Dear Emmie Blue

by Lia Louis

  “Okay,” I say eventually.

  “Okay?” Her eyes are wide, like saucers.

  “Okay,” I say again. “If that’s how you feel, then… okay.”

  There is silence as Mum stares at me, clears her throat as if snapping herself out of a trance. She fiddles with a box of tea bags, trying to make it so the lid, which is bent, covers the opening, and I sit beside her, staring around the tiny van that took her away from me so many times when I needed her most. Age fourteen when I’d gotten my first-ever painful, heavy period and panicked and called Georgia. Georgia’s mum came rushing around with a hot water bottle and nighttime sanitary pads and ran me a bath. Age fifteen when I’d failed my mock Maths GCSE, when I had my first kiss, when the neighbor downstairs had a screaming argument with her boyfriend, who threatened to “torch the place,” and I waited, for the sound of fire alarms or the smell of smoke, alone in bed, unable to sleep for weeks after that. The Summer Ball. The migraines that had started soon after, and the nightmares. So many, many times I had watched this tiny van disappear down the road, from my bedroom window.

  “I should get back to it, actually,” says Mum. “There will be people out there wanting readings, and it isn’t fair if I sit in here, letting it pass them by.”

  I don’t want to, but I hug Mum goodbye outside the van, her body rigid—sharp bones and cold necklace chains—and as we part, I think I know. This is the last time I put myself through these meetings I expect nothing from. Over the years, I have hoped for more, of course, the way someone hopes to fall in love, to see the northern lights one day, but I don’t expect it. It’s why I came tonight. It’s why I asked her to dinner. Because I have always hoped that one day she will say yes. That we’ll sit at a little round table, eating together, a bottle of wine between us, and she will tell me about when she was happy, and about the words I’d pronounced wrong when I was a toddler, with chubby hands and dimples for knuckles. And maybe, I always hope to myself, she will tell me how I would make her clay lumps in the first year of kindergarten, painted red and speckled with glitter, or how after bedtime stories she would smell the soapy crown of my hair as I’d fallen asleep beside her.

  I walk to the bus stop, my eyes on the horizon, the darkening sky the shade of blossom, the sea like blue ink. I think of my hot but safe room at Fishers Way. I think of the hotel, and Rosie and Fox. And I think of Lucas. Of my balloon, and how far it traveled to him, across those inky waves. I think of the wide world out there and all its possibilities.

  Maybe one day I’ll see the northern lights.

  And someday I’ll fall in love.

  You might think being a best man simply means organizing the stag, carrying the rings, and making one hell of a speech to remember, but you can elevate yourself to Best Man God by helping in other ways, too, my dude! Have you thought about arranging accommodations for the groomsmen, or asking the happy couple if they need help with the guest list? And, of course, there is the important subject of the outfit. It’s down to you, Best Man Boss, and official right-hand man, to help your groom look his dapper best on the day he ties the knot, so get comfortable in those changing rooms. It’s time for Chapter Seven: Let’s talk about suits…

  * * *

  “I look a twat.”

  I stare at Lucas, who stands under the harsh spotlights of a changing room cubicle, the heavy curtain pulled to one side, in a brilliant-white tuxedo. He looks like someone made of fondant icing.

  “Oh god, I do look a twat, don’t I?”

  “No, no, not at all.”

  “Emmie, your face says it all.”

  “No, I was just… well, I wasn’t expecting—it’s very white, isn’t it?”

  Lucas looks down at the suit as if he’s only just realized he’s wearing one, and looks back up at me and laughs. “I look like… I dunno, a—” He stops, catching a look at me, with my hand at my mouth, my lips pressed together, and goes wide-eyed. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, come on,” he laughs. “What do I look like?”

  I pause, a smile breaking out across my face. “You just for a minute reminded me of when little curly-haired Screech from Saved by the Bell went to prom.”

  Lucas gawps at that, gray eyes widening. “Wounded,” he laughs. “But that’s settled it then, hasn’t it? I cannot in any way, shape, or form, wear a fucking white suit.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Screech, Emmie. You said little curly-haired Screech. That’s all any prospective groom needs to hear.” Lucas throws his head back, sighs, then with one swift movement draws the curtain to closed. A moment later I hear laughter from behind the drape.

