And We Stay

THERE ARE RUMORS THE DAY EMILY BEAM ARRIVES AT THE AMHERST
School for Girls—in January, halfway through her junior year. She doesn’t look like the other girls, who look like girls in magazines. She doesn’t sound like them, either, and she wears different shoes. As she sits on a bed she’s never slept in, in the first room she’s ever shared, Emily announces to the tall, curly-haired blonde standing by the window that she’s come from Boston. This isn’t a lie. It is where she’s stayed for the past month.

K.T. nods and looks down at Emily’s feet. “What size shoe do you wear?”

“Seven,” Emily says.

K.T. walks over to her closet and digs out a pair of navy-blue clogs with wooden heels.

“Here,” says K.T. “Wear these.”

Emily takes off her rubber-soled Mary Janes.

“They’ll be a size too big,” K.T. says, “which will make it tough to walk on those little pebbles out there, but at least no one will talk shit about you.”

As Emily slips on the clogs, K.T. takes the black Mary Janes and drops them—
clunk, clunk
—into the steel trash can.

“You can wear your pj’s to class if you want,” K.T. says. “A lot of us do.”

Emily takes in her roommate’s casual elegance: the un-tucked white button-down, the purple cashmere cardigan, the necklace of tiny turquoise beads, the brown suede boots with scuffed toes. Emily looks down at her new giant feet. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she says.

“Do you remember where it is?” K.T. points. “Just at the end of the hall.”

In the bathroom, Emily sweeps her long hair up into a messy ponytail, which is the style here, she’s noticed. In the morning—her first day of class—she’ll wear the Harvard sweatshirt she got in Boston. As far as boarding schools go, Emily has no idea how Amherst School for Girls (“ASG,” K.T. calls it—like
ask
but with a
g
) compares. Boarding school? It wasn’t even in the realm of possibilities; it wasn’t even on the radar screen. And by the time Aunt Cindy convinced Emily’s parents that it was necessary, ASG was the only school that would take her, and that was only because there was an extra bed since K.T.’s prior roommate, Hannah, had been expelled for sneaking out late at night to meet townies.

“You’re a Hart Girl now,” K.T. tells Emily on their way to dinner.

“A heart girl?”

“Yeah,” says K.T. “As in Hart Hall, where we live.”

“Oh, right,” says Emily. The dorm doesn’t look like dorms she’s seen in pictures or movies. It’s a house, a sprawling Victorian one, painted gray with purple trim, tucked behind a high row of boxwoods.

“ASG was the wrong place for Hannah to begin with.
This place is about the mind, and Hannah, well, she was all about the body.”

Townies. Dorms known as halls. Cafeterias called dining rooms. To survive here, Emily is going to have to learn a whole other language.

Maybe that’s why the poem comes sweeping in that very first night at ASG. In the past, Emily Beam has written poems only when a teacher has required her to, but as soon as she lies down on her single bed under the slope of the old wooden roof, lines unspool like ribbons, and she can’t fall asleep until she ties them into bows.

Emily Beam,
January 15, 1995

EMILY LOOKS OVER AT K.T., WHO, BEFORE SHE FELL ASLEEP, PUT ON
earphones and listened to classical music that was so loud that Emily could hear it across the room. Emily should be sleeping, too. It is five o’clock in the morning, and in three hours, after a special assembly celebrating the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., she’ll stand face to face with her first day of classes. If Emily had to tell somebody what happened in the Grenfell County High School library, where would she begin? How desperate did Paul have to be to do what he did? Emily will never understand it, never. Didn’t he realize that when he pulled the trigger, the world would go on without him in it? Didn’t he know that dead, he’d be nowhere?

Emily puts her head down on her desk, on top of the poem she has written, and closes her eyes. As she has done for thirty-four nights, she tries to read past the dark. Read into Paul. There was little crime in Grenfell County with its spread-out landscape. The most violent thing ever to happen in the history of Grenfell County had happened at the high school.

The high school to which she will never return. The day after she and her parents arrived in Boston, Aunt Cindy quietly suggested over chicken potpie that they find Emily a
boarding school, maybe even one in Massachusetts, where she could finish out her junior year. Emily’s parents agreed. It was not a good idea for Emily to have to go back home and deal with the whispers and stares and, of course, the memories.

Emily was stunned. It was straight out of the Brothers Grimm. Boarding school? Only orphans and screwups and spoiled rich girls went to boarding school. She would be despised there, made fun of. She would become the butt of every joke ever told. So Emily pitched a fit, which had no effect. She jumped around the dining room and kicked the couch in the den and slung all of the magazines on Aunt Cindy’s coffee table across the room. She told her aunt and her parents that they were evil. When she told them she hated them, they stared back at her, stone-faced.

For a month Emily stayed with Aunt Cindy, who oversaw Emily’s recovery by renting movies on a theme. The first trip to Blockbuster, they rented films set in Paris—Emily’s choice. The next time, Aunt Cindy chose films about high school.

“You haven’t lived until you’ve seen
The Breakfast Club
,” Aunt Cindy said. The movie was about five high-school types who don’t know each other very well and get stuck together in Saturday detention in their library.

Emily shook her head. “Is it really a good idea for me to watch something that takes place in a school library?”

“Emily,” said Aunt Cindy, “you’re seventeen years old. I think you’re smart enough by now to separate fact from fiction.”

That’s the thing, though; Emily isn’t so sure. A story gets told one too many times and facts melt away like pats of butter. Case in point: not even forty-eight hours after Paul died, people in Grenfell County were saying that he had tried to use Mr. Jim, the one-armed janitor, as target practice when the truth was that the two of them had simply passed each other in the hall as Paul made his way to the library.

Another case in point: a new girl shows up at the Amherst School for Girls after the holiday break, and rumor has it that this new girl got into major trouble at her old school. Why else would she materialize midway through her junior year at a place where she has no friends, no connections, no legacy? Emily and Aunt Cindy sat on the couch biding time until Christmas was past and the new year was under way, eating popcorn and watching stupid high school movies about nerds who prevail or virgins who succumb.