Little Fires Everywhere(95)

There was a knock at the side door. To Pearl, it was as if she’d summoned Trip with her mind, and she turned to Mia, wide-eyed.

“I’ll go and see who it is,” Mia said. “You stay up here. Keep packing.” If it was Mrs. Richardson, she thought—but no, it was Izzy, standing bewildered in the driveway.

“Why is the door locked?” she said. For months she’d been coming to help Mia every afternoon, and the side door had never before been locked. It had been open to her—to all the Richardson children, it occurred to her now—at any moment of the day, no matter what her trouble.

“I was—I was taking care of something.” Mia had forgotten all about Izzy, and she tried to think of a plausible excuse.

“Is Bebe still here?” This was the only thing Izzy could think of that might make Mia shut her out and send her away.

“No, she’s gone home. I just—I was busy.”

“Okay.” Izzy took a half step back from the doorway, and the storm door, which she’d been holding open with her foot, gave a faint shriek. “Well, is Pearl here? I—I wanted to tell her something.” She had been trying to catch Pearl all day; in fact, she had tried to call Pearl the previous night—but had gotten only a busy signal: Mia, while comforting Bebe, had taken the phone off the hook, and had forgotten to put it back on. She’d tried over and over, until past midnight, deciding at last that she’d find Pearl at school in the morning. Pearl, she felt, ought to know what Moody had said about her, that her mother knew about Trip. But she didn’t know which routes Pearl might take from class to class—would she take the main stairwell, with its crush of students, or the back one that led down to the English wing? Would she eat in the cafeteria, or in the Egress downstairs, or perhaps out on the lawn somewhere? Each time she guessed wrong, and Izzy was frustrated at missing Pearl again and again, even more frustrated at how poorly she seemed to know Pearl. Right after school, she promised herself, she would find Pearl and tell her everything.

Now, face-to-face with Mia, she could tell something was wrong, but wasn’t sure what. Did Mia already know? Was Pearl in trouble? Was Mia, for some reason, angry at her, too?

Mia looked down at Izzy’s anxious face and could not tell whether lying or telling the truth would hurt her more. She decided to do neither.

“I’ll tell her you came by, okay?” she said.

“Okay,” Izzy said again. With one hand on the doorknob she peeked up at Mia through her hair. Had she done something wrong, she wondered. Had she made Mia angry? Izzy, Lexie had always said, had no poker face, and it was true: Izzy never bothered to hide her feelings, didn’t even know how. She looked so young at that moment, so confused and vulnerable and lonely, and this, more than anything, made Mia feel she’d failed her.

“Remember what I said the other day?” she said. “About the prairie fires? About how sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over?” Izzy nodded. “Well,” Mia said. A long moment unraveled between them. She could not think of a way to say good-bye. “Just remember that,” she finished. “Sometimes you need to start over from scratch. Can you understand that?” Izzy wasn’t sure she did, but she nodded again.

“See you tomorrow?” she said, and Mia’s heart cracked. Instead of answering, she pulled Izzy into her arms and kissed her on the top of her head, the same place where she often kissed Pearl. “See you soon,” she said.

Pearl heard the door close, but it was a few minutes before Mia came back upstairs, her feet slow and heavy on the steps.

“Who was it?” she asked, though she had a good idea by now.

“Izzy,” Mia said, “but she’s gone,” and she turned into her bedroom to pack.

They had done this so many times before: two glasses stacked, their handful of silverware corralled inside, glasses nested into bowls, bowls nested into pot, pot nested into frying pan, the whole thing wrapped in a paper grocery sack and cushioned with whatever food would keep—a sleeve of crackers, a jar of peanut butter, half a loaf of bread. Another bag held shampoo, a bar of soap, a tube of toothpaste. Mia wedged their duffel bags into the footwells and laid a stack of blankets on top. Her cameras and her supplies went into the trunk, along with the dishes and toiletries. Everything else—the gateleg table they’d painted blue, the mismatched chairs, Pearl’s bed and Mia’s mattress and the tussock of pillows they’d called a couch—would be left behind.

It was almost dark by the time they’d finished, and Pearl kept thinking about Trip and Lexie and Moody and Izzy. They would be home now, in their beautiful house. Trip would be wondering why she hadn’t come to meet him. She would never get to see him again, she thought, and her throat burned. Lexie would be perched at the counter, twirling a lock of hair around her finger, wondering where she was. And Moody—they would never have the chance to make up.

“It isn’t fair,” she said as her mother put the last of their things in a paper grocery bag.

“No,” Mia agreed. “It’s not.” Pearl waited for a parental platitude to follow: Life isn’t fair, or Fair doesn’t always mean right. Instead Mia held her close for a moment, kissed her on the side of the head, then handed her the grocery sack. “Go put this in the car.”

When Pearl returned, she found her mother in the kitchen setting a plain manila envelope on the kitchen counter.