1.
On Friday, Mr. Wieland, Emily’s science teacher from seventh grade, approached Emily in the hall during class change. “How’re you feeling, kid?”
She looked around automatically for Christopher or Leanna, anyone from their group, and remembered that they were all still home today. Because of her. She’d been bumping up against that realization all morning, and it provoked in her a mix of relief and dread. Relief because she was free of them all for now. Dread because she knew that she wouldn’t be for long.
“I’m OK,” she said. She couldn’t believe he’d asked her that, right out in the hall where anybody could hear him. She hugged her books more tightly to her chest.
“Has Ms. Nicholas talked to you yet about entering the science fair this year? You took that tadpole project pretty far, and you know they have a cash prize if you place at regionals.”
Emily shifted her gaze between Mr. Wieland’s shoes, a scuffed pair of leather hiking boots, and the middle button of his plaid shirt. His shirt cuffs were rolled up on his forearms, his hands thrust deep into the loose hip pockets of his khakis. Her eyes darted for just a second to his face—he was appraising her, friendly and paternal, and she felt a flicker of irritation. “Not yet,” she said.
“She will,” he said, “and you should. It’s a great opportunity, a great confidence builder. And money doesn’t hurt, does it? If you need any help, let me know. I’ve got a couple of new books that might give you some ideas.”
“Oh. OK,” Emily said.
Mr. Wieland looked at his watch. “Bell’s going to ring in another minute, so I ought to let you on your way. Don’t forget that Ms. Nicholas and I are both here to help. And there’s a little extra money in the budget this year for materials, so we could do some neat things.”
Emily nodded, adjusted her books from the left arm to the right, and started toward class. Mr. Wieland watched her go.
She was a strange, sad little thing. And as sorry as he felt for her, as wrong as it was for those kids to target her—those powerful and handsome kids with their rich parents and their easy lives—Ed Wieland couldn’t help but understand the reason, to feel, when Emily was around, something that pretended to be a small emotion, like distaste or amusement, but was actually more profound, too profound to name. Fear? It was like fear, a dark, slick thing in the pit of his stomach, a thing that muscled its way around on a silken underbelly, slow, deliberate. But fear wasn’t the right word, either. And when Ed sensed that crawling inside of him, when he registered in Emily’s presence how fully he wished to be somewhere else, he felt like a jerk. She was a girl, a smart, troubled girl, and he didn’t like to think that had he been Emily’s peer rather than her teacher, he’d have been one of the students pelting her with his lunch. But he wondered.
The bell rang, and he retreated to his classroom. He was liked at Roma Middle School. The students called him Mr. Wee, and the girls sometimes whispered to each other about how he was kind of cute for an old guy.
Emily, following Boss into the woods, thought about Mr. Wieland’s suggestion. Tadpoles—what a joke. What a joke that she had cried over them. If he knew her current, secret project, he wouldn’t be trying to distract her with kid stuff. What had once been so important to her—decorating the project board with construction paper, making frames for the Polaroid pictures she took, neatly lettering headings such as “HYPOTHESIS” and “RESULTS”—seemed trivial now, even pathetic in the wake of the discoveries she was making in the woods.
Mr. Powell’s dog, Boss, wasn’t used to going for long walks on a leash, and he was big and gangly, at least eighty or ninety pounds. Emily didn’t walk him so much as let him walk her. They were a subject of recent amusement in the neighborhood: the girl and the dog, the dog almost as big as she was, stumbling around the streets and then disappearing, who knows where. Boss scampered with his head close to the ground and his silken ears waving around his snout, and the clumsy bones of his haunches angled up and down, machinelike, and his splayed paws landed heavily in the mud. He smelled pungent and alive, and his jowls were dripping in excitement: so much ground, so many scents, a world entire outside his master’s property. He didn’t move like an old dog anymore.
Emily, feet landing in hard stops to keep her from tipping over onto her face, grunted, “Boss, whoa,” and yanked on the leash. He held back a bit and she caught her breath. Her ankle, still a little tender from last week’s fall, hummed with a distant ache.
