Chapter 8
“They say you’re really smart,” Gen said as they ran along a harvested cornfield with its yellow lines of cropped stalks.
It was small, like many farms were in Washford, close to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
Emily didn’t reply to Gen because she needed all of her breath to keep up.
Gen nodded at the field. “Looks like a poem.”
Emily gave her a sidelong look, unsure what she meant.
“Because of the lines,” Gen said. “Each field is a big stanza.”
Oh, so its shape. Emily liked that. Unbelievably, Gen increased the pace.
Gen said, “They say you’re going to an Ivy.
That you’ll be valedictorian.” Emily huffed, cutting the air with a dismissive hand.
Maybe she’d be valedictorian, but the best colleges turned down many valedictorians every year.
Their admissions boards didn’t necessarily want valedictorians.
They wanted something special. Gen said, “They say you’re obsessed with Greek stuff. ”
Emily stopped, chest heaving as she bent to brace her hands on her knees. “Why”—the words came between gulps of air—“are you talking with people about me?”
“I’m not talking, I’m listening. I’m curious.”
“Why?”
“You want hard things.”
“I don’t think of them as hard.” At least, not things related to school.
Emily had discovered that school was easy as long as she paid attention.
It felt good never to be confused. There were clear expectations and she met them.
She enjoyed staying after school in the library, where it was warm and brightly lit and the librarian always asked if she needed anything.
But it was true that Emily wanted hard things.
She wanted to leave home and go far away.
“I want hard things, too,” Gen said. No one talked like Gen talked.
She made Emily feel like an egg without its shell.
It concerned Emily that Gen was going around talking like this: immediately intimate, as though it were normal to ask personal questions and make personal comments.
No wonder Gen was a loner. People at school gave her a wide berth.
Emily was breathless. “Please,” she said. “You’re going too fast.”
“Sorry. Want to walk?”
“Yes.”
“Not too long, or you won’t want to run again.”
A car passed as they walked. Then a trailer with horses. A stray bit of straw flew from one of the open windows and darted around in the trailer’s wake.
“So what’s up with you and ancient Greece?” Gen said.
No one had ever asked. Emily’s fascination had begun with reading myths; as a child she’d been unable to look away from the page.
She had traced illustrations of Pegasus and Hydra.
She didn’t know, then, the word etiology, how it meant a story of origin, one that explained the existence of a rainbow or spider, but even though she didn’t know the word she had taken comfort in the idea that everything came from something, that a spider had once been a girl who liked to weave.
This is why there is a moon, that is why there is a sun.
She explained this to Gen, and said that she liked how far away in time ancient Greece was, that its culture survived in ruins, its lyric poetry in fragments.
She liked the incomplete nature of her understanding, because she could imagine what she didn’t know, and she wasn’t the only one who didn’t know.
Even experts didn’t. The uncertainty was true for everyone alive, so it was okay for Emily to guess.
Gen listened. She didn’t suggest that they run again. The sun struck Gen’s shoulders and flung a long shadow behind her. In the east, the mountains were a bank of fog. “What do you guess?”
“That reality was different then. Special. Wouldn’t it be, if you believed anything could be a god in disguise?”
“Maybe they didn’t actually believe in gods. Maybe the myths were just stories, even to them.”
“Maybe,” Emily said happily. This was what she loved: that Gen didn’t know any better than Emily, and Emily no better than Gen.
“Do you think I could graduate in the spring?”
Emily—tentative yet feeling that she could ask, because Gen was so ready to ask anything—said, “Why are you a year behind?”
“There was a custody battle.”
“Oh,” Emily said as if she understood, when she didn’t.
“My gran won. I was out of school for a while.” Gen kept her gaze on the mountains. “I want to catch up. I want to graduate when you’re graduating.”
Emily felt something delicate move inside her, as small as the straw flown from the horse trailer’s window, lifted by the wind. “I could help you,” she said.
“You could?”
The silence of her house was stale and familiar.
Emily didn’t expect her mother to be home and she wasn’t, though Emily saw signs of her existence: a coffee mug on the table, a terrycloth robe spread over the couch in a shape that made it look almost like a person, as though Emily’s mother had finished watching TV, unbelted the robe where she sat, and stepped right out of it.
Emily pulled her sweaty, cold hair into a tighter ponytail and poured an enormous glass of water.
