For a week, Emily has walked the halls of ASG. After dinner tonight, she will call home just as she promised to do when she stood with her mother at the front gate a week ago, and she will tell her parents that she is doing fine. And in a manner of speaking, she is. Fine means no highs or lows. Fine means no trouble, no conflicts. She has avoided K.T. and the other girls by hiding out in the lieberry, which looks like a church. During the break between morning classes, after lunch, during the evening study period, that’s where Emily goes, mostly to the top floor, to a carrel by an arched window overlooking the quad. The lieberry isn’t as loud and abuzz as K.T. led her to believe. It’s peaceful, in fact, and that very afternoon, standing by the checkout desk, Emily has what she could only describe to herself as her very first religious moment.

Sun streams in through the high Gothic windows, illuminating the dust. For minutes she watches the motes rise and fall long enough for the rising and falling to become one with her breathing, long enough to see the full extent of the damage. Her damage.

As if being nudged by a hand at the small of her back, she walks to the card catalog and flips to Dickinson, Emily. There are at least twenty books on the subject. When Aunt Cindy first mentioned ASG, she said it was famous because of Emily Dickinson, who had been a student there over a hundred years ago, back when it was called Amherst Academy. It was resurrected as Amherst School for Girls in 1961, a hundred years after it closed, by a couple of poetry-loving sisters who never married.

Emily Beam knows something about Emily Dickinson from her English class at Grenfell County High. Emily Dickinson wrote 1,775 poems, a fact easy to remember because it’s one less than 1776, the year America was born. As Emily Beam makes her way to the shelves of Dickinson books, she hopes that the collected poems contain a subject index; otherwise, she has no idea how to find the one poem she is looking for. Ms. Albright, her teacher, said that Dickinson didn’t title her poems; she, or someone else, numbered them.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, looks thick and promising. “Gun, loaded, 754,” the index reads. Emily turns to the page.

Is it the anger and frustration inside of Emily Beam that causes her to feel the anger and frustration inside of the poem? She doesn’t understand all of it—in fact, she doesn’t understand much of it. “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun” doesn’t sound like a poem that a shy woman, a woman who holed herself up in her bedroom during the day, would write. It sounds outdoorsy and violent: the eye of the barrel, the hunted doe, the volcanic eruption.

For a white-hot second, standing in the lieberry, Emily longs for the controlled chaos of the halls between classes, the low shouts of boys, the higher laughter of girls, the drumming on the metal lockers. But here, at least for the moment, it is empty and quiet, which magnifies the noise in her head. There are no school bells at ASG, and when she checks the clock on the wall over the circulation desk, she sees that she is going to be late for Sunday dinner if she doesn’t leave that instant.

I’ll be back, she whispers to the book as she slides it into its place.

• • •

For a while, instead of writing poems in the middle of the night, Emily reads them. She starts with Poem 1, a Valentine poem that calls out for the nine muses. Oh the Earth was made for lovers, it begins. It’s a long poem. Emily thumbs through the book. Most of the poems are short. Emily decides she’ll keep going: 2, 3, 4, 5.

By night, she reads. By day, she follows the rules—go to class, do your homework, study hard, eat three square meals, make polite conversation, do unto others. Emily has learned the first and last names of every girl in Hart Hall, and of the six other girls who live on the third floor, the pair in Room 12, Annabelle Wycoff and Waverley Graham, are the friendliest. K.T. assures Emily that it’s nosiness, not friendship. “Plus,” K.T. says, “they’re cream puffs,” which, at ASG, is a girl who uses hairspray and/or perfume and always wears makeup to class. “Even when it’s five degrees!” K.T. exclaims. “Which is not weather to stand around and be vain in.”

New England cold is textbook cold: blue and bracing and bone-chilling. K.T. is accustomed to it, but Emily is not, and on January 30, after she’s been there for two weeks, K.T. shows Emily how to order clothes from a catalog using a credit card, something that Emily does not have.

“You can pay me back,” K.T. tells her. “Your parents give you an allowance, don’t they?”

Emily nods, envisioning her little pool of babysitting money in the bank back home. Her parents have said nothing about an allowance—she’s never had one—but she still has the hundred-dollar bill her mother pressed into her hand two weeks ago.

“You can’t wear your Harvard sweatshirt every day,” K.T. says, pointing to a purple sweater on sale in the J. Crew catalog. “Oh, and maybe you can order your own pair of clogs while you’re at it.”

Emily can’t tell if K.T. is joking or not because K.T. doesn’t smile when she says it. Emily smiles just in case and chooses a pair of short winter boots from Lands’ End, also on sale.

The next morning in the dining room, when K.T. explains to Emily that the girls from New York City who sit together at a large round table are called “Algonquins,” Emily asks K.T. why she doesn’t eat breakfast sometimes with her other friends.

“I don’t have a lot of friends,” K.T. says, “except for the girls in the string quartet. But they’re seniors, and they don’t come to breakfast.”

“They eat in their rooms?”

“Yeah. They share a triple over in Baker, and it has a small kitchen.” K.T. sighs. “I wish we had a kitchen in our room. I’d cook for you. I’d turn you into a vegetarian.”

“No way,” Emily says. “I’m a meat-and-potatoes girl.”