A week—she could hardly register that so much time had passed. On Saturday she had gone back to the woods, convinced after a restless night that the body wouldn’t be there—that it had never existed or (worse) that someone else had found it. But there it was, now in broad daylight, now partly exposed, and the exposed parts already looked different than they had the previous night. Darker. She had thought about her science project then, “the effects of ultraviolet light,” and had carefully pulled another rock away from the body, exposing a portion of the upper left arm. Yes, she thought, heart trembling. It was different.
With the tadpole project, she’d kept a little spiral-bound notebook to record her findings. It was still in her room, tucked into the drawer of her bedside table: a log patterned with her neat print, observations such as “Beginning to sprout legs” under the heading “Control Group” and “Darker color, growth stunted” under “UV Group.” In two places, on a day when Emily had missed school because of a stomach bug, Christopher Shelton had tended the log for her. It was early in the project, and he’d marked “Swimming, no sign of change” under both headings. When Emily returned to school, she had run her fingers over Christopher’s notations, thrilled at the intimacy of it: his words in her notebook. The ballpoint pen he’d used left an impression on the paper.
She wasn’t writing her findings down in a notebook, but she began on Saturday to keep a mental log of what she was seeing, the subtle and not-so-subtle changes, and the control group was her own body, the taut, strong flesh she had always taken for granted. It seemed miraculous to her now: her plump forearm, its peach-hued ivory, the blond, fine hairs and tiny freckles. In class, while the teacher was lecturing or playing a video, she would put her arm on her desktop, delicate inside facing up, and she’d flex the tendons, observe the way a blue vein pulsed in the hollow of her inner elbow. Think, flex. Think, flex. The body, helpless to her will. But her awe had given way to something else, a sense of hopelessness. She wouldn’t call it depression. But she couldn’t look at her own arm now without imagining the arm of the body, the body that had been a person but was now an object of as much spirit as those UV-cooked tadpoles. What, she wondered for the first time, did it mean to live? What was she? An encasement of flesh and hot blood, a puppet, a collection of cells, an accident. Each day she promised herself that this was the last visit, the last time she’d “make sure” before going to her parents. Each day she stayed silent, easing her conscience with another promise.
After what had happened on Wednesday, she gave up on even the pretense of the promise. Watching Christopher and Leanna at the tennis courts—that thing he had let her do to him—disturbed and frightened her, and it hit her harder, in a way, than what happened moments later in the cafeteria, because she still wasn’t really letting herself think about that. She had to look at the memory in the way she’d looked at the body that first night in the woods; some instinctive order of her mind had cast a protective darkness over those events, making it easier to examine them with her peripheral vision than straight on. In her nightmares, she relived it all: the cruel glee on Christopher’s face, the chorus of shouts all around her, the dull impact of all that greasy, gelatinous food and the nauseating processed smells of it. In the waking day, it was something she brushed up against accidentally: when she saw a certain malicious humor in the eyes of a classmate and knew what the person was thinking, or at lunch, when she found herself reaching for a paper tray of salad or a margarine-soaked slice of garlic toast.
Yet she still couldn’t think about Christopher without feeling the same tender ache as before, and perhaps that was one of the reasons she had succeeded so well in protecting herself from the horror of what had happened in the cafeteria on Wednesday. She believed, perhaps now more than ever, that the Christopher of the tennis courts, the Christopher who had started that assault on her in the cafeteria, was not the real Christopher—the one who had helped her with her science project, the one who had joined her on so many of these walks in the woods. In a way, his suspension had only aided her in this delusion; not confronted each day with the boy who had given her every possible reason to hate and fear him, she was left with the boy her imagination had carefully constructed.
