by Wiltz, Jenni
The blood rushed to Emma’s face. What was she supposed to do now? If she waited until they were done, Rachel would know she’d been seen. If she left now, Rachel would recognize the car and think Emma stayed to spy on her.
Emma slid lower in the seat and rested her face on the door, at eye level with the rearview mirror. Tim put his hands on Rachel’s shoulders. One finger slipped under the strap of her tank top and slid it off.
“Stop,” Rachel said, giggling and pretending to swat his hand away. She left the strap of her tank top where it fell. His hand caressed her bare shoulder. Rachel tilted her head and Tim buried his face in her neck.
Emma’s stomach began to tingle. She wondered what it felt like to have a boy touch her shoulder, to push off part of her clothing. What if she tasted like sweat? What if it tickled? She closed her eyes for a moment and imagined Dan’s long fingers tracing her collarbone. The tingle in her stomach turned into something sharper and deeper, warming her from the inside out. It doesn’t tickle, she thought.
In the rearview mirror, she saw Rachel’s mouth fall open in a gasp. When Tim lifted his head, their mouths came together, heads bobbing back and forth. Rachel stepped back against the wall and Tim pressed the length of his body against hers.
The heat in her belly was starting to make her uncomfortable. She shifted in her seat, wanting to hide her face even though no one was looking at it. She took a deep breath, in through her nose and out through her mouth. When she exhaled, she heard another car start its engine.
She peeked her head above the door frame to see who it was. The car was on her right, further from Rachel and Tim. White and rounded, it was some expensive car she’d seen in a commercial the other night. The driver had parked under a street light so she got a clear glimpse of him as he reversed out of the space.
Short blond hair, glasses, freckles—Emma recognized him instantly.
Rachel’s dad.
Chapter Eight
Monday, March 31
Elvira stared longingly at the empty badminton court next to them. Rafael was absent, and Juan sat on the bench, taking turns in an awkward threesome with John Betts and Raymond Choi. “What a waste of make-up.”
Emma glanced at her partner’s face, with its drawn-on eyebrows and lashes thick as a tarantula’s leg. “Did you do something different?”
“No. That’s why it’s a waste.”
The class had progressed from a singles tournament to a doubles tournament. Emma hastily accepted Elvira’s offer of partnership, and they now faced their first opponents: Marion Bates and Yesenia Santos.
Across the net, Marion shouted the score and served the birdie like she was spiking a volleyball. Marion was five-eleven, the center for the girls' JV basketball team. The birdie whistled down at Emma and she swung. Her racket tipped it, but it fell to the floor well short of the net. As she trotted to retrieve it, Marion pulled her phone from her sweatshirt pocket, her fingers flying to send a text.
“Incoming,” Emma said, tossing the birdie back over the net for another serve.
“I should have known he wouldn’t be here,” Elvira said. “His brother’s a Sureño.”
A nervous stab tickled Emma’s stomach. “What does that have to do with it?”
“One of their shot callers got hit the other night. Maybe it was his brother.”
The carniceria, Emma thought. The body on the pavement. All she’d seen on the news was an upturned hand, fingers limp, lying on blood-spattered asphalt. Below the wrist, she’d seen a tattoo—sur on one wrist and 13 on the other.
“Four-two service,” Marion called as she delivered another air strike in their direction.
Elvira leaned forward, racket down. The birdie bounced off its strings and back over the net. “When things get like this, you never know.”
“Like what?”
“Like a war.”
Yesenia turned her racket sideways and lobbed the birdie back over the net. Elvira backed up two steps and lobbed it back.
“Is that really what it’s like out there?” Emma asked.
“Worse. In a war, they fight on a battlefield.”
My dad’s out there, she thought. And there’s nothing I can do to help him.
Yesenia raced up and spiked the birdie. Emma and Elvira watched it fall to the floor with a rubber-tipped thunk.
“Come on, you guys,” Yesenia said. “You’re not even trying.”
