Emily wakes on Groundhog Day to a split second of blissful ignorance, but then reality squeezes her heart with its tight grip. If she didn’t have a schedule to keep, she’d curl back into the fetal position and try to sleep off the truth.

But there is one thing to look forward to after she rouses herself out of bed. At ASG, Emily has made a wonderful dietary leap.

Coffee. Coffee morning, noon, and night. A hundred and fifty girls drinking coffee. This would never happen in Grenfell County. It feels very European, like a description in a textbook for French class, which is much harder here than it was at Grenfell County. At ASG, she was placed in French II, and even though she did well on her mid-year French III exam, which arrived on January 5 at Aunt Cindy’s in a thick envelope along with the rest of her exams, Emily is grateful for the wisdom that the headmistress, Dr. Ingold, showed in having her repeat the course. The classes at ASG are much harder, which is probably why the girls drink coffee all the time.

But today in French, Groundhog Day, Emily struggles. The fact of Paul’s death and the fact of what she did in Boston join forces and wallop her. She has to tune out when the teacher, Madame Colche, shows the class a short film about Père Lachaise, the famous cemetery in Paris. Emily turns to a blank page in her notebook and practices her signature. It’s time to change it up, give it more flourish. She increases the size of the E and makes the y bleed in to the B.

What had Emily Beam done to Paul’s heart to make him do such a thing to hers? For Paul to want their story to end the way it did is beyond her comprehension, and the poems in her head, like her fancy new signature, flutter like flags of surrender.

Emily had read part of their story in the newspaper. On December 12, Paul went to his first-period class—Statistics. Eighteen minutes into second period, Western Civilizations, he raised his hand to go to the bathroom, and his teacher, Coach Stockley, excused him. But Paul didn’t go to the bathroom. He walked down the hall. On the way to find Emily (the reporter presumed), he passed Mr. Jim, the janitor.

“Paul was one of the few boys who looked me in the eye and spoke to me by name every time I saw him,” said James Glass, custodian of Grenfell County High School for 25 years. “He was a nice young man. Such a tragedy.”

Paul kept walking, past other classrooms, to Ms. Albright’s classroom, where Emily should have been, but on that particular Monday, Ms. Albright had taken her AP English students to the library, which was right around the corner. So Paul entered the library where Emily was sitting with the rest of her class. Emily jumped when she saw him—she knew he wasn’t supposed to be there—but she got up from her chair and followed him into the stacks. He patted his backpack and told her he had a gun in it.

“That’s not funny, Paul,” she said.

He said, “I’m not joking.”

“Yes, you are,” said Emily. “Go back to class. We can talk during lunch.”

There would be no lunch that day.

The gun Paul had stolen had room for six bullets. Three bullets would be used that morning; three bullets would remain. Mr. Jim, the one-armed janitor, had been a soldier in the Vietnam War. Maybe Mr. Jim knew things about Paul that Emily didn’t. Maybe veteran soldiers understood death better than regular people, but if Mr. Jim had a clue as to why Paul killed himself, he didn’t report it to the newspaper.

When the short film on the cemetery is over, Emily raises her hand.

“Oui, Mademoiselle Beam,” says Madame Colche.

“May I be excused?” Emily asks.

“En français, s’il vous plaît.”

“Je voudrais aller,” Emily says. “J’ai besoin.” I would like to go. I have need.

Madame Colche nods, and Emily, who sits in the middle of the room, hurries out, taking her book bag with her. She doesn’t even know where the bathroom is in this building; she has to walk up and down the hall before she sees it, a tiny door labeled “WC.”

Paul could have gone to the bathroom like he told Coach Stockley he was going to. He could have washed his hands and come back to Western Civilizations class and stared at the giant map of Europe on the wall until class was over, tuning out Coach Stockley, the most ignorant teacher at school. (He’d been telling students for years that the Gilded Age was the Guilded Age.) Paul could have stared at that large map, wondering what he would do once he graduated from high school. It was okay that he wasn’t going to college; Mr. Wagoner hadn’t gone to college, either. The plan was that Paul would take over the family tree farm, but not right after high school. After he went to the bathroom, after he stared at the map, after he graduated from Grenfell County, he could have gone out West.

He could have gone to Texas and been a ranch hand.

Or Alaska. And worked on an oil rigger.

Or California. All those vineyards.

He could have worked on a fishing boat in Washington State.

And then he could have come home, managed the farm, gotten married, and made a family. His parents could have been grandparents. His little sister, Carey, could have been a maid of honor, then an aunt.

Inside the WC, Emily locks the door and presses her hand to her mouth. The metallic taste of Boston winds its way back. She never even thought to ask the doctor what would happen to the fetus once it was flushed out of her body. Creatures the size of tadpoles weren’t buried, were they? They were probably burned, burned up into the sky and reshaped into puffy clouds, tiny baby breaths bouncing along in the breeze.

Emily closes the toilet lid and sits down. From her book bag, she retrieves her notebook with the poems. She’s written three whole ones, but there are fragments of others scrawled here and there: Sorrow fades with time. Classmates innocent as birds. Red ink spilled in the name of freedom. She tears out all of the pages with words on them and returns her notebook to her bag. She folds the pages neatly into the trash can and stares at the ceiling, trying to fill her head with light, but all that comes is the first stanza of Poem 813, which she has not been able to get out of her head since she read it last night.

This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies

And Lads and Girls—

Was laughter and ability and Sighing

And Frocks and Curls.

