NO ONE EMILY KNEW PERSONALLY ever came to the shop, but today was a special day, apparently. Mia showed up a couple minutes after Derek left. At the sight of her, Emily’s face felt like your hand would if you closed it around a hot coal. She picked up a hardcover of Gatsby from the table, snarled you fucking whore, and bashed Mia as hard as she could on the side of her head.
Emily blinked as her world started to shake, like an earthquake. It stopped just after a moment, and she found herself standing in the same spot she was before she picked up the book from the table. She looked up and found Mia in the doorway, where she had been the whole time.
For the first time in her life, she really wished that hadn’t been a hallucination.
Not a good time, Emily said simply.
Mia giggled, pushing her curls back. Not a good time for your sista from another mista?
Get the fuck out of my store, Mia, Emily said, and Mia looked revolted, stepping back as if Emily really had hit her with a book. And don’t ever come back. If you do, I will beat the living shit out of you.
Emily . . . ?
I told you that I loved him, Mia, Emily said, tears streaming down her face. I told you that I loved him.
I was just—
You were just being a whore, Emily said calmly. You were just being you.
As if to agree, not one mark of emotion anywhere on her face, Mia turned and left. That was the last time Emily ever saw Mia Molera. Eventually, there would be no more toxic souls left in Emily’s life, starting with her.
Mostly because they all died. Emily could safely say that only one of those deaths was her fault, though.
***
She wore the red dress.
Like with all planned outings, Emily wished she hadn’t agreed to go, though for different reasons. Her brother was young—young enough to need a fake ID—and his friends were young and dumb, and because they were young, they were irresponsible and annoying drunks.
Derek’s new place wasn’t far from downtown, so he, Emily, and his not-lesbian friend Fiona, walked amongst a crowd of night-crawlers. With her phone, Emily took a picture of one girl’s ass, because it was in booty shorts and it was nice. Next to her, a girl she didn’t know laughed as her camera flashed.
Emily had been to the club before. The company was cheap and the drinks were expensive. The walls were lined with platforms for the male dancers dressed in nothing but speedo-type underwear. There was a lower level that was used for dancing, and the bar was on the upper level, below a giant glowing orange light thing that looked like a friendly spider, if such a thing existed. Outside, on the patio, was one female dancer in a leather bikini. Of the entertainers, she made three times as much as anyone else. A few feet away from where men and women crowded around her, sticking cash beneath her strings, was a patio area with tables and smokers. This is where Emily liked to hang out at this place, and tonight was no different.
What surprised her though was that Fiona did not get lost on the dance floor with Derek, but followed her outside, with two clear drinks in her hand.
“Go dance!” Emily waved at her. “I’m fine, I promise you.”
“I’m good,” she smiled the most genuine smile and sat at a table with Emily, pushing one of the drinks over.
“Excuse me,” a bald man tapped Emily on the shoulder. “I don’t mean to be rude but I just have to tell you, you are so beautiful.” He raised his hands to the sky. “You glow under the stars.”
Emily laughed nervously. “Um, thank you.”
He smiled at her, turning back to his friends.
Fiona and Emily laughed together. It would turn out that nineteen- year-old Fiona was not dumb, or irresponsible, or an annoying drunk. Fiona Harvey was really, really smart. They spoke of books, illness, American troops, and of politics. They peed at a park behind the club, squatting against a brick wall for support.
Derek met some Polish rapper and went home with him in his Mercedes. Fiona took a picture of the guy’s driver’s license.
They stumbled back to the house, collapsing on Derek’s couches, laughing way too loudly for what was considered acceptable at three o’clock in the morning.
Scrambled eggs woke Emily sometime around noon, and over coffee, she and Fiona talked shit about mainstream coffee chains.
Emily seemed to remember a phone call just before she fell asleep, a familiar voice saying that he was sorry through the speaker. Don’t be mad at me, the words rang in her head. But that couldn’t be. Emily was really drunk. She must have blacked out or something. Or, she was just, you know, schizophrenic. Either way.
***
Over time, Emily stole Fiona away from Derek. Emily tried to hang out with him—both girls did—but he was so negative. Derek loved to play the flaming gay card and in the public eye, he was the most wonderful person to be around; Emily never laughed as much as she laughed with him. But the antithesis that was Derek these days, well. His childhood had broken him. He believed that no one loved him and that everyone owed him something. He pushed away everything that was wonderful or had positive potential. When he spoke, all Emily heard was her mother. He hated her; Derek’s hatred for Karla burned a hole through his chest and through his head. But sometimes people were just mirrors, and Karla, she was a mirror of Derek’s existence. He was exactly like her. Both Karla and Derek got to the point where they would call one another and yell, cuss the other out until they couldn’t speak or breathe anymore, and then they would call Emily and tell her how awful the other was. Karla was a terrible mother, and Derek was an even more terrible son. And the truth was that Emily didn’t want to hear it anymore. From either of them.
She stopped replying to Derek’s texts and didn’t answer the phone when Karla called (her mother didn’t know how to text). When she finally agreed to hang out with him again, and they got really drunk, Derek said something to Emily that she would never forget. He told her that he didn’t care if she loved him, because it would never be good enough. Quietly, she cried, and she left him standing there on the street. When Fiona found out what he had said to her, she refused to speak to Derek ever again. She told Emily that she was a good sister and a good person and that Derek didn’t deserve her.
