“Paul,” said Ms. Albright to the back of his head, “give me the gun. You don’t want to do this. We know you don’t.” She held out her hand. “Here,” she said. “I’ll take it.”
Paul shifted his eyes backward, but maybe not far back enough to see Ms. Albright’s outstretched palm. He raised the gun straight over his head and fired the first shot into the ceiling.
Ms. Albright had been interviewed by several of the newspapers, Ms. Albright, who looked more like a student than a teacher with her curly red hair and her freckles. One reporter had asked Ms. Albright if she thought Paul had a plan.
“If you’re asking if Paul had any intention of hurting anyone,” Albright said, “I would have to say no. It all happened so fast, but as far as I could tell, it didn’t look to me that he was about to shoot Emily Beam. No, I don’t think he had any intention of hurting anyone, not even himself.”
Ms. Albright had proposed her theory to more than one reporter: that in the blinding chaos of the moment, Paul had panicked. He had run deeper into the stacks for an emergency exit, but there wasn’t one. There weren’t even any windows, just blocks of concrete stacked on top of one another to form walls. That was where, in the very back of the library, Paul had taken his second shot at one of those walls before he pushed the gun into his stomach and fired.
It was a library, not a lieberry.
A lieberry has windows with light coming through them. A lieberry is as cozy as a garden. The ideas it inspires are seeds that grow up to be flowers. This is why Emily isn’t shocked at first, upon her return from the water fountain, to find a crocus laid across the open pages of her math book. Then a chill shimmies up and down her legs. She paces, back and forth, checking the other corners and carrels. No one. Not a soul but hers and the flower’s, its purple head bright as birdsong.
Girl at a Bedroom Window
Tucked as one in a tree,
two wrens court for a full hour.
To the girl, this
is romance: the elegant
science of beaks, how they
distill softness, how they
parse into ribbons the language
of air—oh, it is quiet, the ruffle
of feathers, clicks to the tune
of sun. Years from now, she
will remember that sound—
two little swords—and she’ll
wonder why she is here in this
used-up bed; she’ll wish
for the window where she,
the leaves, their whole green
lives, nodded up and down like the sea,
the branch stretching herself out
for love.
Emily Beam, February 19, 1995
Where did the crocus come from? For the whole afternoon, Emily pinches herself: Is she real? She takes off K.T.’s clogs and her new drugstore socks and examines her toes, which look the same as they always have, but have they traveled somewhere and not told her? After Emily doesn’t return to the room in time for Sunday dinner, K.T. comes looking. When K.T. finds her, Emily stands up from her carrel, first stretching her arms above her head and then stretching them out to K.T., who steps into them. The hug is long and stabilizing.
“I was worried,” K.T. says.
“I’m sorry.”
“Why did you leave like that?”
“I don’t know,” says Emily. “I’m really sorry.”
“You said that already. Listen, I called Madame Colche. She’s going to make you dinner.”
“Oh, K.T., I wish you hadn’t—”
“Well, I wish you’d come back when you’re supposed to,” K.T. says.
“I’m not hungry,” Emily says.
“I’ll go with you. Come on, you need to eat something, and it’ll be nice.”
And it is nice. While Madame Colche whips up mushroom and spinach omelets, Emily and K.T. sit on kitchen stools. “Let’s play Favorites,” Madame Colche suggests.
“How do you know about that?” K.T. asks.
“You give me little credit, Mademoiselle Montgomery,” says Madame Colche. “I listen.”
Favorites is a popular game at ASG; Emily has played it a couple of times with K.T. and with the girls at her dinner table. Madame Colche starts them off with food, Emily suggests movie stars (living and dead), and K.T. takes up books they loved as children. K.T.’s favorite is a toss-up, either Harriet the Spy or From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and Madame Colche’s favorite is Hitty, a book about a doll who lived for a hundred years. When Emily tells them about The Secret Language, she suddenly recalls how she used to beg her parents to send her off to the Coburn School, the girls’ boarding school in the book. “How could I have forgotten that?” she says to them, remembering with shame the fit that she pitched in Aunt Cindy’s living room. To herself, she thinks, And K.T. is my Martha, and Madame Colche, our Mother Carrie, and I am Victoria North. Or did Victoria just come from the North? In any case, I am the new girl who learns a new language.
During dinner on TV trays in the parlor, a fire in the fireplace, they talk about their favorite music. Madame Colche plays them a CD of live performances by Edith Piaf.
“She was thought of as a little sparrow. That’s what piaf means—‘little sparrow.’ ”
Emily pictures a large flock of birds swooping up from a field she and Paul rode by once in his truck.
“Piaf had such a sad life. She had to fight her way out with singing. You can hear that in her voice, can’t you?”
“She sounds kind of manic,” K.T. says.
“I think she sounds like champagne,” says Emily.
“Spoken like a true poet,” Madame Colche says. “Speaking of which, have you told K.T. about the contest you’re entering?”