She had run so much that she felt shaky.
The light on the answering machine blinked.
“Hey, Ladybug,” her father’s voice said.
“I want to take you out to dinner tonight. Ask your mom and give me a call, okay?” Emily felt a leap of excitement at this rare invitation.
When her parents divorced, her father had said that nothing would change his love for her.
He would see her lots. Eight years old, she had reported this immediately to her mother, who said, “We’ll see. ”
Emily called him. “There’s my girl,” he said. “Did your mom say yes?”
“She’s at work.” Emily’s mother was a registered nurse whose schedule was a mystery.
She had a beeper but Emily hadn’t used the number since she was small and woke in the middle of the night to discover that the house was empty.
Her mother called back to say that the beeper was for emergencies only.
“I’ll pick you up in an hour,” her father said.
She wore a pink and white dress that he had given her last year and she hadn’t quite outgrown.
Her long hair, still damp from the shower, was brushed straight, though it would buckle into waves once dry.
She had used a little strawberry lip gloss.
He liked her to look pretty and she was always proud when he said that she did.
He opened the restaurant door for her and asked the waitress to bring an extra basket of breadsticks.
Emily didn’t like them as much as when she was little but ate two while they waited for their pasta.
Her father carried the conversation easily.
His real estate agency was doing well, especially now that he was handling commercial properties as well as residential, and his church, the United Methodist church on Sycamore Street, had appointed him chairman of the Vision Board, and she knew what an honor that was.
She nodded, pretending a comfortable inclusion in all this, a skill that she didn’t realize until years later was a skill, one that allowed time for her to catch up on what other people knew before they understood that she didn’t.
She ate her pasta. She had ordered alfredo out of concern for the dress, though staining it wouldn’t really matter because it was already tight around her ribs and she would outgrow it soon.
He told her how much he had missed her, how hard it was to get away.
But he always thought about her. Every day.
Emily’s stepmother and half sisters were away, he explained.
Denise had pulled the girls out of school for a long weekend at her parents’ home in Florida.
“Just paradise down there.” He ran a hand through his sandy-colored hair, a favorite gesture of his that drew attention to how thick it was.
“I would have loved to go, but work, you know? Gotta take care of my family.” He smiled, which meant that he meant her, and child support.
“One day I’ll take you on a trip. Just you and me. What do you think of that?”
“Great,” she said, but saw that she had disappointed him by not expressing the excitement she usually did when he proposed something.
What he proposed rarely manifested, though he always meant what he said while he was saying it.
I owe you one, he would tell her later when what he had imagined unraveled.
He’d shake his head, so sad that she knew he did miss her, which always made her feel guilty for having doubted it.
Still, she had the sense that she was easy for him to forget, that she needed to work harder to hold his attention.
That she wasn’t a room he wanted to spend time in but a hallway to a different, better room.
“Of course, you have school,” he said, “so a trip would be hard to pull off.”
Emily sipped her Coke. Its bubbles were harsh.
“Everything good at school?”
“Definitely.” Her father appreciated positive language. He once told her that whenever his boss asked him to do something, he said absolutely .
“Any boys I need to scare away?”
“Dad.”
“Is that a yes?”
“I’m too busy.”
“Smart cookie.” He cut into his steak. “So what’s new?
I haven’t seen you in forever.” He looked happy, and Emily understood that he expected her to feed his happiness, so she chatted about Kim and Meredith and prepping for the SATs, how she wanted a scholarship (she needed one, but didn’t use that word, out of care for his pride), and that she didn’t like AP Chemistry as much as she had liked AP Bio.
She didn’t mention Gen, though her limbs still felt loose and buzzy from the run; she would be sore later.
At first Emily thought that not talking about Gen was a harmless, invisible rebellion, a decision to keep one thing private when he wanted to be the kind of father whose daughter told him everything.
But as Emily talked about track and said nothing of Gen, she realized that her father wouldn’t want to hear about Gen, that something about Gen would invite his disapproval—maybe the obvious poverty to her appearance, or that Gen was too skinny, too tall, too angular, too odd.
He wouldn’t like it if Emily liked Gen…and she did.
There was that feeling again: light and quick as wind-borne straw, a golden stem that flicked around inside Emily’s chest as she reached for her icy glass and thought about how she would see Gen the next day.