And We Stay (8 page)

“Amber,” Madame Colche says in English. “Do you need to be excused?”

“No, ma’ am.”

Over the course of the class, each time Emily glances back, Amber is staring at her like she knows something she didn’t know three nights ago. Emily feels the little bit of power that she wielded in the drugstore and on the bench slipping away. After classes are over for the day, Emily checks herself in to the infirmary so that she doesn’t have to go to Fitness for Fun. She sleeps through dinner; she misses her walk. The nurse lets her sleep through the whole study period but wakes her so that she can get back to Hart Hall in time for check-in.

K.T. wants to talk, but Emily wants to sleep. She crawls under the covers and tries, but her brain won’t stop showing its own little horror movies. In one of them, a large clock with swords for hands points to 9:18 as Paul lunges through the doors of the school library. Then, the floor opens like an earthquake. People and things, bookshelves and tables and notebooks, are swallowed up in the crack. In another one, Madame Colche chains Emily to the floor at the front of the French classroom and makes her dump out the contents of her backpack, which is loaded down with guns and boxes of bullets. Emily waits until she hears K.T. snoring, and she sneaks out of bed for her notebook and flashlight and crawls back under the covers.

Writing poems makes Time move backward, makes Time
move forward. Time will not stand still. Emily Dickinson raged her private rage by eschewing conventional punctuation or by capitalizing nouns that weren’t normally capitalized; sometimes she did both. In the vaulted Space of Emily Beam’s Mind, Ghosts hover like Clouds.

Emily Beam,
February 17, 1995

WITH THE AID OF HER FIRE-DRILL FLASHLIGHT, EMILY BEAM LEARNS
that Emily Dickinson had been as interested in science as she was in poetry. She believed in step-by-step scientific proof, not grand leaps of faith. She believed in the smallest miracles of nature. Stalactites. A robin’s trill. The dizzying speed of hummingbirds, each plodding step of the tortoise.

Emily Beam used to believe in those things, too. The survival of tadpoles. The transformation of caterpillars to butterflies. She knows that butterflies use antennae to lead them to potential mates. But what are humans supposed to use? What drew her to Paul, and he to her, was hard to say. They had walked the same halls for two years, and before that, they’d been at middle school together and in the same Sunday school class. What if they had just continued to coexist, as countless butterflies do?

Lying in Cole Hankins’s parents’ bed at the party, the party that ended it all, Emily asked Paul if he had ever loved another girl.

“It might not have been love,” he said, “but it was something.” That past summer, before Emily, there’d been a girl named Allison. Paul was working part-time at the farm
where Allison’s horse boarded. Allison, who was two years older, loved her horse; she did not love Paul.

“How could you tell?” Emily asked.

“I could just tell.”

“But how?”

“She was always in a hurry around me,” he said.

“Maybe you made her nervous,” Emily said.

“No,” said Paul. “It wasn’t like that.”

“So you never told Allison how you felt.”

Paul shook his head.

“You pined away in anonymity.”

“Yep,” said Paul.

“Why?”

“I was afraid to risk it.”

“Risk what?”

“It.”

Emily kissed his naked shoulder. “You risked it with me.”

“You don’t feel like a risk.”

“How do I feel, then?”

“Safe.” He paused. “How do I feel?”

“The same,” said Emily.

Which wasn’t true, not entirely. Sometimes being with Paul felt safe, but sometimes it made her feel alone. He’d be drinking with his friends, and she wouldn’t be, not wholeheartedly, anyway. If a trapdoor opened up in the floor, she could drop through it without Paul noticing until it was time to drive her home.

So Emily has decided that she won’t go to any more parties. She is her own entertainment. Tonight, while a busload
of girls from ASG are at St. Mark’s Academy making out with boys in the bushes, Emily decides that she will stay in Room 15 with her books. She will order pizza and eat every slice.

The Soul selects her own Society— / Then—shuts the Door
, wrote Emily Dickinson in Poem 303. A century and a half later, Emily Beam will follow in Emily Dickinson’s footsteps.

“So you don’t want me to sign you up for the Sadie Hawkins thing?” asks K.T. on their way to breakfast Saturday morning.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s the dance where the girls ask the boys. My God, Emily, you have lived a sheltered life.”

Emily shrugs.

“But St. Mark’s, being the elitists they are, call it the Snow Ball. It’s the same thing, though. Come on. There’ll be lots of guys there without dates. There’s this one guy, Sam—”

Emily cuts her off. “I don’t think so.”

As they enter the dining room, Annabelle waves them over, but Emily pretends not to see.

“So what are you gonna do here all by yourself?”

“Study.”

