EMILY PICKED UP her homework from her locker and headed out of school. It was a low building, concrete, built for maximum heat insulation in winter.
“See you at the game?” called Kelly, her hand on her car door.
Emily smiled. “Yeah,” she said.
And it was true: she’d be there, supporting—but absolutely not cheerleading. Her suspension was over, and to her surprise, coming back had not been too awful. She’d expected to be ostracized, to be whispered about. Well, there was a bit of that, but it was more excited whispering than cruelty: she was the girl who had survived a plane crash, after all, and then walked down off a mountain. She was pretty sure that was one reason she’d been allowed back—she was famous now, at least briefly, and the school wanted to look forgiving because of the trauma she’d experienced.
One reason.
What went unsaid: that everyone assumed she’d stowed away on the plane in order to escape the humiliation, in order to flee from the little town where she was the arson girl.
She was still the arson girl, of course, the girl who had burned down part of the school; she knew it would take some time to get past that, but even then—it was high school, wasn’t it? There was hardly a kid there who hadn’t dreamed of burning the place down. She was just the one who’d actually done it. Or rather, who had smoked a cigarette in secret, in the boys’ locker room, and then carelessly discarded the butt—that was her story, and she was sticking to it.
And Miss Brady was going along with it. From the way the teacher looked at her, Emily had a feeling she had a lot of questions: about the cigarette, about what she had been doing in the locker room in the first place. But she didn’t ask them. Emily suspected the man with the gray eyes had something to do with that—that he had exerted pressure of some kind, influence.
“We’ll keep it off your school record,” Miss Brady had said. “We don’t want to throw away your future because of one mistake.”
No. No, Emily did not want to throw away her future. Not anymore.
And later, in return, she’d filmed a special with Miss Brady for the local news crew: the head teacher shaking her hand, welcoming her warmly back to school.
As if nothing had ever happened.
So: she’d been hanging out with Kelly, with Madison, with Eric, with Tyrese. It was—and again, she was surprised—kind of fun. It was as if something had changed inside her, since Aidan.
None of them remembered Aidan, of course.
She climbed into her old blue Ford F-150–eighty thousand miles on the clock, but her dad had checked it over and reconditioned the engine before he and her mom gave it to her.
“Thought you could use a little more independence,” her mom had said.
“And if you lose the keys, you know how to get in,” said her dad.
There was an awkward silence, and then they laughed. They tried not to talk too much about the time after the plane crash—her parents told themselves a story about it, that they’d been in a rush to get to civilization, but Emily could tell they only partly believed it, and that the best way for them to reconcile the events with the kind of people they understood themselves to be was to not think about it.
Emily started the engine and turned up the heat. It was nearly summer but still cold when the sun was going down, as it was now.
There was a knock on the truck window. Emily turned, startled.
Brad winked at her from the other side of the glass. She wound it down. Manually—it took forever, cranking the little handle.
He winked at her again. “Hey, beautiful,” he said.
She didn’t say anything.
“So…,” he said. “I still don’t have a date for prom. Been kinda…reserving the spot for you.”
Emily laughed, despite herself, at his unflinching self-confidence, his ironclad self-belief.
“No, thanks,” she said.
His eyes hardened. “I’ll just have to ask again tomorrow.”
She took a breath. “Brad,” she said. His small stony eyes. “You know who I am, right? I’m the girl who burned down the locker room because a football player made me mad. I walked away from a plane that crashed and exploded. I did things you would not believe, things the papers have not reported. I came down off a mountain with a man who had sepsis, and lived. A bear attacked us, and we walked away.”
He bit his lip.
“So, Brad, dude. Listen. If you ‘ask me on a date’ again, if you approach me again—hell, if you approach any of the girls at this school again—I am going to come for you, OK? And it will be when you least expect it.”
She gunned the engine, made the tires squeal, and left him standing there, mouth open, as if the Alaskan air might blow right through his head, where his brains should be.