Pretend She's Here(78)

My story. It all haunted me, but one part more than the rest. The question everyone screamed the loudest was: What about Chloe? What part did Chloe play? What was it like to have your friend’s sister as one of your captors?

I shivered, thinking of Chloe in the Casco Bay Youth Development Center. It had a positive-sounding name, but as one official said in an interview, “It’s rehabilitative, but it’s also jail.” She was under arrest and couldn’t leave. Her parents were in the adult jail. All three of the Porters were incarcerated, waiting to be put on trial for kidnapping me. I hated picturing Chloe there. I imagined how scared she must be.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Okay,” my mom said, hugging me. “No pressure, not one bit.”

“That’s right,” my dad said. “We’ll go with whatever you want to do. But for now—as if I have to tell you—don’t talk to any of them.”

“That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about,” I said.

I headed out the back door where the reporters couldn’t see me, toward the car to meet Patrick and Bea. But there was a gigantic surprise. Every single one of my siblings was there: Mick, Tommy, Anne, and Iggy stood in the driveway. When they spotted me in the doorway, they began to cheer. Mick and Tommy hurried toward me. I hugged them, and they swooped me up in a king’s chair and held me off the ground.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, smiling.

“You think we weren’t going see you off to school today?” Mick asked.

It made me think of how they had all walked me—the baby of the family—to school my first day of first grade. They’d all gathered around me at the hospital, kept vigil until I started getting better. But now they were back at college, beginning their second semesters. Now they were grown up. We all were.

“You didn’t have to come,” I said.

“It would have been really funny to see you try to stop us,” Tommy said. He half threw me up in the air. I laughed and righted myself, arms clamped around both his and Mick’s necks until they lowered me to the ground.

Anne stepped forward. She held out a scarf woven from the softest red-jewel-colored yarn, and she wrapped it three times around my neck.

“I made this for you, little one,” she said. “To keep you warm and so you know I’m with you always. You can do it.”

“I thought I was ready,” I said, my eyes flooding as I stared into my oldest sister’s steady gaze. “But now I’m not sure. Everyone’s going to ask too many questions.”

“And you don’t have to answer,” Anne said, and her eyes started watering even more than mine. “You’re as brave as ever. And you’re a Lonergan, as stubborn as your four big brothers and two big sisters. You have an Irish heart. Just remember that.”

I nodded. I was a Lonergan. I was Emily. I wasn’t fake Lizzie Porter. I wasn’t a rag doll dressed in my old friend’s clothes, parroting her words, with her mole dotted on my cheek. I wore a knit cap to cover my roots growing out. I’d tucked the longer black part up underneath.

I knew all that, but I wasn’t sure I could count on my Irish heart. I wondered if I had stopped, in some permanent way, having the Lonergan strength the night the Porters had locked me in that room.

“I should have fought harder; I should have escaped when I could,” I said.

“No, Em,” Mick said, and I was shocked to hear his voice choked up. “You should have stayed alive, exactly what you did.”

“You were perfect,” Tommy said.

“You’re with us now,” Anne said.

“Faugh a Ballagh,” Mick said.

“Clear the way,” Iggy said.

“Here comes Emily,” Patrick said.

Bea took my hand. She and I climbed into the back seat of the car while Patrick got into the driver’s seat. As we pulled out of the driveway, Mick, Tommy, Iggy, and Anne cheered and waved. I looked for secret worry in their eyes and saw none. They believed in me. I swallowed hard and tried to feel their strength. So far, no luck.

*

At school, most people circled me at a safe distance. It seemed they thought I might be dangerous. I felt stared at, like a creature at the zoo, as if I wasn’t quite human. Maybe they were right and I had turned into another species. Jordan and Alicia came straight over, though. They glued themselves to me while I put my coat in my locker.

They looked different. Jordan had cut her platinum-blond hair really short—feathered around her face and the nape of her neck. She had gotten a pair of Harry Potter–style black-rimmed glasses, even though I was pretty sure she didn’t need them. She’d started wearing a shark tooth necklace that she never took off. Alicia had spent Thanksgiving with her cousins in Mexico City and gotten a tattoo of Our Lady of Guadalupe on the inside of her wrist.

“I couldn’t sleep last night, I was so excited to see you, Em-girl,” Alicia said.

“I was excited to see you, too,” I said, a semi-lie. Nervous dread better described my feelings the night before.

“For once, my grades are the only part of my life that aren’t a mess,” Jordan said. “Nothing lower than a B minus so far this semester! On the other hand, Kirk is such a Scorpio, and I just can’t.”

“Kirk?” I asked.