Such a Fun Age(85)
“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 and 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.