Page 59 of Emma on Fire

She steps away from Thomas’s embrace. “I understand,” she says, nodding. She knows all about responsibilities, about what it’s like to have everyone looking at you to make things right.

She turns to Jade, whose face is pale and tear-streaked.

“I thought you were really going to do it,” Jade says. “God, Emma, I was so scared.”

“Me too,” Emma says quietly. Then she turns to the small crowd. “Thank you. Really … I just…” But her words are gone now, and she’s just left looking at their faces, and being thankful for each and every one of them.

“You don’t have to talk,” Celia says, reaching out for her hand. Her nose wrinkles. “But you do totally need a shower.”

CHAPTER 50

THE WORLD IS so green and bright. Its beauty hurts her eyes. Emma feels like she’s floating down the path. Every cell in her body feels like it’s charged with electricity, with new and ferocious life. They kept her overnight at the hospital. Her father was by her side the whole time, eerily silent without his phone, which he’d left in his car. Instead, he held her hand, only letting it go when he brought her back to campus this morning.

She’s only dimly aware of where she’s walking. She has no plan for what happens next. She feels like she’s woken up from a dream.

Yesterday was supposed to be the end. Instead it was a beginning. Of what she isn’t sure yet. A life without Claire. But a life that will mean something. A life where Rhainais okay, and she knows that the little ripples she causes by doing good things for one person will spread, eventually affecting the entire world.

She sees Ridgemont students walking to breakfast, laughing with each other like nothing has ever been wrong. For the first time in months, Emma doesn’t want to tell them that they’re doomed.

Because what if, somehow, they aren’t? What if, every time someone told her things were going to be okay, and she just sneered—what ifshewas the one who was wrong?

A robin hops along the path beside her for a moment, then flutters up into a tree. She stops and looks up, wanting to find her nest. She’s peering dazedly into the branches when Rachel Daley appears by her side, talking a mile a minute, questions shooting out of her mouth like bullets, her phone held out to capture an audio clip.

Emma flinches away. But she catches a strange look in the reporter’s eye. And Emma suddenly realizes that Rachel Daley is disappointed.

Emma speaks softly, her voice full of wonder. “You secretly wanted me to die, didn’t you?”

Rachel stops the recording app, shakes her head. “No, Emma, listen—”

“Not to you,” Emma says, spinning away. “You just want a headline. You don’t actually care about me. The real story is that I didn’t die, that I chose life and kindness, andcaring for others. I know it’s not the front page. I know it’s not above the fold. Butthat’sthe story. Printthat.”

And Emma walks away beneath the magnolia trees. Free.

Hopeful.

Alive.

CHAPTER 51

Dear Claire,

I told my therapist that we used to write letters. She said I should keep doing it, because supposedly it’ll help me process my feelings. She said I needed to write everything down.

My assignment today is to recall a happy memory. (In case you wondered, it’s the only kind of assignment I’m doing. My teachers said I could take incompletes this semester and finish up during the summer. Believe it or not, it was Hastings’s idea.) So anyway, here’s a memory from a long time ago.

It was my fifth birthday, and Mom and Dad had rented a big white tent for the backyard. It was likethey were hosting a wedding! There were bouquets of balloons, towers of cupcakes, and multicolored streamers hanging from the trees. There was a clown on a unicycle and a little pony we could ride, and every kid in the neighborhood was there, and they were all screaming their heads off in delight.

At first I felt like a princess. Everything was so big and bright and wonderful, and it was all for me. But it didn’t take very long before I started to feel really small and really lost. Everything was such an expensive spectacle. I was five—did my party really need waiters? Hand-calligraphed place cards? A Pocket Lady, handing out presents from her giant skirt? There were so many people at my party, and half of them I’d never even seen before. I’d lost our parents in the crowd.

And then you came out of nowhere and found me, hiding behind a rosebush, and you picked me up and you carried me to the far corner of the garden. “Here,” you said, “I made this for you, Emmie. Happy birthday.” And you set me down next to a tiny, beautiful house constructed out of sticks and leaves, glass beads and glitter glue. “This is a fairy house, and soon there will be fairies living in it,” you said to me. “You might not ever see them, but they’ll be watching over you, granting you little wishes, and keeping you safe.”

It was the best present I ever got.

It’s too late for these wishes, but I’m making them anyway:

I wish I could’ve made you a fairy house, Claire.

I wish I could’ve kept you safe.

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