She was passing the Calahans’ mutt now, and it and Boss were snapping at each other through the fence, a new part of the ritual that Emily had still not gotten used to. She tugged and tugged on the leash and finally shifted Boss’s course, tipping him back toward the trail, which recaptured his interest. He knew where their journeys always led, and he was as curious now as she was, though the first time she brought Boss to the body, Tuesday evening, he’d howled and rocked back on his haunches, and then he’d started stalking back and forth beside it, coming forward for a sniff and just as quickly jumping back, as though he believed that the body might roll over and grab at him. The smell had been very bad that day, which was in the fifties after a weekend of steady drizzle, but now the temperatures had dropped into the high thirties, and Emily didn’t think yesterday that the smell was as pronounced as it was before. Or maybe she had just gotten used to it.
“Good Lord,” her mother said one night after she came home from a walk. “Did you step in something?”
“I don’t think so,” Emily said, but her mother made her go back outside and check her sneakers anyhow. And though Emily hadn’t seen anything, she could tell, putting her nose close to the shoe’s rubber tread, that she’d carried home the stench of death. She had raked the shoes across the damp grass, and then she went inside and retrieved the Lysol from under the kitchen sink. She sprayed the soles and left the shoes sitting out on the back step to air, and she thought for the first time, hard, about what she was doing—what she’d done by staying silent. The stench had followed her home like a ghost. Perhaps it had followed her to school. She had noticed how the other kids—even some of the teachers, like Mr. Wieland—recoiled from her. Had it always been like this? She was, she thought, a good person. She hadn’t hurt anyone. She hadn’t hurt the woman. She had only watched her and stayed quiet about her, and in all of these days someone else could have discovered her. It wasn’t Emily’s fault that no one had.
It was cold, cold enough that her breath clouded, and she’d worn a pair of cheap red knit gloves, the stretchy kind that looked as if they’d only fit the hands of a small child. She and Boss made a noisy procession, snapping branches underfoot, Emily’s exerted respiration mimicking, in a way, Boss’s urgent sniffs. She smelled it at almost the same time the dog did—or perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps she just knew now the way the tension in the leash changed the moment he caught his first whiff. They both slowed, and Boss leaned even closer to the ground, zigzagging, halting, jumping back. A fast spring forward. And, despite herself, her heart lifted a little. It was the pleasure of visiting with a friend, a good friend that you hadn’t seen in a while, though Emily knew neither of those pleasures: the pleasure of real friendship or the tender ache of temporarily doing without it.
She and Boss slid down into the ravine and stopped. Emily looped the dog’s leash around the trunk of a sapling, as she always did, so that his span of reach fell short of the remains. She approached the body and stood beside it, head dropped in what might have appeared to be mourning—but she was staring, calculating, making notations in her mental log. Her pulse had picked up, and her skin warmed with a flush of excitement. It was only here, after what had happened in the cafeteria on Wednesday, that she felt fully alive, and safe; here, measuring the resilience of her own smooth flesh against the body’s. Each day it was different—scary, yes, but there was a comfort to the body’s decimation, too, for she could see now how the earth seemed to be reaching around it to reabsorb it, and she could believe, only here, only momentarily, that there was a greater power dictating these things.
“Or who even needs God?” Christopher said. His fingers were twined in hers. His smell obscured the low, lingering stench of the body; his cologne was always strong and grown-up smelling, as if he borrowed his father’s.
“Sometimes I do,” Emily said. She could never remember Christopher’s face out here exactly as it was. He wasn’t an image but an idea, more vapor than person.
“The need is what makes it bullshit,” Christopher said. Emily remembered his complaints about Mrs. Mitchell’s test-preparation sessions, and she’d liked the coarse edge to his voice, could conjure the sound of it now more easily than she could conjure the shape of his face. “He would only exist if we didn’t need him to.”
Emily closed her eyes and squeezed her right hand. “You would hate me even more if you knew about this,” she said.
“I don’t hate you, Emily. I really like you.”
“You called me a freak. You embarrassed me in front of everybody.” This was the hardest part to explain to herself.
“I can’t be myself at school. You know how much pressure there is.”
“And that’s why you’re Leanna’s boyfriend?”
Silence.
She imagined Leanna Burke finding the body, Leanna Burke calling the police, Leanna Burke being celebrated in town as a hero, everyone asking her what the body had been like or if she’d been frightened. Leanna would not, Emily knew, have the strength to stay quiet as she had. She would have exposed the body, exploited it; it would have been a gross thing to her, a thing to seal up in a box and forget about.
