And We Stay Read online

  “My mom named me after a stripper she met in Las Vegas.”

  “So you’re a thief and a liar,” says Emily.

  “We all are sometimes,” Amber says. “Aren’t you?”

  Emily inhales, beginning to enjoy the taste of tobacco.

  “My mom really did name me after a stripper.”

  “I’m not in a talking mood right now, okay? And I would offer you a cigarette, but that would be contributing to the delinquency of a minor. And you’re already delinquent enough.”

  “I don’t smoke,” Amber says. “You’re a minor, too, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “Yeah,” says Emily, “but in my heart, I am very, very major, so …”

  “You don’t sound like most of the other girls at school. Where are you from?”

  Emily takes the cigarette out of her mouth and makes a “zip it” sign with her lips.

  “Oh, right,” Amber says. “We’re just gonna sit here and stare down the night.”

  Emily looks across the street at the stately yellow brick house, the kind of house she had always dreamed of living in. Large but not too large; elegant but not showy. Tall windows. Most of the houses in Grenfell County are small, boxy.

  While riding in Paul’s truck, winding through the woods and farms of Grenfell County, Emily began to take the female brain apart and piece it together again. Girls go back in their minds over things they wish they had said or done, or not said or not done, while boys put those things in a box with a tight-fitting lid. Girls think they can save boys in need, and Emily was no different.

  The world is easier on boys, simpler. Paul had two choices once he found out Emily was pregnant: he could propose marriage, or he could pay for the abortion.

  But the fact of the matter was that there was no choice, no second chance. Paul killed himself, so Emily has to go it alone.

  “I guess we should head on back,” Amber says. “It’s almost seven-thirty.”

  Emily nods, lighting another cigarette and putting it in her mouth next to the other one. She inhales and coughs out, inhales again and sputters, wishing she could walk and smoke, smoke and walk, walk her mind to the sky, smoke her heart out of her body.

  Poem of the Middle Heart

  You cannot hear me

  through a stethoscope.

  I do not say Ba-BUM, Ba-BUM.

  If you cut the body open,

  you would not find me.

  I stick close to the invisible;

  otherwise, I’d be hunted,

  a sliver of food

  on the dinner plate of the elderly,

  silver as a fish,

  a little doleful around the mouth.

  No, my place is not

  on the earth—it is

  in the earth, an ancient vein.

  It is everywhere

  where you are,

  It is everywhere—

  at the intersection

  of Young and Dumb,

  and driven by the wheel

  of need. No intellect

  involved. No brain.

  Just the rain of time

  that keeps you skidding

  back for more.

  Emily Beam, February 14, 1995

  Emily Beam writes her best poems in her head while lying on her back staring through the dark at the ceiling while K.T. snores. Emily isn’t sure what to make of K.T. While the two of them were in the bathroom a few hours earlier brushing their teeth, Annabelle Wycoff, who was washing her face, studied Emily in the mirror.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “You look sad.”

  Before Emily had a chance to pull the toothbrush out of her mouth, K.T. said, “Oh, didn’t you know? Emily’s an orphan.”

  “Oh, my gosh,” Annabelle said. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” said K.T., making her brown eyes as wide as they could be. “Really.”

  Emily could tell that K.T. was being sarcastic, but in the mirror, Annabelle turned her eyes to Emily’s. “But didn’t I meet your mom? The day you moved in?”

  “That wasn’t her mom,” K.T. said. “That was her guardian.”

  “But Emily introduced her as her mom.”

  “Wishful thinking,” K.T. said. “Emily’s much too devastated to tell the truth.”

  In the mirror, Emily narrowed her eyes.

  “My gosh, I’m so sorry,” Annabelle said. “How did your parents die?”

  K.T. looked at Emily. “You want to tell her?”

  Emily took the toothbrush out of her mouth. “In an avalanche,” she said.

  “They were skiing,” said K.T. “In Switzerland.”

  “That is just awful.” Annabelle turned to Emily. “Were you with them at the time?”

  “No,” said Emily. “I was here in the States, staying with my aunt in Boston.”

  “Her parents were on their second honeymoon,” K.T. said. “They were very much in love.”

  Annabelle put her hand to her heart and looked at Emily with sad puppy eyes.

  “Emily’s hurt,” K.T. explained to Annabelle. “She doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  Without a word, Emily walked out of the bathroom and down the hall, past the huddle of girls by the phone waiting to talk to their boyfriends. When, a minute later, K.T. arrived, Emily refused to join her in her celebratory dance.

  “I don’t want to lie to anyone here,” Emily said.

  “It wasn’t a real lie,” said K.T. “It’s not like she’ll believe it.”

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “Because it’s stupid.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Whatever yourself,” said K.T., kicking off her suede boots. “Be that way.”

  Emily plopped on her bed, thinking of her mom and dad back in Grenfell County. She glanced at her watch. Her dad would be asleep downstairs in his chair with the radio on, and her mom would be upstairs in bed in her flannel pajamas, reading, which was where they were and what they were doing the night Emily returned from the party at Cole Hankins’s house, the night it all veered off course.

