Page 10 of Little Pieces of Light

Xander

I read Emery’s text, and my stomach tightened. One long wall of the Academy’s massive library was lined with study rooms: small, windowed offices, each with a whiteboard, round table, and chairs for six. Emery had chosen the last room, tucked in the corner, though every other room was empty.

Because she doesn’t want to be seen with me.

Day three of this high school experiment hadn’t gone as well as the previous two. Word had somehow gotten out about Dad’s breakdown and my mom walking out on us. I caught groups of students whispering and shooting me glances as I passed by.

Fuck them. My father had made groundbreaking discoveries in structures of molecular orbitals using ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy. None of these rich pricks would ever accomplish a fraction of what Dad had—never mind understand it—no matter how much money their parents threw at them.

I’d been stewing in different versions of those acidic thoughts all day, so that by the time my tutoring session with Emery arrived, I was in a foul mood. Her secrecy was a nice touch.

She’s probably been gossiping too, yet desperate for my help.

I leaned in the door of study room nine, my armor fully locked into place. “Hey.”

Emery had her study materials out, her pencil tapping impatiently. Her eyes rose to meet mine, and I could’ve sworn her cheeks flushed, her glossy lips lifted ever so slightly.

“Hey,” she said, almost a whisper. She cleared her throat. “Are you just going to stand in the door all day?”

“Depends,” I said. “Does this school have an underground bunker where you’d feel more comfortable? Or we could take the ferry to Connecticut. Pretty sure no one will see us there.”

She rolled her eyes. “Look, it’s just better if we keep our business private. For multiple reasons.”

“If you insist.”

I stepped inside, closing the door behind me.

I felt her gaze on me as I set down my backpack and busied myself with retrieving my notebook, pencil, and graphing calculator.

But this close to Emery, her flowery perfume was intoxicating, and my gaze was transfixed by the way her hair fell around her shoulders…

Cut it out.

I took the chair beside her. “Where are you struggling?”

“Where am I not?” She pushed her notebook to me, showing a page scrawled with notes. “From this morning. I don’t understand any of it.”

“Can I ask what might seem like an obvious question?”

“Why am I taking calculus in the first place?” She sighed. “Because my father insists that I take it. To pad my application to Brown.”

Without thinking, I blurted, “Brown? I thought you were going to RISD.”

Pronounced like Rizdy , she’d said seven years ago, her face lit up with excitement. It had been her dream…

Emery’s eyes flared with shock. I hadn’t meant to touch that conversation, but it was too late now. “Well? Isn’t that what you told me?”

On that perfect afternoon that you evidently forgot all about.

“I told you a lot of things that day,” Emery said, her voice stony. “But no, I’m not going to RISD. My father won’t allow it, and since he’s the one paying for college, I don’t have a choice. There. All caught up? Can we get back to the math, please?”

“Fine. But this isn’t helpful.” I slid her notebook back to her. “Math is like a bridge, and each stepping stone is an essential component. We have to go back to the place where you were doing well and start there, filling in the gaps until you’re caught up.”

“I don’t know that I was ever doing well. I memorized a lot of trigonometry in order to get by, but it’s all flown out of my head. I barely passed last year with an A-minus.”

“That’s more than ‘barely passed.’”

“A-minus is my dad’s bare minimum.”

Emery peered up to see me looking at her.

She was punching holes in my armor: Her father was still as strict as ever, denying her her dream school.

Stealing her light. My gaze softened and then so did hers, taking in my heterochromic eyes.

I didn’t miss how that anomaly thrilled her all over again.

The moment caught and held. She and I, back where we’d been…

Emery gave her head a shake, breaking the spell. “Anyway, I guess we could start at the end of trig.”

I pushed in my chair. “Be right back.”

The library had an entire section of classroom textbooks. I found the one I wanted and returned to the study room. Together, Emery and I flipped through the last chapters until we found where she’d gone astray.

“Here,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t remember most of this stuff, but this is where things got really shaky.”

“Inverse trigonometric functions.”

“Yes. God, I hate functions,” Emery said. “The worst .”

“Okay, let’s see where you’re at.” I grabbed my pencil and paper and created sample problems not found in the book. I felt her eyes on me again.

“I forgot how good you are at this,” she said. “My turn to ask the obvious question. Why are you here? I’d have thought you’d have a bunch of degrees by now.”

“Three,” I said, not pausing my work.

“You have three degrees?”

I nodded. “Biotechnology, physics, and philosophy from the University of Maryland. MIT is waiting for me to do my postgrad.”

“Then why—?”

“Because after my mother walked out, my father needed to be here, and I needed something to do,” I said, setting my pencil down with a snap. “And that’s all anyone needs to know.”

I hated speaking harshly to Emery; it felt counter to every impulse of my heart. But being this close to her… The old hurt was trying to swamp me, and I couldn’t let it. Emery recoiled, and I watched her tighten her armor too.

“Fine. Shall I?”

I pushed the sample problems to her, and Emery got to work while I scrolled my phone as if I had texts from friends or any kind of social media to speak of. Silence filled the room for a few minutes until Emery tossed her pencil down.

“I can’t do this,” she said.

“Sure, you can. It’s an arbitrary value—”

“Not the stupid math. This. Us.” She turned in her chair to glare at me. “Are we not going to talk about what happened?”

Here we go.

“You’re referring to our first encounter, seven years ago.”

“When you broke your promise?” she blurted. The mask of imperiousness fell for a moment, and real hurt touched her eyes. But she bottled it back up. “Never mind. It was just stupid kid stuff. Forget it.”

