Page 33 of Emma on Fire

“But she’s my guest. I—I invited her,” Emma says quickly. Anything to keep a reporter in the room long enough to slow Hastings down and buy Emma some time to figure out what she’s going to do.

Rachel doesn’t miss a beat. “Yes, Emma reached out to me directly,” she says.

“Is this true?” Hastings asks.

“Yes,” Emma says. Her lie has more to do with having a tiny bit of control over this dorm room chaos than it does with keeping Rachel Daley around, but whatever. “I’m not some damaged person who’s got to be protected from herself.” She thrusts out her wrists. “Look! Not so much as a scratch!”

“What about the third-degree burn?” Hastings asks.

“This isn’t some suicidal fantasy I’m having!” Emma cries, ignoring the question. “Don’t you see this isn’t about me?”

“What is it about, then?” Hastings asks quietly.

“It’s about the entire world,” Emma says. Suddenly she can feel tears stinging in the corners of her eyes. “And how completely, totallyfuckedit is.”

“Language, Emma!” Mrs. Vickers gasps.

“Sorry,” Emma says. “I mean,le monde est foutu.”

The baffled look on Mrs. Vickers’s face is proof that while she may be of French extraction, she does not actually speak French. But it doesn’t matter.

And maybe it doesn’t even matter that two rent-a-cops are snooping through her stuff, or that Hastings is about to call her dad, or that she’s never going to find her graphing calculator.

In just a few days, she’ll be gone forever.

CHAPTER 21

HASTINGS SINKS INTO his office chair and drums his fingers on the desk as Fiona calls Byron Blake for the third time in three days. Hastings is sweaty and anxious and furious at everyone.

At the beginning of Emma’s downward spiral, he hoped that this was an expected footnote to her grief, a bump in the road for a girl who had always been flying along in a Mercedes-Benz, and that she would likely recover quickly. As things escalated, some part of him—he realizes now—wondered if Emma was acting out, creating a scene as an emotional outlet. But the hollow look in her eyes as she watched campus security toss her room has led Hastings to consider the unthinkable: Emma is serious. And now he has to convince her father of that.

Fiona signals thumbs-up, and Hastings picks up his phone.

“Hold for Mr. Blake,” says that same smooth British voice, and a split second later the man himself is seething into the headmaster’s ear.

“What is itnow?”

Mr. Hastings clears his throat. “Sir, I wouldn’t keep calling if I weren’t deeply concerned about your daughter.”Believe me,he adds silently,I hate talking to you.“There have been … developments since yesterday—”

Blake cuts him off. “You didn’t let her hurt herself again, did you?”

“Let?” Mr. Hastings repeats, incredulous.

He takes a deep breath, reminds himself of the money Blake donates every year, and tries to keep his tone even. “No one allowed your daughter to harm herself yesterday,” he says. “I’m not even sure anyone could have stopped her in regard to the Bunsen burner.”Except herself,he adds silently.Which is why I’m calling. Please, hear me.

“Today I’m calling because she has made another disturbing and specific threat about self-immolation. And she did it in a video that she posted to YouTube. We think that—”

“YouTube?” For the first time, something cracks in Blake’s voice, even if it is only concern for the reputation of his family name. “Make her take it down immediately!”

“Ihave,” Mr. Hastings says. He doesn’t mention that others have reposted the video—that once something’s online, it’s almost impossible to take it off again—or that Emma herself could put it back up any minute. He learned long ago that policing the Internet is a never-ending task.

“But I believe we need to take her threats seriously.” He takes a deep breath. Works up the nerve to say what he needs to say next. “Mr. Blake, one of the greatest risks for suicide isexposureto suicide. When Emma’s sister killed herself, she put Emma at a much greater risk of doing the same thing.” His heart pounds as he waits for Blake’s reply.

“Emma,” the man says after several moments, “is not her sister.” His voice is thick, like it’s hard for him to say the words. “Claire was in therapy ever since she was twelve. She was hospitalized twice when she was at Ridgemont. But she was still the valedictorian, did you know that? No, you wouldn’t; it was before your time. Her second semester at Harvard, she ended up at McLean in a locked ward. But she got herself out, and she graduated at the top of her class. She was incredible. Brilliant and driven and successful.”

“I’ve heard,” Hastings says quietly. “I’m so sorry.”

It’s not clear that Blake hears him. “But Claire was not stable, and she was not happy.”

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