  First, there was what happened in Mr. and Mrs. Hankins’s bedroom, and then, when a policeman showed up to shut the party down, Paul was the one to go to the door. Someone had seen the blue lights through the window and had warned everyone to hide their alcohol. When he let the policeman in, Paul did not lie when asked if the teenagers in the house were drinking.

  “Tell you what,” Paul said. “I’ll take keys away from everyone who’s in no condition to drive.” The policeman stayed around to make sure it happened but didn’t end up arresting anyone.

  To Emily’s surprise, Paul had been a leader that night. Maybe he was mature enough to be a father, but after that party, Emily felt about as mature as a tadpole. She had gotten drunk, the first time in her life she’d ever done more than nurse a beer for four hours. In Mr. and Mrs. Hankins’s bedroom, the three beers she’d had downstairs were making the ceiling spin. After she and Paul did it once on top of the paisley bedspread, Paul wanted a blow job, and Emily said no.

  “But it will turn me on,” said Paul. “In a major way.”

  “That’s what whores do,” said Emily.

  “Emily,” said Paul, “you could never be a whore. You’re a nerd.”

  “I am not!”

  “You’re, like, the one smart cheerleader. The hot and smart one.”

  “Is that why you like me? Because I’m a cheerleader?”

  “No,” said Paul. “No way. Give me some credit.”

  He rolled Emily down again on the bed. He was urgent and this time gave no thought to a condom. She didn’t say anything; he was too far into her and too far gone. It was the only time they’d ever done it twice in a row, and afterward, Emily ran down the hall and threw up in the guest bathroom.

 
; A lot can happen in a bathroom.

  Before ASG, Emily never had to share one, but the bathroom in Hart Hall is hardly ever empty. She found the matchbook on the floor of one of the stalls. It was more than against the rules to smoke in Hart Hall—it could get a girl sent home. A wooden house built in the 1890s could go up in flames in a snap.

  Emily gets out of bed and walks to the hook where her towel and flashlight are hanging. All AGS girls have hooks with towels and flashlights, their armor against a raging fire that would be started, no doubt, by one carelessly discarded match. Emily takes the flashlight to bed with her and opens the book Madame Colche gave her.

  While the Civil War raged in the hills and valleys beyond her home, Emily Dickinson wrote. She was thirty-five when the war ended, a spinster still living at home, which wasn’t unusual. Back then it was what unmarried women of privilege did.

  Dickinson dashed off poem after poem, numbering them to keep track. What she ended up with instead of a husband, instead of children, were words, thousands of them.

  In the four months that Emily and Paul were together, they had sex fifteen times. Emily had been in Paul’s bedroom twice, and both times, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Wagoner was at home. Her parents were strict, too, about allowing Paul in the house when they were away or already in bed, which was why Emily and Paul spent so many evenings sitting in the truck. Paul knew places to park on the back roads. They made out with the heater on; it was cold without clothes. But it had been thrilling, to be needed so wildly. The first time Emily rubbed her hand over his crotch, Paul came in his pants. He had been a virgin, too.

  • • •

  The next morning, as Emily is stepping out of the shower, Annabelle announces from the sink again how sorry she is for Emily’s loss, her debate-team voice echoing off the tiles.

  “I’m sorry for your brothers and sisters, too,” Annabelle says. “If you have any.”

  “I don’t,” Emily says, wrapping her towel more tightly around her body.

  “It’s a good thing you’re here, isn’t it?”

  Emily looks at Annabelle, who seems completely sincere.

  “You have a hundred and forty-nine sisters at ASG. Isn’t that great?”

  Emily excuses herself.

  “Don’t hesitate to knock on my door if you need anything!” Annabelle calls as Emily walks fast, faster, down the hall to her room. When Emily throws open the door, K.T. is just waking up.

  “Thanks to you, Annabelle now wants to be my guardian angel.”

  “You could use one,” K.T. says.

  “But she’s a cream puff.”

  “Yeah, she is, but she aspires to be the first female president of the United States. It wouldn’t be the worst thing, to have Annabelle watching over you.”

  “Why did you lie like that?”

  “You lied, too,” says K.T.

  “You roped me into it,” says Emily. “I couldn’t just stand there like a mute.”

  “Come on, it was fun. And it will throw them off the trail.”

  “What trail? Who’s them?”

  “You would not believe the rumor mill at this place,” K.T. says.

  “Well, you sure gave it a generous feeding last night.”

  K.T. smiles. “Exactly. Annabelle is the Mouth. Once the story is out, all the other rumors will fizzle, at least for a while.”

  “I thought you said no one would believe it.”

  “They won’t, not in their heart of hearts. But an orphan shipped off to boarding school because her hip, rich, very in-love parents died? Are you kidding me? It’s romantic. The stuff of storybooks. And people believe what they want to believe.”

  “I need coffee,” Emily says. “I need to think this through.”

  “It’s foolproof,” says K.T. “It will keep them occupied for a good long while. Trust me.”

  “I was taught never to trust anyone who says ‘trust me.’ ”

  “That’s sad. Who taught you that?”

  “My dad.”

