better.
To the Cold
I woke up cold,
worried death had come for me
and sucked my life,
licked my bones,
devoured my intestines,
leaving nothing.
This is what the cold can do.
And I thought,
to the cold I would go,
to the cold I would go,
if I never wanted to feel again.
When she was younger, Emilia thought Alaska was the coldest place in the world. It was always Alaska she thought of when she pictured her father going to the cold. And she was fascinated by the books in the library about Alaska, with pictures of so much snow and, sometimes, a person among all that white bundled in so many layers. She tried to look past the goggles, the fur-lined hats and bulky coats, wondering if that was him, her father, in those pictures. So close she could touch him.
Emilia sighed. It had never been him.
She got up and wrote the poem on one of the walls. She wasn’t too much of an artist, but it didn’t matter. Not here. Everything could look beautiful in this room somehow. So she drew a man on the wall, his back to the viewer, and snowcapped mountains in the distance. In the mountains, she wrote her father’s words.
Around the room, Emilia used chalk, paint, and markers to add more images, anything that came to mind. Clouds and birds. Cherry trees full of blossoms. She wrote more lines of poetry, from her father’s journal and his poetry books. She loved how full the walls were getting, but they still seemed to be missing something. She looked at the glittery paint.
I’ll paint them, and make them sparkle somehow!
Emilia didn’t realize how much she loved this room, what she was turning it into, until she wasn’t able to get away from her house yesterday. Now she sat among all the cut-up books and paper, feeling better and energized.
She rushed to her backpack and took out some pictures of her family and Ian. She’d gone through old school pictures and found one of her third-grade class. She cut herself and Ian out and laughed at how little they were. She would figure out the perfect thing to do with this.
Then she took out the Christmas gift her father had given her. She had unwrapped it alone last night and now she stared at the silver ribbon she’d put back on so carefully. She slipped it off the plain white gift box and opened the lid. Inside was a turquoise music box, adorned with delicate gold leaves around a border framing a picture of a tree. In gold lettering, it read, LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL. Emilia opened the box, and a sweet but melancholy tune played.
Her eyes filled with tears.
Last night, before Tomás had caught her watching the snow falling from the back door, Emilia had snuck downstairs to the living room to open this gift. And she’d sat by herself, next to the Christmas tree, and cried quietly as it filled her with bittersweetness. How much time had her father spent looking for this? Had he picked it up thoughtlessly because it was pretty, or gone on the recommendation of a salesperson? Or maybe—what she liked to think—he saw it and immediately knew she would love it.
Emilia stared at herself in the small oval mirror inside the music box. Was it possible her father still knew her, somehow, even after all this time? Even if she felt more and more like she didn’t know herself?
Emilia took a deep breath and slowly closed the lid.
* * *
*
When she left the school a little while later, her head was filled with that music and that room. But the farther she walked, the more reality set in and thoughts of Carl Smith slipped into her mind. By the time she got home, it was all she could think about. Her mind flashed with the image of a body wasting away in its deathbed, too decrepit to be hauled off to prison. But what Emilia wanted was to see his face, to see that he wasn’t Jeremy Lance.
Emilia sat on her bed, alone in her house, and looked at her crows pecking at the peanuts on her window ledge. She closed her eyes, trying to think of that classroom, but instead her mind clouded with the image of a gray-and-white sky, of tree branches. She felt the cold on her skin. Emilia felt herself drifting back to the past, swayed with the sense of falling.
Look at his face.
But her eyes snapped open and her body jerked as she came reeling back to reality. It was the same at night when she tried to fall asleep. She didn’t want to go back to that day and relive it. She didn’t want to fall. But she wanted to see his face.
Not now, she told herself. Just not now.
Emilia took a breath and looked around her bedroom; she was here, not the cold playground. She was sixteen, not eight. And she had to decide what she’d wear tonight on her date with Ian and Anthony and Jane.
She went to her closet, and a sense of déjà vu overcame her. She brought out a shirt and held it against her body, studied herself in the mirror.
Emilia looked at herself, that girl in the mirror who all this was happening to. That girl who had been attacked years ago. She looked tired.
Who are you? she wondered. I don’t know you.
The girl she saw looked sad, desperate. Emilia didn’t like the look in her eyes.
I don’t want to be you, Emilia told her. But her image stayed the same.
Emilia reached into the top drawer of her dresser.
I can be someone new. Someone different. Not you.
Emilia retrieved a pair of dull scissors she kept in the junk drawer of her desk. She returned to the mirror, held them to a long strand of her hair, and began cutting. She watched that girl she’d been staring at fall away with each grating, thick snip until someone new appeared. Emilia smiled at who she saw.