“Leanna wouldn’t understand what this means,” Emily said. The Christopher of the woods could follow her thoughts, fill in the gaps.
“Of course she wouldn’t,” he said. “But I would.”
“Really?”
“I’m more like you than I let on at school. I would understand. I would respect you for waiting for the right moment to tell.”
“Who do I tell?”
“Who do you think?”
She looked at the disarray on the ground. “What if someone finds it before I can tell?”
“You know what to do about that, too,” Christopher said.
Emily dropped down to her knees and started scooping up handfuls of dirt and leaves, covering what she’d uncovered, doing a better job than the person who had originally buried it had. Boss pulled on his leash, whimpered, keeled back on his haunches. She ignored him. Her gloves were filthy and damp, and Emily couldn’t bear to wear them home. She peeled them off, dropped them onto the ground beside the body, and kicked some dirt over them with the toe of her tennis shoe. “Let’s go, Boss,” she said, untying his leash from the sapling. She left Christopher behind at the gully to keep watch over the dead.
“Don’t you have that Mitchell teacher at the school?”
Emily, watching television, hadn’t been listening to her mother. Boss was stretched out on the carpet beside her—“He smells like he ain’t had a bath in ages,” her mother had groused when Emily’s father brought him home on Tuesday—and she let her hand rest on the warm swell of his stomach. She’d been feeling a surprising kinship with the dog. He was the only one who knew her secret, and he hadn’t spurned her for it; if anything, he’d adopted her as his favorite in the Houchens household, sleeping at night on the rug beside her bed and following her from room to room, even if she was just getting up to use the toilet.
“Emily.”
“Huh?”
“That Mitchell woman. Is she your teacher? The one who called the other day? The day—” Her mother waved a hand, hesitant. “The day you took the cab home,” she finished lamely.
“Uh—yeah,” Emily said. “English class.”
“It’s a sad thing,” her father said.
Emily roused a little, frowned. She had been watching an Andy Griffith rerun. “What’s a sad thing?”
Her mother huffed. “I wish y’all would turn the TV off every now and then. We’re raising a couple of space cadets.”
“Your teacher’s sister is missing,” her father said. “I saw the posters up around town today.”
Emily sat up so quickly that Boss, startled, ambled awkwardly to his feet. “What posters? What did they say?”
“That she was missing,” her dad said, throwing up his hands, feigning exasperation. He hadn’t showered yet since work, so he was on the couch next to Emily’s mother in his oil-stained khaki shirt and pants, sock feet slim and almost fragile looking. His boots, she knew, would be sitting on a rug in the utility room. “Said she went by the name Ronnie and that she’d been gone since weekend before last. There was a photo.”
“What did she look like?” Emily’s mother asked.
“I don’t know.” His brows drew. “She had short hair and a lot of makeup on. Kind of tan, sort of.”
Emily ventured hesitantly, “Pretty?”
“Heck, I don’t know,” her father repeated. “I guess so. In a funny way.” He smiled at Emily’s mother, teasing again. “Not my taste, of course.”
“Well it’s scary,” her mother said, not returning the smile. “There could be some crazy person out there. I don’t like you wandering off out of sight with that dog, Emily.”
“I don’t go out of sight,” she lied.
“My foot.” Her mother jabbed a finger toward the backyard. “I tell you, Morris, she’s gone from the time she gets home from school until right before you come through the door. I look out and there’s no sign of her. Where do you and that dog go off to?”
“God, Mom, not that far.” Emily felt her face burning. “Sometimes to Tasha’s.”
It was a mistake, she realized. Her mother, with her daffiness and her soap operas and her stories about the good old days, was easy to underestimate—but she’d seen through Emily’s lie, and they exchanged a glimpse of recognition.
Her mother cleared her throat a little. “Tasha’s.”
Emily nodded wordlessly. Her father’s gaze was back on the television.
