Page 28

The day before the fire

THE SMELL OF fresh pancakes is nauseating.

Or maybe Emma feels sick to her stomach because everyone in the Ridgemont dining hall is staring at her. This is why she’s been avoiding the place. This is why she’s been surviving on cold Pop-Tarts and L?rabars.

Some kids try to be subtle about it—Zadie from French class sneaks glances out of the corners of her sly green eyes—but most gawk openly.

“For seventy-five grand a year, you’d think they could get some decent chairs around here,” mutters Emma’s father, shifting around uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s like sitting on a pile of kindling.”

Byron Blake arrived at Ridgemont Academy after getting a call from Thomas last night, and his thundering voice awakened Emma from her half sleep. This is no way to treat my daughter! She’s coming with me!

“I don’t think they designed the chairs with a six-foot-five man in mind,” Emma says quietly.

Byron’s head swivels as he scans the room. In his custom black suit, he looks like a rich, pissed-off undertaker. “A lot of ninety-pound weaklings around here.”

“Dad!” Emma exclaims. “Don’t be rude.”

“The truth is never rude,” Byron says. He glares at his pancakes before cutting the whole stack in half with a violent slice of his knife. “Undercooked,” he mutters.

Emma sighs. She’s glad he rescued her from solitary confinement.

But that doesn’t mean she wants to sit here, hair unbrushed, wearing the sweats she slept in, and eat pancakes with him.

He’s always been gruff, but his roughness and impatience have only gotten worse since her mother’s death. And then, when Claire died…

“The bacon’s too fatty,” he says.

Emma bites her tongue. Slowly butters a piece of toast she doesn’t feel like eating.

Then Byron looks up from his breakfast and trains his eyes on Emma, his gaze sharp and probing. “I don’t appreciate what you’re doing,” he says. “This supposed cry for help—it’s nonsense. I know that, and so do you.”

They’re tucked away in a corner, but Emma can feel everyone’s eyes on them. She pushes her thumb into the burn on her arm. The sudden flare of pain somehow reassures her. It reminds her of what’s at stake.

“I agree,” Emma says. “If it were a cry for help, it would be nonsense. But I’m not asking for help.” She locks eyes with her father. “Everyone seems to think I need it. But I don’t.”

“How’s your arm?” Byron asks. As if he knows what she’s doing right now.

Emma stops pressing on the bandage. “It still hurts.”

“That was an interesting experiment,” he says.

Emma nods. There’s a sudden lump in her throat, and she doesn’t know why.

Maybe it’s all the things she won’t ever say to him. Daddy, why didn’t you save Claire? Daddy, we’re all alone. Daddy, I can’t take it any longer—

She feels like she might start choking.

She stands up. “I’m going to go get some more water.”

When Emma comes back to the table with a plastic pitcher of ice water, her father is frowning and stripping the fat from his bacon.

She wants to take him by his broad, strong shoulders and shake him.

Don’t you understand what’s going on? Instead she sits down, leans forward so their faces are almost touching, and says quietly, “Were Claire’s cries for help not loud enough? ”

Her father looks away. His entire posture changes, the muscles in his jaw twitching. With nothing to complain about and no one else to blame, the man has nothing to say. In the silence between them, the whispers grow louder.

“I knew she was hurting,” Emma says. “But I had no idea how much. Did you?”

Slowly Byron shakes his head. “I didn’t know,” he says finally. “I didn’t know.” But then he looks straight at Emma. His two hands have become fists. “She was different, Emma. She wasn’t like us.”

“Wasn’t like us? What do you mean?”

“I’m tough,” he says. “And you’re tough. Claire was strong, but she was a china teacup compared to you. You’re the toughest person I know. You’re made of iron. You’re going to be fine. You just need something to do, something to keep you busy, take your mind off it.”

Her father might be able to stay busy and not feel things, to work until all of his thoughts only flow through one channel, a desensitized, unfeeling one. He is never still, her father.

His hands are flexing, fingernails digging into his palms or darting out to rearrange silverware.

Even here, on his mercy mission to save the only daughter he has left, he’s multitasking, putting the tines of his fork at a perfect angle to his plate, refolding the linen napkin into a more perfect triangle.

Anything to stay busy. Anything to flood his mind with something other than emotion.

Emma isn’t like that. Emma feels things, right down to her core.

She feels the loss not only of her own mother and sister, but of every elephant that died for its tusks, and the pain that comes from watching the uptick of the thermometer each summer.

Emma wants to direct all her efforts toward what she feels, until she’s able to do something that makes other people wake up and feel that way too.

But she can’t admit that to him. Even if she did, he wouldn’t believe her. Byron Blake says she’s tough, that she’s going to be fine, and Byron Blake is always right.