You'd Be Home Now (7)

“Oh,” she says quietly. Her smiles dies. “Oh.”

“It’s not anything,” I say quickly. “It’s stupid, really—”

Maddie looks at me and she doesn’t look mad, like I thought she might. Instead, she looks sad. But why would she look sad about Gage Galt and his Instagram feed?

I grab the phone from her.

My heart drops.

She wasn’t looking at Gage Galt. She was reading my messages.

Tasha. I blink, scrolling down.

The first texts were just a day after the accident.


OMG are u ok? Please call me

What happened???

I can’t believe this

Call me



And then a few days later.


Hey Emory, call me if you get a chance

There’s a lot happening, rumors and stuff

     Why were you in a car with Luther Leonard

I can’t believe Candy’s dead God I’m so sad

I went by your house and no one’s there



I take a deep breath. There are others, from the girls on the dance team. Mary, Madison, Jesse. Candy was on the dance team with us freshman year. She was nice, bubbly and friendly and laughed at herself when she’d mess up a move. Then she moved on to Drama Club.

Everyone loved Candy MontClair.

Listen I’m really sorry, Tasha texted a week ago.


Leaving for dance camp tomorrow sorry we can’t talk

But there’s a lot going on

I’m really sorry, Emory. I hate this but

I think maybe in the fall

When school starts

You should lay low, ok? Some of the girls

Well, they’re just, I mean, we’re all sad

And there’s just so much to deal with

Did you know that Luther guy had drugs in the car?

I mean, that’s awful and kind of scary and we all talked I mean, they just feel really uncomfortable with all this So it’s better I think if you kind of back off a little bit Until everybody is feeling more comfortable



My heart’s thudding. I can’t look at my sister.

“You’ve been dropped,” Maddie says. “I was worried that might happen. Kind of wondered why no one’s come around to see you since you’ve been home.”


I heard about your knee, that really sucks

You probably can’t do dance team anyway

And let’s be honest, you didn’t really like it

I’m really sorry



“Emmy,” Maddie says, touching my shoulder.

I turn the phone facedown on my stomach. Shake my head. “Doesn’t matter,” I say. “No big deal. We weren’t friend-friends, really, anyway. I was just on the team.”

And it’s the truth. I wasn’t close with any of them, but I was on the team, and that meant built-ins like eating lunch together, hanging out when I wasn’t worrying about Joey. Being on the team meant a kind of protection at school. People to be with, so you didn’t appear to be completely alone. Some kind of social umbrella, by proxy, since I am not like Maddie, outgoing, beautiful, chatty, popular. All the things I should be, according to the family I come from, the house I live in. My mother.

And now I don’t have even that.

And the person I most want to talk to about it, who would list each and every thing wrong with each and every one of those girls, even if he didn’t really believe it, would be Joey. Screw them, he’d say. Snooty bunch of hags. Who needs that? You’re better off.

But he’s not here. And I can’t even call him, because Blue Spruce doesn’t allow phone calls. Something in the family handbook they sent us about building a base of inner strength before reentering the outside world.

“Let’s get you inside,” Maddie says gently. “Take a shower, maybe eat something. We can talk about this. I can help you.”

I nudge her hand off my shoulder and stand up, wobbly on my weak leg. My knee is starting to hurt again, more than I admitted at the doctor’s office, and I’ll have to ask Maddie for a pill, and my mother will wonder why I need it, and my brother is an addict, and now I don’t even have what little friends I thought I had, and I just want to disappear.

    “Hey, be careful, Em, what are you doing?”

Just…disappear.

I hobble away from Maddie and her concerned face, ignoring the pain vibrating in my knee, and stand at the edge of our ridiculously large, too blue, achingly beautiful pool in our achingly beautiful and carefully landscaped backyard.

Then I let myself fall in.

My shirt and shorts billow out across me and I swim beneath the surface, with just my arms and one good leg, encasing myself in silence, away from an accident, a dead girl, and my broken brother, and I decide, then and there, my lungs bursting, that I will spend the rest of the summer underwater, weightless and unharmed and silent and safe.





7


A STAR IS MIGHTY GOOD company.

Those are the words from a play we read last year in American Stories. They float up in me as I bobble on my back in the pool, arms out, water lapping my cheeks, the sky a dark, speckled tapestry above me. The story of a small town, small lives.

All summer I have been looking at this sky.

I don’t know any constellations, I don’t know what happens up there, I don’t know what it means, I don’t know anything but the calm that floating at night gives me. The way my body moves gently in the water, protected, the eerie sound of water drifting in and out of my ears every so often. The peculiar quiet of Mill Haven late at night, all our secrets gone to sleep. The water takes my pain away.