There, Emilia thought as she finished. There I am.
She studied herself, but the longer she stared, the more she noticed the girl, her old self, reemerging. Only now she looked sadder. With hair that looked torn, and shredded.
Emilia stared in horror.
It had felt like time was standing still, and now it was rushing toward her, thrusting her back into the present and reality. What had she done? Ma would flip out.
Everyone will think—no, they will know—something is wrong with you!
Emilia threw the scissors in the drawer, like they were burning her skin.
What did you do? What did you do?
Fix it! Fix it! an urgent voice inside her cried. But she didn’t have money to go get it fixed. She ran to Tomás’s room, to the top drawer, where she knew he kept the money from each paycheck he cashed.
Go, before Ma gets home. Emilia grabbed her hat. Hurry, Emilia. Hurry.
* * *
>
*
Emilia ran out of her house and down to the local hairdresser. The chain beauty salon was somewhere Emilia had never gone since Ma had friends who were professional hairstylists and cut her and Emilia’s hair for cheap. They were far more experienced than the stylists at the salon.
All those stylists are recent beauty school graduates, Emilia. And your hair is too beautiful to let them get their hands on it.
Ma’s words echoed in Emilia’s ears as she opened the door and the smell of styling products and burnt hair hit her.
A man stood next to the receptionist, laughing at something she’d said. They both looked up when Emilia came inside.
“Hello,” said the girl. “What can we do for you?”
Emilia stood there for a moment, both of them staring at her, before she finally got the words out. “A haircut.”
“That would be with me,” the man said. He gestured for Emilia to follow him to his station, where she sat down and he pumped up the chair. “Let’s see what we have here,” he said as he went to take off her hat.
Emilia reached up, held on tight to the hat. The hairstylist stared at her in the mirror. Emilia, to her surprise and horror, began to cry.
“Oh dear,” he said, his tone softening. “It’s okay.”
Emilia shook her head. It wasn’t okay. It was terrible.
“I’ll fix it, I promise,” he said. “Let’s take a look, okay?”
Emilia took a deep breath, watched in the mirror as he gently, slowly took off her hat.
He studied her hair, ran his fingers through it. “Oh, it’s not that bad,” he said. “I see this a lot. You’re not the only one who’s tried to cut her own hair,” he told her image in the mirror. “Let me get some books, some pictures of what we can do, okay?”
Emilia nodded and watched him walk away. She hoped he wasn’t telling the receptionist, rolling his eyes at Emilia’s stupidity. She shifted in her seat and he returned in a few moments with several hairstyle books. Emilia studied his face to see if he’d been laughing, but his kind look erased her suspicions.
“We could do this,” he said, pointing to a cute, short cut. “It really would look amazing with your bone structure.”
Bone structure.
Emilia looked at her face, imagined all the tiny bones underneath her skin. She nodded. She didn’t care what he did, as long as she didn’t look the way she did now. So tragic.
“It’s a little short, but I think it would look really cool.” He smiled and she took a deep breath.
“Yes,” she said finally.
He gave a quick nod, draped a black cape around her shoulders, and got to work. She closed her eyes, each snip of the scissors echoing in her ears as she thought of herself in her room. What had she been thinking? Her hair was still on the floor.
“You know what else might be fun?” the stylist said. “A few streaks of color. Would you like that? I’m bored as hell. We were swamped with everyone who needed their hair done before the holidays, but now not so much. Besides, looks like you could use a little cheering up.” He smiled and winked. “No charge.”
Her chest swelled with emotion. She nodded.
“What color? I could do something really punkish. Something that says, look at me!”
Emilia didn’t want anything that said look at me, but she did want something. She thought for a moment. “Blue?”
He continued to cut. “Blue . . . yeah, that would work. It won’t be super obvious with your dark hair, but when light catches those strands, at just the right angle, it’ll look perfect.”
His excitement was contagious as he worked. He started applying the bleaching agent and Emilia concentrated on how he separated portions of her short hair and foiled them. When he put her under the hot dryer, she closed her eyes and relaxed under the warmth of it.
The hot air blew around her, and with the soothing hum of it in her ears, Emilia felt she could never be cold here. But too soon, the hairstylist was back to wash out the bleach and add the blue hair color. Emilia smiled when that was finished and she went back under the dryer.
Twenty minutes later, back at his station, he styled. Emilia kept her eyes closed for as long as she could while he applied various products, tugging and twisting pieces so they lay perfectly imperfect.
When he was finally done and told her to open her eyes, she did. And how changed she looked. Her eyes seemed larger, wider. Her face more delicate. But fiercer somehow, too. Emilia touched the soft, sleek, glossy strands and stared at herself. She turned her head and saw the shimmering iridescent blue as it caught the light. Her hair looked like feathers.
