Pretend She's Here(82)

Bea scrolled through her phone and made an impatient-sounding exhalation.

“Mom, jeez,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“She joined Twitter and now she’s following all our friends.”

“Mom?”

“She’s replying to people,” Bea said. “To anyone who posts about you.”

Since getting home, I’d decided to close all my social media accounts. As much as I’d missed being online when I was away, I knew it wouldn’t be good for me now. “I don’t want to see what people are writing about me,” I told her.

“Well, a lot of people are curious about you,” Bea said, scrolling. “‘How’s she adjusting to being home?’ ‘What is she saying about Chloe?’ That’s their big thing—they want a feud between you and Chloe.”

“There’s no feud,” I said.

Bea looked up. “Em, how can you forgive her?”

I knew Bea was being loyal to me, but I really didn’t want to talk about Chloe. Maybe that’s why I uncovered Lizzie’s letter on the table, so she’d see.

“Is that Lizzie’s handwriting?” Bea asked. She leaned forward to take a closer look.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m doing my project on this amazing woman she found out about. Sarah Royston. She used to own the biggest mill in Maine, and …”

“Royston?” Bea asked. “As in the town? Where they took you?”

“Yes,” I said.

She frowned. “Why are you focusing on it?”

“Not the town—Sarah. Lizzie was fascinated by her. After Lizzie died, that’s why the family moved there. It was one good thing they did—a way to honor Lizzie. And that’s why I want to do my report on Sarah. She was a major business woman in a hard-core man’s world, and she donated her house to help troubled girls …”

I stopped short. I thought: Chloe. Maybe some of the girls who’d lived in Royston Home for Wayward Girls had been nineteenth-century versions of her, had had parents who’d committed crimes, leaving them with nowhere to go.

Bea leaned forward. “Em! Put that place and those people out of your mind! Royston and the Porters, just forget about them!” she said.

“Forget about them?” I asked. “You think I can?”

“I swear it would be better if you ripped up that letter and did your project on shipbuilding in Black Hall, something nice and local and so what if it’s boring? At least it won’t traumatize you,” Bea said.

“What traumatizes me is not thinking about it,” I said. “Pretending it didn’t happen. Why can’t you understand that? And can’t you let me have my own feelings about Chloe?”

I glared at Bea, and my heart fell. Tears were running down her cheeks. She took my hand.

“I’m trying,” Bea said. “But you don’t know what it was like. Missing you. Worrying every minute that you were never coming home. That you were dead.”

“Oh, Bea,” I said. I hadn’t thought of it from her perspective, not like this.

“When we found out you were alive, I was overjoyed. But once it came out that the Porters had taken you, and everything they did to you, I went crazy. I want them to pay for what they did to you—even Chloe. And it kills me that you’re doing a report on Royston—to me, it’s the worst place on earth.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “For not realizing what it was like for you.”

She wiped tears from her cheeks. Then she reached over, stroked my head. “Even your hair,” she said. “They changed the way you looked. They tried to make you into someone else. Every time I look at you, it reminds me of what they did.”

I looked at my reflection in the convex apiary window. She was right—my hair was two distinct colors: my own, and the black dye. The police and my parents had taken plenty of photos documenting all the Lizzie-isms—the hair, the mole, my eyebrows, the green contacts, so I didn’t have to worry about preserving the evidence or anything. But it was taking forever for my hair to grow out.

“I want to cut the black part off,” I said.

“Then the rest will be really short,” Bea said.

“I don’t care,” I said. “Will you do it for me?”

She began to smile. “Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, when we get home.”

“No, now,” I said.

Bea stood up and ran out of the room. She came back a few minutes later with a pair of scissors.

“Go for it,” I said.

And it was strange, but as soon as she started to snip, I began to feel really anxious. I heard the scissors clicking—sharp object alert. Bea caught the clumps of hair as they fell. I’d always had long hair, below my shoulders, and it suddenly felt so light and weird. I checked my reflection again. She had gotten about halfway through.

“Keep going,” I said. “Make it look good for Friday.”

“Friday?”

“Chloe has a hearing, and I want to be there for it. To make sure she doesn’t get sent somewhere horrible. Casey is going, too.”

Bea was silent. I waited for her to say that Chloe should stay in jail, that she didn’t deserve my support. The scissors kept snipping. I gazed at the bees. They were so still, no signs of life. But they were beautiful: tiny, perfect yellow-and-black bodies, waiting in suspended animation. Being in that cell block room had been a type of hibernation. I had been waiting to be rescued. The bees were waiting to wake up.