Sighing, yes. Emily Beam is sighing for all time, just like Emily Dickinson. She checks her watch. There are ten minutes of class left, and Emily doesn’t want to get in trouble, but when she tries to open the door, it doesn’t turn. She jiggles the handle and bangs on the door and yells for help, but she’s locked in, trapped in a water closet. When Emily doesn’t return to class, Madame Colche comes looking. The lock is jammed on the outside, too, and Madame Colche tells Emily in a loud voice that she’s called someone on the maintenance crew. By the time Emily is rescued, Trigonometry is over—all classes are.

“Come with me to the parlor, and we’ll take tea before you go off to athletics,” Madame Colche says. “I almost always take my afternoon tea alone, and it will be nice to have some company.”

In the parlor, which looks just like a living room, Emily sits on an itchy brown chair. The talk is small at first. Madame Colche speaks in French, so Emily catches only some of it. As far as she is able to make out, Madame Colche grew up in Amherst, met a Frenchman in New York City, and married him. Because he would be gone so much, back and forth to Paris on business, he told Madame Colche that they could live anywhere she wanted.

“And I chose here,” she says, gesturing around the room. She switches to English. “Being a hall mother keeps me from missing Henri. You girls keep me young. So, tell me about yourself, Mademoiselle Beam.”

“En français?”

“Anglais is fine.”

“Well,” Emily says, “I’ve never been to France. But I’d like to go. And I’m an only child, so it was hard for my parents to send me here, so far away, but we live in a place where the school system isn’t very good, which is why I’m no star pupil in French.”

“Yet,” says Madame Colche. “You’re no star pupil yet. Give it time, Mademoiselle. I’m an excellent teacher.”

“Oh, yes, ma’am.”

“I hope you’re starting to make friends here. I’m sure you miss your friends from home.”

Emily pictures an empty chair at the round table of girls she sat with every day in the cafeteria, cheerleaders, mostly. Each girl was paired off with one other girl, a best friend. Emily’s best friend, Terra, who was not a cheerleader, had moved away at the end of tenth grade, which suddenly made Emily the odd girl out.

“I guess they’ll have to find someone else to be the middle block on the pyramid,” Emily says. “I was a cheerleader.”

“I’m sorry to say we don’t have those here,” Madame Colche says.

“Oh, that’s fine. I’ve sort of grown out of it.”

There is a knock on the door.

“Pardonnez-moi,” says Madame Colche.

Emily hears another woman’s voice and the door closing again. There is a long minute of silence before Madame Colche returns holding sheets of folded-up notebook paper.

“Mrs. Brooker found these in the bathroom when she was fixing the lock. She thought they might be yours. I took a look; it does appear to be your handwriting.” Madame Colche holds them out for Emily to take. “So. You’re a poet.”

Emily shakes her head. “No,” she says, “I’m just a girl who writes poems.”

“And that doesn’t make you a poet?”

“I think you have to be published to be a poet,” says Emily, unzipping her bag and stuffing the folded-up pages into her notebook.

“I disagree,” Madame Colche says. “Emily Dickinson wrote poems for years and years before she was ever published. But you would still call her a poet, would you not?”

“I would,” Emily says.

“Pardonnez-moi,” Madame Colche says once more, disappearing through what looks like a door to a bedroom. She flies back in, waving a sheet of paper in her hand. “Here,” she says, handing it to Emily. “There’s a poetry contest you should enter.”

Sponsored by the Emily Dickinson Society, the flyer reads. For girls aged 13–18. At the bottom below the guidelines is an entry form.

“I’m a proud member of the EDS,” says Madame Colche.

“Merci,” says Emily. “I’ll think about it. Oh, and merci for the tea, too.”

Folding the sheet of paper into the back pocket of her jeans, Emily makes her mouth into a smile that she hopes isn’t too fake and says, “Au revoir.” Out on the quad, the clouds have lowered. When he came out of his burrow this morning, the groundhog did not see his shadow. It is raining now, a silvery rain that turns winter to spring. A heavyset girl Emily doesn’t know passes by and tells her that the afternoon athletic period has been canceled, and the two girls share a joyful moment.

It was raining the night Emily and Paul first kissed, at a football party after the game. The rain had started during the fourth quarter, and Emily’s hair and cheerleading sweater were still wet when Paul led her from the lights of the living room and onto the dark of the back porch. She hadn’t planned to go to the party and didn’t have a change of clothes, so she apologized for the dampness as Paul put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her close.

Emily used to think this was the beginning. Now she knows it was the beginning of the end.

As she climbs the three flights of stairs to her room in Hart Hall, Emily hears the hall phone ringing. By the time she gets to it, the ringing has stopped—somebody’s boyfriend, but not hers. Hers is buried in the ground. Hers has a tombstone with Paul’s name on it and two dates. A beginning and an end. In her room, at her desk, Emily opens her notebook, the one with the poems in it, and writes another one, the second of the day. An hour later, when K.T. returns from her music lesson, Emily is fast asleep, folded over on her desk, used-up Kleenex scattered on the floor like roses tossed from a bride’s bouquet.

Ashes

This is where her story

begins and ends. This is where

her story ends and begins.

In her story, the telling

is not linear. The telling

is a circle, the shape of earth.

If earth is a circle, there’s no end;

she can’t walk the plank of it

to sink in a bottomless sea.

So she throws away her insides,

which are burned

in the night, and the sky

sucks up

the ashes.

The same sky that once

held her dreams has stolen

her story. And the stars

will know just

how to tell it:

night after night,

over and over.

Emily Beam, February 2, 1995