  “Well, forget him,” K.T. says. “He died in an avalanche, remember?”

  Emily rolls her eyes. It is exhausting, nights of little sleep, days of being one against the world. While K.T. is in the bathroom, Emily sits at her desk and dashes off the poem that rained on her brain in the shower. Emily wishes she could write to Ms. Albright and tell her that the house where a great American poet lived, the one Ms. Albright loved most, is only three blocks away. Emily should go inside and buy a postcard and write in tiny, tiny print all she needs to say to the best teacher she’s ever had. But where to begin? What do you say to the person who probably saved your life? Not only literally, but also figuratively. With Terra so far away, Ms. Albright’s classroom was the one place at the start of eleventh grade where Emily could be Emily.

  Unlike other teachers, Ms. Albright lined the windowsills with flowering plants. Her walls were covered with posters of books and movies that Emily had never heard of. Ms. Albright introduced her, introduced them all, to Ingmar Bergman and Bollywood, showing snippets of films every Friday but only if everyone in class had passed the reading quizzes that week. Every Monday at the start of class, Ms. Albright would read them a poem from the New Yorker or even a whole story. Sometimes she passed around the magazine so they could see the cartoons.

  Ms. Albright told them memories of her own days in high school, which weren’t that long ago, when everyone called her Tinkerbell because she was so small. Above all, Ms. Albright showed Emily that the life had a mind all its own, and that this life had its own separate beauty, its own separate magic. But what life is Emily living now? There are two girls trying to claim it, the Emily who used to be and another Emily, scarily unfamiliar. Sometimes, Spooky Emily can communicate only in meter and rhyme.

  A girl who lies alone

  In her single bed

  Cannot grasp the science of

  Her solitary head.

  It is a sadder but wiser Emily who will rise each morning and eat breakfast with her roommate and go through the motions of being an orphan.

  Never Land

  She rocks herself to sleep,

  rocks herself awake, rocks

  until she is one with a sky

  deep as midnight.

  The ground is not hers—

  never was—and the only

  light, the only light there is,

  hums a high song

  from the backside of stars.

  Here in the dark, yes, here

  is the cradle.

  Emily Beam, February 16, 1995

  Madame Colche gives Emily a special smile when she walks into French, but Emily can barely smile back. It’s Friday, almost the end of her fifth week of classes, and she feels like a zombie. The coffee at breakfast hasn’t stayed with her, and she skipped lunch to go to the lieberry and write a poem that had been tapping at the back of her brain all morning. Emily almost asks Madame Colche for the leftovers in the French press perched on the windowsill.

  Amber sits in the back hiding behind her wheat-stalk hair. As Emily slides into her desk in the middle of the room, she catches Amber’s eye. Amber looks away, but when Emily turns toward her again a few minutes later, Amber winks at Emily. Three times.

  “Mademoiselle Atkins,” Madame Colche says. “Qu’est-ce que tu as? As-tu quelque chose dans ton oeil?” What’s the matter with you? Do you have something in your eye?

  “Comment?”

  Madame Colche repeats the question.

  “Oui,” says Amber.

  “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” What is it?

  “Regret. J’ai le regret dans mon oeil.” I have regret in my eye.

  The whole class turns to look at Amber.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” Amber says. “Ça va, everybody. Ça va.”

  Madame Colche says nothing for a moment as Amber s
hakes her curtain of hair back into place.

  “Amber,” Madame Colche says in English. “Do you need to be excused?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Over the course of the class, each time Emily glances back, Amber is staring at her like she knows something she didn’t know three nights ago. Emily feels the little bit of power that she wielded in the drugstore and on the bench slipping away. After classes are over for the day, Emily checks herself in to the infirmary so that she doesn’t have to go to Fitness for Fun. She sleeps through dinner; she misses her walk. The nurse lets her sleep through the whole study period but wakes her so that she can get back to Hart Hall in time for check-in.

  K.T. wants to talk, but Emily wants to sleep. She crawls under the covers and tries, but her brain won’t stop showing its own little horror movies. In one of them, a large clock with swords for hands points to 9:18 as Paul lunges through the doors of the school library. Then, the floor opens like an earthquake. People and things, bookshelves and tables and notebooks, are swallowed up in the crack. In another one, Madame Colche chains Emily to the floor at the front of the French classroom and makes her dump out the contents of her backpack, which is loaded down with guns and boxes of bullets. Emily waits until she hears K.T. snoring, and she sneaks out of bed for her notebook and flashlight and crawls back under the covers.

  Writing poems makes Time move backward, makes Time move forward. Time will not stand still. Emily Dickinson raged her private rage by eschewing conventional punctuation or by capitalizing nouns that weren’t normally capitalized; sometimes she did both. In the vaulted Space of Emily Beam’s Mind, Ghosts hover like Clouds.

  Buttons

  Eight buttons on her blouse

  like the eyes of daisies,

  and his hands are giant

  butterflies. Prehistoric

  creatures of flight.

  Underneath the buttons:

  the girl. The butterflies

  shift, soften in pursuit,

  landing and staying

  on hills made of skin.

  The girl and

  the butterfly boy—