And We Stay Read online

Paul could have gone to the bathroom like he told Coach Stockley he was going to. He could have washed his hands and come back to Western Civilizations class and stared at the giant map of Europe on the wall until class was over, tuning out Coach Stockley, the most ignorant teacher at school. (He’d been telling students for years that the Gilded Age was the Guilded Age.) Paul could have stared at that large map, wondering what he would do once he graduated from high school. It was okay that he wasn’t going to college; Mr. Wagoner hadn’t gone to college, either. The plan was that Paul would take over the family tree farm, but not right after high school. After he went to the bathroom, after he stared at the map, after he graduated from Grenfell County, he could have gone out West.

  He could have gone to Texas and been a ranch hand.

  Or Alaska. And worked on an oil rigger.

  Or California. All those vineyards.

  He could have worked on a fishing boat in Washington State.

  And then he could have come home, managed the farm, gotten married, and made a family. His parents could have been grandparents. His little sister, Carey, could have been a maid of honor, then an aunt.

  Inside the WC, Emily locks the door and presses her hand to her mouth. The metallic taste of Boston winds its way back. She never even thought to ask the doctor what would happen to the fetus once it was flushed out of her body. Creatures the size of tadpoles weren’t buried, were they? They were probably burned, burned up into the sky and reshaped into puffy clouds, tiny baby breaths bouncing along in the breeze.

  Emily closes the toilet lid and sits down. From her book bag, she retrieves her notebook with the poems. She’s written three whole ones, but there are fragments of others scrawled here and there: Sorrow fades with time. Classmates innocent as birds. Red ink spilled in the name of freedom. She tears out all of the pages with words on them and returns her notebook to her bag. She folds the pages neatly into the trash can and stares at the ceiling, trying to fill her head with light, but all that comes is the first stanza of Poem 813, which she has not been able to get out of her head since she read it last night.

  This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies

  And Lads and Girls—

  Was laughter and ability and Sighing

  And Frocks and Curls.

  Sighing, yes. Emily Beam is sighing for all time, just like Emily Dickinson. She checks her watch. There are ten minutes of class left, and Emily doesn’t want to get in trouble, but when she tries to open the door, it doesn’t turn. She jiggles the handle and bangs on the door and yells for help, but she’s locked in, trapped in a water closet. When Emily doesn’t return to class, Madame Colche comes looking. The lock is jammed on the outside, too, and Madame Colche tells Emily in a loud voice that she’s called someone on the maintenance crew. By the time Emily is rescued, Trigonometry is over—all classes are.

  “Come with me to the parlor, and we’ll take tea before you go off to athletics,” Madame Colche says. “I almost always take my afternoon tea alone, and it will be nice to have some company.”

  In the parlor, which looks just like a living room, Emily sits on an itchy brown chair. The talk is small at first. Madame Colche speaks in French, so Emily catches only some of it. As far as she is able to make out, Madame Colche grew up in Amherst, met a Frenchman in New York City, and married him. Because he would be gone so much, back and forth to Paris on business, he told Madame Colche that they could live anywhere she wanted.

  “And I chose here,” she says, gesturing around the room. She switches to English. “Being a hall mother keeps me from missing Henri. You girls keep me young. So, tell me about yourself, Mademoiselle Beam.”

  “En français?”

  “Anglais is fine.”

  “Well,” Emily says, “I’ve never been to France. But I’d like to go. And I’m an only child, so it was hard for my parents to send me here, so far away, but we live in a place where the school system isn’t very good, which is why I’m no star pupil in French.”

  “Yet,” says Madame Colche. “You’re no star pupil yet. Give it time, Mademoiselle. I’m an excellent teacher.”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am.”

  “I hope you’re starting to make friends here. I’m sure you miss your friends from home.”

