She glanced at him, then returned her gaze to the clouds. “Yep.”
He took her hand once more and squeezed it. “Stick with me, kid. I promise you we’ll have fun.”
* * *
EMMALINE MET THE ONE in eighth grade during dodgeball, a game that further proved that gym teachers hated children. A few years before, someone’s parents had sued the school to eliminate dodgeball, but then someone else’s countersued to have it reinstated, and while there was currently a lawsuit to have it banned once more, the dreaded sport was still allowed, apparently, because Ms. Goldberg was smiling her snakelike evil grin and fondling her whistle.
Bad enough that Emmaline was already a target of her classmates. She didn’t need to be pelted with red rubber balls. But worse than that, as everyone knew, was the choosing of the teams.
She tried to look nonchalant and unconcerned, even as her palms sweated and her heart thudded, as the horrible ritual began. Lyric Adams (daughter of a middle-aged rock star and his fourth wife) and Seven Finlay (son of an award-winning British actress and her third husband) were the popular kids, and anointed by Ms. Goldberg to do the honors of bolstering or destroying the egos of their classmates, one by one.
“Ireland,” Lyric called, and Ireland, who was the daughter of big-deal producers, bowed her head graciously as if accepting her own statue and cantered over to her best friend’s side.
“Milan,” Seven countered.
Most of Emmaline’s classmates were named for a place—in addition to Milan, there were two Parises, three Londons, a York, a Dallas and a Boston. It sounded more as if Lyric and Seven were in a geography bee than gym class, but hey. Emmaline wasn’t kidding herself. She would’ve loved a cool name. Would’ve loved to have been one of the popular kids, even though she recognized their cruelty. She would’ve settled for less, even...would’ve loved to have been able to turn to the new boy and make a joke about all the map names and how the two of them were outcasts because of it.
That wasn’t possible, however.
“Jupiter!” Lyric called with a hair toss.
“Diesel,” Seven countered.
Her fellow pariah had moved from a town that most of Em’s classmates had never heard of...Tacoma or something. His parents didn’t work in the entertainment industry, and he was therefore already marked as an undesirable. Also, he had a human name, which didn’t help.
Kevin. Kevin Bates.
Kevin was also—insert dramatic pause—fat.
In Malibu, it was far more socially acceptable to be a he**in addict or murderer than to be overweight. When he walked into Algebra, Emmaline’s classmates stared at him as if he had a nipple growing out of his chin. To be fair, many of them had never seen a fat person in real life. Not in Malibu. Not on the pristine beaches or exclusive mountains where their families cavorted. Being fat? Who would’ve dared?
Why hadn’t his parents sent him in for gastric bypass? A tummy tuck or lipo? At the very least, why not a fat camp? Surely if there had been a surgery to fix Em’s problem, her parents would have jumped on it. Why not fix something that made life so hard? In Malibu, it seemed that imperfect children were tossed into the ocean, or sent to live in a more normal state.
On his first day, the teacher asked Kevin to tell the class about himself and the other kids had peppered him with questions... Granted, he was fat, but that would be tolerated if he was, say, Steven Spielberg’s son.
Kevin’s mother was an accountant; his father was a computer programmer.
The death knell. It wouldn’t have mattered if Kevin’s mom won the Nobel in economics or his father invented time travel; it didn’t matter that his parents happened to make a very comfortable living. Kevin didn’t have dinner with movie stars, he didn’t come to school in a limo and he was fat. He was no one, buh-bye.
Em knew the feeling. She wasn’t fat. She wasn’t tiny, either, by SoCal standards; she was solid, lacking mouselike bone structure or an eating disorder. But her problem wasn’t her size.
It was her stutter.
Words had always fought her. Years and years of speech therapy hadn’t done much. The only way she got past it was if she was relaxed or spontaneous or had a patient audience, and even then it was a struggle.
And patience wasn’t a quality associated with children. Not being able to get out an answer, not being sure if her throat would lock and the horrible sounds would start and stop, start and stop as her classmates watched in gleeful horror... It made her an easy target.
It didn’t matter that Emmaline got her black belt in aikido at the age of eleven. That she was great at sports. That she was tall and smart and, except for class participation, got really good grades. Her classmates were led by the mean popular kids, vampires who only seemed happy if they were feeding off someone else’s misery.
When they were smaller, Em got into a lot of fights, back in the good old days when “acting out” was more acceptable. In fifth grade, however, Asia Redding’s parents had threatened to sue the Neals after Emmaline had pushed Asia at recess. Never mind that Asia had been mercilessly mocking Em’s stutter for years.
Emmaline’s defense had been to pretend (miserably) not to care. She mastered the dead-eyed stare and wore Doc Martens and black clothes. She learned sign language for the rude phrases her stutter wouldn’t let her say.
Her parents told her to laugh it off or ignore it. But her parents were child psychologists, so they had no idea how kids really acted. At least pretending to be tough protected her from having the mean kids know how much it hurt.
Next to her, Kevin heaved a sigh. Emmaline sneaked a look. His expression was amused and tolerant. He glanced at her, and his mouth pulled up in a smile. “Sucks to be us, huh?” he said.
Us. That had a nice sound to it.
“Chord,” Seven called.
“Birch,” Lyric said.
“Guess his parents hated kids,” Kevin murmured. “Birch? Seriously?”
