Page 17

EMMA TOSSES AND turns in her dorm bed. Her burned arm throbs. Olivia’s slow, steady breathing taunts her, reminding her of her own sleeplessness and the storm inside her that won’t ever go quiet.

She rolls over, and her cozy blankets tangle in her legs. Her pillow wants to suffocate her. At night, all she can think about is everyone she’s missing. All that she’s lost.

It gets easier, everyone always says. Sadness fades .

These are the same damn people who say, It must be so hard. You must miss Claire so much.

They don’t understand that time equals loss.

It’s a freaking law of nature. If Emma lets the years keep on passing, she’s just going to keep on losing.

So is everyone else, even if they can’t bear to admit it.

They just walk ignorantly through the world, turning away from anything they don’t want to see.

But Emma sees all of it. And she needs them to know how bad things really are.

She decides that it’s time to film another video.

If anyone saw the first one, she hasn’t heard about it.

And what’s the point of making a statement if no one knows you’re making it?

If she doesn’t tell people about her plans, then she’s just a tree falling in the forest, crashing down where no one can hear it land.

She isn’t going to be the girl who burned but no one knew why.

She’s going to make them understand.

Emma gets out of bed. Olivia gives a snort and rolls over, still sleeping peacefully.

Emma grabs her phone and the ring light Olivia uses when she FaceTimes with her boyfriend at Choate.

She slides open the closet door. Pushing aside the dresses that she stopped wearing after Claire died, she sits on the floor among the shoes.

She turns on the light and flips her phone to selfie mode.

She looks pale and ghostly, her black hair dissolving into the background dark.

She looks like someone reporting from inside a grave. Or else somebody already dead.

Not that she cares. Vanity, like grades, doesn’t matter when the world is on fire. When she’ll be dead in a matter of days.

The closet is stuffy and smells like gym clothes.

She hesitates. It’s a big deal to bare your soul. To make a promise like the one she’s going to make.

But she has to be brave.

Emma reaches out and touches the red button.

“Hey,” she says softly to the camera. “It’s me again.

Emma, remember? It’s around two a.m., and I’m hiding in my closet.

I wonder who’s out there. I don’t know if I’m talking to a hundred of you or only to my own face.

I wish I could say that it didn’t matter, but it does.

I need you to hear me. To actually listen.

And when I say you, I mean a lot of you. ”

She takes a deep breath. Brings her shoulders up tight to her ears and then lets them fall again.

“It’s weird how it feels easier to talk to a bunch of invisible strangers than it is to my friends.

But I guess I feel like my friends don’t really want to hear what I have to say.

Or maybe they’d want to, but they wouldn’t really be able to.

It’d make them too uncomfortable. I’ve changed so much.

But you—whoever you are—don’t know what I used to be like.

And you can believe what I’m telling you or you can think I’m crazy.

You can listen super carefully or you can get bored and click over to a makeup tutorial or a Hype House video.

I won’t know. I’m not following the metrics. I’m not trying to be an influencer. ”

She stops for another breath. Tries to brush her bangs away, but they fall back down, of course.

She never should have cut them in the first place.

“Or maybe I am trying to be an influencer. But I’m not trying to get you to buy skin products or whatever.

I’m trying to get you to wake up and look around and understand what is going on.

We’re at the brink of total disaster. Everything is going wrong. And I literally mean everything. ”

She gives a light, false laugh. “ Oh, come on, Emma, you’re thinking, don’t exaggerate .

I’m not exaggerating. Little things, big things: everything’s messed up.

It’s spring, right, with nice flowers and birds and all that?

Well, the robins got here two weeks earlier than they’re supposed to, because global warming changed their migration patterns.

Robins will be okay for now. But what if I told you that three billion birds have disappeared from the skies in the last five decades?

Three billion! That’s more than the population of China and India put together.

” She hears a noise outside the closet and hits STOP .

Olivia mumbles something in her sleep, gives a honking snore, and then goes quiet again.

“Speaking of which,” Emma says, “we keep cramming more and more people onto the planet, and guess what—news flash, you guys—it isn’t getting any bigger.

Earth can’t produce more fresh water, or more fertile soil, or more fossil fuels.

We’re using our natural resources up, and the more of us there are, the faster they’re going to disappear.

So why do we just keep drilling into the Arctic and driving our SUVs and cutting down the Amazon and polluting our rivers like there won’t be any consequences? ”

She leans in closer and whispers. “By the way, people, do you know that you’re full of plastic ?

We basically eat a credit card’s worth of it every week.

We don’t notice, though, because they’re microplastics, coming to us in our food and water.

And from our leggings and our polar fleece.

We’re polluting the world and our own selves.

We can see smog, or wildfire smoke, or beaches covered in trash, but we can’t see the consequences of what we’re doing to our bodies.

” She grimaces. “ Yet. You’re full of more weird chemicals than you can imagine, by the way, and we don’t know what those do to us either.

They call them forever chemicals because our bodies can’t ever get rid of them. ”

Her voice begins to rise. Her anger’s hot, like a flame.

“What do you want to know about next? Modern-day slavery? Nuclear proliferation? Cyberwarfare?” She taps a finger at her temple.

“Let’s take door number one, that’s fun.

Did you know there are more than forty million people trapped in modern slavery?

I’m talking forced marriage and forced labor.

The palm oil in your lipstick, your toothpaste, and your Burger King got harvested by people forced to work for next to nothing.

It also contributed to deforestation and destroyed orangutan habitat, if you care about that.

And that T-shirt you’re wearing? Children probably picked the cotton for it. ”

Emma gives a bitter laugh. “You’re impressed with my handle on depressing facts, aren’t you? I memorize this shit like the rest of my class memorizes Emily Dickinson for National Poetry Month. I don’t want to do it. But I can’t not. ”

She pushes her face right up to the camera. “When you know everything that I know, you can’t just sit there pretending everything is okay. You can’t even pretend that there’s hope for the future. We’ve screwed up everything!”

Then she covers the camera lens so that only her voice is being recorded.

“The world is burning. But I’m going to burn first,” she says. “Two days from now. Here, at Ridgemont Academy in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. And all of you can watch.”

FIRE VIDEO # 2

Organdonor 2 hours ago

mike grieve 5 hours ago

wtff

Anniebananie 5 hours ago

Omg this is so depressing

deadnaughtpirate 5 hours ago

Someone call this girls parents

Narwhalmusic 5 hours ago

“Im gonna burn 1st” this is fucken baller

Panda c 5 hours ago

Do it do it do it

Misha 6 hours ago

she srsly gonna do dis

GamerJo69 6 hours ago

i don’t know u but i gotta say this is a bad idea