“What do you think?” the stylist said, meeting her gaze in the mirror.
She loved it. She loved him, this stranger who had fixed it.
“It’s perfect!” she told him.
* * *
*
“Emilia?” Her mother’s voice reached out to meet her even before Emilia stepped inside the house. Then she saw her daughter.
Ma covered her mouth as if quieting a scream that might come out at any moment, and Tomás, who sat just behind where Ma stood, stared at Emilia also. They both looked frozen, eyes wide with strange looks on their faces.
“What have you done?” Ma whispered from behind her hand.
Emilia immediately reached up for the short strands. She’d been so happy about it moments ago, had felt so fierce and amazing and giddy the whole walk home. But now she suddenly felt self-conscious under their gazes, and she pulled at the short strands as if it would make her hair grow. “I . . . I cut it,” she said.
“I can see that,” her mother said, but her green eyes shone as they filled with tears.
“It’s no big deal. I wanted to do something different for my date tonight with Ian and his cousin,” Emilia said, tugging at the short strands. She looked at her brother for some kind of support.
Tell her it’s no big deal. It’s not. Right?
But Tomás just sat there, looking almost as shocked as her mother.
“It’s just a haircut,” Emilia mumbled into the silence. “God, Ma. You’re acting like I just killed someone.”
Her mother stood there. “How can you say that? Don’t say that.” She continued looking at Emilia as if a ghost had walked into the house. Then she cleared her throat. “Why did you cut it?”
Emilia shrugged. She’d felt perfect when she left the hair salon. Why did Ma have to ruin it with this question? What kind of question was it? Why does anyone do anything? It was impulse. It was wanting to see someone else when she looked at herself. It was wanting to be someone else and trying to rid herself of something or someone she didn’t want to be.
And it’s because you fucked up your hair, a small voice reminded her. But Emilia silenced that voice and decided it didn’t matter. Everything was fine now.
“I told you.” She looked from Ma to Tomás.
Her mother shook her head. “No,” she said. “That’s not it. Tell me the truth, Emilia. Why?”
Emilia could hear the no-nonsense therapist tone Ma used after the attack when she was trying to get Emilia to talk again; it had crept back into her mother’s voice.
“I told you. I wanted to try something new for tonight.”
Tomás cleared his throat. “I think it looks good,” he said finally. “I’ve seen a lot of girls with this kind of cut.”
A lot of girls. Yes! She was just like a lot of girls.
No different, Ma.
Her mother looked at both of them, disbelieving. Tears slid down her face and Emilia knew what she must be thinking.
Can’t you just be okay, Emilia? Can’t you just be okay?
The words echoed in Emilia’s head from the past, when her mother had had to pick her up from school once she finally went back. She hadn’t been able to speak the words to make her mother un
derstand then, either, what it was like to walk those halls, to go back to school after being home for years, surrounded by kids who’d made up their own truths about Emilia. They all thought they knew everything about her. She felt naked when she walked those halls, exposed for all to see. Sometimes, she even imagined that she had huge, gaping wounds, revealing her insides, her thumping heart, her pulsing veins. They looked at her as if that’s what they saw. And when she heard someone laughing, she couldn’t help but think they were laughing at her.
There’s the freak who Jeremy Lance attacked. Do you think he raped her? Do you think he even can? Oh my gosh, I’d die . . .
And then she would remember the playground. The teachers would send Emilia to the nurse’s office then, because suddenly, she would get lost in those memories, in the woods of the playground, and she couldn’t find her way back.
Have you seen her pull the zombie act in class? She completely zones out. I’ve taken her to the nurse’s office. She doesn’t say a thing, just starts shivering like a weirdo.
Sometimes, even the nurse’s voice couldn’t reach her. Emilia would feel that woman gently pull her onto the paper-covered cot, the crinkling sound hardly making sense as she saw a sky full of birds.
We’ll call your mother, okay? she’d hear from somewhere far away. Emilia would try to focus on the woman’s face, one moment seeing the kindness there, the next minute seeing the outline of a beak, a glossy round head, small dark eyes.
We’ll call your mother.
One by one, she’d watch more birds fly over her. Some of them coming down to perch next to her, their wings fluttering, shuffling in her ears, as they landed and took off again.
The nurse would lay a blanket on her because of the way she shivered. And Emilia would wonder at how it came floating down from the sky. How could she exist in two places at once? How could she be in the nurse’s office and out in the woods by the playground at the same time? Maybe she was a time traveler, a ghost, who floated back and forth between worlds.
The Fall of Innocence Page 17