Another silence fell in which she wrote furiously to solve the equation, making at least three errors. I should’ve let it go. It was kid stuff. We were ten. Nothing ten-year-olds say should be binding for life, but something happened between us that day and we both knew it.

“I didn’t break my promise,” I said quietly.

Emery’s head whipped up, her eyes blazing for a fight. “You sure about that?”

“ Yes . I’m sure.”

“You never came back to meet me at the park, and I never got any letters. So?” She shrugged as if to say case closed .

“My mother left, so Dad had to work constantly to keep up. Coming back for vacation was impossible. And what do you mean, you didn’t get any letters?”

“Just that. I never got one letter from you.” She crossed her arms. “Are you saying you wrote to me?”

“I wrote to you,” I said. “A lot. And you never wrote me back.”

“No, you didn’t. Wait…you did? How many is a lot?”

“Enough.”

Too many.

The pain of my mother leaving was tangled up in the relief of meeting Emery—a bright spot in a vast field of black.

But that tiny scrap of happiness withered and died with every passing day I didn’t hear from her.

I was not about to chalk up seven years of heartache to an issue with the postal service.

It could not be that trivial. I needed someone to blame.

Emery must’ve had similar thoughts because she remained just as guarded. “Yeah, well, I never got any.”

“I wonder…” I tapped my chin, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “Do you think, perhaps, your authoritarian father might’ve had something to do with their mysterious disappearance?”

Emery’s eyes flared with indignation. “ No . I asked every day— every day— if I had any letters. Then every week. The answer was always no.”

The image of a ten-year-old Emery came to me: blond hair gleaming in the sun as she skipped to the mailbox, only to discover it empty yet again. But I’d upheld my end of the deal. I wrote to her and then I waited and waited…

“And of course, he wasn’t lying ,” I said snidely. “That would be out of character for a strict, ubercontrolling father who chooses which college his daughter will attend for her.”

“Yes, it would be out of character,” Emery said, her chin quivering.

“Because my father wouldn’t bother lying.

If he didn’t want me corresponding with you, he’d have made sure everyone knew it.

He’d have sent your letters back. Or burned them while I watched.

You’d have received a cease-and-desist if you really wrote me as often as you claim. ”

“As I claim ? I poured my fucking—” I bit off my words. “Why didn’t you look me up?”

“ How ?”

“I told you my dad worked for the NIST. You could have—”

“You never said that. You said he worked for ‘the government.’ Not a lot to go on, Xander, especially for a ten-year-old. I didn’t even know where you lived.”

“Maryland,” I said stupidly.

“Gee, that narrows it down,” Emery retorted. “You’re the genius. Why didn’t you think to look me up?”

“I did. Once. To double check that the dozens of letters I’d sent were going to the right address. And they were.”

“You checked once ?”

“My father was having a prolonged mental breakdown,” I said, my voice rising. “I’m sorry I didn’t think to follow you on Instagram, but I was a little busy picking up the pieces of our lives after my mother walked out .”

“So you don’t know.”

“Know what?”

Emery heaved a shaky breath. “About my brother, Grant, who went missing that day. He…died.”

Every muscle in my body seized up. “Oh fuck. Emery…”

“He was in Providence. They said he had his headphones on.” She swallowed hard and her voice grew small. “He didn’t hear the train.”

My heart dropped to the floor and took all of my bullshit and self-pity with it. “Jesus. No, I didn’t know.” I started to reach for her, then pulled my hand back. “I’m sorry, Emery. I’m so sorry.”

She tossed a lock of hair over her shoulder, but her eyes were still shiny, her jaw set against tears. “It’s fine. Whatever.”

“It’s not fine,” I said. “You’re right about everything.

I wrote some things in those letters, and when I didn’t hear back…

” I ran a hand through my hair. “I get in the habit of thinking I always have the right answers. I thought you were ignoring me, and that’s the story I told myself to the exclusion of all other possibilities.

But I was wrong, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry about your brother, Emery. ”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry too. And your dad? Is he…okay?”

“He’s okay. For now.” I managed a small smile. “He likes it here. That’s why we came back.”

She glanced up at me through lowered lids. “So, what…um, did you write in your letters?”

“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Nothing important. Kid stuff. I hardly remember.”

“Oh.” She looked away, then heaved a shaky sigh. “Well, I don’t know what happened to them, but I guess it’s good we cleared the air.”

“Agreed.”

“It’s kind of a silly thing to argue about, right?” Emery laughed nervously. “So many big feelings over nothing.”

“Nothing. Right.”

“I mean, why are we being so dramatic about something that happened when we were ten?”

“No clue.”

A small silence followed. Now that we were done turning a monumental and consequential incident into something trivial and childish, I supposed we could go back to being virtual strangers.

Emery looked to me uncertainly. “Will you still tutor me?”

I should’ve said no. My stupid heart wanted to go back to the beginning and pick up where we left off, but that was impossible, and that impossibility was going to be torture. But if I didn’t help Emery, her father was going to torture her in his own way, and that I could not stand.

“Of course, I will.”

Emery eased a sigh. Relieved but sad too.

“Thank you.” She glanced down at her work. “I can’t concentrate any more today. Save it for next time?”

“Next time,” I said and gathered my stuff, needing to get away too. To sort out this afternoon’s revelations that had rewritten the past seven years.

I was at the door of the study room when her soft voice stopped me. “Xander?”

“Yeah?”

She made to speak, then changed her mind. “Nothing.”