A smile started in Emmaline’s chest. There was something about Kevin. He had...swagger. Here he was, fat in the land where sixteen-year-old girls got breast implants for their birthdays, where boys had personal trainers and professionally done highlights before they started high school. Fat? Fat? It was a rejection of the very fabric of society. Almost James Dean in terms of rebellion.
Kind of thrilling, really.“Journey.” This was said with a sigh, as Journey was the product of a first marriage whose parents were still together, and therefore not nearly as cool as the other kids. Not on Emmaline’s and Kevin’s level, but still pretty far down. Also, he was named after a band and not a place, so...
Now there were only two of them left.
Emmaline sneaked another look at Kevin.
He looked back. Rolled his eyes. Not at her...at this, the horrible ritual of crushing the human spirit. She smiled.
“Kevin, I guess,” Lyric said. “Whatever.”
“Great,” Seven said. “I’m stuck with Eh-eh-eh-Emmaline.”
Em glanced toward Ms. Goldberg, who was jotting notes on her clipboard, pretending not to have heard. She wouldn’t chastise Seven, Em knew. And Em wouldn’t be able to tell her about it.
“Asshole,” Kevin muttered, then sighed and walked over to join his teammates, Gulliver among the Lilliputians.
That day at recess, Kevin waited for her by the door. “Want a Twinkie?” he asked.
She took the strange, tubular cake in wonder. Her parents were on a macrobiotic kick these days, tragically. “Th-thanks,” she said.
“So you stutter?” he asked.
“S-s-somet-t-t-times.” Most times.
“I’m fat,” Kevin said.
He had beautiful dark eyes—amazing eyelashes—and curly black hair. If you looked closely, he wasn’t really that fat. Husky, that was the word. And, yes, soft. But he was tall, about the same height as she was, and the truth was, he was kind of...handsome.
“Want to be friends?” he asked, so of course she fell for him.
Around Kevin, her stutter wasn’t quite so pronounced, and when it did come up, he waited. Not like her parents, who stared at her, waiting, waiting, waiting. Maybe if they hadn’t been riddled with PhDs and gurgling with words like transference and empowerment and self-actualization, Em would’ve felt a little less freakish.
Mom and Dad knew exactly what the recommended method was for dealing with a stutterer (or a nonfluent speaker, as they liked to call her). “We have all the time in the world,” Mom would say. That was another thing. There was always a we. There was never I. “Don’t feel pressured. We’ll wait as long as it takes.”
Which made the stutter even worse. Their take on her speech impediment was relentless reframing (Em knew all the terms). “We love your stutter, because we love you!” Dad said once, which was just ridiculous.
She hated the stutter. She pictured it as a skeleton dressed in a black suit, rising up, wrapping its sharp, hard fingers around her vocal cords and squeezing, smiling as it did.
Kevin got it. He liked himself; he didn’t like being fat. He liked her; he didn’t like her stutter.
They kissed for the first time in April of eighth grade, when they’d been friends for months. His lips were soft, and he didn’t do anything more than just kiss her...no tongue, no groping. It was lovely. He smiled afterward. “Want to go to the movies this weekend?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said. “What do you want to see?”
Not one stutter.
Unfortunately, the idea that the two freaks of eighth grade were dating was deeply offensive to their beautiful, oddly named classmates. The bullying got worse. Emmaline found a used condom in her locker, such a disgusting sight that her throat locked for the entire day. One day when she went into music class, all the other girls burst out laughing for no apparent reason. Someone put a pregnancy test in her backpack, which caused her mother to deliver a lecture on sex and readiness, ignoring Emmaline’s protest that she and Kevin had kissed and that was it.
But it was when Lyric threw a lit match at her in science class that shit got serious, as the saying went. The match went out before it landed in her hair, thankfully, and Emmaline shoved Lyric, who then screamed as if she were being chased by cannibals. Em was suspended for a week. Worse, she had to apologize to her bully, and, no, a note wouldn’t do.
But she had Kevin.
Then came the news. Kevin got into his dad’s alma mater boarding school. In Connecticut. Kevin was wise beyond his years, it seemed; he knew they were only fourteen. Of course he’d be going.
Her only true friend. The boy she loved.
She sat down at her computer at home and wrote her parents a letter. She wanted to go live with Nana and go to high school there, because she just couldn’t keep fighting the good fight.
Nana, her mother’s mother, lived in Manningsport, New York, a lovely little town on a big lake where Em spent each summer. Nana was the epitome of a grandmother—she cooked, she clucked, she cuddled. Those summer weeks were fantastic, filled with plenty of gluten and red meat and sugary desserts. Bike rides and morning swims in the chilly lake, hikes and waterfalls and visits to the candy store. Nana even invited a couple of other girls over to play, and, unlike the Malibu crowd, these girls seemed nice. When one heard her stutter the first time, she put her hand on Em’s arm and said, “Don’t worry. I have epilepsy, so I’m different, too.”
Em stuttered less there. Still stuttered a lot, but not as much.
Her parents were all too supportive of the idea of her moving.
“Very empowering,” Mom said, pretending she had something in her eye.
Dad cleared his throat. “This is a healthy decision. We support you.”
All three of them knew they couldn’t fix her or her problems.
In a sense, she was running away, but the idea of leaving her mean-spirited peers filled her with such relief and excitement that she didn’t care.