The Future Lives of Emily Milty

Julianna Baggott

Being Emily Milty is like being a wool coat, an old grandma type of wool coat with a horrible broach. Being Emily Milty is like being gray soup and SPAM and a yogurt dessert. Being Emily Milty is like being wall-to-wall Sears carpeting. It isn’t fun. That’s what I’m saying. And I should know because I am Emily Milty.

I’ve always thought of my life as a play. (I am currently in the chorus of my high-school performance of Oklahoma!; I’ve stolen four dust-bowl bonnets out of the costume closet.) But in the play of my life, there are only two possible roles, both leads: my own, Emily Milty, or my sister’s, Miranda Milty. There were no auditions, of course, only a shifting down of my mother’s eggs, like well-sifted flour, and an arsenal of my father’s sperm shooting randomly. Not that I think of my father as a gunman; far from it. I hardly know the man. He lives in Pasadena with his new wife, Junie. But I do know that my family lineage consists of window-blind salesmen and Fotomat managers—no known gunmen. I’m only talking about my father’s perfunctory anatomy. You know what I mean.

I’m only sixteen, but I’m not giggly about sex. My mother and my biology teacher, Miss Finch, have gone over the facts. And I like facts. They make me feel comfortable. So does Miss Finch, who is full of facts and smells forever tidy—a mix of breath mints and mothballs. Miss Finch is one of the possible futures for Emily Milty. My mother is another future for Emily Milty. Are these good futures? No. They’re bleak, but highly likely, and so I try to embrace them.

I’ll always live here in my same life. I was cast as sweet, passive Emily, and my sister as Miranda, my opposite. Miranda ran off with Tommy Eldridge when she was seventeen and pregnant with baby Marco. She would tell me about their nights out. We shared a bedroom, and she would come in late and wake me up and tell me where she and Tommy went and what it was like to have sex in his grandmother’s basement or his parent’s aboveground pool or on the greens of the par-three where he worked. This happened more than two years ago.

Early that fall, Miranda and Tommy disappeared but didn’t get married. I was new to high school, still figuring out the maze of corridors, trying to go unnoticed while stealing things—a nervous habit. In those first few weeks, I swiped two padlocks, a sports bra, fourteen pens, two welcome banners, a lighter, a phone from the front office, and Miss Finch’s hand-pump lotion, which sat on her desk. So now I smell like Miss Finch’s hand lotion sometimes, on weekends, to prepare myself to become Miss Finch, nervously rubbing my hands together while thinking of the things Miss Finch thinks of— biology and whatnot.

Miranda vanished. I am left here forever.

I’m a virgin. Do I have to spell that out? I’m sixteen and a virgin, and I’m aware of the fact that no one would dare say something like this out loud. But I am, truthfully, Emily Milty, the virgin.

I have to admit it wasn’t only eggs and sperm and the multiplication of DNA that made Miranda Miranda and me me. There was also nurture involved. Breath-minty, mothbally Miss Finch taught us about nature vs. nurture earlier this year. My meek mother always let Miranda have her way. Once upon a time, I think she let my father have his own way, too. So much so that he left us when I was two to drive across country with Junie in our old Chrysler LeBaron, which my mother had bought with her own money. From then on, my mother and I always shuffled behind Miranda’s full head of steam, bowing and wilting. Miranda was the churning engine, the blowing whistle, and the two of us were only the clackity clackity of wheels: pardon me, pardon me, pardon me.

Yes, secretively, I’ve thought I could have played a wonderful Miranda, giving a memorable and heartaching performance. Miranda, in her body glitter and her berry lip gloss and her Get It Straight hair gel and her Gap perfume spray and her low-rise jeans. Sometimes, I picture myself running down the street as Miranda did that summer, her long blond hair swinging back and forth across her back. Sprinting under streetlight after streetlight like a row of moons, to the car at the intersection with the rusty, cancerous muffler, and the boy, Tommy Eldridge, waiting for her behind the wheel.

