Loving Emily (7 page)

We are quiet for a minute.

It feels safe, sitting here with her.

I want to say to her, do you know that you smell like lavender? Do you know what it does to me when you smile, when your hair moves across your cheek like that?

“Hey,” she says, “Would you give me a lesson some time? I’d be terrible, though. I’ve never played.”

“I’m not sure I’d be a good teacher,” I say slowly, although I probably would. I’m really good at tennis and teach Maddy stuff all the time.

Emily’s eyes open wide. “Okay, sure, it’s no big deal.” Her shoulders slump, and she looks down, her cheeks pink.

I’m a jerk to make her feel bad, and after she’s made me feel so much better.

I tell her the truth. “It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just that I’m in a weird place right now.”

“I understand. You don’t have to.”

“No, I want to. I’ll give you a lesson. Maybe in a few weeks, okay?”

“Okay.” Another silence, then Emily says “I guess the school’s having a memorial service for Michael? Tomorrow?”

“Yeah.” The pain and the tearing sensation are starting again. I know it’s only been a couple of days, but will it always be like this? I look down at the grass.

The bell for class rings, interrupting my thoughts. I leap to my feet, then reach down to help her up. My hand closes on hers, setting off a storm of electrical activity in my body.

As Emily comes up beside me, my brain signals my hand to let go of hers, but it won’t. For a few long seconds, it just keeps hanging onto her hand as if it’s suddenly very important—a lifeline.

And Emily doesn’t seem to mind; at least, she doesn’t pull away.

Finally, my fingers move enough to drop Emily’s hand. But I can still feel it in my own, warm and alive, even after we’ve said goodbye and I’ve gone off to my endless afternoon classes.

I
’m in the kitchen with Ro, Maddy, and Molly. Ro’s making lunches, while I go through the motions of quizzing the girls for their spelling tests. “Maddy— ‘chuckle’,” I say. She begins to spell it out.

“Rosario!” Mom walks in. She’s got about a pound of make-up on and this clingy T-shirt and pants, along with her usual pair of gravity-defying shoes.

She interrupts Maddy in mid-spell. “I need my cashmere sweater—the moss green. Do you know where it is?” She directs a little smile at us, her three offspring, acknowledging our existence.

“Miss Nadine, I took it to the dry cleaners yesterday. Remember, you gave it to me?”

“I did?” Mom stops short, considering her options. “Well, can we get it today? I need it for the Teen League luncheon.”

“Hey, Mom,” I say. “Did you know that, in some countries, entire families live in spaces the size of your closet?”

“Ryan.” Rosario shakes her head at me, but I ignore her.

“It’s true. I saw this thing on the Internet about comparative home sizes around the world.”

Mom turns her back on me. “Well, Rosario?”

“I will call the cleaners.” Ro dials, while Maddy and Molly finish their milk and start to put on their shoes. We need to leave for school in a few minutes.

As always, my mom’s wearing a ton of expensive jewelry, including a chunky gold necklace with these red stones called garnets. I recognize the necklace, because I helped Dad choose it for her at Tiffany’s when I was twelve.

Dad had picked me up from the tennis club one Saturday and said he had an errand to run on the way home.

“I’m getting something for your mom,” he told me. “Some jewelry.”

“You already got her jewelry,” I said. “For her birthday.” We were in my dad’s Mercedes, as he turned onto Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

“Yeah, but now our wedding anniversary’s coming up.”

“So you have to buy her more jewelry?”

“Well, it’s good to do
something.
”

Dad parked the car and led me into Tiffany’s. He had obviously called ahead, because waiting for us was this amazingly tall woman with silver hair piled high on her head.

“Mr. Mills, what a pleasure to have you back!”

“Hi, Rhoda! What do you have to show me today?”

Rhoda whipped us past glass cases and people in black clothes into a private room, where she had laid out all these trays of necklaces and bracelets. The garnet necklace was the best one, even though Rhoda called it a “choker,” which didn’t sound very romantic to me.

Leaving Tiffany’s, I remember Dad saying, “The thing with women is, you gotta sweep ‘em off their feet. Make ‘em feel special. You know why?”

I shook my head.

