Amelia Unabridged

by Ashley Schumacher

  In our four years of friendship, we’ve only had a handful of arguments—mostly about which inside joke originated where—but never a fight. The closest we’ve come was an intense row last year when Jenna insisted I attend the homecoming dance with the big group of single girls and I refused.

  If this slow-boiling lava rising up my throat is any indication, our first fight will be the battle to end all wars.

  “But the festival said he had to cancel,” I say, trying and failing to keep my voice even and calm and adult. “They said he was unable to attend.”

  Jenna sighs. “I know. I saw him before he left.”

  “You saw him from a distance, you mean,” I say. “You saw him getting into his private car or something is what you mean, right?”

  Apparently, Jenna is incapable of starting a sentence without sighing, because she does it again before she says, “No. I met N. E. Endsley. I spoke with him while you were in the bathroom.”

  My mouth doesn’t stop long enough for my brain to process this impossible information. “This is a joke, right? You’ve got to be joking.” I can hear my voice rising.

  “Please stay calm, Amelia. Please?” Jenna exhales. She is slipping into the tone her mother uses in court, the forced relaxation of someone who refuses to lose their cool in the face of hysterical clients, husbands, or—in this case—fangirls.

  I try to make my voice more level. “Where did you see him?”

  This is a betrayal of the highest degree, a purposeful withholding of my greatest desire—to meet the author of the Orman Chronicles—and I can barely hear her through the heat pulsing in my ears.

  The Uber guy flicks his eyes to us in the rearview mirror, then away. I bet he’ll tell his partner over dinner about the two insane teenagers whisper-arguing in the backseat.

  “You know that rope I was standing next to?” Jenna is picking at the invisible lint again. “I guess it was blocking the way to the refreshment room they had for the authors. I heard a choking sound and thought someone was in trouble. I ignored the NO CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS sign to check and … it was him.”

  “Him,” I say bitterly. “Him. How can you say it like that? It wasn’t just a him, it was N. E. Endsley, Jenna.”

  “I know, Amelia, but he’s also just a guy, you know?”

  Now she sounds sympathetic and motherly, and I know my reaction is unfair, but I can feel my temper rise even higher.

  “No, I don’t know that he’s just a guy, because I wasn’t there. Remember?”

  Jenna is quiet. A bright yellow sports car comes roaring out of nowhere and jerks around us, the sound of the engine cutting through the silence.

  “He was pacing and pulling at his hair,” Jenna says. “And mumbling. A panic attack, I think. I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Jenna’s voice is almost a whisper, like she’s afraid to speak too loudly.

  When I say nothing, Jenna tries to fill the quiet, her voice pitching higher in exasperation. “He needed help, Amelia. All I could do was try and calm him down. Do you really think I could leave him there? ‘Hey, one sec. Let me go find my friend. She loves your books. Hold that thought and that mental breakdown. Thanks.’”

  “You could’ve,” I half shout, hating myself for the slight Texas accent that breaks through and how unreasonable I sound. “You could have come to find me. I could have helped!”

  In the span of a second, I think of all the things that make up Jenna—her goodness, her quiet but fierce empathy, her infuriating need to be right—and wish I could shut up. That I could make the aching, disenchanted part of my chest stop hurting long enough to tell Jenna that I understand.

  But when Jenna responds, “Oh, Amelia. You’re being unreasonable,” the angry swirling in my brain starts anew and I’m at the mercy of the storm.

  “I’m not, though.” I’m almost shouting. The Uber driver coughs, but we ignore him. “That was the whole reason we came to this festival, even though you and your mom said it was too close to your Ireland trip. Because we wanted to meet him and get our books signed, and I didn’t even get to do that because whatever you told him to”—I pause to make air quotes—“calm him down actually made it worse, because he left.”

  “I refuse to talk to you when you’re like this,” Jenna says, her voice rising to be heard over my ranting.

  “You know how much those books mean to me.” I’m yelling, but I don’t care. “You know what those books got me through!”

