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I feel my heart squeeze in my chest. She looks so sweet and innocent folding laundry in a hot little sundress, completely natural and graceful. There’s no artifice with her. She doesn’t pretend. She just is.
It’s fucked up to think that we bully her the way we do when she’s such an essentially good person. I know she hurt Trent, but I’ve started to think maybe he’s wrong for blaming her. Maybe she had a reason for what she did. Fuck, he never even gave her a chance to explain herself. And I understood his reasoning at the time. But damn, how long can her punishment last? Even convicted criminals get released once they’ve done their time.
Sometimes, I want to just take her by the hand and lead her far away from this place, where she and I can be alone together and we can cut through all the bullshit. I want to try to make her happy—to make up for everything I ever did to make her sad.
But every time I think that, I worry that I’ve just been blinded by my desire for her. That Trent is right, and she pulled that shit with his mom and dad on purpose, knowing full well what she was doing. She’s so beautiful, but that’s what makes her so dangerous, isn’t it? It’s hard to imagine anyone like Emma doing anything bad.
She was always gorgeous, but she’s fucking stunning now. It’s hard to think straight around her sometimes. Even though the meeting this afternoon was super awkward, Emma still looked gorgeous in the sun. Her shoulders are slightly tanned now, and I wonder what the rest of her looks like; the skin that I can’t see. Is it still pale as ivory?
I flash back to a vivid memory of me and Emma from high school—a moment when the two of us were walking through the park at night. We’d just had pizza with the guys, and they decided to go off and smoke weed while Emma and I went for a stroll. The conversation is burned into my memory. Every word that was said, I remember in exact detail.
“There’s something I need to talk about,” Emma murmurs, her expression full of worry.
“What’s up?” I shift a little closer to her, delighting in the fact that Emma’s confiding in me without the other guys around. Is it a sign? Is she going to choose me?
Please, God, let her choose me.
“I…” She trails off, then starts again. “I’ve never told anyone. But I feel like I need to. It’s eating away at me. I feel like if I don’t say it out loud, it’s just going to make me feel worse and worse.”
“Okay.”
I take her hand, trying to let her know that she can trust me. We step off the path into a small playground area, and I hold out a swing for her like I’m holding her chair at a fancy dinner party. She laughs, and my heart swells. Best fucking sound in the world.
Then she and I sit on the swings, and we’re both silent for a moment. It’s a perfect night—tons of stars in the sky, no one around.
“You know my mom died in a car accident, right?” Ems says finally, her voice small.
“Yeah.”
“Well, that day,” Emma begins, her eyes starting to fill with tears, “Mom and I… we got into a fight. Right before she got into the car.”
“Are you serious?” I ask in shock.
Emma’s mom died when she was twelve, so I never knew her. But I have a hard time imagining the girl in front of me getting into a bad fight with anyone. She’s so sweet, so loving.
“Yeah.” She swallows. “It was a really bad fight. We were literally screaming at each other. Then she got into that car and just… I never saw her again. An hour later, Dad got a call from the hospital. She’d gotten into a terrible wreck. And I—I think she was distracted because of our fight.”
Emma’s seriously crying now, and I reach over and take her hand.
“You think you caused it?”
Her body shudders, and she drags in a breath. “I think I had something to do with it, yeah.”
“Emma, that’s crazy,” I say, trying to console her as best as I can. Her heart is breaking over this, I can tell. I get why she hasn’t ever told anyone, if she seriously thinks she’s part of the reason her mom died.
How do I make her understand she’s not? That that’s not how the world works? That accidents just happen, and it’s heartbreaking and it sucks, but sometimes there’s no explanation.
“But it makes sense, doesn’t it?” she insists, her eyes gleaming. “I mean, my mom was a really cautious driver. She always came to a complete stop at every stop sign, and she wouldn’t even think of changing lanes without signaling.”
“It was a tragedy, Ems.” I take both her hands in mine, shifting my swing closer to hers as I rub my thumbs over her knuckles. “Sometimes tragedies have no meaning.”
“But I want there to be meaning. I don’t want to believe that my mom just died because the world is completely random.”
“And so you blame yourself?”
“She was so mad and upset when she left the house. If we hadn’t been fighting…”
“That’s not your fault. And a fight takes two people. It’s not all on you.”
