Sometimes, like now, as she’s running around the dirt track during Fitness for Fun, the sound of a thousand bells—doorbells, alarm bells, school bells, church bells, sleigh bells—rings in Emily’s ears. She can make them play symphonies; she can make them play hymns: “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” She can make the bells peal out short little poems, the downbeats in sync with her footfalls:

Staying power is gradual.

We feel it through the soul,

The poetry that happens when

New Eyes see like Old!

On December 12, Paul walked down the hall to the library, believing deeply in life, in the power of youth, wanting for Emily to believe in those things, too. And she didn’t, not at the time, not with the fervency that he did. In the dust under her running feet, there is a message that she couldn’t hear then: life, life, life.

• • •

On Thursday night, as soon as dinner is over, Emily falls into a deep sleep while K.T. listens to classical music and plays the air-cello. Madame Colche drops by—Amber does, too—but even though she tries, Emily cannot wake up. The cups of coffee she drank in place of dessert can’t keep up with her need for sleep. In one dream, a white cloud floats toward her in a sunlit field and hovers, delivering paper snowflakes with lines from poems written on them. When she wakes Friday morning, she can still remember some of the phrases, but it’s 7:45, so she has only enough time to rush into the bathroom and chug down a cup of K.T.’s home brew before class begins.

When Emily told K.T. about that snowy day in Boston, she admitted that she stole the Harvard sweatshirt from the campus bookstore, walked straight out with it on under her coat. She got back to Aunt Cindy’s house in Belmont by taking the red-line T to the end of the line. Yes, her mother yelled at her and punished her with therapy and grounded her for the rest of their time in Boston, but where was she going to go? That kind of grounded was nothing compared to the kind of grounded she felt sitting in the recovery room with two other girls, waiting for the better part of the anesthesia to wear off. For K.T., Emily assessed it as a snapshot, a single image, like a parody of a brochure for a private girls’ school: one white girl, one black girl, and one Latino girl, all colors of the rainbow represented, slumped in chairs, the useless blood trickling out of them.

“Did you talk to each other?” K.T. asked.

“No,” Emily said. “We should have, though.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Emily thought for a moment. “Because the voices in our heads had already started up.”

Mosaics

In childhood, they had killed things:

ants, bees, a bird, a squirrel, a dog.

Accidents, mostly all

accidents. They could have

dealt with it inside the fog

of memory. If time were kind—

as time is known to be—they could

trick their hearts into telling

another tale, a believable one

about a boy and a girl

with magical days laid out

like mosaics.

The tiles of their past

rearranged, redefined.

Emily Beam, March 17, 1995