Page 49 of Emma on Fire

Emma was ten years old, too tall and too bookish already. Back then she couldn’t stop talking about going to Ridgemont herself. She was a walking brochure for the place. “Ridgemont Academy has an eight-to-one student-to-teacher ratio. The percentage of teachers holding an advanced degree is eighty-six. There are forty-five US states and territories represented in the student body, and thirty-eight countries. There are over a hundred student clubs and organizations on campus.”

Her mother, usually so patient, snapped at her. “Can’t you lay off thefactsfor a night? I haven’t slept in weeks!”

Emma blinked back tears as she sat next to her parents, listening to Claire’s valedictory speech about the importance of perseverance and having high expectations for yourself.

“When things get hard,” Claire told the assembled crowd, “you must not give up. When I felt like I couldn’t do any more homework, or any more violin practicing, or any more sprints, I’d say to myself, ‘What’s the matter? It’s onlypain.’ And pain, like my dad always told us, ‘is weakness leaving the body.’”

“That’s my girl,” Byron whispered.

That night they ate a celebratory steak dinner in Concord. Then Claire headed back to the dorms, and Byron went back to Cambridge, and it was just Emma and her mother in the little pink motel room. By tradition, her mother pulled a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild and a bottle of sparkling cider from her suitcase and filled up two of the motel’s plastic cups.

Then Sarah Blake drained one cup and quickly poured herself another. Emma had never seen her mother drink more than half a glass of wine at a dinner party. She didn’t look like she was celebrating anymore.

“Mom?” Emma asked. “Do you want some water?”

“It isn’t easy,” Sarah said, almost to herself. “No, in fact it’s very hard.”

“What is?” Emma asked, suddenly worried.

Her mother shook her head. Took another gulp of wine. Stared dully at the watercolor sheep, which she said looked like wads of Kleenex with legs.

“Mom?” Emma scooted closer to her on the bed. “What’s so hard?”

“It’s hard to be the kind of person your father wants us to be,” Sarah said. “I’ve done it for twenty years, and I’m very, very tired.”

Little flares of alarm were going off inside Emma, but she didn’t know what to say or do. She was only in fourth grade. She reached for her mother’s hand. She said, helplessly, “Everything’s going to be okay!”

Her mother had laughed tonelessly, the sound harsh and low in the small room. “Of course everything is going to be okay, sweetheart. You’re going to go to Ridgemont. Your sister is going to Harvard. Your dad will continue to make more money than we can spend, and I’ll … I’ll…”

She’d waved her hand in the air, eyes cloudy with confusion.

“I’ll just keep being Mrs. Byron Blake.”

And her mother turned to Emma and put her hand against her cheek. Then she forced herself to smile. “But there will be good times for us, my dear, of course. So many of them.”

But Sarah Blake was dead less than four years later, so really, how many more good times did she get?

CHAPTER 38

“IT ISN’T FAIR,” Emma says out loud. “She deserved better.”

And so did Claire.

But maybe the idea of deserving anything at all is meaningless. Do babies born today deserve to grow up in a world of war and hunger, mental illness and loneliness, hurricanes and deforestation? They don’t ask to be born in the first place, and theydefinitelydon’t ask to be born in the middle of worldwide crises.

Emma wishes, with every molecule in her body, that she could still talk to Claire the way she used to.

“Oh, Claire,” Emma says to the empty, anonymous room. “Why did you have to go?” She shakes her head. “But you didn’thaveto. You chose to. And I will never understand why.”

Once again, Emma can’t sit still. As she paces, she keepstalking out loud, because hearing her voice makes her feel less alone. It’s almost like she can imagine the words somehow reaching Claire, wherever she is. She barely notices the tears streaming down her cheeks.

“No one understands why I’m making my choice either. But if I’m honest, Claire, I think part of me was never sure that I was going to go through with it. Like maybe it’d be enough to raise all those issues and make that terrible threat.” She shoves her hands into the pockets of her jeans. Finds a lone Tic Tac, which she tosses into the corner. The room needs a good vacuuming anyway. “Not that the whole thing was an empty threat from the start. But I guess I thought there was a chance that I could, like, talk the talk but not have to walk the walk.” She laughs awkwardly. “God, I sound like our PE teacher. Mr. Briggs. You never had him. He only speaks in clichés. ‘You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take,’ and stuff like that. It’s so dumb.

“But now I’m getting distracted. I guess what I’m saying, Claire, is that this whole thing has gotten so much bigger than me. People are paying attention, just like I wanted them to. They’re marching and having rallies. They’re making videos and calling for change. So suddenly it feels like there’s no way I can back down.” She pauses in front of the sheep painting. It really is ugly. “I won’t missthat,” she says. “There’s a lot of things I won’t miss, I guess. So maybe there’s a bright side to having to burn myself alive.”

CHAPTER 39

THE RINGING OF Emma’s phone startles her back to reality. Glancing at the screen, she recognizes the number as the same one the texts came from. She wipes her eyes. Picks up. “Who is this?”

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