  She flinches, thinking of abandoned-puppy Amelia that she found outside of Downtown Books. Of the countless times her parents had to claim two daughters instead of one because my parents never bothered to attend award nights or sit through cheesy high school Christmas programs.

  “Yes, but nobody knows what those books got him through. It’s not fair to ask too much of someone, Amelia, no matter how much we admire them or their work. He was desperate to get out of there. He looked trapped and lost and I … I told him that he had to take care of himself.”

  The smooth hum of the driver’s BMW, the light, posh clicking noise of the turn signal, ticks into yet another pocket of silence. I wonder if it’s true that there can be absolute quiet before a tornado.

  “I told him about you,” Jenna says after a while.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” I interject. There is something else clanging around inside me that feels detached from our discussion of N. E. Endsley, and it’s making my chest hurt. “I don’t want to hear anything about it. You sent home the headliner of the festival because he was feeling stressed. I get it, but I’m disappointed, and I don’t want to hear any more. Please.”

  The Please comes out on a hiccup. It’s pathetic. I’m pathetic. And I can’t bring myself to care.

  We don’t speak for the rest of the ride, or through security, wordlessly sitting next to each other as we wait for our boarding section to be called. We don’t speak when the flight attendant brings sparkling water for Jenna, Coke for me.

  When the plane begins its descent into the airport, I finally ask her why she didn’t tell me sooner, why she waited until the car ride to bring it up.

  “What difference would it have made if I told you sooner?” She says it like a fact, and I’m too emotionally exhausted to tell her that’s not an answer.

  * * *

  I’ve cried in front of Jenna a thousand times, but I’ve only seen Jenna cry once.

  We were barely fifteen, and our friendship was still new and unformed, but I knew her well enough to understand that her affection for the Williamses’ ancient cat, Moot, ran deep, even if it was not readily apparent to observers. She would make a show of grumbling about how much he shed, how his sharp claws tore holes in her comforter, but if he wasn’t at the foot of her bed when it came time to sleep, she would fetch him.

  “He’ll cry at the door,” she reasoned. But she scratched behind Moot’s ears affectionately when she thought I wasn’t looking.

  It was one of those days with a cold snap in the air when Moot slipped out past Mr. Williams’s legs and scampered off into the wilds of the neighborhood. Nobody worried much until that evening, when it was time for me to go home and Moot still hadn’t returned.

  “He’ll come back,” Mr. Williams said. “He always does.”

  But Moot didn’t. Not that night or the night after.

  Jenna wouldn’t admit that she was worried, but on the third night, instead of hyperfocusing on her Romeo and Juliet essay, she kept looking out the window, her brows furrowed.

  “Jenna?”

  “Yeah?” She didn’t look away from the window. She probably didn’t even realize she was doing it.

  “Let’s take a walk,” I said. “It’s nice out.”

  Snapping out of it, Jenna glanced at me. “It’s fifty degrees,” she said, but she was already pulling her sweatshirt on over her head.

  After a few minutes of walking, Jenna and I gave up the pretense and used the flashlight on Jenna’s phone to scan under trees and behind cars, hopi
ng to capture in its beam a chubby, graying tabby with glowing green eyes.

  An hour later, by some miracle—or curse—we found Moot’s raggedy collar with the dented silver bell that no longer jingled, beside a bush in the neighborhood park. Even in the dim light I could see it was streaked with blood and a few too many strands of Moot’s fur.

  “Coyotes,” Jenna said.

  I fought back tears at the sight of the pathetic, hollowed-out collar.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

  “He was old,” Jenna said, her voice a dull monotone. And then, quoting the Frost poem we had read in English class that week, “‘Nothing gold can stay.’”

  That night I broke our rule and announced I was staying over on a school night. Jenna fought against it—I’m fine, I’m fine, she said—but I wore her down.

  I woke in the dead of night to the sound of the window opening and the cold air chasing away the snug coziness of Jenna’s room.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, blearily pushing myself up from her bed.

