Pretend She's Here(47)

Casey smiled. “You need calluses. You’ll get them, the more you practice. Just take it easy now, let me hear you.”

I nodded and strummed harder than I’d intended.

“That’s an E chord,” he said encouragingly. He readjusted my finger pattern on the neck, and I strummed again with slightly more control.

“There—an A.”

He showed me D, which was a little harder, an E minor, which was really easy, and a C and G, but by then I got mixed up, trying to remember everything, and by the movement of his hands over mine, his warm breath on my cheek, and the way he closed his eyes when I strummed each chord.

“You’re getting it,” he said.

“I have a long way to go,” I said.

“Not really,” he said. “Our songs are really simple, with a typical chord progression, A-E-D.”

“But the melodies are so much more complicated!”

“Well, we riff on them, and Hideki completely slays on guitar solos. And Angelique’s fiddle always takes the song somewhere else completely.”

I hesitated, going back and forth on whether or not I should ask, but I had to know. “Are you two going out?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

He was very quiet for a minute. “No,” he said after a while. “We used to.”

“I thought, by the way she wanted to sit with you … that you were, or that she wanted to.”

“She broke up with me,” he said. “So I don’t really think that’s the case.”

She wants you back, I wanted to say, but I had the feeling he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing,” I said. “If I reminded you of being hurt.”

“It’s been since the summer,” he said. “It was bad back then, but I’m over it.” The way he said it so fast made me wonder if he really was. “How about you? Are you with anyone? From before you came here?”

“No,” I said, thinking of my unrequited crush on Dan. “Not at all.”

“It’s funny,” he said. “Earlier today, when I said your voice sounded familiar in a different way?”

“Yeah?”

“I was almost going to ask, are you on the run?”

“The what?” I asked, my spine freezing.

“There was something on the morning news,” he said. “A girl who went missing, maybe ran away. It caught my attention, because her name is Emily, and I thought of the song. That’s probably why, when they played a clip of her talking, she sounded like you. Crazy, right?”

“Crazy,” I said. My voice came out in a croak.

“My mistake,” he said. “I tend to listen extra hard—I guess because I love music so much and, I don’t know, to make up for other things. You and that girl really do sound alike.”

“What a coincidence,” I whispered, almost afraid to have him hear and register my voice.

“Yeah,” he said.

All I had to do was let the truth spill out. We could tell his dad, the police cars could arrive silently so Mrs. Porter wouldn’t hear.

But she saw everything. Shadowlands, Casey had said. I knew what he meant. Mrs. Porter lived in my mind, and she existed in reality, too—constantly in the shadows just out of sight. I was positive she was watching out the kitchen window—or maybe she was hovering just outside the Donoghues’s house, behind the sycamore tree, eyes trained on me now.

Wind whistled, coming through cracks in the door, making a loose shutter clunk against the house—boom, boom, boom, over and over again. The stove had started to heat up, and the furnace was humming in the basement, and Casey was sitting so close beside me.

I had the feeling that if he looked at me right then I would tell him everything. And he did—he glanced over. I opened my mouth, but no words came out.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I couldn’t nod, I couldn’t shake my head, I couldn’t move.

“Are you that girl?” he asked, frowning. The question hung in the air between us. Seconds of silence ticked on. I tried to shake my head no, but I was frozen. Finally, as if he thought he must have sounded foolish, he gave me a hesitant grin. “I’m so sorry. Of course you’re not,” he said. “You wouldn’t be living with the Porters if you were.”

Casey went back to music. I practiced the chords. A-E-D, A-E-D, over and over. He hummed along at first, then picked up his mandolin and began to play, so it actually started to sound like a song. I concentrated on the triangles, my fingers on the strings until my breathing calmed down and I was pretty sure my heart wouldn’t fly out of my chest.

I made up lyrics in my head—is this how it was for Lizzie, writing a poem? I didn’t know. For that moment, I was myself again: Emily Lonergan. I had no idea what Lizzie would hear in the melody, but running through my mind, in time to the chords, were the words:

You heard my voice, you know my name,

Lizzie and I are not the same,

I wish you could look at me and see

I’m Emily, I’m Emily.



“I want to show you something,” Casey said after we had played for a while. He replaced our instruments in the stands. Then he led me down the hallway to the kitchen. Everything was old-fashioned: a yellowing enamel stove, a refrigerator with a motor that hummed as if it were about to give out, a big farmhouse sink.