K.T. shakes her head. “You only think you are. Cheese, nuts, and coffee: I could live the rest of my life on that diet.”

Emily laughs, thinking that K.T. might be joking. They have another cup of coffee before heading off to classes. Emily holds it together through most of them, but by Trigonometry, she is ready to lay her head on the desk and fall into the pit of sleep. She dreads the athletic period that follows—she’s enrolled in Fitness for Fun—and then it’s off to the dining room, where she’s been assigned for the next two weeks to sit at a table with two history teachers and seven girls she doesn’t know. She nods and smiles and pushes vegetarian lasagna around on her plate. She passes on the chocolate cake but drinks two cups of coffee.

After Tuesday dinners, there are club meetings, but Emily doesn’t belong to a club. At the security desk in the main building, she signs herself out to go for a walk before study period. She’s wired from the caffeine and needs to wander through a landscape, any kind of landscape, so that she can take apart her brain and put it back together again. This old New England town, with its shops and restaurants and large houses, will do just fine. She follows the sidewalk along the high stone wall surrounding the campus. If anyone were to ask her who her favorite character in literature is, she would answer Humpty Dumpty.

For as long as she can remember, characters in books have seemed more real to her than actual people. In the backseat of her parents’ car on the way to Paul’s funeral, Emily tried to pretend what she used to pretend on long rides with her mom and dad: that the car was a covered wagon and she was Laura Ingalls, on her way to the prairie. Outside, the clouds had hung low like the hammock she cocooned herself in one beachy summer a lifetime ago. Where will we vacation this summer? she wondered as she braided her hair into one straggly rope. Are we still a family? Maybe she could talk her parents into driving her to the prairie and leaving her there.

During the funeral, Emily chewed on the tip of her braid. To stop her, Emily’s mother grabbed her hand and held on tight. When Reverend Wright spoke about an eighteen-year-old named Paul Wagoner, it didn’t sound like he was talking about someone who used to be her boyfriend. The conclusion that Reverend Wright, the students, their principal, and their parents clung to was that it was no one’s fault. Paul was going to do what he was going to do, and no one could’ve stopped him because God had called Paul Nathan Wagoner back home.

But Emily knows that God had nothing to do with it: it was her human error that caused Paul to end his life. With a loaded gun. With a big, fat, black exclamation point. As Reverend Wright prepared, with ancient Biblical words, to return Paul to the earth, Emily sent a letter to God, up to the rafters, up through the ceiling, up into the low clouds filled with rain.

Paul’s funeral was forty-six days ago. She has not spoken to God since. Tragedy binds, one newspaper reported. The silver lining of tragedy is that it stitches communities together again. But as she walks the streets of Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily has her doubts. Grenfell County was as devastated by this as it would have been by an earthquake. If the girl who caused it all, despite what others maintained, never returned to Grenfell County, would she still teeter on the fault line?

Amherst, Massachusetts, is so far away, so serene, a town at peace with itself even though the air at dusk is so cold that it can cut a girl in half. Emily notices a low puff of cloud, feathery and white against the darkening, and as she walks, the cloud seems to follow her. The day after she and Paul had sex for the first time, Emily rose early from her bed and put on the same coat she is wearing now. Still in her pajamas, she walked out the side door of her house. The hills in the distance, hugged by a veil of mist, seemed closer than usual, and she set out to reach them.

Emily lost her virginity in the middle of October in an abandoned barn. Paul got a blanket out of the back of his truck and spread it out on the packed-down dirt. He lit a candle he pulled from his coat pocket and, looking around for where to stick it, found a brick with three holes.

“It’s going to be cold,” he said.

“That’s okay,” said Emily.

“I’m kind of nervous,” he said.

“Me too.”

“I’m probably not very good at it.”

“Me either.”

“Oh, no,” said Paul, helping her off with her coat. “You’re perfect. You’ll be perfect.”

Walking toward the misty hills beyond her house the next morning, Emily locked the night before into place. The sex itself had lasted maybe a minute, but afterward, they had wrapped themselves up in the blanket for an hour or more and talked and kept each other warm. She wondered what was so perfect about her. Nothing, really. Her breasts were average, she had too many freckles, and her eyes were dull blue. She was average, like Paul was. His little sister, Carey, was the good-looking one in the family, with her luminous skin and high cheekbones, though she and Paul had the same stormy gray eyes.

Is Carey feeling like a lone survivor? Carey, who didn’t get to escape like Emily, who had to go back to Grenfell County High School, to the three-story building that has stood on its own hill since 1921, a survivor of stock-market crashes and dust bowl storms and other major events in America that took place nowhere near it. In Amherst, the streetlights flash on, but the ghosts in a girl’s heart, they stay.

Little Sister

Her mother woke her three hours early

for her brother’s funeral when all

she had wanted, the only world

she could make for herself,

was the world of sleep.

The little sister stood in the shower

watching the short life of water.

Her brother had taken showers,

had taken his own short life.

The little sister dried her hair with a towel,

let it fall in her face. Over her head

she pulled the wool dress, black,

her mother had laid out on the bed,

and she hung inside of it.

She could hear the rain pecking

at the window. Chicken rain.

Peck peck, peck peck peck.

She had almost laughed

at how absurd it all was,

how water made mud

of the ground. How hearts

made mud of the world.

Emily Beam, February 1, 1995