  We have been here in the changing rooms of a high street menswear chain in Berck-sur-Mer for the last half an hour, mostly laughing, as Lucas tries on suits and blazers in an array of different styles and colors; some that make him look like a Hugo Boss model, and others, part–Willy Wonka, part–varicose vein. He’ll be using a bespoke tailor whom Jean has used for many years for his actual wedding suit, apparently, but he wanted to come here to get a “feel” for the sort of style he likes. So far, he likes only the dark shades of blue best. The only color Marie told him she didn’t want.

  “Marie wants me to try powder blue and white,” he’d said on the phone, the day after I saw Mum at the Maypole Festival. “White, Em. Like a member of bloody *NSYNC or something. I need your eyes. I know you won’t let me look like a loser. When’s good for you? Can you come for a weekend?”

  I was nervous, I admit, coming here to do this. I think that’s why I immediately, despite having no shifts, told him I was busy last weekend. I’d give myself a week, I thought, before I’d come back here. A week to strengthen my resolve. Allow my heart, and my head, a breather, some time to heal. I did some more crying in bed, some rewatching of my favorite Hallmark straight-to-television films full of meant-to-be’s and men in plaid shirts, and had many pull-my-shit-together chats with Rosie over packed lunches at work. I’m far from enthused, far from excited, but it’s like Rosie said: chance, meant-to-be’s—they cannot be rushed or planned. And if it’s meant to be, I have to trust it will be.

  The next morning, I’d sat at the kitchen table beside my quiet landlady, Louise, with her mint tea and golden pen, poised on another crossword puzzle, and I started a Pinterest board called “Lucas’s Wedding” and ordered a book. “Threw myself into this best-woman business,” as Fox had put it. Eased in, is probably more accurate, the way you do into a too-hot bath.

  “A book?” Lucas had picked it up last night off the coffee table and settled back down on the sofa. “You the (Best) Man! Wow. Clever.”

  “It had the strongest reviews. Shockingly.”

  Lucas had looked at me then and smiled lazily, head against the back of the sofa. “I love you for buying a book.”

  “Well, I’m a rookie at this,” I told him. “I’ve got to start somewhere, haven’t I?”

  It was like old times last night: his parents in the main house, reading, cooking, listening to classical music; Marie miles away with her dad, for business; and just Lucas and me, with a takeaway pizza and a bottle of rosé, in the living room of the guest cottage. It felt normal, like it’s always been, and my stomach had settled, the way it does after the first slice of toast and cup of tea post–tummy bug.

  “And you’ve marked all these pages.” Lucas smiled, opening the book and tugging at a pink sticky tag. “Where Emmie Blue goes, so do the Post-its, eh?”

  “Naturally.”

  Then he’d stretched his strong arm around me and pulled me toward him, my head on his shoulder. “And you’re… cool with this,” he’d said softly, over the mumble of the TV. It wasn’t a question, but I nodded.

  “And… you are?” I asked.

  He’d sighed then, and when I looked up at him, he nodded too, robotically, mimicking the way I had, and chuckled.

  “And remember, Marie said the dress is up to you.”

  “I know,” I said.
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  “And you don’t have to worry about the stag stuff either. Tom said he’ll sort the party and only involve you on the little details, so don’t feel like you have to do everything and—”

  “I know, Luke.”

  I felt him nod again, his chin brushing the side of my head. Then there was quiet again, and I could feel them, the way you feel a storm before the first thunderclap: so many unsaid words, swelling, multiplying, hanging above us like fog. “Em?” he said, lips against my hair, and I braced myself.

  “Yeah?”

  Could I? I thought, squashed into him. Could I lie if he asked me outright, right now? If he asked me how I felt about him doing this?

  He hesitated, cleared his throat. “You the man,” he simply said, then laughed, and so did I, with relief as the fog slowly dispersed. And that’s where we’d stayed—there, against the soft cotton of the button-studded sofa, watching a film—one of Lucas’s many “oh my God, how have you not seen it?” choices we’ve been working our way through for years.

  “Seriously,” he says now from behind the changing room curtain, which juts and judders with his movement. “Couldn’t you have lied and said I looked like Chris Evans?”

