by Wiltz, Jenni
She didn’t know if Elvira would come, or if she knew what happened yesterday, or if she’d ever talk to her again. That thought hurt more than the red welt on her side, where the chola’s first kick had landed.
She watched the second hand fly around the dial. Girls tossed their backpacks into lockers and gave her strange looks over their shoulders. No one hung out in the girls’ locker room for fun.
7:53 a.m.
She pushed her weight onto her other foot. Two more minutes and she’d have to run all the way through the courtyard and the main building to Mr. Parker’s class. She leaned her head back against the cold cement wall. Somewhere behind her forehead, that same vein was throbbing. This is stupid, she thought, pushing herself off the wall. I’m stupid. She’s not coming.
She hurried to the locker room entrance and crashed into Elvira. Sweat beaded her friend’s brow beneath the barrel-roll bangs. Her cotton candy gloss was smudged below her bottom lip. “I did it.”
Emma gulped. A nervous stab in her stomach dwarfed the pain in her head. It’s really happening, she thought, glancing at her watch.
7:55 a.m.
“Let’s go.” She grabbed Elvira’s arm and pulled her to the bench beside her PE locker. Elvira eased her backpack off her shoulder, setting it down gently, as if it contained a bomb. Emma clenched her stomach muscles as she twirled her combination lock.
Elvira pulled a shopping bag from her backpack, something from a bath store, red with white candy canes on it. She handed it to Emma, fingertips turning white where they grasped the raffia handles.
“I don’t know where she got it. It’s probably stolen.”
“They all are,” Emma said, gauging the weight of the bag. It felt like a full soda bottle, not a two-liter, but the size that cost $1.50 in the vending machine. “The cop told me that much.”
Elvira zipped her backpack and stood up. “Emma, I only did this—”
“It’s okay,” Emma said softly. “I know why.”
“Don’t get in any more fights, okay?”
“I won’t.”
“So I’ll see you in PE?”
Emma nodded. “Thank you. You’re the only person who understands what family means. What it should mean.”
Elvira smiled wanly and turned to go. Emma set the red bag down on the floor and dropped her backpack next to it.
7:56 a.m.
She pulled out a piece of scratch paper with last week’s grocery list on it. On the other side, she’d scrawled a quick diagram of a handgun, copied from an online store. There were four of them, the top sellers on the site, with the safety marked in red colored pencil on each. According to the website, the safety temporarily disengaged the firing pin. The gun couldn’t go off in her locker or backpack as long as she set it correctly.
She looked over her shoulder.
Two girls stood at the end of the aisle, their backs to her, gossiping about a third girl. As long as she could hear their voices, she was safe.
Emma picked up the bag and set it on top of the pile of clothes in her locker. Carefully, she reached inside. Her fingers touched the soft cotton of a crumpled white T-shirt. She splayed her fingers over it, feeling out the contours of the gun. When she’d established the handle and muzzle, she slid her fingers underneath the T-shirt.
The gun was heavier than she thought it would be. The ones on TV looked so light. People did rolls, flips, and slides while pointing and shooting with complete accuracy. Emma knew it wasn’t possible, at least not for her. The weight alone would wear on her arm after more than a few seconds.
She tilted it downward. It looked fake, like a cheap piece of plastic. The article she’d read said that different kinds of guns had different safety mechanisms. The trick was in deciding whether this was a revolver, a semi-automatic pistol, or a kind of weapon not mentioned in the article. She’d studied images of the different types over the weekend. Just as she’d suspected, a revolver looked exactly like it was depicted in the game of Clue. This was not a revolver.
It looked like a semi-automatic.
She held the muzzle up and looked at the side of the gun. Glock. There were numbers along the side of the gun, too: 19, gen4, and 9x19. She didn’t know what they meant, but now that she knew she had a Glock, she could figure it out.
She flipped over her paper, where she’d written something down about Glocks, Smith & Wessons, Sig Sauers, and Rugers. For a Glock, the YouTube video said, you just had to make sure the trigger safety was in the “forward” position. If it was, the gun wouldn’t fire without a significant amount of trigger pressure.
She tilted the gun and felt the satin slickness of sweat-soaked skin. Her armpits would be dripping by the time she finished. It couldn’t be helped.
7:58 a.m.
In the trigger hold, she saw two levers sticking out, looking like the tiny scissors in her mom’s Swiss Army knife. According to the YouTube video, this meant the trigger safety was engaged.
Emma let out a shaky breath and slipped the gun back into the bag, settling the T-shirt on top of it. She slammed her locker, twirled the combination lock, and sprinted for Mr. Parker’s class.
• • •
“Take your stations,” Mr. Lopez said. “You have forty-five minutes to complete the lab.”
“Ready, partner?” Dan asked.
Emma didn’t answer. There’s a gun in my locker, she thought.
She grabbed the printout with the lab instructions and followed Dan to their workstation. He handed her the required safety goggles, enormous plastic windshields that left red suction marks across her forehead and the bridge of her nose.
She tried to read the lab directions through the plastic haze, but the words were all blurry. Every time she thought about what was in her locker, goosebumps raced down her legs and she had to start all over. “Hand me those test tubes,” Dan said.
