OCTOBER 21, 1981
Emily sat on the floor in the very back of the school library with her forehead resting on her knees. She could not stop crying. She had a pounding headache. She hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. Her legs kept cramping. Her stomach kept turning. Her thoughts kept ricocheting between Ricky telling her that their friendship was over and Blake placing Emily’s hand on his thing.
Had the twins always been that cruel, or was Emily simply stupid?
She found a tissue in her book bag and blew her nose. Laughter filled the front of the library. She hunched down against the wall. She didn’t want anyone to find her back here. She’d skipped chemistry. She never skipped class. Not until this week. Not until her entire life had been thrown into turmoil.
It was the stares of her classmates that Emily could not abide. In the hallway. From the back of the chemistry lab. Some of them had been pointing and giggling. Others had looked at her as if she was the most disgusting creature they had ever laid eyes on. Ricky had a big mouth, but Emily knew it was Blake who had started the rumor that she was pregnant, because the pointers and gigglers and most of the blatantly hostile stares had come from the boys. Not that Emily’s current state was a rumor, because the word rumor implied an uncertainty or lack of truth.
No matter the source of the salacious information, whether it was Blake or Ricky or even Dean Wexler, Clay clearly knew that she was pregnant. Emily had seen him this morning as she was walking past the row of downtown shops. Clay was alone, smoking one last cigarette before heading across the road to school. Their eyes had met. There was no mistaking that he had seen her. Even from a distance, there was the flash of recognition in his features, the twist of his mouth into a quick grin. Emily had started to wave her hand, but his grin had melted away. He’d tossed the cigarette into the gutter, then turned on his heel like a soldier on the parade field and walked in the opposite direction.
So much for Clayton Morrow styling himself as a rebel who shirked the norms of the religiously bankrupt modern American society. He might as well have traded his Marlboro for a pitchfork. Or maybe he was running away from his own mistake.
Clay?
That was the first word she had written down in her Columbo notes. The more Emily talked to people, the more she thought that it really might be him.
Would that be so bad?
Emily had always liked Clay. She’d had embarrassingly sweaty dreams about him before. And sometimes when he was close, or he looked at her a certain way, she’d felt a rush of what could only be called desire. Clay had told her that nothing was going to happen, and she had accepted that, but maybe Emily had come onto him the night of The Party. And maybe Clay had been so stoned that he’d given in against his better judgment. Her father had said that teenage boys had a hard time controlling themselves. Emily had been thinking all along that she was somehow the victim, but maybe she was the aggressor.
Was that possible?
Emily used the back of her arm to wipe her tears. Her skin felt raw. The bruise on her neck where Dean Wexler had grabbed her had started to turn an angry, dark blue. She took a deep breath. She found her Columbo Investigation tucked deep inside her purse.
The notes she had recorded from her interaction with Ricky and Blake yesterday were smeared by her own tears. They had both been equally disgusting in their own unique ways. Emily shuddered when she thought about Blake moving her hand to his lap. His slick tongue in her ear. She shuddered a second time, her hand going to her ear as if his gross tongue was still there.
Emily closed her notebook. She had practically memorized the three different transcriptions. Dean Wexler had said that Nardo and Blake were inside the house that night. Blake had also told her that he and Nardo were in the house. Using Cheese’s Columbo logic, she had two people telling the same story, which likely meant that they were both telling the truth, which meant she could eliminate Dean and Blake.
Right?
She wasn’t certain. Dean and Blake could be telling the same story because they had previously agreed to a story. Seeking out a third confirmation from Nardo was a non-starter. In fact, his response to Emily’s pregnancy was the only one that she did not find surprising.
Yesterday, Ricky had railed against Esther and Franklin Vaughn for being rich assholes who bought their way out of trouble, but this time, the Fontaines had beaten her parents to the punch. A hand-delivered letter had arrived before breakfast this morning. Gerald Fontaine was putting the Vaughns on notice that Emily was not to speak to—or more importantly, speak about—Bernard Fontaine in any false, negative or inflammatory manner unless they wanted to be staring down a very expensive lawsuit for libel.
“What a ridiculous buffoon,” Esther had pronounced when she’d read the letter. “Libel pertains to written or printed statements that are found to be either false or defamatory. Slander is oral or spoken defamation.”
Her mother had seemed to triumph in scoring a rhetorical point, but Emily was the one who was paying the price.
“Em?”
She looked up. Cheese was leaning his shoulder against one of the long bookshelves. She had chosen to hide in Biblical References because she knew that no one would accidentally wander by.
Except for the people who knew that Emily always hid in Biblical References.
He asked, “Are you okay?”
She shook her head and shrugged at the same time, but the response that came out of her mouth was the God’s honest truth. “No. I’m really not okay.”
Cheese glanced over his shoulder before joining her against the wall. He slid down beside her, their knees almost touching.
He asked, “Anything new going on?”
She laughed. And then she started to cry. Her head went into her hands again.
“Aw, Em.” His arm wrapped around her shoulders. “I’m so sorry.”
She leaned into him. He smelled of Old Spice and Camels.