But I have taken up the role of Emily valiantly, because the audience is the most important thing after all is said and done. My audience consists of my mother, the adoring fan who always sits in the front row, hands clasped together, eyes shimmering with tears. My mother who needs me.

I don’t think about Miranda too much. But sometimes lying awake on Saturday nights, listening to the drone of my mother’s small bedroom TV, I try to imagine Miranda in a bar, flirting with big-armed men with flexing tattoos, then taking one of them back to her place, where Marco is already asleep, and what might happen next. And sometimes, in these imaginings, the guy turns out to be Justin Gunter, who stands beside me in the chorus, and sometimes Miranda turns out to be me, and then when I see Justin the next day, I feel hot and nauseous.

But things changed when Jean Pencher sidled up to my locker one day last week. Jean is shaped like a thirty-five-year-old mother of two. She’s hippy and full-breasted with a saggy belly. She wears much too much makeup, penciled-in eyebrows that make her look suspicious, pinched and nearsighted. I only wear mascara, because you can’t really mess it up.

Jean was just standing there, breathing.

“What is it?” I asked. It was just before last period, biology class with Miss Finch. I don’t like to be late for Miss Finch, because she adores me. She sees in me a young Miss Finch, and she’s invested a lot of sighing and warm, gentle smiling in my direction. Once she said, “What would I do without Emily Milty?” And she shook her head dreamily with this foggy smile and faraway gaze.

Another time, she took me aside and said, “I was a late bloomer, too, Emily.” And I thought, My God, you once bloomed? I had no idea.

“I know something that you don’t know,” Jean said.

“What’s that?” I assumed that this had to do with something that Jean had overheard while in a bathroom stall. Jean is a natural informant.

“Your sister, Miranda. My brother saw her at BJ’s this weekend buying dog food.”

The news made a little prickle of heat spread on my neck. People liked to talk about Miranda. Throughout my freshman year, I would get introduced as Miranda Milty’s sister. Sometimes people would say things like “I heard she ran off with Tommy Eldridge. Is that true? Was she knocked up?” And I would be left to answer for her.

“I can’t really talk about it,” I’d tell them. “For legal reasons.” As if there were some court battle somewhere and facts couldn’t be released. I’d seen celebrities sidestep hard questions with an answer like that.

The other kids would nod knowingly. “Right, right . . .”

And as much as I hated being Miranda Milty’s sister, I liked this feeling of respect. I was almost dangerous, by association. And because there is nothing really dangerous about being Emily Milty (or a wool coat, gray soup, or Sears carpeting), it felt good. (Almost as good as stealing a phone right out of the front office!)

“I’m sure it’s a mistake,” I told Jean with a firm voice. I wanted to add that there was no way my sister even had a dog, because the Miltys aren’t dog people. My mother says so every time the subject of dogs comes up, in public or private. “We Miltys aren’t dog people,” she says solemnly with a kind of uppity tone, a tone that I know well because, like it or not, my mother is a future possibility for me and sometimes I can hear that uppity tone coming out of my own mouth. Maybe I used it right then when I told Jean I was sure it was a mistake. What can I do, though? I am Emily Milty.

But the truth is that I don’t really know anything about my sister. (Hell, maybe even my dad and Junie run a damn bulldog farm in Pasadena!) I hadn’t seen my sister, in fact, for a year and a half, since our grandmother’s funeral. Miranda had come alone, leaving Marco, a six-month-old at the time, with a friend. (I’d only seen pictures of Marco. Every few months one would appear in an envelope with no return address.) Miranda’s appearance at the funeral was like a miracle, a vision almost. It was so quick and grief-clouded. (My grand-mother was a wonderful woman, and it seemed like another horrible loss in my mother’s life. How many could she take?) I had wondered how Miranda had heard about our grandmother’s death at all, since my mother wasn’t in touch with her, but I’d been too disoriented to ask then and, until this moment with Jean, I’d put it out of my mind. I changed the subject. With girls like Jean, you can change subjects and, pretty easily, throw them off the trail.

“That homework took so long. Did you finish it?”

Jean shrugged and looked up at the clock with her pinched eyebrows and trudged off.