Emma obeyed.
As he took them, he brushed his knuckles against hers. She looked down at his hands, lightly freckled, covered with long golden hairs. She wondered why his knuckle hair was blonde instead of dark, like the hair on his head. “Em, are you all right? You didn’t call yesterday. I kind of thought you might.”
Emma reached for her pencil. “Things are weird right now.”
“I can see that.” He pipetted PbCrO4 into BaSO4. “You’re stroking your thumbnail against your index finger like you’re petting a dog.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Classic nervous tic.” He looked down at their notes and circled the trial Ksp. “You’re doing it again.”
“Shit.” She pressed her hands flat against the lab table.
Dan put down the pipette and sighed. “Em, you’re starting to scare me. A fight?”
Her eyes drifted to the note he’d marked with his finger: trial Ksp is used to determine whether a precipitate will form when two solutions are mixed. Ksp was a constant representing the solubility product. But how could there be such a thing as a constant if the universe was descending into entropy? Wouldn’t that preclude a constant in the first place?
“I didn’t fight. I just curled up and let her hit me.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“I can’t tell you that, Em. It just doesn’t seem like a fight is something the real you would do.”
“The real me.” No one wanted to see the real her. They wanted her to box it up and take it back, like a Christmas gift that didn’t fit. “I don’t even know who that is anymore.”
“You’re more Anakin than Vader, I can tell you that.”
“Things change.”
“Not all things. Not the Force.”
“The Force is made up. It doesn’t count.”
“Look, when you’re feeling bad, it’s easy to convince yourself everyth
ing is bad. I don’t want you to do that. Don’t let this thing get bigger than you.”
“What if it already is?”
“It’s not,” he said, stepping closer to her.
“How do you know?”
He leaned over her shoulder and whispered into her ear. “Because it has to go through me first.”
She turned her head away, afraid of what he would see if he looked in her eyes. There’s a gun in my locker, she thought.
• • •
After French class, Emma hurried back to the locker room. Most of the sixth-period girls were gone or finishing up: lacing boots, reapplying lip gloss, smoothing hair ruffled by the wind. She squeezed herself along the wall, unsure whether to look at them, past them, or at the floor. Every choice seemed wrong. They’d take one look at her and then they’d know and then they’d turn her in.
She wondered what would happen if they called her mom to come get her from the principal’s office again. Would she even come? Where did they put kids so bad their own parents wouldn’t come and get them anymore? She didn’t want to eat dinner in her room again, without seeing Mattie’s smile and her dad’s warm eyes.
“Excuse me,” she said, shouldering through a line of girls. When she looked up, she found herself face-to-face with Via. White-hot panic flooded through her.
“Jesus,” Via said. “Overreact much?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I wore my PE shoes because my boots were pinching. What are you doing here?”
“I stepped in a puddle.”
Via glanced at Emma’s jeans. “You look fine to me.”
“In my PE clothes. I have to wash the pants.”
“You’re going to do laundry? I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Via’s skin was smooth and dark, with a luminous glow even though she only ever drank soda, never water. Her irises were almost the same color as her pupils, big drops of ink blotting out the truth in the beautiful parchment of her face.
Emma took a deep breath. If Via wouldn’t say it, maybe it was time she did. “All you ever do is tell me what I can’t do.”
“That’s not true.”
She set down her backpack, feeling a strange pang in her stomach. It wasn’t hunger or pre-test nerves. It was something sharper and faster, a stab from an exquisite knife. “Since freshman year, you’ve called me 294 times, 263 of them to ask what the homework is. You knew I liked Will Decker and you went after him anyway. You got angry when Dan started paying attention to me because you can’t stand the idea that someone might want to date me instead of you.” She paused, looking for a reaction. It wasn’t there. “What is it about me that makes you hate me so much?”
“This is such bullshit.” Via rolled her eyes. “Isn’t your mom waiting for you or something?”
“I only ever wanted to be your friend.”
“Friends need to have something in common first.”
“Don’t we?”
“Emma, you’re just—”
“What? What am I?”
“Selfish. You’re so oblivious about anything that happens in the real world. I can’t fucking stand it.”
Emma thought about the blood on the walkway leading up to the door, the vomit stain on the hardwood floor by the sofa, the cracked leather of the badge holder Kobilinski flipped open in the counselors’ office. “Oblivious,” she said. “Is that what you call this?”
“One bad thing happens to you, and it’s like the world is ending. You bitch about everything, but you never do anything to fix it. School, grades, boys, college, nothing is ever your fault.”
“I thought those were things we all felt. I thought we were helping each other.” Emma looked up at the buzzing tube light above her head. “Aren’t you tired of making decisions that affect the rest of your life before you even know what that means?”
“Come on, Emma, what do you think it means?” Via evil-eyed Marci Pitman, who did a 180-degree-turn and walked the other way. “I have a job, Rachel has a job, and we go after the things we want. That’s how the world works, and you’re the only one who can’t figure it out.”
“Like you went after Will Decker?”
