Chapter Twenty
My heels clacked together as I swung them from my fingertips, walking on tiptoes through Paul’s yard to make my way back to the party. A high-pitched voice emerged from the shadow covered driveway, startling me.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Emily was leaning against Andy’s vintage truck, her arms crossed over her chest, features pinched.
“I was hooking up with the guy across the street. Have you been waiting on me this whole time? That’s so romantic, Em,” I said dryly, still upset with her about earlier.
She glanced around to make sure there was no one in the yard to hear us, before crossing the lawn and got right in my face. She sneered, “Do you want to ruin your life?”
“High school doesn’t last forever, Emily. We have to get over ourselves at some point,” I said, exhausted.
Her eyes flickered in panic. “Andy is going pre-med next year. If you mess this up now, he’s going to go to college and find someone who deserves him,” she said like it was a threat.
“Yeah? What’s Jack doing next year? Think you’ll finally let him off his leash, or are you going to spend the rest of your life hiding from yourself and force him to do it with you?”
She chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment before answering, “It’s not the same for us, and you know it.”
“It could be,” I said, desperate. “You could have so much more, Em. I know you can’t tell your parents, but we’ll all leave this shitty town soon. And when we do, I hope you take what you deserve from the world.” The words came out soft, and I meant them.
Her lashes glistened in the porch light, and for once, Emily had nothing to say back.
“Are you in love with Penelope?” I asked after a beat.
She reared back, and for a moment I thought she might smack me. But instead her shoulders fell and she breathed out. “No. Her best friend.”
A small laugh escaped me. “Angelica?”
She nodded, quietly.
“You hate Penelope because she can have her in a way you can’t?”
Another small nod. I pulled her close, wrapped my arms around her shoulders, and kissed the top of her shiny blonde hair. “Oh, Em, we are two fucked-up peas in the same very fucked-up pod, huh?”
She squeezed me, then whispered into my shoulder, “Are you in love with the loser across the street?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
We stayed outside, sitting on the edge of the porch, talking until our boyfriends came out of the house, the pair of them laughing and oblivious as they climbed into Andy’s truck.
The drive home felt louder than the rest of the night had somehow.
Emily sat curled in the passenger seat of my hatchback with her knees tucked to her chest, the radio low enough to be swallowed by the sound of wind howling outside.
The roads in Woodland always smelled damp after dark, like wet dirt and dying things.
The fields of corn stretched black on either side of us, interrupted only by the occasional porch light glowing weak and yellow through the crops.
Emily watched the blur of farmland through the window. I kept glancing at her hands grasping her ankles.
“You can stay over if you want,” I said before I could lose the nerve. The pause that followed made my stomach tighten instantly.
I had never invited anyone to my house before.
Andy had picked me up for church enough times that he knew where I lived, but he’d rarely stepped foot inside the trailer, unless my parents weren’t home.
My friends existed in one world; my family existed in another.
I kept them separated carefully, like mixing chemicals that might explode if they touched.
Emily looked over at me slowly. “You sure?”
“Yeah.” I forced a shrug. “It’s late anyway.”
She studied me for a second too long, like she could pinpoint the source for the strain in my voice. Then she smiled softly. “Okay.”
The trailer park sat at the edge of town beside an abandoned textile building with busted-out windows. A man-made river that powered an electric company ran behind it, where locals liked to slide down the slippery rocks for fun during the summer.
Most of the trailers leaned slightly to one side, porch lights glowing over moss-covered steps and tiny patches of grass we liked to call a yard. Mine was near the back, tucked beneath two massive pine trees that dropped needles thick enough to hide the dirt beneath them.
I parked behind my father’s truck. “Get out on my side, there’s a big puddle over there,” I warned Emily, as I unbuckled my seat belt. She didn’t seem to have a reaction to having to climb over my center counsel.
The porch creaked when we stepped onto it. The neighbor’s small dog barked once through the window, then went silent after my headlights shut off.
The trailer smelled faintly like bleach and orange furniture polish when we stepped inside. My father cleaned obsessively before bed every night, a habit from the old days he’d never outgrown. A small lamp over the stove cast the outdated kitchen in a buttery yellow glow.
I slipped my shoes off by the door, leaving them on the speckled gold linoleum floor and motioned for Emily to follow me down the narrow hallway.
My parents’ bedroom door was shut, but I could hear my father snoring through the paneled walls.
The only other sound, the faint melody coming from the radio on the counter my father kept on a christian station at all times.
I led Emily into my room and picked up the door that hung loose on its hinges by its tarnished knob to push it softly into the frame, hoping it’d stay in place for the duration of the night.