He leaned down toward my ear, as if he were telling me a secret. “There’s an old saying. ‘If momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy!’“ And he laughed at his own joke.

“Would something bad happen if you didn’t do it?”

“No,” he said. “But I
like
doing it.”

I look at my mom, standing there in the kitchen. Judging by the gold hanging off her arms and neck, she ought to be pretty darn happy.

Right now, though, she wants that sweater. Rosario’s on the phone, turning to Mom. “He can rush it through, but it will be very expensive.”

Mom frowns at this annoyance. “Well, I just have to have it. Be a love, Rosario, and pick it up by eleven?” Mom blows kisses to the three of us and a second later is out the kitchen door, walking down the hall to her office.

Maddy, Molly, and I say good-bye to Ro, and I drive the girls to their school, then head off for mine.

J
onathan falls into step next to me on my way to class. He’s one of the few people at school I can stand to be around since Michael died.

“So you and Emily, huh?” he asks. He must have noticed us having one of our lunches or sitting together in the Quad, talking. It is Emily, mainly, who has gotten me through the last couple of weeks, pulling me out of my black moods with her steady friendship.

“What? No, we’re just friends,” I say.

“
Right.”

“No, really.” She and I are just friends, and I have a bad feeling it’ll have to stay that way.

“She’s in a bunch of my classes.” He doesn’t say it, but he means the AP classes. “She’s very cool. She’s
hachimenreirou.
”

Jonathan breaks into Japanese every once in a while. He speaks it at home with his family.

“What’s that?”

“It means
perfect serenity—beautiful from all sides
.”

Wow.
Jonathan nailed it with that one. “I can’t believe you have a word in Japanese for that.”

“We do.” He gets an evil look on his face. “We also have
bakku-shan
. That’s a girl who’s pretty from the back, but from the front, it’s like
no way
.
”

I try to look disgusted at him, but I can’t help smiling. I’ve known Jonathan since the second grade, although not as well as Michael. “What’s your point, Takahara?”

“Just that an asshole like you could do a lot worse than Emily.”

“Thanks for the tip, asshole.”

There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask him. He’s into all this weird spiritual stuff, and sometimes we talk about it.

“Jonathan, do you believe in karma?”

Because I do. I believe that everything you do somehow comes back around to you eventually. The night that Michael died, I made enough bad karma to fill an ocean.

“Yep.” Jonathan answers instantly.

I reach up and shift the strap of the loaded backpack that’s biting into my shoulder. Not sure I really want to know the answer to my next question, I ask it anyway.

“What happens if you’ve got a lot of bad karma? Do you go to karma hell?” We turn a corner and pass some guys we know, raising our hands briefly to them as we go by.

“Kinda, yeah. If your karma’s bad enough when you die, you get reincarnated as some lower form of life.”

Great.
I’m probably scheduled to come back as a sea slug.

“On the other hand, you can work off bad karma and create good in its place.”

I get this image of a giant worksheet in the sky, where the karma gods keep track of how everyone’s doing. Right now, I’ve got a whopping balance of negative karma.

“How do you know all this?” I ask.

“I have two uncles and three cousins in Japan who are Buddhist monks.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Nope. My father’s the black sheep of the family, because he went into the import/export business.”

So Jonathan knows what he’s talking about. I can redeem myself, if I do good deeds. But what about Emily? Since I lost any right to be happy when I left Michael in the stairwell that night, the karma gods would probably count being in love with her as a bad deed on the worksheet.

Jonathan brings my thoughts back to the hallway. “Ryan, did you ever figure out anything about Michael’s secret—the thing that was bothering him?”

I shake my head. “I have no clue.”

There’s no one else he would have told. Letting it go doesn’t feel good, but I don’t know what else to do.

“Okay, well, see you later,” Jonathan says, and we go to class.

E
mily has put on white gym shorts, a white polo shirt, and a pair of white Keds, the color scheme being a requirement of my tennis club. She looks cute, with her hair up in a ponytail. She’s going to have her first tennis lesson.

It has taken me a while to get up the nerve to go back to the club. I park my car and get out, setting my feet carefully on the asphalt of the parking lot, as if I’m not sure it will hold me. I would go around to open Emily’s door for her, but she’s already out and pulling the tennis rackets from the back seat.

