by Kiley Reid
“So yeah, it’s been fun?” Emira said to Laney. “But this video being released has definitely put some things in perspective and . . . due to some creative differences, I will no longer be working here. But you can find me at the front desk at the Green Party Philadelphia office because . . . yeah. That, that’s where I’ll be.”
Alix’s first instinct was to laugh. She let her lips creep beautifully over her teeth and put her hand on the couch in the space between her and Emira. “No, Emira.” She grinned. “She’s talking about you being our nanny next year.”
“Mm-hmm. Yeah, I am too?” Emira lifted Briar and put her on the ground—an act with which both were so clearly familiar—and Alix froze in her seat. “Yeah, I’m not gonna do that,” Emira clarified. “I’m gonna be working full-time with the Green Party instead.”
Alix laughed again. She looked at Laney as if she were realizing in real time that an elaborate joke had been played, but Laney’s face was stretched in bewilderment as well. “I’m sorry,” Alix said, tucking her hair behind an ear. “What did you—”
“Well, the thing is . . .” Emira turned toward her. “Basically . . .” Her eyes came up to meet with Alix’s. And for a second, Emira appeared as if she’d just remembered a dream she had the night before. “I just think it would be best if we went our separate ways and . . . that those paths never like . . . came back together.”
It was as if Alix had floated out of her body and was watching herself from three feet above. The room suddenly reeked with the terror of a surprise party and the cameras seemed twice as large, sucking her into their dark round lenses. Emira had dropped the kind of punch line that evoked both petty embarrassment and screaming dread, and her inflection came as if she’d said, Sorry, this seat is taken. But the reference and the implication that yes, Emira and Kelley sat around laughing at new-money-trash Alex Murphy, that she was still a person that existed—it felt like the plot twist of a horror movie. Suddenly, the call was coming from inside the house. She was the one who had been dead the whole time. This was a dream within another dream. Out of the corner of her right twitching eye, Alix could see Tamra’s hand go up to her mouth. She covered half of her face, but Alix could hear her say, “Ohmygod.”
The cameras kept rolling.
Alix’s nervous system told her to stay as still as she could, to try to keep smiling. She knew she looked like a three-year-old who had just been tapped on the shoulder in a friendly game of freeze-tag, excited but awkwardly unsure of how long they’d have to stay frozen. She opened her mouth to say something, anything, but her tongue felt stupidly huge.
“Okay, yeah, so thanks!” Emira said to the floor. She stood up and scooted between Alix’s legs and the camera gear. Briar trotted after her and said, “Mira, way fo’ me!” As Emira exited the living room, she and Zara exchanged another look, but this one prompted Zara to slip her phone into the waistband of her pants. Just as Emira left from sight, Zara jumped into frame.
“Yeah, das right!” Zara said to the camera behind Laney. “Homegirl is out, okay?! She ain’t need this!” By this, Zara meant the white throw pillow Emira had been sitting against, which Zara flicked with a disinterested hand. “She wit’ the Green Party now, nigga! She got money!” Zara began to dip her head at different angles in the camera lens, shouting and clapping on every syllable of “This is what democracy looks like!” As Catherine began to clap with Zara, a privately panicked Laney said to the camera, “Alix Chamberlain’s book To Whom It May Concern will be out in May 2017. Back to you, Misty.” In the space above her crotch, Laney did a manic signal for cut.
Twenty-six
Emira said, “B, come here real quick,” but Briar was already on her heels. Zara’s voice began to echo through the first floor of the Chamberlain house as Emira took Briar’s hand, and for a moment she thought, What if I just took you and walked out the door? How far would we get? Shaunie’s apartment? Maybe Pittsburgh? Instead, Emira hoisted Briar onto the toilet in the guest bathroom and closed the door behind her. She squatted and placed her hands on Briar’s knees, but when she noticed her palms and pinkies were shaking, she placed them on the sides of the toilet.
“Hey. Look at me real quick.” Briar swung her legs aggressively on the toilet seat, and the top of her shoes almost smacked Emira’s chest. With one hand, Briar swiped at a shock of blond hair, which had fallen into her face. Emira felt her body begin to crack beneath the realization that the ponytails she gave Briar Chamberlain had always been tragically numbered. Briar looked up and pointed to Emira’s necklace. “I want dis,” she said. Emira thought, Oh fuck, this is really it.
