by Wiltz, Jenni
“I was at the mall with Letizia. Monica was watching my little brother.”
“It happened at your house?”
“A drive-by,” Elvira sobbed.
“What about your brother?”
“Monica hid him under the bed. Then she went to—” Elvira stopped, her muscles suddenly tense beneath Emma’s arms.
In an instant, Emma knew exactly what Elvira was going to say. The world opened up in front of her like a ravine, newly split and spreading further apart with every breath. She was on one side. Everyone else was on the other.
“It’s my fault.” She rested her forehead on Elvira’s shoulder. “This is all my fault.”
Elvira’s arms snaked around her, but her lips stayed shut. They sobbed against each other’s shoulders until the first bell, then walked into the gymnasium, tear-streaked and grim-faced.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Wednesday, April 16
The wind had whipped color into her cheeks. She couldn’t see it, but she could feel it. They still stung, hours after the lunch she spent outside alone, crying for a girl she’d only seen once.
It was Monica’s gun she asked Elvira to steal. What if that gun had been in the nightstand when the drive-by happened? What if Monica shot back? Maybe the shooter’s car would have moved on a little faster, a little sooner, when Monica was a little more alive.
Emma put a hand on her forehead. It radiated heat, like the surface of the toaster oven after Mattie made a Pop-Tart. Across the street, she heard the rattle of the busted-ass Corolla’s loose muffler. It seemed strange that other people could go on with their lives, never knowing how things had changed forever just a few feet away.
Suddenly, she understood why school had to be completed while you were young. When you grew up and had real problems to deal with, there was no way you’d tolerate being asked to graph a function. People were hungry and hurt and dying everywhere in the world, and some stupid college thought it was important that she understand when the limit would approach zero.
There’s a gun in my closet.
She slammed her math book shut and walked down the hall to the spare bedroom, snatching the cordless phone from its cradle. Rachel’s cell was easy to remember. The last four digits were 1814, the year of Napoleon’s exile to Elba. She dialed as she closed the bedroom door behind her.
It rang three times before Rachel’s breathy voice answered. “Hi, Emma.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d pick up.”
“Neither was I. Where were you at lunch today?”
“I needed to be alone. Something bad happened.”
“Are you okay? Is it your dad?”
“Do they let you go to church anytime you want?”
Rachel paused. “The chapel’s open until ten. But there’s also a youth service tonight.”
“I need to get out of here.”
“Emma, you sound terrible. Are you crying?”
Her eyes drifted to the closet door. It had no real handle, just a grab-hole with a brass-plated fixture. Within a month of moving in, her sweaty fingers streaked it and permanently darkened the metal. “I did something stupid and someone got hurt.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Can you come get me? I know things are weird right now, but I need you to take me to church.”
“Emma, this is serious, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know what else to do.”
“Hold on, okay? I’ll be there soon.”
When they hung up, Emma went downstairs. Her mom, dad, and Mattie sat in the family room, watching a talk show. The blinds tilted inward, darkening the room. Her dad was in his bathrobe, a napkin spread across his lap. “Hi, Dad.”
He craned his neck and pressed his dry, white lips in greeting. “Em, you’ve been hiding from us.”
I would never hide from you, she thought. “Mom, Rachel’s coming to get me. I asked if she’d take me to church with her. Is that okay?”
“Yes,” her mom said, letting out her breath. “That’s more than okay.”
“I won’t be late. I still have homework.”
“You always have homework,” Mattie said.
“That’s why she’ll make the big bucks,” her dad said, pulling his dry lips into a smile.
Her mom got up and opened the fridge, pulling out some lunchmeat and a brown hunk of iceberg lettuce. She reached for a spreader and cast a thin sheen of mayonnaise across a slice of wheat bread. “They won’t feed you there, will they?”
“I don’t think so.”
Her mom squeezed a bit of mustard onto the turkey. “Are you sure this is what you want?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I have to try.”
Her mom handed her a plastic bag with a sandwich inside. When Rachel came to the door, her mom followed her, standing at the long, narrow window beside the front door as they drove away.
• • •
It was cold and foggy when Rachel pulled into the church parking lot. They got out of the car and Emma looked up at the droplets of mist swirling in the breeze, their windswept stops and starts visible in the stream of orange streetlight. “We’re in a Van Gogh.”
“Uh-huh,” Rachel said.
Emma looked sideways at her. “You don’t see it, do you?”
“It’s mist.” Rachel’s eyes flickered toward the door. Even though the temperature was in the low fifties, Rachel wore plaid flannel shorts, a white T-shirt, and flip-flops. “Let’s just go inside.”
Emma followed her friend’s perfect ponytail past the gymnasium, into a vestibule. A sign over a door on the left said Chapel and Emma started toward it. “Not that way,” Rachel said. “Youth service is in the rec room.”
Emma groaned. There was nothing holy about a rec room.
“Come on.” Rachel pulled her through a wide doorway. Across the room, Tim leaned against a wall with one leg turned out. He wore narrow-leg jeans and a Western shirt with pearly buttons. He smiled at them as they approached.