  Emily pictures an empty chair at the round table of girls she sat with every day in the cafeteria, cheerleaders, mostly. Each girl was paired off with one other girl, a best friend. Emily’s best friend, Terra, who was not a cheerleader, had moved away at the end of tenth grade, which suddenly made Emily the odd girl out.

  “I guess they’ll have to find someone else to be the middle block on the pyramid,” Emily says. “I was a cheerleader.”

  “I’m sorry to say we don’t have those here,” Madame Colche says.

  “Oh, that’s fine. I’ve sort of grown out of it.”

  There is a knock on the door.

  “Pardonnez-moi,” says Madame Colche.

  Emily hears another woman’s voice and the door closing again. There is a long minute of silence before Madame Colche returns holding sheets of folded-up notebook paper.

  “Mrs. Brooker found these in the bathroom when she was fixing the lock. She thought they might be yours. I took a look; it does appear to be your handwriting.” Madame Colche holds them out for Emily to take. “So. You’re a poet.”

  Emily shakes her head. “No,” she says, “I’m just a girl who writes poems.”

  “And that doesn’t make you a poet?”

  “I think you have to be published to be a poet,” says Emily, unzipping her bag and stuffing the folded-up pages into her notebook.

  “I disagree,” Madame Colche says. “Emily Dickinson wrote poems for years and years before she was ever published. But you would still call her a poet, would you not?”

  “I would,” Emily says.

  “Pardonnez-moi,” Madame Colche says once more, disappearing through what looks like a door to a bedroom. She flies back in, waving a sheet of paper in her hand. “Here,” she says, handing it to Emily. “There’s a poetry contest you should enter.”

  Sponsored by the Emily Dickinson Society, the flyer reads. For girls aged 13–18. At the bottom below the guidelines is an entry form.

  “I’m a proud member of the EDS,” says Madame Colche.

  “Merci,” says Emily. “I’ll think about it. Oh, and merci for the tea, too.”

  Folding the sheet of paper into the back pocket of her jeans, Emily makes her mouth into a smile that she hopes isn’t too fake and says, “Au revoir.” Out on the quad, the clouds have lowered. When he came out of his burrow this morning, the groundhog did not see his shadow. It is raining now, a silvery rain that turns winter to spring. A heavyset girl Emily doesn’t know passes by and tells her that the afternoon athletic period has been canceled, and the two girls share a joyful moment.

  It was raining the night Emily and Paul first kissed, at a football party after the game. The rain had started during the fourth quarter, and Emily’s hair and cheerleading sweater were still wet when Paul led her from the lights of the living room and onto the dark of the back porch. She hadn’t planned to go to the party and didn’t have a change of clothes, so she apologized for the dampness as Paul put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her close.

  Emily used to think this was the beginning. Now she knows it was the beginning of the end.

  As she climbs the three flights of stairs to her room in Hart Hall, Emily hears the hall phone ringing. By the time she gets to it, the ringing has stopped—somebody’s boyfriend, but not hers. Hers is buried in the ground. Hers has a tombstone with Paul’s name on it and two dates. A beginning and an end. In her room, at her desk, Emily opens her notebook, the one with the poems in it, and writes another one, the second of the day. An hour later, when K.T. returns from her music lesson, Emily is fast asleep, folded over on her desk, used-up Kleenex scatter
ed on the floor like roses tossed from a bride’s bouquet.

  Ashes

  This is where her story

  begins and ends. This is where

  her story ends and begins.

  In her story, the telling

  is not linear. The telling

  is a circle, the shape of earth.

  If earth is a circle, there’s no end;

  she can’t walk the plank of it

  to sink in a bottomless sea.

  So she throws away her insides,

  which are burned

  in the night, and the sky

  sucks up

  the ashes.

  The same sky that once

  held her dreams has stolen

  her story. And the stars

  will know just

  how to tell it:

  night after night,

  over and over.