I wished Jean hadn’t told me. I was frazzled now. I don’t like being frazzled. How would I make it through biology? I had to be strong for Miss Finch, who depended on me for the limited joy in her life. Maybe it’s a lie, I said to myself. But really, now that Jean had said it, I knew that it was true, that my sister was in town again. I could feel Miranda’s presence, a certain closeness, as if at any moment someone would cough in the hall and I would look up and she would be standing there, shimmering in her body glitter.

I sat by the bank of crank-out windows that overlooked the parking lot. I had no idea what kind of car my sister would be driving and I had no indication that she would show up here at all, but still the least I could do was keep a lookout, and so I did it.

During biology, Miss Finch wrote on the board He-man and Domestic Bliss. You see, sometimes Miss Finch knows exactly what to say, what to do. Sometimes she tunes into my needs and she provides answers. (Like God, but the Miltys, who aren’t dog people, are also not God people. Religion is a crutch, my mother says. It’ll make you walk with a limp. To which I sometimes think, What if we’re already limping? Because of life? And we need a crutch?) She told us that certain female animals (“The peacock,” she said. “The walrus . . .”) choose their mates by the first approach, meaning they look for flashy, big, virile males who would be most likely to produce strong offspring. This was the he-man approach.

I thought of Tommy Eldridge, who was loud and drove a red car. And poor Miranda, I thought, poor Miranda fell for it. (Sometimes I can feel really sorry for Miranda!) See, Miss Finch knows better than to fall for such trickery. (I kind of love Miss Finch.)

“But other animals,” Miss Finch continued, “blue bills, for example, woo their mates by providing them with gifts of food to prove that they will be good fathers, protecting and nurturing their young.”

I thought of my mother’s stories of courtship, how my father bought her a leather-bound collection of the works by one of the Brontës, whom she loved, and pear-shaped earrings because they’d picked pears together once on a field trip as children. And then how he’d bought Junie a tennis bracelet (which, by the way, is made of diamonds, I came to find out, not a sweatband of some sort) with money from my parents’ joint checking account.

I looked out across the class. There was Justin Gunter. My boyfriend. Or, well, at least my mother thinks he is my boyfriend . . . because I’ve told her that he is my boyfriend. But Justin isn’t the flashy type or the wooing type. We kissed once under the mistletoe at a Christmas party at his house. I’d gotten invited because his mother and my mother work in the shoe department of Boscov’s. The Gunters are dog people. They have a Lab named Arlen, a great big-headed, pink-tongued, loud-breathing dog that sniffed my crotch when I walked into the party, as dogs do.

The kiss had been almost an accident. We bumped into each other under the mistletoe. I accidentally got punch on his white shirt, and some neighbor girl yelled out, “Kiss! Kiss!” She was drunk.

I told my mother about the kiss, loosely, not the specifics. My mother had smiled shyly, had put up her hand to say, “No more. That’s enough. It’s private,” and then kissed me on the forehead. I thought of Justin Gunter’s kiss right there in Miss Finch’s biology class—the tight press of his lips, the wispy brush of his light mustache. (And I thought of other things, too; that party hadn’t gone perfectly well in the end. Justin made fun of me. And I snuck into his bedroom and shoved one of his sneakers into my faux-designer backpack.)

“Choose wisely,” Mrs. Finch said. “Choose very wisely or, if in doubt, choose not to. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

And was it my imagination or was Miss Finch staring at me, Emily Milty, third row back on the left? Be like Miss Finch, I thought, be more like Miss Finch. She’s an unlikely role model, I know that, in her cardigans—orange for Halloween, red for Christmas. But Miss Finch has a part to play in life, and you can’t rely on the Justin Gunters or the George Miltys or the Tommy Eldridges of the world. Miss Finch has stuck with her role, and there was much to be said for that.

My mother never said anything against Tommy Eldridge. She was afraid of him. He never knocked at the door. He’d gun the engine, and Miranda would clomp down the stairs. She’d flip her hand up, the other hand fitting into her tight jean pocket, and say, “I’ll be home late. Don’t wait up.”