“Hey,” Emira whispered. “You know how I said you can’t have favorites?”
Briar nodded. She agreed with this statement and waved a finger to say, “No no, that’s not nice.”
Outside, Zara could be heard shouting, “Whose streets?!” She clapped three times. “Our streets!” She clapped again.
“Okay, but guess what?” Emira smiled. “You’re my favorite. No one else. Just you.”
“Okay, Mira?” Briar’s eyebrows suddenly appeared as if she had something very important to say. “Maybe?” She pointed at Emira’s necklace again. “Maybe I keep dis for a little while.”
Emira realized that Briar probably didn’t know how to say good-bye because she’d never had to do it before. But whether she said good-bye or not, Briar was about to become a person who existed without Emira. She’d go to sleepovers with girls she met at school, and she’d have certain words that she’d always forget how to spell. She’d be a person who sometimes said things like, “Seriously?” or “That’s so funny,” and she’d ask a friend if this was her water or theirs. Briar would say good-bye in yearbook signatures and through heartbroken tears and through emails and over the phone. But she’d never say good-bye to Emira, which made it seem that Emira would never be completely free from her. For the rest of her life and for zero dollars an hour, Emira would always be Briar’s sitter.
Outside, there was a shuffling of feet. Zara began performing an accelerated rendition of “We Shall Overcome” and she ended every verse with Ayyeee. Emira heard Tamra say, “Girl, get down from there!” and Zara yelled back, “I’m not resisting!” Laney asked everyone to please calm down as Catherine began to cry. Mrs. Chamberlain’s voice said, “Where is Briar?”
Emira placed her head at the side of Briar’s. She kissed her cheek and took in Briar’s scent: baby soap, strawberries, and the tart sweetness of dried yogurt. She sat back on her heels. In what she hoped would be the saddest gesture of her twenties, Emira tickled the side of Briar’s neck and said, “I’ll see you later, okay?” Briar pursed her lips into a smile and dipped her chin into Emira’s fingers. She raised her shoulders up next to her ears as if she didn’t know the answer to a very darling and rhetorical question.
There were quick footsteps and then the bathroom door swung open. Zara was out of breath. She leaned over with her hands on her knees, and between dramatic exhales, she said, “K . . . they mad so . . .”
“Go get an Uber,” Emira instructed. She kissed the top of Briar’s little head, placed her on the ground, and told herself to get out of the house. When she turned to go, Zara’s presence had been replaced by Mrs. Chamberlain’s.
Mrs. Chamberlain’s neck was blemished in red splotches of freckled skin. Her jaw was set strangely forward and only her bottom teeth were showing. She looked at Emira as if Emira were hours late, and she were waiting for her to deliver an apology. “Tamra?” she called. The sound of Tamra’s socks could be heard on the tile as Catherine’s uneven crying came closer. Once she had sufficient backup, Mrs. Chamberlain locked eyes with Emira again. From somewhere deep in her diaphragm, she said, “Emira? Get away from her.”
Emira let an impressed expression slide over her face. This was really how Mrs. Chamberlain wanted to end it, by playing the matchless mom card that she always held so tightly to her c
hest. This was the most responsive reaction Mrs. Chamberlain had ever expressed concerning the whereabouts of her daughter, in what was, in Emira’s opinion, the safest place Briar could ever be. There’s literally one thing I’m good at, Emira thought, and that’s taking care of your daughter. But still, Emira laughed once and said, “Okay.”
Emira walked past her and Tamra swooped in on Briar as if Emira had just surrendered her last hostage. To her right, the front door was propped open by Zara and her shoe. Mrs. Chamberlain held her ground in the space in front of the guest bathroom, and from there she called Emira’s name with a bold and bitchy authority. “Excuse me, Emira?” With both her hands on the vestibule door frame, Emira looked to the hooks on the wall and said, “Where’s my backpack?” With her phone in her hands, Zara looked to the stairs behind Emira. She winced and said, “Uh-oh.”
“Emira!”