“I think it’s time to give Tasha’s folks a rest,” she said. “She can come over here sometimes. If y’all are just so set on spending every minute together.”
Emily frowned down at her hands, which were knotted together on her lap.
“Or maybe you want me to call Tasha’s mom and tell her so.”
“No, Mom, God,” Emily said. “I’ll stay closer to home. It’s not a big deal.”
“We’re going to have to set some ground rules around here,” her mother said.
Emily’s father stretched his arm across the back of the couch and kneaded her mother’s neck, conciliatory. He had been putting out fires between them for thirteen years. “That sounds good to me, honey. And Em oughta be doing homework after school anyhow.”
“I agree,” her mother said.
“We’ll be taking the dog back to Wyatt’s soon enough.” He rose, put his hands on his lower back, and leaned against them, wincing. “He’ll want the company. And it’s getting too cold to be outside all the time.”
“I need the exercise, Dad,” Emily said. She felt her flush deepening. “I’m trying to lose weight.”
“Lay off the Debbie cakes if you want to lose weight,” he said.
“Morris,” her mother hissed.
“What?” He started toward the bathroom, paused to ruffle Emily’s hair along the way. “She’s the one talking about losing weight.”
“Just leave her be,” Emily’s mother said.
He shrugged a little and left the room. The bathroom door closed, and the faucet on the bathtub creaked, the echo rattling through the plumbing all over the house. Seeming to sense that some tension had exited the room along with Emily’s father, Boss backed slowly down and flopped onto his side with a sigh.
Emily, pretending to watch television again, felt the soft press of her mother’s hands on her shoulders. “I worry about you,” she said tenderly. Emily waited for the follow-up, the offers of fun: Why don’t you have a sleepover? We could order a pizza, or Do you think one of your friends would want to go to the mall with us on Saturday? Perhaps she would start touching Emily’s limp hair, combing her fingers gently through it and lightly scratching the scalp (a move that had, in Emily’s earlier childhood, always provoked in her a sleepy bliss), offering to use the curling iron or pull it into a French braid. “You always hide your beautiful eyes,” was her refrain. “Just once I’d like to see you keep your hair out of your eyes.”
But she did none of these things, made no offers.
“I wish I could tell you to just be yourself. I like you, Daddy likes you, and that ought to be the end of it. If you’re happy.” She hunched down, trying awkwardly to cradle Emily, and Emily could smell her sour coffee breath. “But you don’t seem happy. You don’t even seem yourself to me.”
Emily stiffened against her mother’s touch, felt both relieved and guilty when the hands pulled away and her mom rose.
“It’s becoming a teenager, I guess,” her mother said. On TV, Barney Fife was gesturing theatrically, eyes bulging. His gun fired by accident. “You’re getting farther and farther away from me. I don’t know how to help you.”
“I don’t want help,” Emily said. “I just want you to leave me alone.”
There was a pregnant silence, long enough that Emily, still facing the television, thought that her mother had perhaps left the room. She cast a quick glance over her shoulder and saw that her mother was standing and crying a little, clamping her hand over her nose and mouth as if she could hold it in that way.
“Do you want to have friends, Emily?” Her voice was hoarse, high-pitched.
Emily shrugged.
“I think you do,” her mother said. “I think you do and don’t know how. Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I—I don’t know. Playacted with you too much.”
“Oh, Mom,” she said miserably.
“What I’m saying is that if you want people to care about you, you have to meet them halfway. I wish that being yourself was the answer, but, honey, it’s not. I’m sorry. It’s the truth. You have to act interested in other people, and you have to ask them questions about themselves, and”—she was weeping openly now—“you’ve got to be normal sometimes.”
“I’m not normal,” Emily said. She looked up finally, taking in her mother’s damp, magnified eyes and sun-spotted neck. Her skin, Emily noticed for the first time, was loose and slightly crinkled. Overripe.
“Baby, normal’s not who you are or how you’re born.” Her mother was smiling a little, calm again, as if Emily had made the only statement that she could have formulated a response to. “It’s how you act. It’s something you do on purpose.”