“No,” K.T. says, sticking her tongue out at Emily. “She hasn’t. Emily’s not a big talker, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I’ve noticed,” says Madame Colche. “But we are here, Emily, any time you would like to talk.”
Emily nods, her mouth full of buttered baguette.
“Emily is a gifted poet,” Madame Colche says. “Extraordinarily gifted, in fact.”
“I’d love to read some of your poems,” K.T. says.
“K.T. plays the cello, and Emily writes. I have two of the very best artists at ASG right here, right now, dining with me in my parlor. If Amber Atkins were here, I’d have all three of you. You know her, Emily—she’s in your French class. She’s a wonderful painter.”
“She’s the sophomore with the hair,” K.T. says, running her hands down the side of her face.
“Oui.”
“I saw some of her pieces in the school exhibit last year,” K.T. tells Emily. “She’s really good.”
“I’ll have to get you three together,” Madame Colche says.
Emily slides her eyes toward K.T., whom she has not told about the lipstick incident. But why would she? Emily is beginning to understand something about girls: when big things have been swept with no warning right out from under their feet, they have to get a little back just to keep themselves tethered.
• • •
For a week, Emily contemplates telling K.T. the whys of how she arrived at ASG. A couple of times, she picks up the hall phone to call Carey back, but as soon as she starts to dial, a girl walks by, and she hangs up. Late one night, she writes Terra a five-page letter, but then she remembers that she’s left Terra’s address back in Grenfell County. All she can remember is the name of the town and state—Winesburg, Ohio—so she seals the envelope and addresses it to herself. Emily hasn’t talked to Terra since Christmas. Terra knows Paul, and knows what happened in the library, but what Terra doesn’t know could fill way more than five pages. In the ninth grade, Terra and Emily put their hands on Terra’s Bible at a sleepover and swore that they’d stay virgins until
they were married.
On the last Sunday in February, a week after dinner at Madame Colche’s, Emily closes up her poetry notebook and sets it on K.T.’s desk after K.T. has gone to sleep. Fourteen poems, fourteen little stories that make up one big story. There is another poem Emily must write, but it can’t go in the notebook. It is too private. It needs to live under a mattress or a floorboard or in a locked drawer. As the whistle of the 2:00 a.m. train sounds low and long, Emily gets out a loose sheet of paper and closes her eyes, placing the tip of the fountain pen in the upper-left corner.
Was it too much beer or too much Paul that made Emily throw up in the guest bathroom at Cole Hankins’s house? She still isn’t sure. After she scrubbed her mouth out with someone’s dried-up toothbrush, she walked back down the hall to the master bedroom, where she and Paul had lain on Mr. and Mrs. Hankins’s bed holding hands, listening to each other breathe. Paul rubbed Emily’s stomach because she wasn’t feeling well. He kissed her belly button and told her how sexy it was. He said he couldn’t wait for summer so he could see her in a bikini.
When a girl loses something, she tries to accept the loss because it’s what is expected of her. It is in her blood to lose. For example, a baby lives inside of a woman for nine months, and when it is born, it is no longer just hers. It belongs to the world. And there is the poor mother, trying to stitch up the emptiness. But the hole is too big, and the thread is too thin. That baby’s going to get away no matter what.
Mother, Once Removed
There’s a train to somewhere,
tiny baby.
Float away to a town
that loves the sound
of a train.
You can go
anywhere; you can’t
go wrong if you
ride that sound;
the distant horn
will find you
your place.
And I, a stranger
by day and a stranger stranger by night,
I, who cut
you out
of the trap
of my body,
will listen,
always listen,
for the whistle.
Emily Beam, February 27, 1995
Monday morning, K.T. sees the notebook. While Emily is in the shower, K.T. sits at her desk and reads. Emily takes a longer shower than usual, and when she returns to the room wrapped in her towel, the notebook is sitting on top of Emily’s pile of schoolbooks. K.T. doesn’t say anything until they are both sitting in the corner of the noisy dining room with their breakfast coffee. Like a character in a play, K.T. reaches across the table for Emily’s hand, squeezes it tightly in her own, and says, “Those are the best poems I’ve read in my whole life.” She smiles the widest smile Emily has ever seen on K.T.’s face. “The robin’s egg one is my favorite.”
Emily waits for K.T. to ask questions, to offer up interpretations of soil and weeds and ashes sucked up into the sky, but K.T. doesn’t. She doesn’t even ask about the bullet. Emily pictures the purple crocus that was laid across her math book a week ago, the one she watched wilt and fade over the course of a long winter afternoon. Surely K.T. left it there, but where did she get it, if not from Emily Dickinson’s garden? There are no crocuses yet on the grounds of ASG.
“Madame Colche is right,” K.T. says. “You need to enter the contest.”
“No. No way. What if I win?”
“Then we celebrate!”
“I threw the flyer with the details away,” Emily lies.
“So get another one. Big deal.”
“Let’s just forget about the poems, okay?”
