Page 35 of Emma on Fire

CHAPTER 23

RACHEL DALEY PEERS at the gilt-framed pictures Emma keeps on her bookshelf. She gets so close to them that her freckled nose nearly touches the glass. When she turns around, she smiles and says, “You’re such a beautiful family.”

“Weresuch,” Emma says.

What seems like a flicker of confusion crosses Rachel’s pale, fine-boned face. “What?”

“The verb’s past tense,” Emma says. She kicks off her shoes. Crosses her legs underneath her. The cops are gone, and she’s not going to math class today. She’s probably never going to math class again. But she doesn’t want to talk to Rachel Daley about her dead family members. “Never mind.”

Rachel gestures to the end of Emma’s bed. “Can I sit?”

It’s weird that she’s asking now, when earlier she just flopped down and started patting Emma’s leg, but Emma shrugs. “Make yourself at home.” She doesn’t offer Rachel a snack. Last time she did that, someone narced on her. Hospitality apparently doesn’t pay.

Rachel pulls out her phone. “I was hoping we could talk more openly.”

Emma eyes the iPhone. It’s an old model, and the screen is beat to hell. “And you want to record me?”

“If you agree.”

Emma shakes her head. “I don’t feel comfortable.”

“But you’ve already put out two videos—”

“I made those. I was in control of them,” Emma says. “How do I know you won’t twist my words? Won’t make me sound crazy? I know how easy it is to splice together something that changes my meaning, even if my words are the same.”

“I would never.”

Maybe, maybe not. The truth is that Emma doesn’t know Rachel Daley, and trust doesn’t exactly come easily to her. “I don’t understand why you want to write about me anyway. What brought you here all the way from Boston?”

“When a girl says that she’s going to set herself on fire to protest the state of the world, that’s news,” Rachel says. “I want to tell that story.Yourstory.”

“The videos said it all,” Emma says stiffly. “I already told it.”

Rachel nods. “A lot of people saw them, before you had to take them down.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Rachel scoots closer to her. “What do you think is the worst problem humanity’s facing?”

Emma snorts. “Gee, how do I pick? Climate change is going to kill most of humanity eventually. But a nuclear bomb from a rogue state could start a war that kills everyone in a matter of days.”

“You don’t sound like you have a lot of hope.”

“That’s because I don’t.” Emma’s hope died with Claire. Maybe that’s when her trust went too.

Rachel lifts a shoulder in a half shrug. “You’re young. Brilliant. Rich. You have a lot of power, Emma. You could be a voice for change.”

“Iama voice for change,” Emma says. “People are going to listen to me. They’re going to listen to me because they’re learning from my videos. Think about it: if what I’m saying isn’t true, I sure as shit wouldn’t burn for it.”

Every time Emma says it, it becomes more real.

When exposed to heat, the muscles in my thighs will shrink and retract along the shafts of my femur…

Rachel is quiet for a minute. She fiddles with her phone, rubbing her thumb across the cracked glass, her browfurrowed. Emma watches the reporter out of the corner of her eye. Once, she thought she might be like Rachel: young, ambitious, hungrily seeking out stories that mattered to people. Emma loved running the Ridgemont newspaper, kept notebooks full of story ideas.

Last fall she was planning a summer internship at theNew York Times. But then Claire died, and everything fell apart, and now the only thing Emma is planning is her own death.

Rachel looks up, and her cool gray eyes search Emma’s face. “I have to ask,” she says. “Is some of your despair about the state of the world motivated by your own personal tragedies?”

---