Emira turned around to find Mrs. Chamberlain’s hands in the air in front of her and her fingers splayed wide. Emira took a breath and walked past her to the stairs. She found herself gracelessly crouching down as if doing so would make her less likely to be seen, or as if she were walking in front of a large group of people watching a game on a television screen. Emira saw Tamra patting the back of Briar’s head on the couch as Mrs. Chamberlain took the stairs after her. “Emira, stop,” she said. Emira sped up. She heard Briar ask, “Where does Mira go now?”
She didn’t stop until she spotted her backpack on the floor of the upstairs bathroom. She snatched the strap and stood up, swinging it onto her right shoulder, but Mrs. Chamberlain took advantage of her delay by securing her feet in front of the bathroom door. With her hair around her face and her chest growing pinker by the second, Mrs. Chamberlain closed her eyes and said, “Are you kidding me?”
Emira closed her mouth as Mrs. Chamberlain went on. “Emira, this can’t be real,” she said. “Do you know what you just did? You just humiliated me and my entire business.”
“Ummm . . .” Emira couldn’t believe she was in another white space so soon, trying to keep her cool, and struggling to imply that she could honestly just go. Emira hoisted her backpack farther up on her shoulder. “I’m just grabbing my stuff,” she said.
“Ohmygod, Emira!” Mrs. Chamberlain’s hands were in front of her chest again, and she wrung them as if she were wringing a neck. “Do you think that looked good for you either? Did you honestly seek out the Green Party just to do this to me?”
Emira squinted in confusion. “Umm . . . no?”
“Oh, so I tell you that I’m working with the Clinton campaign and suddenly you want to quit and work for the Green Party?”
“No . . .”
“No?!”
“No,” Emira said louder. “I’ve worked for them longer than I’ve worked for you.”
In the most dramatic reaction Emira had ever seen in real life, Mrs. Chamberlain’s eyes bulged as she said, “What?”
Emira thought about carefully pointing out that the things Mrs. Chamberlain seemed to care about most were whom Emira was dating, or what her favorite cocktail was, or what she was up to on a Friday night. But what was the point of having one more incident of trying to prove a point in the proximity of a three-year-old child who Emira more than liked. So instead, Emira said, “I’m just gonna go.” She inhaled through gritted teeth as she inched past Mrs. Chamberlain and reached out to the stair banister.
“Emira, are you serious?!” Mrs. Chamberlain followed. Emira told herself not to trip as she gripped the railing and jogged down the steps. At the bottom, Laney stood by the front vestibule with one hand to the wall and one against her chest. When Emira reached the first floor, Mrs. Chamberlain yelled out, “Don’t you dare walk out that door like this!” Standing in the vestibule doorway, Emira turned around.
“All of this was for you!” Mrs. Chamberlain cried. “We wanted to help you clear your name and you turn around and do this? Whatever Kelley said, I . . . Emira. Everything we’ve done was for you. Everything,” she said. Her focused stare seemed to say, I know you know what I did, and I also don’t care. “You might be too young to understand this right now, but we have always had your best interests at heart. Emira, we, we love you.” Mrs. Chamberlain threw her hands up in surrender as she said this, as if loving Emira was despite her family’s other best interests. “I don’t . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to say.”
Emira stared up at the foyer chandelier. In that moment, Mrs. Chamberlain going into her email and releasing a private video seemed like the least of her or Mrs. Chamberlain’s problems. Emira understood that if Mrs. Chamberlain had a video of herself being mistreated, she’d want someone to release it for her too. There was no way of convincing Mrs. Chamberlain that what she had done had actually not been for Emira; however, this was a chance, Emira’s last one, to suggest that Mrs. Chamberlain do something for someone else. Emira reached behind her back and secured the other strap onto her left arm. “Sooo . . . right now it’s probably whatever ’cause she’s only three?” she said. “But you gotta act like you like Briar once in a while. Before she like . . . really figures it out.”
Mrs. Chamberlain put a hand to her sternum. Her collarbones became dangerously apparent as her neck curved; her posture stiffened into an awkward slant. She stared at Emira and said, “Excuse me?”
“I know I’m not a mom or whatever,” Emira said, “But you gotta stop looking at her like you’re just waiting for her to change, ’cause umm . . . It is what it is, you know? You’re her mom.”
Everyone in the room stopped speaking.
