Page 52 of People Like Us

She took them with a small smile while I dug around my skin care basket for makeup wipes and moisturizer. “You can use these too.”

“Are you always this hospitable?” she teased.

“My stepmom says sleeping in makeup causes moral decline.”

Emily snorted quietly. “Cleanliness is next to godliness.”

I changed in the bathroom, washing my face and brushing my teeth. When I came back into the bedroom, she was standing in front of my sewing desk, fingertips brushing over the old machine. The bedside lamp painted her skin gold and soft.

She picked up a scrap of pale blue fabric, a sleeve to a top I hadn’t finished yet. “Where’d you learn to sew?”

I sat cross-legged on the bed, watching her. “My mom taught me.” The words came out easier than I expected.

Emily turned toward me fully then. I looked past her, toward the yellowing machine, fixated on the small patches of fading in the protective coating where my fingers had rubbed across too many times.

“I would sit on her lap when I was little,” I said quietly. “She’d work the foot pedal and let me guide the fabric beneath the needle.” I smiled despite myself. “I used to think it was magic. Watching those flat pieces turn into beautiful dresses.”

The memory rose up vivid and aching. The smell of river water and strawberry shampoo. My mother’s bracelets clinking together as she moved. The vibration of the machine rattling through my tiny bones. I dug the heel of my hand into my sternum, willing the ache to go away.

“Sometimes,” I continued, “she’d tuck strands of her own hair into the hems.”

Emily lifted a perfectly plucked brow. “Why?”

“My mother has OCD.” I picked at a loose thread on my quilt. “Sometimes her brain would tell her to do funny things.” A dry laugh escaped me. “Put your hair in the hems. Check the windows seventeen times before bed.” I swallowed. “Abandon your child.”

The silence afterward felt alive, the same way it had in those years after she had left the last time. Emily crossed the room slowly and sat beside me on the bed. The mattress springs groaned beneath her weight. She gave me a look so soft it almost hurt to receive.

“Sometimes my brain tells me to do funny things too,” she said quietly. I looked over at her. “Like throwing soda at the best friend of girls I wish I didn’t want to kiss.”

A sad smile tugged at my mouth before I could stop it. Emily leaned back against the headboard beside me, our shoulders touching lightly.

“I hope your mother is someplace she deserves,” she murmured.

I looked down at my hands. “She always talked about New Orleans, that’s where she was from.” I smiled faintly. “Like the whole city was enchanted or something.”

In my head I could still hear my mother describing it: the music in the streets, the thick heat. The smell of sugar and rain water. The way people danced like they had something holy inside them.

My mother wasn’t religious. Not in the way people usually used the word. She was, however, devout. Devoted to her rituals of cleanliness; to making more things than she bought; to tending to the herbs she grew in every window that could get sunlight. There were still water and soil stains on the sill above the kitchen sink where she grew her basil and rosemary that wouldn’t come out no matter how hard my father had scrubbed at it.

Now that I’m older I know that my mother was a wiccan, something I imagine she was raised in considering her hometown. But I knew better than to say something like that outloud. Knew that I had to keep the books I bought on the subject tucked under a shelf in the school library because my stepmother would have me committed if she’d found it during one of her monthly snooping sessions in my room..

“I like to think she’s there,” I admitted quietly. “Dancing in the swamps in her hair-spun dresses.”

Emily smiled at that. “I hear Louisiana’s beautiful in the summer.”

“Yeah,” I whispered. “I think it probably is.”

I thought about what Jack had said about if Emily were a serial killer, none of us would know it. But looking at her now, I thought she might be the most fragile of any of us. I slipped my hand through hers, squeezing tightly as I said, “If I had to bury a body, you’d be the person I’d call.”

Her smile was bright and taunting as she laughed, “I know the perfect corn field.”

Chapter Twenty-One

The cafeteria buzzed with movement as I sat at the long, scuffed table with Lindsey across from me. Her elbows propped on the surface’s edge, eyeing me expectantly. I was pretty sure she’d asked me a question, though I was too busy thinking about the face August had made when he’d come Saturday night to have heard it.

“We’re going to Charlotte to look for Winter Formal dresses this weekend. You in?” she asked, voice slicing through the hum of teenage chatter.

I unzipped a plastic bag of grapes, their cool skins bursting between my teeth. “I don’t know if I’m going to Formal.”