Pretend She's Here(74)

*

Even though we tried to escape the press people, they spotted us leaving the house. Their shouts made me block my ears.

Emily! Over here! How are you feeling? Do you hate the Porters? What was it like? Why didn’t you try to escape? Why didn’t you run away when you were at school? Will you testify against the Porters? Will you testify against Chloe?

Their words rang through me as if I was a hollow bell. The word that hurt the most was Chloe. Bea, Patrick, and I herded Seamus into the station wagon, backed out of the driveway, and headed down Shore Road toward town. Patrick drove fast, backtracking down dirt roads to shake our pursuers. The news trucks must have not wanted to get their fancy tires all muddy, so they dropped away.

The radio was on. Patrick sang loudly to Bon Iver’s “Flume,” and I felt this crazy fondness—my brothers always sang at the top of their lungs without knowing they were awful. We rounded the corner by the Congregational church and stopped at Black Hall Roasters. The café was on the first floor of a yellow Federal-style house with white columns. Bea and I stayed in the car, and Patrick ran in to get three black coffees. The Lonergans are hard-core; no milk or sugar for us.

“What do you think will happen to Chloe?” Bea asked me, turning around in her seat.

“I don’t want to talk about Chloe,” I said.

“Was she really part of it?” Bea asked.

“I told you! I really don’t want to talk about her!” I said, a little too loudly.

Bea stared at me with an air of older-sister disappointment, letting me know that snapping was unacceptable.

But her questions reverberated in my mind. Chloe had lured me into the Porters’ minivan right here, on this exact street. She had made me write that first email to my parents. She had reminded me about her mother and the knife. Yet I wouldn’t have gotten out of the basement without her.

I stared out the window.

“Em,” Bea began. There was silence while she struggled for the words. “Why didn’t you?”

“Didn’t I what?”

“Run when you could. Why didn’t you call us when they let you go to school?”

“Gee,” I said, feeling sarcastic and miserable. “I don’t know, Bea. But what a good idea. Why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t I just escape?” I glared at her. “Why didn’t you find me? Look harder? When I sent those emails, why didn’t you trace me?”

“Emily. We tried. But the IP address came up as somewhere in Iceland, then Australia. The FBI said …”

“I know,” I said, deflating, all the anger toward my sister going out of me, along with all the air in my lungs. Evil Mrs. Porter and her fake proxy server, her virtual private network. As Chloe had said, her mother had thought of everything.

Patrick came out with the coffees. Seamus let out an impatient yelp. He was ready for his walk. We drove down to Old Granite Neck, parked in the lot, tried to ignore the reporters who pulled up next to us. Patrick opened the tailgate, and Seamus bounded out, running along the trail to Long Island Sound.

Bea opened the back door, waited for me.

I shook my head.

“A walk on the beach,” she said. “You know how much you love that.”

“Not today,” I said. “I’m just going to stay in the car and drink my coffee.”

Bea stared at me for a few seconds. She didn’t follow Patrick and Seamus. She stayed with me, to protect me from the reporters. We sat in the car, not talking. I felt numb. I felt encased in a hard shell—me soft as a snail inside, everyone else on the outside. They couldn’t get to me, and I couldn’t get to them.

I tried not to remember how it used to be, when my sister and I would be talking and laughing so fast and constantly, tripping over each other’s words. Since returning home, I’d barely had any conversations at all.

*

More weirdness:

Being back in Black Hall, you’d think I’d want to text and see my old friends, my lifelong friends, catch up with them and get back to where we’d been before I was taken, right?

We texted, but I’d see their names on my phone, and my heart would do nothing at all. No feeling of happiness.

I lurked on Instagram and Facebook, not posting anything, scrolling back through the months to see what people had said about me. To my shock, Dan had posted all these photos of the Ghost Girl play, including a shot of us kissing.

My girl Em, he’d written under one.

Whattttt?

Then a slew of girls from our class commented: Oh, poor Dan! My heart is with you. She WILL come home. You have to heal. Can I help?

He didn’t reply to any of them, just posted another picture of me—he’d obviously taken it during rehearsal, me standing onstage pointing and looking kind of bossy: the director I was.

Dan texted me, too.

Hey its Dan u free for a sec to talk?



This would have been my greatest dream a few months ago. And I was free, but I couldn’t talk. I just couldn’t.

Sorry, busy, I wrote.

Dan: R u well? Will u tell me?

Me: Yeah, I’m fine.



I didn’t want to be a jerk, but I didn’t have that much to say. I knew that what everyone—including Dan—really wanted was to talk about THE KIDNAPPING. To ask what it was like to be abducted. To delve into the creep factor, of me being forced to be Lizzie. My friends, like everyone in Black Hall, wanted to know why I didn’t bolt.