“How late?” my mother would chirp, trying to sound casual.

Miranda would say, “How would I know? I haven’t even gone out the door yet.”

My mother would glance at me, her eyes shifty with fear, and I’d give her the big eyes and my shrug.

I could have learned how to come and go as I please, like Miranda. She’d already oiled the door hinges. But I didn’t. Miranda would strut out the front door, the car’s engine would tear open and they’d roar off, and my mother would start crying.

And then she would turn her eyes on me, Emily Milty. She would say, “Tell me what you’re learning in school.”

But what she meant was: Don’t ever leave me. Don’t ever leave me like that.

In fact, just last week, she’d been sad, when we were eating, just the two of us, at the table in the kitchen with seating for four. Sadness would sometimes just descend, because Miranda was gone and Marco was out there somewhere with her. My mother’s grandson. She’s already lost her husband and her mother. And she said, “How about something from Oklahoma! to brighten things up around here?”

So I stood up, opened my mouth, and sang my heart out. “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” I smiled and sang and rocked on my heels and then slapped my knee. “Oklahoma O.K.”

How can I explain it? I would stay here forever. I would make up for my father and Miranda. And, in return, she would offer me all of their uneaten portions of love . . . so much love that I could almost choke on it.

We had a deal.

I was nervous when I got home from school. I always tell my mother everything, a moment-to-moment recap of my day over doughnuts and milk. I thought it would only raise false expectations if I told her about Ed Pencher seeing Miranda at BJ’s buying dog food. I knew that my mother lived on the hope that Miranda would come back (and maybe my father, too). Somewhere deep in her maternal heart, she still expected Miranda to bound through the door. No matter how wonderful I am, no matter how uplifting and simply good, each moment that slipped by without Miranda was a call for disappointment.

I decided not to say anything about Ed Pencher seeing Miranda. But I certainly couldn’t say that nothing interesting happened, because every detail of my life interests my mother, everything, especially anything I have to say about Justin Gunter. “It’s so nice that you have a little friend of your own,” my mother says.

The truth is that I’m not so sure that Justin Gunter likes me at all. Miss Finch once told us about Inuit mothers, that they know their children so well that the babies don’t have to wear diapers. The mothers can sense when the baby in the papoose is about to pee, and they then just slip them out to do so.

After the kiss under the mistletoe and before I stole his sneaker, Justin walked up to me, his teeth stained pink from the spiked punch, his upper lip wet with it, his apple cheeks shiny with sweat, and said, “I always see you with your mother. Don’t you have any friends your own age?”

“Sure I do!” I get along really well with both of the girls who have lockers on either side of me. Both of them, not to mention Miss Finch.

“It’s like the Inuit mothers,” he’d said.

“What?”

“Does your mother know everything about you? Does she still carry you in a papoose? I saw you two at the movies together. Shouldn’t you get out and live a little? And I don’t just mean here at my stupid Christmas party.”

“And you’re living large?” I said. “You’re really going buck-wild? Please!”

I kept this part of the story from my mother. It would have made her knit her brow. She would have said that men were imperfect. She might have even started to cry.

Sometimes I don’t even like Justin Gunter. He’s a little overweight and sometimes he wears his shirts too tight at the neck and they seem to cut off oxygen to his big red face. He’s sarcastic with everybody, and although they seem to like it, I don’t. It’s confusing. It sends mixed messages. What would my mother think if she knew that Justin Gunter wasn’t my boyfriend? (Was my mother jealous of Miranda? As jealous as I was when she came home those nights after being out late with Tommy Eldridge and told me how in love she was, and where they did it? Hadn’t my mother married George Milty when she was still young and pretty like Miranda? Couldn’t she have lived a little? What does she think about when she’s listening to the car radio and hums along like she does to “Muskrat Love” and “Afternoon Delight”?) What if my mother knew that I was only a coat-soup-carpeting sort of a girl who doesn’t have anything better to do than comfort her grieving mother?