  “God, you’re not still going on about it,” I say from the padded cube I’m sitting on outside the dressing room.

  “I definitely am.”

  “You wanted me here for honesty,” I call out. “Let it go, Moreau.”

  The curtain is drawn back. “No.” He grins. He’s in only jeans, muscular and bare-chested, and I don’t know why, because during the fourteen years we have known each other, I have seen Lucas in all different stages of undress—albeit mostly drunken, him sobbing into various vessels as he pukes (toilets, jumbo crisp packets, hats, his mum’s mop bucket)—but today, my face is instantly aflame at the sight of him.

  “Jesus,” he says. “How roasting is it in here?” He reaches inside the cubicle and pulls on his shirt and starts buttoning it up.

  “Are you not… trying any more on?” I look away, pretending to take great interest in the characterless changing room, the fluorescent lights, the carpet, and oh, are those beams?

  “I think we’ve seen quite enough,” says Lucas. “Plus, Marie wanted me to try the white, didn’t she, see how I felt about it…”

  “And how did you feel about it?”

  Lucas looks at me, smiling, fingers fastening a button at his chest. “I don’t know,” he says, “but we all know how you felt about it, don’t we?”

  Moments later we walk through the sliding doors of the shopping center and out to the warm, salty breeze of Berck, a seaside town with the biggest stretch of beach I think I have ever seen. I’ve lost count of the amount of times we have come here. Dinners and lunches and paper bag wrapped sandwiches on the beach, and shopping trips where we’ve whiled away the day, talking, with Lucas stopping every now and then to point things out—the use of a certain material on a villa, the fifteenth-century carvings on the stone corbel of a church. Tiny snippets of beauty in buildings the rest of us would walk by and miss.

  “Architects aren’t real people, are they?” Rosie said last week. “I mean, they’re in all the films and ITV dramas and that, but I don’t think anyone in real life actually does that job.”

  “Oh, interesting take,” Fox had said.

  “Why is it?”

  “Just interesting. But then you do only date mechanics and people that emerge from a day’s work coated in a greasy residue, so I must say I’m unsurprised.”

  “Er, what?” she’d said, then looked at me and said with a smirk, “I can’t be sure, Emmie, but I think he’s speaking Latin again.”

  Lucas’s dad is an architect, and I often wonder if Lucas actually really wanted to be the same, or whether it was instilled in him, this love for design, for structure, so long ago, that it’s impossible to know whether it’s a natural part of him or something planted and now fully grown. Jean had decided Lucas was going to university long before Lucas knew he definitely wanted to go; decided which and what modules and “if you can be only one thing, you two, be driven.” Jean is like that. People are mostly their successes, and although I have frequently worried about what he thinks of me—working class, single-parented, someone who only managed one year of college and goes into Waitrose for no more than a scotch egg to eat on the bus—it has helped me in the past, having Lucas beside me, his dad snapping at his heels. I may not have quite managed to finish the full two years at college in the end, but I found the strength to keep studying because he did. Despite the loneliness, despite Georgia, despite the rumors about me and Mr. Morgan, because he told me it would be worth it, that I was bigger than it. Having someone who could see their future so clearly, with so much excitement, helped disperse the smoke distorting my own.

  “Where you at, Emmie Blue?” Lucas looks down at me now as we walk slowly in the sunshine. He asks this a lot, texts it sometimes, in horrendous on-purpose shorthand text: emmie blue whr u @? It can mean where am I physically sometimes, yes, when I haven’t answered my phone for a while or if it’s been a day or two since hearing from me, but he asks me mostly when I’m quiet, when my brain is spiraling off somewhere, and he can somehow tell, and wants to help pull it back to land.

  “Food,” I say with a smile. “I’m thinking about food.”

  “Then you’re going to love this new place we’re going to for lunch. Plus,” he says, “they do chips that taste like the ones we used to eat in your flat. When you’d use your old-lady fryer. That’s why we’re going.”

  “God, I miss my old-lady fryer,” I sigh.

  “I miss your old-lady fryer. And your chips, actually.”

  “Me too. Why haven’t we had them for ages?”