“Don’t you need a break?”

“I can’t afford a break,” says Emily. “I want to get into Harvard.”

“Harvard, Harvard.”

“Though I doubt they’ll accept me.”

“Sure they will,” says K.T. “Since you’ve made As on all of your tests—”

“Except for Trigonometry.”

“Oh, and what was that? An eighty-six? You know, I’ve learned something about you girls who study all the time.”

“What’s that?”

“You all have a pathological need to anticipate the future.”

Emily smiles a little. “So that’s your theory, is it?”

“Yeah. School coincides with the worldview that if you pay close enough attention, you can beat time at its own messed-up game.”

“You ought to write that down,” says Emily. “Put it in one of those essays you’re always turning in late.”

“Hey, if the weather’s nice, you want to go for a walk? Before I leave for St. Mark’s?”

“Okay,” Emily says. She starts to add the tag line that she and her Grenfell County friends used to say to one another: “As long as you promise me you won’t do anything that I wouldn’t do.” Emily wishes she’d listened to her friends. She and Paul had been so historically dumb. They’d believed the bond would hold fast when all it took were a couple of crossed signals and parents to dissolve the glue. But some images stick, and the words that go along with them. So many things Paul told Emily, so many things Emily told Paul. It makes her want to weep a cupful of tears. Even if she writes 1,775 poems, she will not be able to preserve everything they did together, everything they said.

Emily spends the rest of the day, in between classes and sometimes during them, reading
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
. She wants to write poems like these, simple but smart. Very, very smart. Every now and then, she’ll come across one that sounds like a nursery rhyme that took a
wrong turn down a dark alley. On her way to classes, Emily Beam walks to a beat in her new black boots and composes her own lost rhymes. But if she can hear them long enough to record them in her notebook—if they stay—even the faintest of poems can be found.

On a cold but sunny Saturday, K.T. takes Emily on one of the trails that start from the campus at Amherst College, just a few blocks away. “The college has made all these into a
wildlife sanctuary,” K.T. tells her. As they walk through the brown fields, K.T. launches into a stand-up routine about all the weird people in her hometown, like the fat man who goes around showing anyone who passes by how far he has walked on his pedometer.

“He never, ever loses weight,” K.T. tells Emily. “He’s walked everywhere for almost twenty-five years. He gave up his car during the 1970s energy crisis.”

Emily smiles.

“I wish you’d come with me tonight,” K.T. says.

“Maybe next time,” Emily says.

K.T. stops walking. “I want to be your friend. But sometimes I feel like you’re using me. Using all of us.”

“I don’t understand,” says Emily.

“Sure you do. ASG’s your hiding place. And I’m your beard.”

“My what?”

“Let me ask you a question. Are you a lesbian?”

Emily bursts out laughing. “Is that what everyone thinks?”

“Not everyone,” says K.T. “It’s okay if you are.”

“I know it’s okay,” says Emily. “But I’m not.”

“You’d rather have straight As than a boyfriend.”

“Pretty much.”

“I get it,” says K.T. “I guess.”

A bald eagle swoops out of nowhere over their heads and lands on a nearby fence post. “Oh,” says Emily with a gasp. “Oh, wow. I’ve never seen one, have you?”

“No. Hey, guess what? We’re no longer National Bird Virgins.”

K.T. and Emily try to give each other quiet high fives,
but the eagle rises and disappears into the branches of a tree laced with new green.

“Did you know that Ben Franklin campaigned for the wild turkey to be our national bird?” K.T. asks.

“Actually, I did know that.”

“It’s a sign,” K.T. says.

“Of what?”

“That you and I should room together again next year.”

“Sure,” says Emily.

“Maybe your work ethic will rub off on me,” says K.T.

“But that’s not why I want to room with you.”

“Oh, really?”

“You’re gentle,” says K.T. “But you have inner strength. It’s comforting.”

“I don’t feel very strong on the inside.”
As a matter of fact
, Emily wants to say,
my insides feel like a hurricane, and not the eye part, either
.

“There’s a guy at St. Mark’s I’d like you to meet,” says K.T.

“K.T.—”

“Look, no pressure, okay? Whenever you’re ready. He’s like you, very Zen. He plays the cello. That’s how I know him. He’s had his heart broken, too.”

Emily looks at her feet, watches them step across the stubbly grass at the same moment that something drops from a tree branch. She and K.T. bend down together. A pale-blue egg cracks open, yellow life slipping from it.

“Oh, no,” says Emily and, without any warning whatsoever, the tears spring forth. K.T. puts her arm around Emily until she is able to stand and walk back to school.

Emily Beam,
February 18, 1995