Madame Colche gives Emily a special smile when she walks into French, but Emily can barely smile back. It’s Friday, almost the end of her fifth week of classes, and she feels like a zombie. The coffee at breakfast hasn’t stayed with her, and she skipped lunch to go to the lieberry and write a poem that had been tapping at the back of her brain all morning. Emily almost asks Madame Colche for the leftovers in the French press perched on the windowsill.

Amber sits in the back hiding behind her wheat-stalk hair. As Emily slides into her desk in the middle of the room, she catches Amber’s eye. Amber looks away, but when Emily turns toward her again a few minutes later, Amber winks at Emily. Three times.

“Mademoiselle Atkins,” Madame Colche says. “Qu’est-ce que tu as? As-tu quelque chose dans ton oeil?” What’s the matter with you? Do you have something in your eye?

“Comment?”

Madame Colche repeats the question.

“Oui,” says Amber.

“Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” What is it?

“Regret. J’ai le regret dans mon oeil.” I have regret in my eye.

The whole class turns to look at Amber.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Amber says. “Ça va, everybody. Ça va.”

Madame Colche says nothing for a moment as Amber shakes her curtain of hair back into place.

“Amber,” Madame Colche says in English. “Do you need to be excused?”

“No, ma’am.”

Over the course of the class, each time Emily glances back, Amber is staring at her like she knows something she didn’t know three nights ago. Emily feels the little bit of power that she wielded in the drugstore and on the bench slipping away. After classes are over for the day, Emily checks herself in to the infirmary so that she doesn’t have to go to Fitness for Fun. She sleeps through dinner; she misses her walk. The nurse lets her sleep through the whole study period but wakes her so that she can get back to Hart Hall in time for check-in.

K.T. wants to talk, but Emily wants to sleep. She crawls under the covers and tries, but her brain won’t stop showing its own little horror movies. In one of them, a large clock with swords for hands points to 9:18 as Paul lunges through the doors of the school library. Then, the floor opens like an earthquake. People and things, bookshelves and tables and notebooks, are swallowed up in the crack. In another one, Madame Colche chains Emily to the floor at the front of the French classroom and makes her dump out the contents of her backpack, which is loaded down with guns and boxes of bullets. Emily waits until she hears K.T. snoring, and she sneaks out of bed for her notebook and flashlight and crawls back under the covers.

Writing poems makes Time move backward, makes Time move forward. Time will not stand still. Emily Dickinson raged her private rage by eschewing conventional punctuation or by capitalizing nouns that weren’t normally capitalized; sometimes she did both. In the vaulted Space of Emily Beam’s Mind, Ghosts hover like Clouds.

Buttons

Eight buttons on her blouse

like the eyes of daisies,

and his hands are giant

butterflies. Prehistoric

creatures of flight.

Underneath the buttons:

the girl. The butterflies

shift, soften in pursuit,

landing and staying

on hills made of skin.

The girl and

the butterfly boy—

they flutter over sheets

of white, arching and rolling,

the buttons abandoned

no longer strained,

no longer serving

the need.

Emily Beam, February 17, 1995