She would’ve laughed if she’d the energy.
“Are you …” Clay’s voice trailed off. “Are you going to name someone?”
“Name someone?” she asked. It sounded like McCarthyism. “Who would I name?”
Clay shrugged, but he had to know the list. Nardo, Blake, Dean, Jack. Not to mention himself, because even though he kept saying he wasn’t interested in Emily, he’d still been at The Party and they had clearly argued about something.
She felt a spark of Columbo. Maybe Emily wasn’t so resigned to her state after all. “Clay, I’m sorry about arguing with you the night of The Party. It wasn’t—it wasn’t your fault.”
His mouth twisted to the side. “I thought you didn’t remember anything.”
“I remember yelling at you,” she lied. And then she tried to build on the lie. “I shouldn’t have said all of those things.”
“Maybe.” His shoulders shrugged. “I know I can be selfish, Em. Maybe it’s because I’m an only child.”
She had always found it cold-blooded that he so easily dismissed his other siblings, even though they hadn’t grown up together.
He said, “I can say that I’ll try to do better, but you’re right about that, too. I probably won’t. Maybe I should accept who I am. You seem to.”
Emily felt an echo of a memory. They were standing by Nardo’s swimming pool. She had screamed at Clay that he always promised to do better but then he never actually did. He simply made the same mistakes over and over again and expected other people to change.
He added, “At least I’m not as bad as Blake, right?”
Emily was at a loss as to how to answer. Was he talking about what Blake had done yesterday or Blake in general? Because either could work. Blake had been a sleazeball yesterday. But as with Clay, he was never going to change. His ego wouldn’t let him ever admit that he was wrong.
“You should know,” Clay said. “Blake is telling people you’re into drugs and partying.”
Emily took a deep breath and held it in her lungs. The news was unsurprising. Blake had a level of cruelty that none of them could fathom. Jack had called it this morning. Nardo was just mean. Clay was easily bored. But when Blake took against you, he really took against you. Not to mention Ricky, who was part Wicked Witch, part flying monkeys.
She said, “Nardo told me—he said that Jack—Cheese was at The Party.”
Clay turned to look at her. The light blue of his eyes was bleached out by the sun. She could see the fuzz of hair beneath his chin. He was so handsome, but she didn’t feel the same stir she had before.
He said, “You were stoned that night.”
Emily had never claimed otherwise, but she had no idea why he sounded angry.
“You were really fucked up,” he said. “You could barely remember how you got home. You didn’t even know it until your grandmother told you.”
“Okay?” she asked, wondering where this was going.
“I mean, so, technically, what Blake is saying isn’t that far off base.” Clay looked down, watching the toe of his sneaker dig into the earth. “You’re into drugs. You’re into partying. You played the game. You need to take the loss. Have some dignity.”
Emily’s only surprise was that she kept being shocked every time this happened. They had all turned on her in the exact same way—first Dean, then Ricky, then Blake, then Nardo and now Clay. They really were all following a script. Friendliness. Obsequiousness. Fury. Contempt.
Clay stood up. His hands were still in his pockets. “Don’t talk to me again, Emily.”
She stood up, too. “Why would I want to talk to you when all you do is lie?”
He grabbed her arms. He wrenched her forward. She braced herself, expecting a threat or a warning or something—anything—other than what he actually did.
Clay kissed her.
He tasted of nicotine and stale beer. She could feel the roughness of his skin against her own. His tongue probed her mouth. Their bodies were practically clamped together. It was Emily’s first real kiss. At least the first real kiss that Emily could remember.
And it felt like nothing.
Clay pushed her away. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Goodbye, Emily.”
She watched him leave. His shoulders were hunched. His feet scuffed the ground.
Emily’s fingers went to her mouth. She gently touched her lips. She had expected that a kiss made you feel—something. Nothing tingled. Her heart wasn’t lurching. She had felt the same passive disinterest she’d felt when Blake had drunkenly tried to kiss her in the alley two years ago.
She watched Clay turn the corner of the house. His shoulders were still hunched. He looked guilty of something but there was no telling what.
Emily felt a laugh come from deep inside her soul. If only she could get back all the time from the last decade she had wasted obsessing over how Clayton Morrow was feeling.
Emily used her foot to cover up the gouge he’d made in the gravel. She looked up at the house. By chance, she caught a glimpse of her father walking back into the bedroom. He had been on the balcony that overlooked the shed and garden. She had no idea how long he’d been there or what he’d seen. She tracked his progress through the windows. He went to the sideboard table and poured himself a drink.
Emily looked down. Without realizing it, she had put her hand to her stomach again. She had thought of herself as alone in all of this, but there was someone else making the arduous journey alongside her. Or inside of her, to be accurate. She felt no attachment to the cluster of cells, but she did feel a sense of duty. It was exactly what Melody had written in her letter—
Your weirdness comes from your LOVE and ACCEPTANCE of all kinds of people.
Emily felt no love for the cells, at least not yet, but she had resigned herself to acceptance. Clay was not altogether wrong when he implied that Emily’s pregnancy was her problem to deal with. She was the one who was going to live with it for the rest of her life. She sat back down on the bench. She stared out at the fallow garden.
She cleared her throat. She said, “I will—”
Her voice gave out.
Again, Emily felt strange to be alone and speaking out loud, but she needed to hear the words as much as she needed to say them. It was a wish list, to be honest, enumerating all of the precious things that she had lost in the short span of a few days. It was also a promise to give all of those lost things back to her eventual baby.
She cleared her throat again. The pledge came freely this time, and loudly, because it mattered.
“I will protect you. No one will ever hurt you. You will always be safe.”
For the first time in days, Emily felt as if some of the stress had finally left her body.
Behind her, she heard the balcony door slam closed.
8
The salty water had a calming tint of French blue. Andrea floated upside down, weightless and free. She could stay down here, languid and warm, but something told her not to. Her hands reached up. Her feet pushed off. She broke through the surface. The sun kissed her shoulders. She wiped the water out of her eyes as waves lapped at her chin. She turned, looking back at the beach. Laura was underneath a large rainbow-colored umbrella. She was sitting up so that she could keep an eye on Andrea. Her top was off. The scars from her mastectomy showed. A man wearing a dark hoodie was sneaking up behind her.