I walked into the kitchen through the back door, the curtains puffing out and then going slack. My mother was lining up the doughnuts on a tray. I decided to talk about Jean Pencher’s eyebrows again. It couldn’t be overstated.

“There should be a policy against penciling in your eyebrows,” I declared. “A firm policy.”

My mother turned then to put the tray on the table, and I could tell that she’d been crying. Her eyes were puffed and red.

“Emily,” she said, and then she smiled broadly and then the tears welled up and she covered her crinkled mouth. She walked over to me and hugged me around the shoulders. She whispered into my ear, “Miranda is back! She’s back! Our Miranda!”

Over the next two days, my mother told me all the new things she’d learned about Miranda. Miranda had gotten a job at the veterinary practice on Cleveland Avenue. It was just secretarial, but she was thinking of becoming a vet herself and so she was checking it out from the inside. My mother said “from the inside” as if Miranda were FBI working undercover in the mob. Marco was in day care. He was a great talker. My mother had conversed with him about a tricycle on the phone. Miranda had three dogs, a great Dane and two mutts she’d taken in as strays.

But I couldn’t process any of it. I would tell myself the old Miranda stories—how much Miranda had loved Tommy Eldridge, and when he decided to take off with the money he’d saved from working at the par-three, he wanted Miranda to come, too, because she was pregnant and he was going to prove everyone wrong and make something of himself and his new family. I remembered Miranda’s long, impassioned speeches about Tommy Eldridge. There was no need for the speeches. My mother wouldn’t stop her, couldn’t. She wanted her to stay with us, to raise the baby at home while attending the community college, and my mother said so, calmly, unconvincingly. It was as if my mother had been pulled from the audience to help out with a scene. (It was called “performance theater” or something like that. My theater teacher had talked about seeing it in New York. It was bad.) Miranda had her suitcase packed, and Tommy was waiting at the intersection. I replayed in my mind how my mother and I followed her to the front yard, the sprinkler ticking around our shoes.

Miranda said, “Well, this is good-bye, like it or not. I know that I’m the black sheep. I know I never fit in.”

“That’s not true,” my mother said. “It’s not true.” But her tone rang otherwise. She was desperate. “We love you, Miranda,” she said. And although this was true, it only made the first denials more obvious lies. It seemed to be that my mother loved her despite the fact that she never fit in, or because of it.

I was desperate, too, though, and this desperation was what I remembered most of all, probably because I’d begun to feel it again every once in a while since Jean Pencher had told me the news. It was a tightening in my throat, as if my muscles were made out of elastic bands, the kind found on nightgown sleeves, and someone had just cinched them. Even out on the front lawn the night Miranda ran off, the sprinkler spraying my bare legs, my shoes soaked down to the socks, I seemed to understand that if Miranda left like this, so angrily, I would spend the rest of my life making up for it, and I would never leave.

I said, “Go, then, if you’re going to go. Don’t make any more out of it. Don’t be so dramatic! Just go.”

And I stormed inside, slamming the screen door behind me and running up to my room, where I dipped below the window and watched her run up the street under the streetlight-moons to the car at the intersection, a car that then roared away.

This is what I thought about, not any of the newfangled facts like Miranda’s coming for dinner! With Marco! No. I refused to try to believe that. I stuck with the past, with the set of roles the past had well established, with what I knew had happened and was dependably true.

I was upstairs in my room, waiting, all of my stolen objects laid out on the floor, my padlocks and banners and bonnets, the office telephone, and Justin Gunter’s sneaker. If my mother had knocked on the door, I would have told her to wait; I’d have shoved everything under the bed. But she wasn’t going to knock. She was waiting for Miranda and Marco, who were late—not a surprise. My mother was fluttering around downstairs. She’d vacuumed the whole house, rubbed down all the wood with Pledge, and wiped the windows until they squeaked. And now, from my room, I could smell the bubbling meat loaf, the buttered carrots and green beans, the caramel dessert—Miranda’s favorite.

I was looking at my loot, thinking, No one knows this about me. No one knows that Emily Milty is a thief.

