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  K.T. raises a palm, and Emily high-fives it.

  “I guess I could be one of those ‘country veterinarians,’ ” says K.T. “You know, the crotchety type that thinks medical school is bullshit and teaches herself everything she needs to know. Did I tell you about that cat I used to have named Pablo? My mom and dad named him after Picasso, which was pretty ironic because at the time, we didn’t know he spoke Spanish.”

  “Shut up,” says Emily.

  “No, I’m serious. Pablo liked to nap on my bed after dinner, and one time, when I was doing my homework—and before you make some smart-ass comment about that, yes, I actually do homework every once in a while—Pablo said ‘pollo.’ Not ‘meow,’ like he usually said, but ‘pollo.’ ”

  “Maybe he was hungry,” Emily says. “Maybe you forgot to feed him dinner.”

  “I swear to God,” says K.T., pushing her wild curls back from her forehead. “When I turned around, he was gazing at me like a sphinx. ‘¿Cómo está, Pablo?’ I asked, but he didn’t answer. Not that I expected him to, but, hey, stranger things have happened, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I would say.” Emily nods. “Yes, I definitely would.”

  “Tell me one.”

  “Tell you one what?”

  “A stranger thing that’s happened.”

  “Well,” she says slowly, “I saw a dog get hit by a truck once.”

  “That’s not so weird,” K.T. says.

  “No,” says Emily, “it was weird. Because it was like the dog wanted to get hit. It actually backed up onto the road. If it had kept moving forward, it would have been safe.”

  “Were you driving?”

  “My boyfriend was. Ex-boyfriend.”

  “Did he cry?” K.T. asks.

  Emily shakes her head and takes a long sip of coffee.

  “I’ve never seen a teenaged boy cry,” K.T. says. “Have you?”

  “He didn’t cry.”

  “Did the dog die?”

  “Yeah,” says Emily.

  Emily had seen Paul cry, twice. On December 10, her birthday, the day she broke up with him, and two days later on the last day of his life. With her memory, she has tried to erase his tears, but no one could edit what she went through, not even her own amazing brain. What had happened on December 12, 1994, is stamped on there for all time exactly as it happened. Paul had tears on his face, tears in his voice, when he dropped the book he had pulled from the shelf onto the floor and grabbed Emily Beam’s hands out of the pouch of her sweater.

  “You can’t do this to us,” he said.

  When she pulled her hands away, he bent down to the backpack, rummaging for the gun.

  Emily watched in shock as he lifted it out. He held it for a moment in front of him, to show to her, then he pulled it in close, staring at it as if it were a creature he’d discovered on the beach. She held Paul’s watery gaze.

  “It’s not loaded,” she said. She was certain at first that it wasn’t. If she’d really believed it was loaded, she would have grabbed it or dived for Paul’s feet, something, anything, to keep him from doing what he did.

  He stared past her, way past her, and that was when Emily got scared.

  “Put it down, Paul. Or give it to me, okay? Give the gun to me.” He didn’t, and her knees shook so hard that she crumpled to the floor.

  “It’s our decision to make,” said Paul. “No one else’s. We love each other, don’t we?”

  Emily was crying now, too. “But I want to go to college,” she said. “I can’t do that if I have a baby.” She shook her head. “Don’t you see?”

  But Paul was gone, sucked up into a black hole.

  Emily said, “If you loved me, you would understand. If you really loved me, you wouldn’t be so selfish.”

  Paul was now holding the gun out in front of him with both hands. Was he aiming it at her? It appeared that he was. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Was it an out-of-body experience? A time warp? Was her brain completely done in because of all she had put it through over the past three days? She and Paul stared at one another like the trapped animals that they were.

  His eyes clouded up, dark as she’d ever seen them. “You’re the selfish one,” he said.

  It was the first time in Emily’s life that she opened her mouth to speak and nothing, not even a breath, fell out. It was then, in the devastating silence, that Emily’s English teacher, Ms. Albright, appeared. She stepped up behind Paul, quietly, like a cat.