  Emily Beam, February 2, 1995

  After dinner, Emily signs out with the old lady on duty at the security desk and goes for a walk. The rain has stopped, but the sidewalks of Amherst are icy now that the temperature has dropped, so she shuffles along in K.T.’s clogs and her one pair of thick socks, which need to be washed. Emily is not a smoker, but just outside of the ASG gate, she finds an unopened pack of cigarettes on the ground. She walks a block before she tears back the thin layer of plastic and places a cigarette between her lips. She takes a pretend drag. The taste of tobacco blends smoothly with the aftertaste of coffee. She tucks the rest of the pack in the waistband of her jeans, pulls her sweater down low, and wraps her scarf around her head. Her nose is already numb, her fingers stiff. She shoves her bare hands into her pockets.

  Walking through the icy dusk, the unlit cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth, Emily believes with a force that drives her forward that Paul never intended to use the gun. In this world of uncertainty, she has faith in one belief: that Paul never planned to shoot anyone, including himself. She clings to that belief. The gun was only a power play, a desperate, shortsighted, woefully misdirected attempt to prove his manhood. Here in Amherst, Emily has hardly seen a man; even the maintenance crew at ASG is composed of women. In the crystal-cold air so far away from Grenfell County, Emily can almost convince herself that her life before was the dream, and her real life began the day she moved into 15 Hart Hall.

  She scoots down Spring Street, where the school is, and up Dickinson Street. Her fast walk must look suspicious, as if she’s done something wrong. But she hasn’t. Only her brain has, like wishing it had a pack of matches so it could set itself on fire.

  On Main Street, Emily notices a sign in the yard of a large, yellow brick house—The Emily Dickinson House, it says, Open Saturdays & Sundays 12–5. She remembers the entry form in her back pocket and takes it out. Emily Dickinson, with her 1,775 poems, must have been running from something. Emily Beam opens the gate that separates the lawn from the sidewalk and carries the sheet of paper up to the railing of the front porch. Let another girl have it, she thinks. One who doesn’t use her poems as places to hide. Let that girl enter the contest and be the center of the world for a day. Let her have fifteen minutes of fame because Emily Beam has had hers already.

  When she tries to stuff the entry form inside of the iron scroll that attaches itself to one of the tall white columns, the overhead porch light winks. Emily jerks her head around. Is she trespassing? Does someone live here? She looks up and down, but all of the windows are blank and unfeeling. When she moves to leave, it winks again: on/off. And again. Emily flies back down the steps, almost tripping on her clogs, and slips and slides the three blocks back to school.

  As she checks herself in at the security desk, Emily realizes she still has the paper in her frozen hand. She starts to throw it away there, in the trash can near the old lady’s feet, but the lady is staring at her with a saint’s possessed smile. Back in her room, Emily sticks the entry form into her notebook of poems and shoves the pack of cigarettes into the back of a drawer, behind her underwear and pajamas.

  “I’m going to the lieberry,” she tells K.T. “You don’t have any matches, do you?”

  “For what?” K.T. asks.

  “There’s something I need to burn.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing important,” Emily says. “Maybe I just feel like burning something.”

  “Oooh, pyromania,” K.T. says. “Can I come?”

  “Do you have any matches?”

  “No. But if you find some, can I burn something, too?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like my grade report from last semester,” K.T. says. “I spent too much time practicing the cello. Hey, wanna order pizza later tonight?”

  “Sure,” Emily says, thinking that she can break her hundred-dollar bill and pay K.T. back for the sweaters and boots.

  “Is plain cheese all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “Stephanie Simmons probably has some matches. She always smells like a chimney.”

  “I don’t need them really,” says Emily. “I can use scissors, I guess.”

  “You weren’t going to burn your hair, were you?” K.T. asks. “You have great hair.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah. It’s the color of horses. The pretty racing ones.”

  Emily walks over to the full-length mirror in between the closets and takes her hair out of its messy ponytail.

  “You should wear it down more,” K.T. tells her.