When the doorbell rang, I arranged everything in the back of my closet, stood up, and looked in the mirror. I’m ordinary. I have nice eyes. My teeth aren’t too big or too small. Neither is my nose. But Miranda gobbled up all of the prettiness. She was first and took more than her share. (Miranda was a thief first. I’m just reclaiming things here and there. I’ve been stolen from myself, you know.) I brushed my hair and walked downstairs.

Miranda was standing in the hall and Marco was sitting on the floor at her feet, taking off his shoes. He had dark hair like Tommy and lots of it, though it had been smoothed down with a comb. My mother hugged Miranda carefully and kissed her cheek the way she would our ninety-year-old aunt Sassy.

Miranda was a little skinnier than she’d been at our grandmother’s funeral, softer. Her hair was a brash blond, still long, but straggly even though it had been brushed. She wore a big necklace with wood cutouts of giraffes and rhinos. And parrot earrings. She was stomping her feet as if they were cold. My mother took her coat to hang up for her. Miranda still spoke loudly. Her mouth was, in fact, bigger than the rest of the family’s, and she spoke using all of it.

She was saying, “I forgot it gets chilly here. I mean, I expect Delaware to be so much warmer than Michigan and it isn’t much different.” Tommy had had friends in Michigan. It’s where he left her.

My mother doesn’t ever really leave Delaware. It has a city, farmland, and a small slice of the ocean for vacationing. I was saying inside my head, We’ve never even been to Michigan. We’ve never been invited or even been given a phone number or an address. And again I thought of my grandmother’s funeral: How exactly had Miranda gotten the news?

My mother said, “Oh, is that right? Is that so?”

And then Miranda looked up and she gasped a little, startled to see me standing on the stairs. “Emily, you scared me. You’re always sneaking up on people!” This is the type of thing that’s often said of people like me, the Emily Miltys of the world—the wool coats and gray soups and Sears carpetings.

Miranda had lipstick stuck on one tooth, but she had a perfect nose and her face was still glossy and all-American. I walked down the stairs.

“I didn’t mean to be sneaking up,” I said. “I was just waiting my turn.” I felt like a grade-schooler. Since when did I say, “Waiting my turn”? I never had to wait my turn anymore. It was always my turn.

At dinner, Marco sang his ABC’s, and everyone clapped. He slipped under the table and poked at our legs. Each time we were supposed to say, “Ouch!” But I didn’t.

Miranda said things like, “I’m thinking of staying here in town for a while.” And, “It’s a nice town actually. I mean, I’d have never said that before I left, but it is.” She said, “It’s such a nice place to raise kids.” She seemed oblivious to what her comments might mean to my mother.

I wanted my mother to explode at her, to say, “Of course it’s nice! It’s where I raised you! It’s where I told you to raise Marco!” But my mother only encouraged her, talking about the parks and the recreation leagues as if she were informing a new neighbor of all that was now available to them in the land of plenty.

Miranda turned to me halfway through dessert. She said, “So, are you seeing anybody?”

I looked at my mother and then back at my plate. I could feel the cinched elastic of my throat, a small tug, a pull.

“What?” Miranda said, glancing from my mother to me and back again. “Who is it? Anyone I know?”

“No,” I said, meaning No, I’m not seeing anyone, but also meaning No, you don’t know him, because I knew that my mother wanted to think I’d found a boyfriend in Justin Gunter.

My mother said her lines, as I had expected. “I think that Emily has a special fella at school. Justin Gunter. He lives just three streets over from us!”

“Oh, Justin,” Miranda said, pointing her fork at my mother. “The one you told me about a while ago, the one she kissed at the Christmas party.”

This, I wasn’t expecting—a departure from the script. I stood without thinking about it, a natural reaction to my body’s stiffening up. I stared at my mother, who was tsk-tsking with a little shake of her head, meaning Oh, no, no, Miranda, you shouldn’t have mentioned it. You’ve spilled the beans, dear. I glared at one face and then the next, the next and back to the first. I wanted answers. When had my mother told Miranda about Justin Gunter’s kiss? A while ago? Not at the funeral; I’d barely known Justin then. I imagined Miranda and my mother’s conversations. How many had they had? Had there been months’ worth of them, more than a year? I could just imagine their dialogue.