  She was silhouetted against the window, her long spine hunched into the warmth of her plush robe as she gazed out the window.

  “I thought I heard him meow,” she said.

  I came to stand beside her. “I’m sorry.”

  She still didn’t move. I glanced at her.

  Tears, little diamonds shining in the faded light of the moon, cascaded down her face in steady streams.

  Hesitantly, a little afraid she would shrug me off, I put an arm around her shoulders. I thought of a hundred things to say, but in the end I came back to Orman.

  “You know the little river? The one across the street, that runs through the park?”

  Jenna nodded.

  “Maybe it runs to Orman,” I said. “And maybe Emmeline and Ainsley needed a tubby old cat to help them feel less homesick for this world.”

  Jenna was quiet. I was starting to feel really stupid when she said, “Moot will do well in Orman, don’t you think? The cook at Siren’s Point will probably feed him so much he won’t be able to walk.”

  I laughed louder than necessary in my relief. “Yeah, or maybe Emmeline will love him best, but he’ll choose to live with Ainsley, and it will make Em angry.”

  “Likely.”

  The corner of Jenna’s mouth twitched, and she dropped her head onto my shoulder, wiping at the tears on her cheeks. The night air was freezing my face, but I didn’t dare move, for fear of breaking the moment.

  * * *

  Jenna might never cry, but I do.

  I force myself to dry my tears and bottle up my anger. We only have one day before Jenna leaves for Ireland.

  One day to unpack—and in Jenna’s case, repack—and to squelch out the bubbles of dead and empty space I have built up between us since she told me about N. E. Endsley.

  We reach a strange equilibrium, placing Jenna’s new books she got at the festival on shelves and trying again and again to fit her extensive botanist-in-training wardrobe into the two suitcases she is bringing. Jenna unrolls the reading poster we bought, making eye contact with me across her unmade bed full of sock balls, and smiles, holding it higher as if to say, Look.

  I nod dully. Yeah.

  She rolls it back up and puts it in the tube, setting it atop my tote bag to take home with me, and sighs.

  I’m sorry, the sigh says, but I pretend not to hear it and continue to roll her tops into tiny little cylinders.

  She asks me two different times if I’ll remember to go to the college prep seminar. I still think it’s going to be eight hours of people who like the sound of their voices talking into crappy microphones, but I tell her I will. She makes me pinky promise, a trick I started sophomore year to make sure Jenna was really, truly listening to me instead of concentrating on something else. I almost smile when she holds out her hand, and our fingers meet, but not quite.

  “Take good notes,” Jenna says. “You can tell me all the best bits when I get back.”

  I want to tell her the best bits will be the catered lunch and the closing statements, but I don’t.

  Things still feel off the next day when Jenna leaves. Neither of us wants to relive the book festival scenario and drag up the argument from where it lies dormant in its unsealed coffin, so we don’t discuss it.

  If the Williamses notice how quiet we are on the way to the airport the next morning, they don’t mention it. Maybe they think we’re exhausted from the California trip. Jenna didn’t tell them about the Endsley drama.

  When I give her a hug, I loosen my arms to leave space for our good-byes and for the stray specks of unease and mild indignation that I can still feel floating below the surface of my skin.

  “You owe me,” I say into her ear. “For Endsley, I mean. I want you to bring me a Highlander in a kilt to make up for it.”

  She huffs but doesn’t break our hug. “It’s Ireland, you idiot, not Scotland.”

  “I know, but it’s only a couple hours by ferry, right? Surely you could spare one day.”

  Her grip on me tightens and I will my arms to move and follow suit, but they can’t quite make it. My joke about Scottish travel time is as close to forgiveness as I’ll get for the moment. It’s only been two days since I was supposed to have been in the same room as N. E. Endsley.

  “Fine,” Jenna says, a smile tucked into the warm corners of her voice. “But if there are any magical standing stones that take me back in time, I’m not trying to come back.”