  Lucas gives a little shrug. “I dunno, Em,” he says. “I guess I haven’t been over in a while. Life, work, the promotion, all that. Bit shit growing up and being an adult sometimes, isn’t it?”

  I look up at him, the sun turning his hair the color of spun sugar. I’d style it when we were younger. I’d sit on the sofa and he’d sit on the floor, between my legs, his back against the couch, and I’d plait chunks of hair, spray punky spikes bolt upright on his head as he watched TV and said, “Make me look beautiful, Emmie Blue. I’ll accept nothing less.” His brother Eliot and I straightened it once. “You look like our old neighbor. Leticia,” Eliot had said, and Lucas had grabbed a mirror and said, “Fuck, I do. Why hello, Leticia. Fancy a shag?” Even though I know it wasn’t, the sky is always blue, the sun always shining, in those memories.

  I look up at Lucas now, the sky cloudless and azure behind him. “Eating chips from my eighties chip pan is not a reason to not grow up, Luke,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, I know, it’s just…” He takes a hand out of his pocket and runs it through his hair. “I miss it sometimes, I suppose, don’t you? Being young and silly and drunk, and you waking me up on your sofa with fried eggs and chips and that thick white bread you used to get from that weird bakery-slash-cab-office by your flat.”

  “Ned’s.”

  “Ned’s,” laughs Lucas. “Good old Ned and his inability to choose between careers.”

  “And do you remember the ketchup we’d have? That cheap, radioactive ketchup.”

  “Yes.” Lucas grins. “Basically vinegar. Sublime shit, that stuff.”

  “We get it at the hotel.”

  Lucas’s head swings round, his eyes just visible over the tops of his sunglasses. “Seriously? I thought it was a five-star place.”

  “Four,” I say. “But the ketchup is still as cheap as they can get it. Two years and it just gets more neon as the weeks go by.”

  Lucas laughs, hand outstretching to land on the small of my back so to weave me around a group of teenagers, windsurfing boards under their arms, walking toward us on the pavement. It’s moments like this that I understand why people in the past have mistaken us for a couple. Lucas always plays up to it when it happens.

  “Two years have flown,” says
Lucas. “Is it totally shit?” He drops his hand again as they pass. “I mean, are you bored?”

  “Of the job?” I ask. “No, it’s good. I mean, I definitely didn’t expect to be there two years later, but the people are really nice. I did sign up to an agency last month, though.”

  “That’s great,” says Lucas.

  “It’s not that I don’t enjoy it. But it’s just—”

  “It’s waitressing at a hotel?”

  And I don’t know why, but the way he says it feels like a punch to the chest. It makes me feel shrunken down, like a speck, here in this beautiful place, next to Lucas in his designer shirt, he newly engaged, weeks past signing one of the biggest projects his firm has ever signed.

  “No,” I say shortly. “I was actually going to say, I’d like a little more money. I’d like to be able to afford my own flat again.”

  “Ah. ’Course,” he says, nodding, eyes to the floor. “But you’ll get something better, Em. You’ve got loads of experience in admin after all your years at the photo studio. And I can always talk to Dad.”

  “About what?”

  Lucas shrugs, hands back in his pockets. “Well, he has tons of friends in London who have their own firms. I’m sure if I sent your CV to Dad, he could make some calls.”

  “I don’t really want to go into London, Luke.”

  Lucas’s brow crumples. “Why?”

  “I don’t think I’d be able to hack commuting every day,” I say. “I’m not sure that’s me.”

  “So waitressing at a hotel is you, then, or—”

  “Oh my god.” I stop on the pavement outside an open-fronted busy café, and freeze. “Listen.”

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  I gesture with a hand. “This song. I don’t think I’ve ever heard this in public anywhere. Don’t you remember?”

  I do. I remember exactly where I was when I heard it for the first time. The CD arrived one morning before I left for college (in exchange for the six bags of Milky Way Magic Stars I’d posted to Lucas a fortnight before), and I listened to it on the bus there, on my Discman, the sun beating through the murky window, heating my skin. I had two classes that day with Georgia and her friends—the girl and the constantly smirking two boys—but I listened to it on repeat all day. That CD carried me through. Like arms around me, like a hand squeezing mine, reminding me I wasn’t alone in the world.