“The last time I came here, I was with Michael,” I say. “In fact, probably the last
fifty
times I came here, I was with Michael.”

Her forehead wrinkles. “Do you want to do this? We could go somewhere else.”

“No.” I grab a couple of cans of balls. “I promised you a tennis lesson.”

I’m wearing my best, most professional looking whites. In addition to giving her a few pointers, I wouldn’t mind showing off to Emily the true God of Tennis that I am.

As we walk through the club gates and onto a court, I follow close behind her, grateful I’m not here alone.

“You won’t laugh at me, will you?” she asks.

I bounce a tennis ball. “Only if you’re really bad.”

“Don’t!” She wags a stern finger at me as the corners of her mouth turn up in a smile.

Once again, I’m drowning in those gray-blue eyes. I have to force myself to say, “Okay, well, I guess we should get started.”

I demonstrate a basic forehand and backhand, and we practice for a while. I hit gentle shots straight to her, while she tries to get anything at all back to me. I shouldn’t be, but I’m appreciating the sounds and feelings of tennis again: the grip of my feet on the court, the thwack of the racket strings against the ball. My mind stops churning, and my senses take over. It’s sweet relief, like when a good, strong pain pill kicks in.

Emily’s hitting balls out of bounds, into the net, and even backwards, gritting her teeth and saying, “I’ll get it! You’ll see!” And after a while, she does get it, hitting three shots in a row back to me.

“Good work!” I tell her.

A guy I know, Alex, who’s a really good player, stops to talk to me. Emily, out of breath, invites us to play together.

“Sure,” I say, acting cool and casual.

I stand at the service line, bouncing a ball up and down. Emily is watching me. A few brown tree leaves tumble across the court.

As I look across the net at Alex, sudden rage floods me, and all the good feelings vanish. I hate the guy just because he’s not Michael. I bounce the ball again, tensing as I get ready to serve.

My first serve blisters its way over the net, practically spinning Alex around.
Point, Ryan.
I do it again, and then again, serving three aces in a row. When Alex finally does get a volley going with me, I push him back behind the base line, then tap over a little drop shot that he misses by a mile. I run him all over the court with my deadly topspin shots and end the match by ripping him a forehand that leaves a cloud of yellow fuzz in the air beside me and skitters the ball into a far corner of the court. He tries for it, but he’s not even close.

“Jeez, Ryan,” Alex says and leaves, scratching his head.

We kicked his ass, didn’t we, Michael? Serves the guy right for trying to take your place.

“I can’t believe how good you are,” Emily tells me when I finish and walk over to her.

“Believe it, baby,” I say, putting on a swagger and toweling off my face and neck.
Yes.
I have blown her away with my excellence.

As I walk around picking up tennis balls, Chrissie comes by in a short little tennis skirt. I haven’t seen her since the funeral, but now she comes up to me.

“Wow, Ryan. You looked great just now!” Chrissie’s accent is straight off a Mississipi mud flat. She has always reminded me of a Fourth of July sparkler, sending off light in all directions. She has blonde, curly hair and a blonde, curly personality.

From the side of the court, Emily is watching us. She has probably noticed that Chrissie merits a high score on the Hotness Scale.

Although Emily is the most beautiful girl ever, I still have to take an extra look at gorgeous Chrissie, who is pursing up her rosebud mouth in a way that makes me shift uncomfortably and think, Dang, Michael got a piece of that!

Neither Chrissie nor I mention Michael; it’s like we’ve both decided that subject’s off limits today. She starts to tell me a story about one of the club pros. Chrissie flirts as easily as other people breathe, tossing her hair, laughing, giving off sideways glances and little arm touches. She does this to every guy at the club, including our ninety year old half-blind garage cashier, Raoul.

Emily walks over to stand next to me. “Hi,” she says to Chrissie in a friendly tone. She’s low key about it, but I notice she’s really close to me, her arm almost touching mine.

I introduce them, and Emily asks Chrissie where the nearest Ladies’ Room is.

“Honey, you read my mind! I’ll take you there.”