You'd Be Home Now (70)

I don’t want to stay, because this is the worst thing that could happen to me, having everyone notice me all at once, and not in the most positive way.

“He didn’t make me, you know,” I say softly to Liza. “I wanted to.”

“I get it,” she says. “It’s just words. That’s all it is right now, words. But…”

The way she tightens her face worries me.

“Liza, what? What aren’t you telling me?”

“There’s…there’s something else.”

But the bell rings then, the last one before class starts. The warning bell, and we all scatter like mice.

But even as I sit in my next class, snickers around me, I keep thinking of what she said.

There’s something else.



* * *



—

Liza is waiting for me in the hallway after class. She grabs my arm.

“Tell me,” I say. “Just tell me.”

“There are pictures,” she says slowly, walking me down the hall, her arm crooked in mine. She’s keeping me on the inside, by the lockers we never use, protecting me from the crush of hallway kids.

    “No,” I say. Oh, god, no. He said he deleted them. “They weren’t…it was just…he said he got rid of them. I asked.”

She pulls me into the bathroom no one likes, the one at the end of the hall by the science labs. The sinks are always dirty. It smells.

“It will blow over,” she says firmly. “I haven’t seen them. You don’t even have to tell me what they are. It doesn’t matter. But they’ll feed on this. And you have to be ready.”

I slide down the wall to the dirty floor, tears crashing down my face.

“I can’t do this,” I mumble. “I just can’t. I can’t take any more.”

I should just leave. I should just go home.

“It will be okay,” Liza murmurs, patting my hair.

“J-Joey…,” I stammer. “Joey got high on Friday. Everything is a mess.”

“Oh, god,” Liza says, sitting down next to me. “Oh, god, I am so sorry, I am so sorry, Emmy.”

We sit like that the whole free period, in the dirty bathroom.



* * *



—

I’m exhausted by the time Liza and I get to Drama Club. Simon Stanley is showing kids how to work the lights when Lucy Kerr appears beside me.

I stiffen, try to prepare myself for more words. Liza dried my face in the bathroom, fixed my eyeliner, and told me to suffer through it. It will pass, she promised. It will pass.

If I can just get through this, then I can go home. I can go home and have some peace. Everything will die down. Me and Gage in the pool house will be old news. The photos might be another thing, but how long can that last, really? Then I shudder, looking around.

    How many of these kids have seen me now? Naked, in a window? I cross my arms across my chest.

“Wow, so you and your brother, everything you touch, you hurt or kill,” Lucy whispers.

Liza and Jeremy are practicing with the lights across the stage. One swings high over my head, momentarily blinding me.

“Just go away,” I whisper back harshly. “Leave me alone.”

“Did you really think Gage Galt was going to be into you? I mean, come on. Look at yourself. Dirty pictures in a window. You’re like, nothing. Just like your loser brother.”

I don’t know what does it. Maybe that she said he wouldn’t be into me. Maybe that she called me nothing, which is what I always think I am in this world anyway, but to hear it, actually hear it out loud, from someone else, it rips through me.

“You know, Lucy, you blame me for Candy, for giving her a ride home. That’s fine. I get it. But did you ever once think how I felt about it? How I felt, listening to her in the car? I was the very last one to hear Candy MontClair alive in this world. Do you think I don’t think about that every day? Because I do.”

I’m walking toward her so forcefully she has to walk backward, and she stumbles a little.

“You don’t need to remind me of it. I live it. And I don’t care what you say about Gage, because you know nothing, and I mean nothing, about me and him. But don’t bring my brother into it, and you know why? He had one hundred and thirty-one days clean before that dance, Lucy. One hundred and thirty-one days. And in one fell swoop, you ruined that. Did you know that? He had all those days and after you, he didn’t. Who’s the dick now?”

    Simon Stanley is calling my name, but I don’t care. I poke Lucy in the chest, hard.

“And you have to live with that now, Lucy. That was your cruelty. You didn’t need to do that, and you did. You put that into motion, and if you can’t forgive me for Candy, fine, but I will never forgive you for doing that to Joey, ever. You didn’t even give him a chance. You have to give people a decent chance.”

“Emory Ward.” My name again, sharper now.

“What!” I yell.

I turn around, breathing hard. Lucy runs over to Simon Stanley.

But it wasn’t Simon who called my name.

It was Principal Patterson.





28


PRINCIPAL PATTERSON SIGHS.

“It’s been a long weekend,” she says. “I’m sorry for what happened at the Fall Festival. From what I understand, your brother got into an altercation with Gage Galt?”