“No,” K.T. says, “let’s not.”
“The poems are private. Madame Colche found out by accident. Neither one of you would have known anything about them if I hadn’t gotten stuck in the WC. I mean it, K.T. Thank you for wanting to read them and all, but from now on, that notebook is closed to everyone but me.”
“You’re a bumped pumpkin.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s ASG for ‘odd duck.’ ”
“Odd duck.”
“You’ve heard of that one, right?” K.T. asks.
“Yep. That’s what people say where I’m from.”
“And where is that, exactly?”
“Grenfell County, Nowhere.”
“The girl who called you yesterday—is she from there, too?”
Emily nods.
“Let me guess. You don’t want to talk about it.”
Emily shakes her head.
K.T. stands. “More coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
When K.T. walks away, Emily reaches into her book bag and lifts out her poetry notebook. She flips through the pages, unfolding the loose ones tucked into the back, the ones Mrs. Brooker recovered from the trash. What she sees in her words are contradictions and dichotomies and wild juxtapositions. What she witnesses is a girl on the run from her innocence.
Does she want it back? No, not all of it.
Does she want a giant eraser? Perhaps.
Does she wish for a maze-free mind? That might help.
As Madame Colche said the night before over coffee and dessert, fake it till you make it. Keep on keeping on. The only way to make sense of backward is to move forward.
• • •
In French II that afternoon, Madame Colche hands each girl a map of the United States.
“You are going on a train trip,” she tells them in French. “You will begin here in Amherst, and you can go anywhere that the train goes, as long as you travel to a place you’ve never been. Once you arrive, you will have an adventure. And you are going to tell the class about that adventure.”
“En français?”
“Oui, Catherine, en français.”
“Mon Dieu,” says a funny girl named Lauren Dunlap.
“And,” says Madame Colche, “you will take this trip with a friend, another girl from this class.”
“I’d rather go with a boy,” Lauren says.
Madame Colche ignores her. “I have assigned traveling companions according to birthdays. The girl in this class whose birthday is closest to yours will be your traveling mate, and, together, you will create an adventure for two.”
Emily takes notes. Madame Colche has to repeat the instructions a few times until everyone in class understands the assignment in French. Unlike Emily’s French teacher back home, Madame Colche uses her hands when explaining, which helps Emily understand better.
“We’ll begin with January,” Madame Colche says.
Emily sits and waits. She was born on December 10. As she watches everyone pair off, she knows no one wants to get stuck with her, the new girl with the halting French accent. By the time Madame Colche reaches October, there are only four girls left, and Emily sees it coming even before the announcement is made—she and Amber Atkins are going on a trip together.
But Emily does not want to travel with Amber. She knows in her gut that Madame Colche designed this whole game just to push the two of them into each other’s paths. She thinks about asking if she can go to the bathroom and then not come back, but then she’ll get Hashes (ASG for “demerits”) and lose her sign-out privileges, which means no smoking after dinner, and Emily has been looking forward to a cigarette since breakfast.
So, slowly, she packs up the things on her desk and walks to the back corner of the room where Amber is waiting. Amber, who was born on December 11.
“Well,” says Emily, “where do you want to go?”
Amber leans forward so that her hair veils her eyes and says, “Wherever they have the most drugstores.”
“Ha, ha.”
“Chicago, definitely,” says Amber. “There’s this famous art museum there, and I want to stand in front of two paintings: A Sunday on La G
rande Jatte, a giant canvas composed of thousands and thousands of tiny dots of color, and American Gothic. Do you know it?”
“I’m not sure,” says Emily.
“It’s the one with the farmer holding a pitchfork, standing next to his sour-looking wife.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I painted a version of American Gothic,” Amber says. “The woman and the man have switched places, and instead of a pitchfork, the woman holds a small white flag, like, for surrender. And I put this red hole, like, from a bullet, through her heart. And the man is younger. He’s bare-chested and wears dog tags. And guess what I called it?”
“No idea,” Emily says.
“American Toxic. Is that brilliant or what?”
“It’s pretty brilliant.”
“I gave it to my mom for her birthday—she was born on Halloween, which is way cool. It was in the school exhibit last year. The guy in the painting is my half brother Brandon. His dad and my mom got divorced before I was born. They got married in Las Vegas, and they took Brandon with them—he was three—and hired a stripper they met in a nightclub to babysit him. She’s the one I’m named after.” Amber paused. “True story.”
Emily doesn’t feel like arguing. “Okay,” she says, “Chicago it is.”
Small Things
I am the thief of small things.
The first small thing
I stole was a key chain
with a portrait of Jesus.
His eyes were closed,
and he was praying.
I am a small-time thief
stalking the drugstores of small-town America.
What do girls need
that they don’t get at home?
The makeup aisles
with lipsticks the color
of candy: I want to eat every tube
in the privacy of my own room.
I want to stand at the mirror
and open my mouth
and bite down hard, peaches and pinks
And We Stay Page 8