Rachel took his hand and let go of Emma’s. “You remember my friend Emma?”
Tim nodded. “I do. How are you?”
Rachel squeezed his hand and smiled brightly. He cleared his throat, which apparently meant he rescinded the question. Emma’s eyes floated across the room. Some of the same girls she’d met last time were here again—Madison, and the blue-skinned girl whose name she couldn’t remember. Behind them, in a corner, stood Owen.
I come here so I’ll know what I’m up against, he’d said.
Whatever he meant by that, she didn’t think he’d find it here. This place looked like any other conference room, with folding chairs arranged in rows and thin industrial carpet on the floor. Bloated ductwork hung from the ceiling, creeping like inchworms around the perimeter.
The mullet-wearing youth leader stood at the podium in front of the room. “Take a seat, you guys,” he said, waving them in. Everyone filed into the room and bunched into the seats in the back. Emma caught a whiff of several different perfumes and colognes, along with someone’s day-old sweat. She hunkered down in her seat as the pastor began to talk about peer pressure. He talked with his hands, and after a few minutes, tiny beads of sweat began to glisten on his forehead.
Beside her, Rachel and Tim kept their eyes downcast. Emma glanced around the room and saw the blue-skinned girl curl her fingers to inspect her nails. One boy had a cell phone tipped out of his pocket, angled to read the message on the screen.
The pastor reached into a cubbyhole in the lectern. “Now, if you brought your Bible, please share with a neighbor and turn to Matthew 16:21. Let’s look at what happened when Jesus faced peer pressure.”
Rachel and Tim made no move to find a person with a Bible. Emma stared at the floor.
“Here, Peter pressured Jesus not to go to Jerusalem, where he would surely be
killed. But Jesus refused. He told Peter it had to be that way, and he wouldn’t bow to the pressure of his disciples to save himself.”
Emma wondered how a few busted-ass fishermen and shepherds counted as peers for the Son of God. On her left, she saw Rachel’s hand sneak into Tim’s. He curled his fingers around hers, letting their joined hands swing between their chairs. Emma closed her eyes and wondered whether Monica had had a boyfriend.
When the youth pastor stopped talking, Rachel and Tim lingered in their chairs, fingers still entwined. It made Emma long to be home with her family. The comfort Rachel found here had nothing to do with God or the Bible. It had to do with Tim and her dad.
Everything led back to a father in the end.
“I want to go home,” she said.
“Just one more minute,” Rachel said. “Please?”
Emma sighed, remembering the feel of Dan’s lips on hers, and his warm hands on her arms. She hadn’t even told Rachel that he’d asked her to the prom. It didn’t matter now, not while she had a dead girl’s soul on her conscience. “Can I go into the chapel? I’ll wait there, or by the car.”
Rachel nodded. “The chapel’s open. Down the hall, through the double doors.”
Emma followed her directions. At the end of the hallway, she saw oak double doors with brass plated handles. She pulled one open and entered the chapel.
The ceiling was higher than any room she’d ever been in. Oval stained-glass windows ran the length of the walls. The aisle led to an altar draped in white cloth. She breathed in, feeling the weight of air perfumed by heavy, waxy flowers.
Halfway down the aisle, she sat down in a pew. The stained-glass window on her left depicted a man with a halo, raising his right hand and holding a book in his left. Are you there, God? It’s me, Emma, she thought. But you can call me Margaret if that makes things easier. She folded her hands and rested them on the pew in front of her. She knew she wouldn’t get an answer, but she asked anyway. Would Monica have lived if she had her gun? Would she still be alive if it weren’t for me?
The HVAC system kicked on, blowing a draft across her ankles. She wondered how anyone in a modern church knew what was a sign and what wasn’t.
Suddenly, the door creaked behind her. “Didn’t think this is where you’d be,” a familiar voice said.
She turned to see Owen’s shaggy head poking through the doorway. He looked at her down the long, flat bridge of his nose. “Why’d you come back? People only do that when they want something or when something bad happens.”
“Something bad happened.”
“And you thought you’d be forgiven if you sat in an empty room for a few minutes?”
Emma shook her head. “I don’t know what I thought.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Why are you here?”
“I don’t have anywhere else to go.” His clear grey eyes met hers head-on. “You?”
“I think I helped kill someone.”
“Well, there you go.” He slipped through the door and eased it shut so it wouldn’t make a noise. With silent footsteps, he walked down the aisle and edged into the pew beside her. “You didn’t have these last time,” he said, pointing to her cheek.
Emma shrugged. “Temporary tattoo.”
“You sure about that?”
“Why do you hang around a church and not a library?”
“Library’s never open. Budget cuts.”
“How do you know Rachel?”
“I’ve been coming here about a year.”
“How long has she been coming here?”
“You’re her friend. You should know these things.”
“Girls don’t always tell each other the truth about things.” Emma sighed. “I’m only here so she and Tim can make out for a few minutes before we leave.”
“You’d rather be somewhere else?”
“Home.”
“I can take you.”
“You have a car?”
He nodded.
“But I thought you said—”
“I said I didn’t have anywhere to go. Never said I couldn’t get there if I did.”
