Open House(30)

Dean shook his head and got to his feet. “Is she going to be all right?” he asked.

“We don’t have that information, I’m sorry,” the officer answered, and then he motioned to two policewomen and two policemen entering the kitchen. “Take them back to the station,” he said.





TWENTY-THREE

Emma

Ten years ago

Please, Emma, says Brad’s next text. Just talk to me.

I’m back in my dorm now, standing in the middle of the carpet. I have no idea where Josie is. The door was locked when I got here, and I opened it to find her gone.

What’s there to say? I text Brad back, still standing awkwardly and unmoored like a guest in my own room. You know she’s my watercolor professor, right?

He doesn’t reply for a while, which means he either didn’t know, or maybe he’s with Priya right now, and she’s screaming at him, or maybe he’s just embarrassed and shameful and doesn’t know what to say. And if it’s the latter: good. Why should I be the only one who feels awful when he’s the one with the fiancée?

I glance around our room. Josie’s jacket is gone, which means she isn’t just bouncing around the dorm. Gum wrappers litter her desk, and her laptop is open to her email. I’ve never felt the need to snoop on Josie, even though I know she’s snooped in my email before. But now something pulls me like a magnet to her inbox. I stand there, zeroing in on an email from Chris’s mom, who lives a few hours away upstate. She’s the one who raised Chris and Josie when they had no one left. Josie told me that when Chris’s dad died, his mom tried to take only Chris back into her home, but Chris refused to go without Josie, so she took both. I recognize the woman’s address because she’s emailed me more than once wondering if everything’s okay because Josie hasn’t been in touch in weeks. Whenever I’ve brought that up to Josie, she just shrugs and acts like she forgot to call her and then assures me she will. Weeks seems like a pretty long time to go without talking to your family, but it’s not her real mom, and Josie and Chris didn’t exactly have a typical family life. Josie’s dad abandoned her, and her mom eventually married Chris’s dad. But then her mom died in a car accident when Josie was only six. Josie says Chris’s dad was a rage-filled alcoholic who didn’t want her in the first place, and hated her from the moment her mom died and he became stuck with her. And while Josie often tells me stories about growing up with Chris in a rural New York town she said could make you forget entirely about the city, she’s only told me one about her stepdad and the day he died. It was more of a memory than a story, really, because she can’t remember the beginning or the end—only the middle. It starts with her huddled on the floor, and then a slant of light spreads across the foyer, and she looks up to see Chris entering the house. It’s Halloween, and Chris is dressed like a superhero, which strikes me as fitting because Chris is still Josie’s hero, the one she truly loves, the only one she really lets in. In the memory, Chris’s smile fades as he takes in the sight of his dad lying dead at the bottom of the stairs with a twelve-year-old Josie sitting beside him, patting his cheek and trying to wake him. Shards of glass from the dropped vodka bottle fan out like a halo and surround Josie and her stepdad. Josie said that sometimes her memories call her like a scab wanting to be picked, and that in this particular memory it was the halo of glass that concerned her the most. She couldn’t figure out how she’d gotten inside it, sharing the epicenter with her stepfather, the glass like something in orbit swirling around them. She told me this when she was drunk and high, and the next day she pretended she never told me at all.

I stare at her computer, wondering if I can get away with scrolling through her inbox. I don’t even know where she goes half the time, like right now, for example, but whenever she comes back (sometimes in the middle of the night) she won’t tell me. She’s either into heavier drugs than I give her credit for, or she’s meeting up with her tall, dark, and handsome guy and sneaking into his dorm and staying the night there, or maybe something I can’t even think of yet because it’s so far outside the realm of what I could imagine. Josie’s always saying I’m short on imagination for an artist. It’s probably the meanest thing she’s ever said to me.

I’m about to turn away from Josie’s computer when I see another email a few lines down, this one from Noah. I can’t help myself. My heart goes wild in my chest as I open it.

What the hell, Josie? What does this even mean? Why are you emailing me something like this?

I scroll down to find an email from Josie, written today at 4:32 p.m.

This has to stop. You know Emma really likes you. What are you doing to her, leading her on like this? It’s cruel.

I step back like I’ve been slapped. Why would she write that?

I’m shaky at first, reading and rereading, but then I try to think clearly. Josie’s always overprotective of me, but there’s nothing Noah’s said or done to lead me on that she’s seen. No one even knows we’re hooking up because Noah hardly ever touches me when we’re in front of other people, even if the way he looks at me may as well be his hands all over my body. There was this night last month when Josie and I were drinking beer with Noah’s roommates, but Noah wasn’t because he had a test the next morning. Josie was watching the two of us like a hawk, like if she just stared hard enough, she could figure everything out. But then Chris got too drunk and said something rude to one of Noah’s roommates, and Josie was distracted trying to defuse the ensuing argument, and in that moment I snuck away into the kitchen. Noah followed me. I tried to play it cool, scooping ice into my glass with my back turned to him. There was plenty of room for him to pass behind me. But he came right up behind me and put a hand on my hip as he passed. I turned toward him, only an inch between us, and then his fingers trailed a line right over my hip bone, which burns every time I think about it.