He called a few weeks later, saying that no one would help him, and that he wanted to sleep away his life. He told her that he wanted to die.
“You should call the police, if that’s the case,” Emily said.
“Emily, shut the fuck up, you make it sound like I would kill myself. You know better than that.”
He was crying.
“So what do you want, Derek?”
“I want you to tell me what to do!”
“What to do with life? Get out of bed, Derek. That’s what you do. You get out of bed, and you get yourself a cup of fucking coffee. That’s all you can do.”
He hung up on her.
***
The threesome-friendship Emily had with Fiona and Savannah felt like a movie set in New York City more often than not. Fiona taught Savannah how to smoke pot properly, and Emily explained to both of them that she called Fiona a not-lesbian because she walked the earth shouting lesbian, yet Emily believed she was one of those who could be in a relationship with anybody. It was about the human connection for Fiona; not the label stuck to the outside of it. Savannah was always making fun of Emily, teasing her for secretly being in love with Fiona.
Emily would laugh. “Nah, Fiona’s not into girls like me, she would say.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” she winked, “Fiona wants a military spouse. You know, so she can reap the benefits.”
Savannah would laugh, and they’d go back to their books.
***
Time passed. Wounds healed. Emily wasn’t about to say that she wasn’t in love with Brendan anymore because she would be lying. But it was a soft kind of love. The kind that lined the edges of your heart, instead of filling it. In time, she forgave him because in reality, he really never did anything wrong. He had been up front with her, and she chose not to hear what he was saying. It takes two to tango, and if you dance too long, implosion is inevitable.
Emily used meditation and holistic healing to her advantage. Her monthly visits with Frank consisted of old cartoons with no dialogue and French fashion shows. He brought her books that he knew she’d never buy for the store because they would never sell. He told her stories of his years. He never mentioned Brendan. Neither did she. She didn’t go back to Shore, and she found other music to listen to.
Jace was no longer a distant friend. He called her one night to randomly say hello, and they talked for hours every night after that. Sometimes they would fall asleep on the phone. They talked about books and art and comics, about everything that was wrong with the world, about feminism, about girls with tattoos. They talked about being roommates somewhere cold. They talked about coffee.
And when she wasn’t talking to Jace, Emily read. She did a lot of research. She learned that healing the mind starts with the body. The voices, the hallucinations, they never left, but they waned. They had somehow traveled to the other side of the locked door, sucked through the cracks, and they couldn’t get back in. She shut out her own illness and by doing that, it danced away from her. Soon, she didn’t need Frank anymore. She spent her time on girls’ nights with Fiona and Savannah. She read a lot of books. She started a book blog, wherein she earned thousands of followers in just six months. She learned how to tweet. She hosted author events at the store. She traded her hoodies for vintage sweaters and her tennis shoes for flip flops. She got pedicures. She drank wine. She laughed at hipsters. The whole thing was like having perfect hair: you never have a bad day, and you always feel beautiful.
She was sexually deprived, but Emily could never have sex with anyone she didn’t trust, so she tried to get past it, and when she couldn’t, she bought the world’s first laser vibrator. And that was the end of that frustration.
The only thing Emily worried about nearly a year after she had sworn to herself that she was dead inside, was spending Christmas alone, and whether or not that made her a loser.
That was the thing about an American Christmas, though. The whole point was to give gifts and to receive them.
***
Emily’s older, half-brother Justin surprised her on Christmas Eve. He had been absent most of her life because he’d lived with her father, but they had the kind of relationship wherein they didn’t have to talk for five years and he would just show up and they’d be as close as best friends would be on any given day.
Emily didn’t have a Christmas tree—it was her experience that Iver would knock it over—but Justin brought gifts and chocolate, and that was more than enough. Justin didn’t drink alcohol, so Emily made coffee. He knew about her Schizophrenia through their father, but he never mentioned it, not even tonight. His carpenter business was booming, and he told her that he was making her a bookcase. It was a good thing, because she was out of book-space, and he had given her some antique books he had found at a shop in LA.
He left around eleven, and Emily grabbed a book, preparing herself to stay up another hour to wish Savannah a Merry Christmas. Her phone, however, went off long before she expected it to.
But it wasn’t Savannah.
Merry Christmas the text said.
She looked at the tiny square photo attached to the contact in the top left corner. She wondered if he still looked the same as he did when Will took that photo with her phone when Brendan wasn’t looking. He was smiling, staring off into the distance. Emily wasn’t in the photo, so she wondered if he had been looking at her with the calm eyes that stared back at her now.
Same to you, she texted back.
How are you?
Good! And yourself?
Wonderful. What’s new in Emily’s world?
Oh, you know. Just living the dream.
Haha, he said back. Well. I have a new house. And a new bed. Wanna see?
Okay, she said, and she followed texted directions to Brendan’s new house. Will didn’t live there, and that made Emily sad. Not because there was a possibility that Brendan and Will weren’t as good of friends as they had once been, but because Will wasn’t there.
She missed him.