“Are you still in love with him?”
“No, but I thought I was. You knew that.”
“Then you should have fought for him.” She shifted her backpack on her shoulder, looking at Emma from the sides of her eyes. “Grow the fuck up and do something without help for once in your life. The rest of us might die of shock.” Via brushed past Emma, a waft of rain-scented shampoo trailing behind her.
Emma sighed. Parts of her body felt like they were on fire: her cheeks, her heart, her belly. Pieces of the conversation echoed in her head, the words bumping into raw nerves and veins. Selfish. Complain. Fault. She tried to memorize them so she could save them for later, when she had time to figure out who was right. There was still a gun in her locker and she still had to get it out without being caught.
She shuffled over to her locker and opened the combination lock. Inside, on top of her wadded PE clothes, sat the red bag. She lifted it by the handles and snatched the clothes out from under it. Then she rolled up the clothes and tried to remember which way the gun pointed. What if she covered the gun with the clothes, but the fabric snagged the trigger and pulled it? What if she shot herself, or her mom, or Mattie?
She stared into the bag, at the white T-shirt Elvira had probably also stolen from her cousin. She could leave it all here and go home like nothing happened. Tomorrow, too. But then she’d spend every day tiptoeing around the locker room, wondering if she had the guts to touch the bag ever again.
She set her PE clothes on top of the gun and looped one finger through the bag’s raffia handles. A bead of sweat dripped from her bra band to her belly button. She held the bag away from her body as she walked toward the school’s main entrance.
When her mom pulled up, she shrugged her backpack off and tossed it onto the floor of the front seat. She held the bag in her right hand, moving slowly to keep it steady.
“What’s that?” her mom asked, flipping on her blinker.
“A bag for my PE clothes. I borrowed it from Elvira.”
“Who is Elvira?”
Shit. If anything went wrong, her mom had a name to give the cops. “Some girl in the locker room. I don’t even know her.”
“Didn’t I just wash your PE clothes this weekend?”
“I got them dirty again.”
“Emma.”
“I know,” she said softly. “I make a mess of everything.”
“You’ll eat in your room again tonight.”
“Mom, I—”
“If you want to eat with the rest of us, you have to behave like the rest of us.”
Like an ostrich? she wanted to say.
But just for tonight, maybe it was for the best. She had a gun to hide and manufacturer’s diagrams to find. It would be easier to do all of that without having to look her dad in the eye and answer questions about what she did at school that day.
• • •
Emma went straight upstairs and turned on her computer, blinds shut tight against the prying eyes of the outside world. Her hands shook where she held them over the keyboard. The gun was less than three feet away. She’d stowed the red bag and everything in it on a stack of crates in her closet, behind her hanging clothes. It was the safest place she could think of. Under the bed was too obvious, as were her desk and dresser drawers.
She’d have all afternoon and evening to figure out how to load it and fire it once she finished her chem lab write-up. She wouldn’t have bothered with homework at all, except that the write-up counted for Dan’s grade as well as hers. He was depending on her, and he was one of the only people who hadn’t let her down.
She opened the doc for the write-up, typing out the complicat
ed chemical equations and solving for the trial Ksp: [ .25 ][ .10 ] = .025 = 2.5 x 10-2, which was greater than the actual Ksp, 6.3 x 10-7. The result, she typed, proves there will be a precipitate.
She stared at the blinking cursor. Why wasn’t there an equation to tell her whether a friend was real or fake? She thought of all the days at the lunch table when she and Via sat next to each other, thighs touching in companionable silence. All that time, Via wanted her to be someone else. Now it seemed like her mom did, too.
There were other things she was supposed to do: a French essay, pre-calculus problems, a take-home quiz in English, two chapters to read for history. Emma glanced at her backpack. Nothing in it could help her put her life back together. She scooted her chair out from the desk and decided to get a glass of water. Her mom hadn’t forbidden her to do that yet.
Downstairs, the kitchen was empty. Mattie wasn’t home yet, and her parents were nowhere to be seen. Emma grabbed a glass and filled it with water. A whiff of chlorine wafted from the tap. Through the kitchen window, she saw the slick green leaves of the rosebushes glowing in the late afternoon sun. She wondered if her dad would ever tend to them again. There wasn’t anywhere in the whole town you could go outside and not hear Spanish.
She went back upstairs and headed toward her room. At the end of the hall, she saw her door ajar. White lightning forked across her heart. She knew she’d closed that door.
Emma tiptoed forward, avoiding the creak in the hall floor, and pushed the door open. Her mom stood in front of her closet, pushing the row of hanging clothes aside.
“Mom,” she snapped. “What are you doing?”
Her mom gasped and spun around.
“What are you doing in my closet?”
A forced smile widened the parentheses around her mom’s mouth. “Looking for your PE clothes. The ones you brought home for me to wash.”
They were in the red bag with the gun, inches from her mom’s fingertips. She’d forgotten to take them out before she hid the bag. Emma’s heart beat fast enough to make her see spots. “I already took them downstairs.”
Her mom tilted her head. “Where?”
“The floor of the laundry room.”