If someone had told Emira that she was bad at her job, she most likely would have done what she always did, laugh once and say Okay. She knew that she was an excellent typist, she was an even better babysitter, and she’d be secretly grateful that someone considered what she did a job, and not just a temporary side hustle. But Mrs. Chamberlain’s stare went empty and embarrassed as if she’d been caught in the middle of the night, standing in front of the refrigerator, fork in hand and chocolate frosting on her face. Her lips smushed together underneath her nose and Emira thought, Is she really gonna cry? For a second, Emira tried to convince herself that what she’d said wasn’t that bad, but merely necessary and hopefully constructive. But then she heard air being tightly sucked into Zara’s mouth behind her. Zara finished this inhalation with a quiet, “Oop. There it is.”
Outside the front door and down the porch steps, a car honked lightly.
“Sorry . . . this is weird.” Emira exhaled. She sidestepped twice before she finally turned to walk out of the Chamberlain house one last time. She made it all the way to the front porch, but then she turned around. She leaned her body back into the vestibule and said, “Sorry, Laney,” before she followed Zara to the passenger side of a silver Ford Focus. Zara opened the door and said, “You Darryl?”
The man nodded and the girls hopped into the backseat.
Twenty-seven
Alex Murphy was one of the two senior class representatives at William Massey High, which meant she delivered announcements at every other assembly and wore a Student Council polo on Fridays. But by graduation, it didn’t feel like Alex had achieved anything from this title. High school felt much more like a bad dream. After becoming the reason that Robbie Cormier wouldn’t be attending George Mason University on a volleyball scholarship, Alex spent the final days of her senior year finding notes attached to her back and textbooks that read Thanks Narc and Richy Bitch.
One of the student council’s responsibilities was cleaning up after graduation. Alex begged her student council advisor to give her another task, to not require her presence with the rest of the group as they took down streamers and told one another they couldn’t believe high school was over. Her advisor must have known what happened—everyone did—and so she gave Alex the easy, alternative job of cleaning out the senior-patio lockers. On the day after graduation, with a sullied rag a
nd a bottle of surface cleaner, Alex started at the Z last names and worked backward toward the A’s. Standing and cleaning the top lockers wasn’t so bad. Kneeling on the concrete for the bottom ones, however, began to bruise her knees.
By the Johnson lockers she had to ask a maintenance worker for a new towel. And by the Garcias, she had filled up an entire trash can with leftover spiral notebooks, a few socks, magnetic mirrors, and candy wrappers. Alex threw away at least a dozen pocket-sized photos showing girls with corsages, two hands around their waists, or group pictures of soccer teams and exclusive lunch table attendants. The closer she got to Kelley Copeland’s locker, the more Alex felt as if she were being watched. She began to feel unnatural in all her movements, as if she were pretending to read a magazine when she was really trying to overhear a conversation.
Alex popped Kelley’s locker open. It was so vacant and sad. This was the locker she’d dropped several letters into, and Kelley didn’t even have the decency to leave it dirty for this moment. She hadn’t known what she expected to find, but the fact that it didn’t really need cleaning felt like a backhanded compliment. Still, Alex cleaned out Kelley’s locker as if it had a thin coat of high school wear and tear. Kelley’s locker creaked all the way open as Alex began to clean the locker directly beneath it.
She started at the top and planned to work her way down, but Alex felt and heard the rag snag on something in the top corner. There was something paper and triangled squished in the metal plates in between this locker and Kelley’s up above. With her fingernail underneath the rag, Alex bent farther on her knees and fingered the roof inside the locker, preparing herself for something foul to pop out like a forgotten sandwich bag or the hardened wings of something dead. But after one final swipe at what she thought was possibly a dirty magazine, hidden here for safekeeping, Alex gasped to see a flash of her own handwriting on folded loose-leaf paper fall out onto the ground in front of her knees. From the slot of space in between Kelley’s locker and the locker beneath it were five of her letters. They were grimy and bent and yellowed, but even worse, they were still unopened and sealed with her cursive on the front reading From A.M. Alex gasped. She turned over her shoulder to find she was thankfully still alone, rapidly picked up her unopened letters, and stuffed them between her breasts and her bra. She quickly wiped the locker down and slammed it shut, which was when she saw another set of initials engraved into the rusty metal. In the top corner of the locker door Alex saw an R and a C. Just below Kelley’s locker was Robbie Cormier’s.