  “Okay,” Emily says. As she packs her book bag for a night of homework in the lieberry, she sees a book on her desk that wasn’t there before, a biography of Emily Dickinson.

  “Is this yours?” she asks K.T.

  “Oh,” says K.T. “Madame Colche stopped by after dinner. She said keep it as long as you like. She doesn’t need it back anytime soon.”

  Emily opens the book to the slick pages in the middle. An image of Emily Dickinson, the one that Ms. Albright showed her class last fall, stares her straight in the eye. When Emily Beam shifts her head to the right, the eyes—bottomless pools—follow. When she shifts to the left, they follow. Emily Beam cannot escape. She reads the caption, which notes that the daguerreotype was taken when Emily Dickinson was sixteen or seventeen. The future poet looked sad and thirsty.

  Thirst was the first sensation that returned to Emily Beam when Ms. Albright appeared behind Paul and demanded the gun. Paul did not give it to her. He lunged away, deeper into the stacks, leaving his backpack and the volume of poems he had pulled from the shelf in a lump on the floor.

  Emily’s mouth had been so dry that she couldn’t speak.

  “Help,” she had managed to croak to her AP English teacher in a voice as tiny as a tree frog. “Help us.”

  Pall

  Oh, yes, she could feel it

  even though the bullet

  had never stabbed her skin.

  The bright white heat

  burned at her core

  where two lives

  beat, and if he’d aimed

  there and pulled the trigger,

  red would have crested

  like a broken dam

  over her hands

  as her last word rushed

  up to her throat—Paul—

  a sound that took no time

  and also lifetimes.

  Emily Beam, February 3, 1995

  Since Madame Colche gave her the sheet with the guidelines for the poetry contest, the poems won’t stop bursting in air. Like bombs, they blow up Emily’s brain with images as she’s walking along, just innocently walking over the little pebbles in her new black boots. Sometimes the words neatly arrange themselves into a Dickinson-like pattern.

  In the darkest Corner of the Place

  The Moment like a Riddle

  The Boy surrendered and then sh
ot

  A Bullet through his Middle.

  But if Emily can get the light to fall in just the right way, she can turn the bombs to blossoms. If she squints in just the right way, she can leave winter behind and arrive at a clearing, sunlit and green, where she stretches out on the grass, a bouquet of words gathered in her hand, and looks skyward.

  Even at breakfast, poems rise into being, and sometimes Emily has to force herself to pay attention to K.T., just as she’s doing now. It’s the day before Valentine’s Day, which, at ASG, is apparently almost as big a deal as Christmas. It doesn’t seem to bother K.T. not to have a boyfriend, and it certainly doesn’t bother Emily, who has sworn off boys. Plus, she has homework to worry about, way more homework than she ever had at Grenfell County High—three times as much.

  “I’m glad Hannah isn’t here,” K.T. is saying. “She had, like, five boyfriends, and she’d enlist me to help her figure out which one to obsess over.”

  Emily has heard girls on the hall refer to Hannah as a ho-bag. “Five? Really?”

  “Well, at least three. I liked her and everything, but she got around.”

  “Was she your best friend?” Emily asks.

  “She kind of was, and she kind of wasn’t. I mean, we did a lot of stuff together, but I don’t know—it wasn’t like we told each other our deepest, darkest secrets or anything.”

  Emily looks down at the remains of her scrambled eggs.

  “I’m not sure I’m the ‘best friend’ type,” K.T. says.

  “Me either,” says Emily.

  “I might just like animals better than I like people. My mom and dad think I should be a veterinarian.”

  “Don’t you have to go to vet school for that?”

  “Yeah,” K.T. says. “Which does not bode well for Yours Truly, who made a C in biology last year.”

  “College is a clean slate, though, isn’t it? At least, that’s what I’m hoping for.”

  “Why do you need a clean slate? You had to have had really good grades to get into ASG in the middle of the year like you did.”

  “Straight As,” says Emily. “Except for a B-plus in tenth-grade biology.”