  K.T. takes a bite of poached egg (made by Hilly with love) and asks, with her mouth full, “What kind of dog was it?”

  “I don’t know,” says Emily. “A mutt.”

  “And your boyfriend wasn’t upset?”

  “Oh, he was upset,” Emily says. “He was shaking like crazy. The dog came out of nowhere.”

  Paul’s attention had been drawn to the cows in the pasture on the other side of the road, dairy cows not bred for slaughter, soft and slow in the October sun. One of them was mooing. Paul had been explaining to Emily how he was learning to understand the way cows spoke to one another; he had worked that past summer on a farm that raised cattle. As Paul’s truck swept around a curve, a black-and-white dog shot backward out of the tall grass and onto the road.

  Paul jerked the truck to a stop, but he was too late.

  “Oh, my God,” he said. “Oh, my God.” He looked at Emily. “The dog. Is it—?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Paul’s hands were bouncing up and down off the steering wheel. “Will you get out and look? Please?”

  Emily opened the door and took a few steps away from the truck. The dog lay on its side.

  “It’s not moving,” she said.

  Paul slid out from behind the wheel and walked around to where the dog lay, its legs stretched out in front of it. Its eyes were closed. It looked like it was sleeping. He bent down and touched it on the head. Blood trickled from the dog’s mouth onto the asphalt as Paul shook the dog gently to try to revive it.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “It just came out of nowhere.”

  “I know,” said Emily.

  “It doesn’t have a collar.”

  “It’s probably a stray.”

  Paul looked up at her with big, blinking eyes. “You’ll be my witness, right?”

  Emily nodded.

  “I don’t think it was my fault,” he said. “Was it?”

  “No,” said Emily. She watched as Paul lifted the dog into his arms and carried it over to the side of the road where the cows were. When he walked back to her, there was a smear of blood on his arm.

  “I’ll just leave it there,” he said, “in case it belongs to anybody around here.”

  “It’s a stray,” said Emily. “There’s nobody around except us and the cows.”

  Paul couldn’t stop blinking. He looked back at the dog. He had laid it along the slope of the shoulder so that its head was higher than its body.

  “Poor guy,” said Paul. He covered his eyes with his hands.

  Emily reached out and touched him on the elbow. “It’s okay,” she said.

  “Nothing is okay,” Paul said, his arms dropping to his sides. “Please don’t lie to me, Emily. I know we haven’t known each other long, but it’ll all go downhill if we lie to each other.”

  Emily swallowed. She was about to tell Paul that it wasn’t his fault, but maybe it was, and she didn’t want to ruin the weight of the moment. A boy had never said such a serious thing to her before.

  “It’s sad when people have their dogs put to sleep,” K.T. is saying. “The dog’s owners are bawling and kissing all over the dog, and the dog smells their sadness and fear, which doesn’t make sense to him because the regular kisses smell happy. How can the dog not feel even the slightest sense of betrayal? Better to be taken out by a car, just like that.
”

  “Are you saying Paul did the dog a favor?”

  “Read it however you like.” K.T. shrugs. “So your boyfriend’s name was Paul. I’m a fan of Pauls—Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Paul Revere.” She sips her coffee. “RuPaul.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “That drag queen who’s on talk shows all the time.”

  “I don’t watch TV,” Emily says.

  “What? They don’t have those in Boston?”

  “Ha, ha,” says Emily.

  “Who doesn’t watch TV?”

  “I don’t watch much TV.”

  “Why not?” K.T. asks.

  “My parents are kind of strict,” Emily says. “They say I have to study if I want to go to college because they can’t afford to send me.”

  “How can they afford to send you here, then?”

  Emily treads water. “My aunt’s paying for it. See, she thinks that going here will give me a better chance of getting in to the college I want to go to.”

  “What college is that?”