“Poor Emily!” my mother would say.

“Why doesn’t she get a life?” Miranda would answer.

Had they been having these sneaky conversations since the funeral or before? Is that how Miranda knew?

I turned to my sister. “And who are you seeing these days? Tommy Eldridge types? Dirty high-school dropouts?”

“I see people all the time!” She gave a laugh that was more a bark. “I’m not like you, Emily. I’ve had my share. I’ve been there and done that!” Again, she barked loudly, but she looked tired, too, older suddenly.

I felt sick. I could feel the caramel and butter and gravy rising in the back of my narrow throat. I swallowed hard.

“Are you a dog?” I said. “Are you some sort of dog now? Barking at the table?”

I glanced at my mother, but she couldn’t look me in the eye. It wasn’t the best exit line, but I picked up my plate anyway, piling it neatly with my silverware and my glass. I walked into the kitchen, letting the dishes clatter in the sink.

“Emily!” my mother called out.

But I was already at the closet fishing through hangers for my coat. I heard my mother say, “Excuse me.” And then her feet shuffled through the kitchen. But by the time she appeared, I had already put on my coat and was buttoning it up.

I said, “You’ve been talking about me? How long have you two been talking about me?”

My mother said, “Emily, no, we don’t talk about you. She calls me sometimes during the day when you’re at school. I just never mentioned her calls. It hasn’t been easy for her. It hasn’t.”

She wiped her hands on her skirt and held them out to me. She wanted me to rest my head on her chest and cry and cry until the shiny duck pin on her sweater made an imprint on my cheek—just like I had after not getting a real part in Oklahoma!, after being pushed into the stupid chorus, where I only wandered around in a herd like a singing cow.

I shook my head. “You shouldn’t have! You broke our promise!”

My mother paused. She looked confused. “What promise?”

I couldn’t answer. It hadn’t been the kind of promise that had been put into words. But it was a promise, an agreement. Oklahoma O.K.! I turned and walked out the front door into the night, which was much, much warmer than anywhere in Michigan.

At first I didn’t know that I was heading toward Justin Gunter’s house. I could only think of how my mother had never slipped, not once. I thought back to her tearful performance in the kitchen. Hadn’t she known for some time? Hadn’t she decided that it was time to tell me? How long had I been lifting my mother up, sticking with her all of the time, denying my life for hers, and all the while she was keeping secrets from me? She’d lied to me. Why? Because I’m so fragile? What does she know about my life? She was a remarkable actor, I decided. Remarkable. So good, in fact, I’d never known she was acting at all!

Soon I found myself rounding the corner of Briar, starting my march uphill toward Justin Gunter’s house. I wanted to see him with my own eyes. I wanted to have my own life, and in this life, I was the kind of person to march over to Justin Gunter’s house if I wanted to.

It was a ranch. The first floor was nearly dark. I could hear a pumping base line coming from the basement, where Justin’s older brother lived. I could hear the dog, Arlen, bark once, twice, but then he gave up, probably flopping to the floor in a tongue-lolling, heavy-breathing heap of fur.

I walked up the cement path. The screen door squeaked as I opened it. Here, tucked inside the screen door, I could imagine Justin’s face appearing in the cracked door, his chin above a chain that he would quickly unlatch. I knocked. But there was no answer. I knocked again and took a few steps back, looking over my shoulder across the street to the other houses, their blank windows staring at me like a row of my classmates all screwed into their desk chairs, their implacable faces, the vacant stares. Are you watching me? I wanted to ask. Can you see me?

No, I decided, no one ever watches me, except my mother. No one could ever really see me. I was nearly invisible. How else could I steal so very many things? I stepped off the porch and onto the Gunters’ lawn. I walked through the side yard to the only lit room. Ducking behind a bush next to the house, I leaned up to the window, my knuckles poised over the glass.