When it rained a lot, the trailer seemed to warp and shift, and the particle board doors would either swing open on their own, or get stuck in place.
I kept my shoulder pressed against it for a moment before I realized she was watching me.
I suddenly saw the room through her eyes.
The metal bedframe with chipped white paint, and sagging mattress.
The dresser with one drawer permanently crooked from where I’d kicked it shut too hard years ago.
The stickers still plastered across the wood—cartoon hearts, faded butterflies, band logos peeling at the corners.
The mismatched desk shoved beneath the window with the old sewing machine sitting on top of it.
A stack of thrifted bedsheets sat folded beside the desk in uneven piles. Florals, varying shades of ivory, and yellowing lace curling at the edges. The room smelled faintly of lavender detergent and fabric dust.
“It’s nice,” Emily said gently. I knew she was lying.
“Here.” I crouched by the dresser and pulled out an oversized T-shirt and a pair of sleep shorts. “You can change into these.”
She took them with a small smile while I dug around my skin care basket for makeup wipes and moisturizer. “You can use these too.”
“Are you always this hospitable?” she teased.
“My stepmom says sleeping in makeup causes moral decline.”
Emily snorted quietly. “Cleanliness is next to godliness.”
I changed in the bathroom, washing my face and brushing my teeth. When I came back into the bedroom, she was standing in front of my sewing desk, fingertips brushing over the old machine. The bedside lamp painted her skin gold and soft.
She picked up a scrap of pale blue fabric, a sleeve to a top I hadn’t finished yet. “Where’d you learn to sew?”
I sat cross-legged on the bed, watching her. “My mom taught me.” The words came out easier than I expected.
Emily turned toward me fully then. I looked past her, toward the yellowing machine, fixated on the small patches of fading in the protective coating where my fingers had rubbed across too many times.
“I would sit on her lap when I was little,” I said quietly. “She’d work the foot pedal and let me guide the fabric beneath the needle.” I smiled despite myself. “I used to think it was magic. Watching those flat pieces turn into beautiful dresses.”
The memory rose up vivid and aching. The smell of river water and strawberry shampoo. My mother’s bracelets clinking together as she moved. The vibration of the machine rattling through my tiny bones. I dug the heel of my hand into my sternum, willing the ache to go away.
“Sometimes,” I continued, “she’d tuck strands of her own hair into the hems.”
Emily lifted a perfectly plucked brow. “Why?”
“My mother has OCD.” I picked at a loose thread on my quilt. “Sometimes her brain would tell her to do funny things.” A dry laugh escaped me. “Put your hair in the hems. Check the windows seventeen times before bed.” I swallowed. “Abandon your child.”
The silence afterward felt alive, the same way it had in those years after she had left the last time. Emily crossed the room slowly and sat beside me on the bed. The mattress springs groaned beneath her weight. She gave me a look so soft it almost hurt to receive.
“Sometimes my brain tells me to do funny things too,” she said quietly. I looked over at her. “Like throwing soda at the best friend of girls I wish I didn’t want to kiss.”
A sad smile tugged at my mouth before I could stop it. Emily leaned back against the headboard beside me, our shoulders touching lightly.
“I hope your mother is someplace she deserves,” she murmured.
I looked down at my hands. “She always talked about New Orleans, that’s where she was from.” I smiled faintly. “Like the whole city was enchanted or something.”
In my head I could still hear my mother describing it: the music in the streets, the thick heat. The smell of sugar and rain water. The way people danced like they had something holy inside them.
My mother wasn’t religious. Not in the way people usually used the word.
She was, however, devout. Devoted to her rituals of cleanliness; to making more things than she bought; to tending to the herbs she grew in every window that could get sunlight.
There were still water and soil stains on the sill above the kitchen sink where she grew her basil and rosemary that wouldn’t come out no matter how hard my father had scrubbed at it.
Now that I’m older I know that my mother was a wiccan, something I imagine she was raised in considering her hometown.
But I knew better than to say something like that outloud.
Knew that I had to keep the books I bought on the subject tucked under a shelf in the school library because my stepmother would have me committed if she’d found it during one of her monthly snooping sessions in my room..
“I like to think she’s there,” I admitted quietly. “Dancing in the swamps in her hair-spun dresses.”
Emily smiled at that. “I hear Louisiana’s beautiful in the summer.”
“Yeah,” I whispered. “I think it probably is.”
I thought about what Jack had said about if Emily were a serial killer, none of us would know it. But looking at her now, I thought she might be the most fragile of any of us. I slipped my hand through hers, squeezing tightly as I said, “If I had to bury a body, you’d be the person I’d call.”
Her smile was bright and taunting as she laughed, “I know the perfect corn field.”