• • •
The ranchero music commenced at 12:01 p.m. Across the courtyard, four members of the debate club stood behind a hot dog cart, each in a blue blazer and yellow tie. “Hot dog, we’re going to state!” their banner read. Via sank her teeth into one of their offerings and a glop of mustard plummeted onto her jeans. “Motherfucker,” she swore, mopping up the mess with a napkin. “Two dollars for a hot dog and all I get is indigestion and laundry. Tell me you’re having something better than lips and assholes for lunch.”
“I had a candy bar last period,” Rachel said.
On Rachel’s neck, beneath the edge of a fluffy scarf, Emma spotted the feathered purple edge of a hickey. Memories burst like fireworks in her mind: Rachel and Tim, his face buried in her neck, his hips pressing her up against the wall. She tore open her lunch bag and sank her teeth into her thin turkey sandwich.
“So,” Rachel said, adjusting the neck of her scarf. “How did you like Owen?”
“Owen?” Via asked. “Who’s Owen?”
“I introduced him to Emma at youth group last night.”
“What the hell? Are you one of them now?”
“I’m just me,” Emma said. “And I left early.”
“You should have stayed,” Rachel said. “Everyone wondered where you were.”
No one wondered, Emma thought. She looked across the table toward the group of Mexican kids standing near the speakers. The boy with the mole stood next to a different girl today. This girl had a partially shaved head, with wild red streaks woven through the black. Most of them were laughing, dancing, or scrolling on their phones. They didn’t look like kids whose siblings or parents were in a war zone. Please let Dad be okay, she thought. Please let Elvira be wrong.
Emma reached for whatever was left in her bag—apple slices and a plastic container of peanut butter—and dipped the biggest slice.
“Oh, my God,” Via groaned. “Can your mom adopt me?”
“Dad’s holding out for a boy.”
“What a coincidence. Mine is too.”
Rachel sat up straight. “Why did you look at me when you said that?”
“Because our dads are fucking deadbeats and Emma’s dad actually lives with her. I forgot what that’s like.”
“Me too,” Rachel said, eyes drifting to the prom ticket table.
Emma put down her apple slice. “Your dad’s not a deadbeat. You said last night you talked to him about Tim.”
“I take it he got suspended?” Via said, licking ketchup from her thumbnail.
Rachel nodded. “My dad’s going to fix it.”
“What can he do?”
“Write a letter or something. Lawyers always have a way.”
“At least your dad responds when you ask for something. Mine doesn’t know I’m alive.” Via pointed at Emma’s plastic container. “What kind of peanut butter is that?”
“The cheapest.” Emma shoved another apple slice in her mouth to keep from having to say anything else. All she could see was Rachel’s head tilted back and her mouth hanging open, while her dad turned on his car and drove away. He was there and you didn’t even know, she thought. You didn’t even look for him, or for me.
The words were there, aching to tumble out of her mouth. They rushed up from her gut, gaining speed and strength as they went. “I have to study,” she mumbled, reaching into her backpack for a book. It didn’t matter which one she pulled out. All th
at mattered was that she kept her mouth shut for the rest of lunch.
“Hey, what’s our chem homework?” Via asked.
“Would it kill you to write this stuff down?”
“That’s why I have you.” Via grinned. No matter how much coffee she drank, her teeth gleamed titanium white against her brown skin.
Emma sighed. “Chapter 13.4–13.6, problem set two.”
The courtyard’s loudspeakers hissed and popped as the student DJ changed tracks. A band of mariachi singers began to yodel in piercing falsettos. Some of the Mexican kids in the courtyard began to imitate the singers, shrieking like air raid sirens. Others posed for the girls snapping pictures on their phones, tilting their heads back and splaying their fingers in gang signs Emma couldn’t read.
Suddenly, she understood what Elvira had been trying to tell her. The pushing in the hallways, the gang signs in the courtyard . . . sometimes you didn’t need a gun to fight. She glanced back at the boy posing for a photo and sketched his sign in the margin of her chemistry book. She turned the page before Rachel or Via could ask why.