And there was Justin Gunter. He was sitting at his desk, his head resting on the fold of his textbook, his arms sprawled out. Was he asleep? And here I was: Emily Milty in the dark, looking in his window. Had my mother ever done such a thing? My dithering mother? Had Miss Finch ever found herself in a situation like this, breath-minty, mothbally Miss Finch? It dawned on me at that moment that maybe there was some other future version of Emily Milty, besides my mother and Miss Finch, out there in the distance . . . a crazy woman who knocked on windows in the middle of the night. I am not the person I’ve always known. That’s what I said to myself. And then I knocked.

Justin’s head popped up. His face was flushed and there was a line running down his cheek from the center of the book. He looked around. I waved. And he drew back, surprised, but then loped to the window and opened it up.

“Were you asleep?” I asked. This was an odd thing to say, in the dark, outside of Justin Gunter’s window.

“No,” he said, which was a lie.

“Well, I just wanted to tell you . . .” And here I realized that I didn’t really have anything to tell Justin Gunter. “I just wanted to say . . .”

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he said, with a hint of happiness, with a kind of I-can’t-believe-my-luck ring to this voice.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I should probably explain . . .”

“Does your mother know you’re here?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t need to have permission for everything. We aren’t Inuits, contrary to what you have to say about it.”

“You know, Emily Milty, I was asking you out. I was saying you should go to the movies without your mother. And, instead, with someone like me. That’s what I was saying.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling hot and nauseous and tight in the throat and happy, too.

“But you got mad and you stormed off.”

“Oh,” I said again. Was I an Oh-machine? Only capable of Oh-ing?

“What did you want to tell me?”

“See, I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to tell you that I’m a thief, and no one knows that.”

“Are you going to rob us?” He smiled. “You don’t seem like a cat burglar.”

“I don’t seem like who I really am,” I said.

“Neither do I,” Justin said.

“Oh,” I said, again with the Ohs, and we looked at each other for a moment. We just kind of stared at each other the way people do, I guess, when they recognize something of themselves in the other person. “Well, I should go.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, though, right? In bio?”

“Yep,” I said.

“Good,” he said.

And then I didn’t walk away. I asked him a question: “Are you going to ask me out again?”

“I didn’t ask you out in the first place.”

“Well, are you going to?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, then.”

Then I walked away and he shut the window.

But the window quickly flew back open. “Did you steal my sneaker at the Christmas party?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “And four bonnets from backstage at Oklahoma!and one of the phones from the main office, but I never told anybody any of it.”

“Wow! You know, I’ve been looking for that sneaker. Can I have it back?”

“Sure.”

And that was it. I thought of my sister’s long hair swinging across her back and Tommy Eldridge’s motor and how everything had changed. I thought of my mother’s meat loaf and little Marco under the table. I started to cry, sharp little bites in my chest, but not because I was sad. I wasn’t. Miranda was home. My sister had come back to us. And Marco was here now, and I am still a wool coat and gray soup and Sears carpeting, but not as much as I was just that morning when I woke up. I was becoming someone else. I could feel it.

By the time I walked down Justin Gunter’s street, I was heading home. Soon I was at my front door, fishing a key from under a clay flowerpot. And that’s where they found me, my mother, my sister, and my little nephew with his lumpy dark hair. And I realized that, no, they didn’t really know me, that I hadn’t ever really been all that honest with them, and maybe more important, I didn’t really know them. Who was this woman with her red nose and her hands clasped nervously at her chest? What did my mother really want? And my sister. She was older now. She was tired, a little heartbroken maybe, but stronger. She was a mother, and her son— who’d stayed up too late—was wrapping himself around her leg, saying, “That’s her. That’s Aunt Emmy from the picture.”

What picture? I wanted to know. Had my sister packed a picture of us away in her bag when she left with Tommy Eldridge? Had she missed us?

I didn’t know very much of anything at all. But I was forgiven, awash in the porch light, redeemed by nothing more than my arrival. My eyes shined into their eyes, back and forth, from one to the other, like a roving spotlight.