  “Harvard.”

  “But you’re from Boston,” says K.T. “Don’t you want to spread your wings, expand your horizons, challenge yourself to move out of your comfort zone? Don’t you want to embrace all those clichés the guidance counselors are always throwing out at us?”

  Emily smiles. “Well, I’m not from Boston. It’s just where I’ve been living for a while.”

  “Look, Emily. Annabelle and Waverley and the girls on the hall keep asking me what your story is. I’m only going to be able to put them off for so long before they begin their own investigation. And that could get ugly fast.”

  “I understand,” Emily says.

  “Want me to make something up?” K.T. asks.

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah,” Emily says. “I don’t care what they think.”

  “I’ll make it good. I’ll make it believable and all, but, oh, my God, this is going to be the most fun I’ve had all year.”

  K.T. offers up a high five, and Emily takes it.

  “When I first met you,” Emily says, “I thought your name was Katie. But then everyone kept saying it funny, like it was two words—Kay. Tee. So what do the initials stand for? I should have asked a long time ago, but …”

  “But you didn’t ask because you didn’t want me to ask you anything back. Am I right?”

  Emily nods.

  “Keller True. Two age-old family names run together. I don’t have any brothers, so—whoo-hoo! lucky me! the third daughter! the last hope!—I got them both.”

  “Well, Helen Keller Too Good to Be True, I wish I could tell you the sad, sad story of my checkered past, and maybe I will someday, but right now, I just can’t.”

  “I knew you weren’t from Boston,” K.T. says. “Number one: you don’t sound like you’re from Boston. And number two: girls from Boston don’t go around wearing Harvard sweatshirts.”

  “Why not?”

  “Emily Beam Me Up Scotty, you don’t advertise where you’re from. You advertise where you’ve been. And even though it sounds like it, believe me, they’re not the same thing.”

  • • •

  During Trigonometry with the soft-spoken, square-haired Mrs. Frame, Emily imagines all the new identities she could invent. Not a single friend from home knows she got pregnant; not one of them knows she is here. And Dr. Ingold, the headmistress, is the only one at ASG who has been told about Paul and what happened in the Grenfell County High School library, but she has not been told anything about Boston because Emily’s parents didn’t tell her. They didn’t tell anyone.

  The day after Paul died, newspaper reporters called Emily’s house. Mr. or Mrs. Beam answered at first, but after the third call, they turned the ringer off. When a policewoman showed up at the door late that afternoon, Emily sat in the living room between her mom and dad and answered the questions. Emily wasn’t any help to the investigation. The gun and the use of it were total surprises—a boy caught in the heat of the moment. He had things to live for, Emily told the officer: he loved the trees under his care, and he was learning how to communicate with bovines.

  As soon as the woman left, Emily flew into a rage. Her mother and father had to grab her, hold her hands behind her back so that she didn’t hurt herself. The police weren’t interested in what Emily had to say about Paul and his trees. The officer had not asked a single question about what kind of boy he was—or what kind of girl she was to have fallen in love with him. The woman had wanted only the whens and wheres.

  Emily’s parents tried to explain that the officer was only doing her job, but Emily was in no mood to be rational. As soon as the funeral was over, the Beams packed the car and left town with their only child crying in the backseat. Emily went through two boxes of Kleenex. Hours and hours later, when they arrived at Aunt Cindy’s little house outside of Boston, her father opened the back door and helped Emily out.

  “We’re here, honey,” he whispered. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  It was a lie, of course, but it was the first time in days that her father had been kind, and for a few minutes, the lie made Emily feel better.

  When Mrs. Frame turns her back to graph a periodic function on the board, Emily reaches into her book bag for the biography of Emily Dickinson that Madame Colche lent her. Dickinson lived in a time of patriarchs. Men ruled the country, the church, and the home.

