Chapter 11
New leaves were bright green froth on the trees when Gen showed her the hayloft.
She opened the barn doors wide. The barn, when they first entered it, seemed unexceptional, filled with equipment: a tractor, cultipacker, and plows, a broadcast seeder.
Gen named them and showed Emily the milking stalls where cows had once been kept.
They climbed the ladder to the hayloft, which did not, in fact, hold hay but was an open room with a table and chairs, as well as a small bed tucked into an alcove and half hidden behind a green velvet curtain held back by a tasseled tie.
There was a bookshelf stacked with paperbacks and dioramas, some crude in their design, the work of a child.
Emily recognized many of the dioramas’ scenes from books, like the streetlamp in the snow from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe .
A lamp stood next to a recliner, but Gen didn’t turn it on.
They could see clearly in the borrowed light coming from the open barn doors.
“My mother made this for me.” Gen said that her mother believed that every child should have a hideout, a special place, a favorite one, and that her mother had built the furniture.
She had been a carpenter until she had gotten hurt on a job and the doctor prescribed a medication that she couldn’t stop taking, even after the pills ran out, and that she had to have no matter what.
Gen had been in fourth grade. By fifth grade, when Emily met her, Gen was moving from place to place.
Gen remembered many strangers. She remembered sleeping in a bathtub.
On the floor. Gen hadn’t understood what was wrong.
The wrongness gradually became normal. Hunger was normal.
Sometimes she was okay. Sometimes there was pizza or her mother braided her hair.
Sometimes she got to sleep next to her mother, in her arms, and her mother slept very soundly, her face peaceful.
Then Gen’s grandmother sued for custody.
“I’m glad she did,” Gen said, “though at first I wasn’t.
I don’t know. Sometimes I’m still mad. It wasn’t my mom’s fault. The case went on for a long time.”
“Because your mom wanted to keep you.”
“She died of an overdose the summer before freshman year. It’s good that Gran won.”
Emily touched Gen’s back. When Gen didn’t move away, Emily let her palm rest between Gen’s shoulder blades.
“I miss her,” Gen whispered.
“I think it’s important that she wanted to keep you.”
“Yes,” Gen said eventually. “You’re right. It is.”
There was a senior trip to Orlando in March. Emily hadn’t filled out the forms in the fall because she hadn’t wanted to ask her father for money, even though Kim and Meredith were going. Now Emily was glad not to go. She called Gen. “Let’s do something.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Do you want to go to the mountains?”
“Like, hiking?”
“Maybe camping, too.”
“I love that idea.”
Emily’s mother brought a tent, a camping stove, and sleeping bags up from the basement. “Who’s this Gen? I haven’t heard you mention her before.”
“She’s my best friend,” Emily said.
The mountain trail was chilly, sunlight falling through the trees in thin shafts, the emerald moss damp.
Moisture trickled over rocks although it hadn’t rained.
They passed a gushing creek. Wildflowers grew in darts of white.
Years later, Emily found their name in a book: trillium.
It was early in the season, and Emily and Gen were alone on the trail.
They reached a clearing and could see straight across the raw valley.
Although Gen said that the preserve must be amazing in fall, she didn’t add that they should come back then.
They didn’t know where they’d be. Letters from colleges would arrive by the end of the month.
In November, Emily had offered to help Gen with her applications but Gen had said that she wanted to do them on her own; she wasn’t applying to many places anyway.
She wanted to stay close to home. Emily had applied widely, and nowhere in-state.
She said, “Which one do you want to go to most?”
“The free one, Emily. You keep asking but the answer is always the same.”
“You never ask me.”
“I know where you’re going.”
“Come on.”
“You’ll see.”
“I don’t want to disappoint you.”
“You won’t.”
They cooked canned soup over the camping stove, facing each other across the small fire. Emily unzipped a sleeping bag and wrapped it around her shoulders. Her heart beat as hard as it had when they were on the steep trail.
“Are you tired?” Gen said.
“No.”
“You’re really quiet. Like, weirdly quiet.”
“I want to see you,” Emily blurted. “Wherever we are in the fall. We can visit each other.”
“I want that, too.”
“I want us always to be friends.”
When Gen didn’t respond, Emily felt sick, sure that she had said something wrong. After a moment, Gen said, “Me too.”
What else do you want? Emily wanted to ask.
What else, she thought as they switched on the lantern and entered the tent.
What else, as she zipped up her sleeping bag, and Gen zipped up her own, and they lay down next to each other on the cold ground, warmth rising between them.
What else what else, as their hips nudged against each other. Gen apologized and shifted away.
Maybe Gen wanted nothing. But what Emily wanted spread in her chest, between her legs. She lay there, silent, her body crowded with desire.