Quiet as a cat, she slipped into the living room. Came and stood over me in the dark, little skinny thing in her white gown, like she’d crumple and leave dust on your fingers if you touched her. Where was Miss Salute-My-Shorts now? Was daytime Emmy a fake, I wondered, and this little moth-wing girl the real person? Was I supposed to say something? She sat down on the floor and started crying. Really quiet except for little gasps, like getting surprised over and over.
“Is it still about the murder thing?” I finally asked.
She didn’t turn around but nodded her head.
“Sucks,” I said. “People dying for no good reason. I hate that for them.”
“He’s so little, and all alone. I can’t quit thinking about him. I know I should.”
“It’s not your fault. You can’t really help what’s in your brain.”
She turned around and looked at me. I sat up. “I know everybody says that. Clean out your juvenile little head and put something nice in there. I get that all the time, and I’m like, Seriously? Just spray around brain-Lysol and get over it? How’s that work?”
“Oh my God,” she said. “Your mother. I’m sorry for your loss.”
She sounded like an adult. I was surprised she knew about Mom. I told her thanks, and I was sorry about hers too. “Before Aunt June, I mean. If there was a real one at some point.”
“My birth mother. Yeah.” She shrugged. “I can’t really talk about her.”
“But now you’re adopted. So maybe it turned out for the best.”
“Oh, totally. I’m lucky.”
“Heck yes you are. I wouldn’t wish foster care on anybody.”
“It’s really bad?”
“So far, yeah. I hate it pretty much every minute of the day. It’s like a cross between prison and dodgeball. And there’s not enough food.”
“Dodgeball, like whenever you play with older kids that want to laugh at you?”
“Yeah. Hurt you, and then laugh at you.”
She seemed to be thinking about this. I mean really turning it over. She whispered, “Do the kids get abused? I’ve heard that.”
“My mom definitely had molester type shit done to her whenever she was little. In a supposedly Christian home. I just basically watch my back, night and day.”
She blinked a couple of times. I was surprised how well I could see her in the dark. I knew I shouldn’t shock Emmy, given she was already upset. But she’d asked. Nobody ever did. I told her I was sure there were good fosters out there that are God’s angels, like everybody says. But I had yet to meet them because they didn’t take kids like me.
“What do you mean, kids like you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
She took in a big breath and let it out. “I was so mean to you and Matty last summer. I’m sorry. This has been a year.” Again, it was like she’d turned into somebody’s mother or one of the nicer ladies at church. I couldn’t figure out what I was dealing with. I wished I was older.
“You were okay,” I said. “At times.”
She smiled. “Yeah. After you saved me from the sharks.” She pulled up her knees and showed me the silver bracelet I gave her that day. She was wearing it around her ankle. Leave it to somebody like her, to think of something like that. I couldn’t believe she still had it.
“It’s not like they were going to take you down. I never got why you were so scared.”
“Because they’re evil creatures with dagger-like teeth? Why were you not?”
“No reason. I’m just not. I like thinking about the ocean, and what all is living in there. It’s like my brain-Lysol. It calms me down or something.”
“Seriously. Sharks calm you down.”
I could see pieces of the everyday Emmy sneaking back into the conversation, but I didn’t mind. Maybe it meant this thing we were doing now, whatever it was, might not just go poof in the morning. “Not sharks specifically,” I said. “The whole being-underwater thing. I put myself there and float. Just, you know. Inside my skull movie.”
“You have a skull movie? You could see yourself drowning. That’s relaxing.”
“I don’t, though. That’s the one bad thing that for sure won’t ever happen to me.”
“Because what? You took Junior Red Cross swimming?”
I laughed. “No. To tell you the truth, I haven’t ever been swimming that much. In water that was deeper than like, an inch.”