  “Fine,” I agree. “Dibs on your library.”

  “Fine.” She laughs. It’s her sparkling laugh, which she doesn’t use very often, with good reason. A man walking nearby almost stumbles over his suitcase when he hears it.

  “Fine,” I say. “Now go before I gag from your stupid perfume.”

  And just like that, Jenna is gone.

  chapter three

  I learn that books are liars when, less than a week after her departure, Jenna’s mother calls to tell me that Jenna is dead.

  “Car accident,” she says. “The other driver sped through a red light.”

  “How?” I ask. Stupidly, brokenly.

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “But she was in Ireland.”

  Was. I’ve only known for a minute and Jenna is already a was instead of an is.

  Jenna’s mother barely stops to breathe; she uses her attorney voice, her no-nonsense voice, the kind she uses for client calls or when Mr. Williams doesn’t cut the Thanksgiving turkey into thin enough slices.

  “Will you speak, Amelia? At her funeral, I mean?”

  I say yes, but when the day comes and I’m standing in front of a congregation that moments before had been singing a hymn of celebration for Jenna and her “reunion with her creator,” I lose it. I let myself bleed onto every surface—the podium, the hideous floral arrangements, her casket—as the stories and memories imprison my head and my voice.

  If this were a photo I was trying to frame in my lens, I would stretch the shadows creeping from beneath her stupid casket as far as I could. I would stretch them until they smothered the somber faces in the pews and all that would be left unshadowed in the photo would be myself behind the podium and what’s left of Jenna. I would call it Survivor and a Half.

  But my imagination can only keep me occupied for so long. Countless pairs of eyes look at me with pity and heartbreak, and I feel the years of waiting in line for book signings, the late-night study sessions when one of us had procrastinated too long on research papers, the countless hours spent reading together. All that, and the stupid, stupid pictures tacked to her bedroom wall, work their way down from the lump in my throat to the choke hold squeezing my heart.

  Eventually the pastor comes up to pat my back and lead me away from the microphone, my hiccupping sobs loud enough without the assistance of amplification.

  It’s wrong, I keep thinking. Life isn’t following its script and it’s not fair … I’m not prepared.

  While some kids waited
for their letter to be delivered by owl or for their closet to one day reveal a magical land with talking animals and stone tables, I’d waited for the other shoe to drop. Because if there’s one thing I learned from books, it’s that life is fair and unfair, just and unjust. When my father left us, I thought that was the end of it, but then Jenna found me and life was dreadfully out of balance again, too right and happy.

  I waited for more hard parts, the ones books say begin when you’re young but always, always end in the early teenage years to allow for happily-ever-after. The Final Big Bad Thing would happen before high school graduation. Everything bad happens to you in high school or after you’ve turned forty and have a spouse and six kids and a few decades of hard-earned disappointment under your belt.

  Books lie. Life isn’t finished with you when you are eighteen or when you think you’ve had enough.

  It’s never enough. You’re never in the clear.

  * * *

  Jenna thought her books should be new and pure, untouched by anyone but herself. I prefer my books to have already been occupied, to have stories independent of the one carried on the page. I like to imagine my used books as little soldiers that have gone off to serve their duty elsewhere before coming into my hands. Books are something to be stepped inside of, to be occupied and lived in. Maybe that’s why I tend to loan out my books while Jenna rarely parted with hers.

  But Jenna is gone now. She’s gone, and her parents have bequeathed me her library.

  “She’d want you to have them,” Mr. Williams says through tears, when he and Mrs. Williams come to check on me a few days after we watch Jenna’s body get lowered into the ground.

  This is only the second or third time they have been inside my mother’s house, and they look out of place seated on the edge of my twin bed.

  Mr. Williams is vying for me to spend the remainder of the summer with them, but something inside me balks.

  “You wouldn’t … you wouldn’t have to sleep in Jenna’s room,” Mr. Williams says. “But we could get you all the help you need. Counselors and therapists and college coaches, whatever you need … whatever you want.”