• • •
That afternoon, she did her pre-calculus homework first. It didn’t take long to realize she and composite functions were never, ever going to get along. She stared at the first problem in the set:
Find ( f o g )( x ) and the domain of f o g:
f ( x ) = ( x - 1 ) / ( x + 3 ),
g ( x ) = ( x + 1 ) / ( x - 3 )
“Seriously?” she growled, glaring at the vomitous mass of letters and numbers. She still had to go over her French vocabulary, do her chemistry problem set, and keep reading McMurtry. There wasn’t time to understand something so opaque it was literally spelled fog. She only had time to guess, collect partial credit, and move on.
An hour and a half later, she’d wiped out the pre-calculus and French and stopped to massage her pounding temples. Logarithms, masculine versus feminine nouns, indefinite article contractions, functions, exponents, graphs, irregular verbs . . . if each new piece of information had actual physical weight, her brain would drop like an overloaded cargo elevator, squish her eyes out through their sockets, shatter the canals between her ears, nose, and throat, and impale itself on her spine.
Her stomach growled and she looked at her watch. It was 6:22 p.m., almost half an hour past the time when her dad usually came home. “Mom,” she called. “What are we having for dinner?”
Her mom stepped into the dining room doorway, patting her hands dry with a red dish towel. “Tuna chip casserole. I’ll serve up as soon as I hear the truck. You can keep working.”
“I don’t want to keep working,” she said as she opened her chemistry book to Chapter 13, Acids and Bases. What did any of it matter when she wasn’t going to be a science major? If an apple fell from a tree, she didn’t care what invisible forces controlled the direction and speed of the apple’s fall. She cared how fast she could pick it up and eat it.
Her sixth-grade teacher had had a poster on the wall, pitting the word “history” against “herstory.” But complaining about the word itself was as useful as banging your head against a brick wall and then asking who put the wall there. Sometimes, she thought, grown-ups’ entire lives were designed to keep them from doing anything real.
Emma looked at her chemistry book and realized it was herstory in sheep’s clothing. She slammed it shut and headed for the kitchen as her mom pulled the casserole from the oven.
A yellowed three-by-five recipe card sat on the counter, written in Great-Grandma Jennings’s loopy cursive. Emma knew for a fact that Great-Grandma Jennings didn’t know anything about covalent bonds, but there were seven scarves and two sweaters she’d knitted tucked away in the cedar chest upstairs, intact seventy-five years after she made them. And whether Emma liked it or not (not), people still used her tuna casserole recipe decades after she wrote it down. That had to count for something.
The rapid fire of her sister’s feet pounded the stairs. “I finally heard the truck!” she said. “I’m starving.”
“Don’t say you’re starving if it’s not true.” Her mom carried the casserole to the table and setting it on a raffia potholder. “Let your father serve up first.”
“Gladly,” Emma said, shrinking from the steaming pile of mush. When she heard her dad’s footsteps in the hall, she turned to tell him how glad she was that he would eat her portion for her. “Dad, thank goodness you’re—”
She stopped. His shirt was wrinkled and untucked. The top two buttons were gone, their white threads caterpilling blindly into the air. The neck of both his shirt and undershirt snaked sideways, stretched until they sagged. A smear of something dark slid across his sleeve.
“Roger,” her mom said.
“Dish up,” he said softly, retreating into the half-bath near the garage. Emma heard the door shut and the faucet turn on full blast.
Mattie wrapped her arms around her sides. “Mom.”
“Don’t talk.” Emma’s mom pulled out her chair. “Sit.”
“But what—”
“I said sit.”
Emma’s fingers gripped the back of her chair. No matter how many shifts he worked at SeedCorp, he always came home with his shirt tucked in and a wink for each of them. Of course, something could have happened to his truck. But the smear on his sleeve wasn’t grease, and it hadn’t gotten on his hands or face. She didn’t know anything about cars, but there had to be a reason mechanics wore coveralls.