Emma looked up. Beneath the cross, electric candles cast their unbending light on the polyester altar cloth. “Coming here didn’t help.”
“If you wanted forgiveness, you should have tried a Catholic church.”
“Do they forgive you for beating a census worker nearly to death? Or for shooting a girl who’s babysitting her cousin?”
Owen shrugged. “I just sleep here.” Then he glanced back at her. “You didn’t do those things, did you?”
She blinked and was surprised to feel her lashes grow heavy with moisture. “I don’t know.”
“Come on. You can tell me about it in the car.”
• • •
The streetlight closest to the church’s side door was burnt out. Emma reached into her purse for a pen and some scratch paper. She scrawled a quick note for Rachel and went to slip it under her wipers. A quick survey of the rec room hadn’t turned up a single glimpse of her or Tim. “One sec,” she told Owen, jogging into the misty night toward Rachel’s car.
“What the hell were you thinking?” a man’s voice called.
Emma jumped. She pulled her hand back from Rachel’s windshield and turned around.
There was no one there.
“Dad, I—”
“You can’t explain it away, not this time.”
The girl’s voice belonged to Rachel. Emma’s eyes scanned the parking lot. She spotted them near the side of the building. Rachel leaned against the wall, hands clasped behind her back. Her dad stood over her, pointing and yelling. Richard Cooper wore a dress shirt, tie, and slacks, like he’d come straight from the office.
“You impersonated me and forged my signature, Rachel. What you did is illegal!”
Rachel tilted her face toward him. “I asked for your help and you ignored me.”
“I was in Atlanta, working on a case.”
“You didn’t answer me!”
Mr. Cooper sighed. “Just because I don’t answer you right away doesn’t mean I’m not listening.”
“How am I supposed to know that?”
“You’re supposed to know it because I’m your father. Do you really think that because I have to go across the country for a few weeks that I’m going to forget you? You’re my daughter, Rachel. Can you please try to remember that for more than a day at a time?”
Emma blinked. Forgery? The only thing Rachel had mentioned was the note that got Tim cleared to go to prom. Oh my God, she thought. It couldn’t be.
“Family doesn’t forget, Rachel. Not in good times or bad.”
He put one hand on her shoulder and Rachel shrugged it off. “Are you going to tell Mom?”
“This could have real legal repercussions, Rachel.”
“It was just a stupid piece of paper.”
“No, it wasn’t. You lied to get what you want, and you used me to do it. I’ve never been so disappointed in your behavior.”
“Hey,” Owen said, walking up behind her. “Are you ready?”
Emma spun, putting her finger to her lips, but it was too late. Rachel’s head snapped toward the new voice. She found Emma’s eyes and met them with a glare that would have turned Medusa to stone, her angry eyes and tear-stained cheeks glowing in the foglight. She would never believe that Emma didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I’m sorry, Emma mouthed.
Rachel pressed her lips together.
“Come on,” Owen said, pulling Emma away. “It’s cold.”
He guided her to the other side of the parking lot, to a dirty black Volkswagen bug. “Mi casa es su casa. It’s not locked.”
Emma opened the door and sat on the cold vinyl seat. She shivered and rubbed her palms against her arms. The left one,
covered with a swampy purple kick-bruise, throbbed under her touch. Everything hurt, everything was wrong. Church hadn’t worked, and now Rachel would hate her the same way Via did.
“So that was weird,” Owen said, turning the key.
“She’ll hate me for seeing that.” Emma looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. “Why aren’t we going anywhere?”
“Car needs to warm up. You ever been in an old car before?”
“No.”
“You probably won’t like it.”
“Why are you doing this? You don’t even know me.”
He curled his thin upper lip. “You trying to tell me you’re dangerous or something?”
“My mom would kill me if she knew I got in a car with you.”
“I just left two witnesses behind. I’m sure they’d come forward if someone found you in a ditch tomorrow morning.”
Emma snorted. “One of them would.”
“What is it with the way girls all secretly hate each other?” He put the car in reverse and backed out of his parking space without looking over his shoulder. Carefully, with one foot on the brake, he eased it over the steep curb to the street.
“Boys see things for what they are. We only see what we want things to be.” Emma paused. “It eats us alive.”
“You seem to be surviving.”
“I was.” A green traffic light cast a phantom glow on the hood of the car. She touched her fingertips to the scratches on her cheek. “But I don’t have any friends anymore. You shouldn’t listen to me.”
“Where do you live? I don’t even know where I’m going.”
She gave him directions and closed her eyes, letting her body sway with the movement of the car. It was louder than her mom’s Buick or her dad’s pickup truck. The whole vehicle felt thin and rough, like it had to work just to take a breath.
Twenty minutes later, he pulled into her driveway and put the car in park. Its gurgling engine sputtered and coughed, louder than a lifelong smoker. “It’s this one?”
She opened her eyes, wishing the ride could have lasted longer. Her mom would ask how Rachel was, and she’d have to decide whether to lie. She unbuckled her lap belt and looked at Owen. “Why did you really come into the chapel earlier?”