  His Heart was pure and terrible, Dickinson wrote of her father, and I think no other like it exists. Edward Dickinson pulled her out of boarding school after one year, supposedly because she got sick so much, but Emily Beam wonders if it wasn’t the father who had made his daughter ill in the first place.

  Fathers are paradoxes—Emily Beam doesn’t need a biography to tell her this. All males are. The summer before his senior year, Paul grew two inches. He came back to school with shoulders and wavy hair. He was six one when he started his senior year, and it was these changes more than anything that attracted Emily. She was changing, too. The melancholy that rose during the afternoon thunderstorms of her childhood was rising now in all kinds of weather, and after Terra moved to Ohio, it was much harder to find girls her age to relate to. They all seemed so sunny. Picking out Paul was like picking out the drummer in a band, not as cute as the lead singer or as flashy as the electric guitar player. She chose him to give some rhythm to her weekends, which had begun to feel longer than weeks, and aimless.

  Lying down next to Paul, Emily measured herself by him. They aligned their torsos and their feet and their hands. Emily was five four then, and she is still five four, too short to be tall and too tall to be short. She is an in-between girl. Emily has always sat, if given a choice, in between other students, not in the front, not in a corner. Her teachers call on her because she’s the one they see when they look out. And that’s okay because Emily usually has an answer, even in subjects she doesn’t care for, such as trigonometry. She is not short of opinions, and she has some ideas about a good many things, but she hasn’t a clue as to how her days with Paul spiraled away from her so fast and so final.

  It isn’t Paul’s touch that she misses the most. It’s the smell of his truck: Old Spice and pine trees and brown leaves and apples. The smell of childhood and adulthood, rolled into one. There are places she needs to see again in the light of day, the graveled lanes and pull-offs where she and Paul had parked and made out. But for now, the walks at dusk through the streets of Amherst will have to do.

  • • •

  Emily wanders into the drugstore on Main Street to buy K.T. a small Valentine’s Day gift. As Emily turns into the makeup aisle, she sees a girl with hair like wheat pick up a lipstick and tuck it in her purse. Emily makes a beeline toward her, and the girl whips around. It’s like a scene out of a Western. Shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.
r />   For the first time since Paul died, Emily feels powerful. She doesn’t know who this pretty girl is, not yet, but she feels like she could kick her to Boston and back.

  “I saw what you did,” says Emily.

  The girl plays dumb. “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. Put it back.”

  The girl reaches into her purse for the lipstick and returns it to the shelf. As she brushes the curtain of hair away from her face, Emily recognizes her.

  “Are you going to rat me out?” the girl asks.

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “I put it back. The manager might not even believe you if you told on me.”

  “But then again, he might,” says Emily.

  “Assuming it’s a ‘he,’ ” says the girl. “You’re in my French class, aren’t you? You’re that new girl.”

  “Oui,” says Emily.

  The girl makes a quick survey of the aisle. “If you say a word, I’ll get kicked out.”

  Emily raises her eyebrows and swivels, but an untied bootlace trips her up, and the girl reaches out to keep her from falling.

  “It was just a dumb lipstick,” the girl says. Fear blazes in the girl’s brown eyes, and the way the girl is still holding on to Emily’s wrist—the way a small child would grip a mother—stops Emily from saying anything.

  The girl follows Emily out of the drugstore. Why should this thief of a girl get off scot-free? She walks until she gets to the bench across the street from the Emily Dickinson House, and the girl sits down right beside her. It isn’t until she reaches into her coat pocket for the pack of cigarettes and the matchbook she found on the bathroom floor in Hart Hall that she realizes that she forgot to get K.T. a Valentine’s gift. After the wind blows out three matches, Emily finally gets one lit, touching it to the cigarette sticking straight out of her mouth. She inhales and coughs out.

  “My name’s Amber Atkins,” the girl says.

  “Emily Beam,” says Emily in between coughs.

  Amber points across the street. “Were you named after her?”

  “Are you kidding? My parents probably never read a poem in their entire lives.”