Her mom piled his plate with three scoops of casserole, two spoons of baked carrots, and two spoons of salad. “I told you to sit,” she said.
Emma sank into her chair and slid her palms beneath her thighs. She imagined her dad breaking up a mugging or helping someone who got hurt. There were plenty of reasonable explanations for that reddish smear on his sleeve.
She met Mattie’s eyes across the table and nodded in silent encouragement. It’ll be all right, she wanted to say. It always is.
Emma kept her eyes on the scoop of cooling tuna chip casserole. A few minutes ago, having to smell warm tuna had been the worst thing about this night.
Finally, they heard the faucet shut off, followed by a squeak from the circular towel ring mounted on the wall. The door handle turned, and her dad’s rubber-soled shoes padded onto the tile. He’d rolled up both shirt sleeves, making the rust-colored smear invisible. He sat down at the table and picked up his fork. Her mom followed suit, and then Mattie.
Emma stared at the casserole. She wanted to eat it because everyone else was eating it, but her stomach revolted under the best of circumstances. She speared a carrot slice, but it got stuck in her throat and she had to hold back a cough. She didn’t want to make a noise or do anything that would associate her with this moment in their collective memory.
“Roger,” her mom said, holding her knife like a scalpel.
“It’s nothing.”
“What happened?”
“I told you, it’s nothing.” He chewed slowly, the way Emma had when her braces were tightened. “I knocked on a few doors at a time, then moved the truck.”
“On El Camino Rojo,” Emma said.
He nodded. Black and white stubble dotted his cheeks and chin, as if a child had drawn on a beard and only partially erased it. “I had my badge,” he said, patting his chest. “I show it to people so they know it’s safe to open their doors. But I guess not everyone feels that way.”
Emma saw Mattie open her mouth and kicked her under the table.
“A man came up to me and said I looked like a cop. He told me to go away. Everyone there was getting too nervous.” He scooped a forkful of salad. One leaf, stacked with cheese cubes, fell off the fork and splattered back onto the plate.
Emma pushed the tuna chip casserole to the corner of her plate. When they interviewed cops on the news, they always behaved a certain way, using words like “victims” inste
ad of “people,” “suspects” instead of “murderers.” Their voices were loud and they looked over the reporter’s shoulder while they talked. Nothing moved them. Her dad spoke gently and always looked you in the eye.
No one could think he was a cop.
She waited for him to finish the story, but he didn’t say anything about how the buttons from his shirt came off. A sick, cold feeling spread through her chest, far worse than the kind of stress she felt over a test or paper. That kind of stress had an end point that gave it shape and made it manageable. She could shove it in a box, put a lid on it, and tape it shut. This feeling had no shape or limit, like a pre-calculus graph that ran forever, always approaching an axis but never actually touching it.
Her mom took a bite of casserole and chewed methodically. After she swallowed, she said, “Did you turn in the paperwork I gave you?”
“After the first round of inquiries. Not now.”
“You didn’t even ask?”
Her dad bent his head and Emma saw his fragile white scalp beneath the grey hair. Suddenly, a world of evil opened up before her. Her dad was human. The man who picked her up from the sandbox when she was three, held her on his shoulders, and danced her around until she felt like she was flying. The man who put her in some sort of baby sling and carted her up onto the roof of their first house, where Mom snapped a picture of them from the front lawn. The man who taught her how to do everything she was afraid of, from riding a bike to bumping a volleyball. He was the one who made her feel like fearless could be normal. If that wasn’t true, if he was fallible, then everything she thought was real life had only been luck.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Why not?” Mattie asked.
He turned his head to look at her. The smile on his lips was thin and scared. “We need this. I can’t complain after only a few days.”
“But it’s dangerous.”
“Yes.” He nodded. “Lots of things are.”
“I want you to ask for a transfer,” her mom said.
“Sharon.”
“Roger.”
