Page 21 of Emma on Fire

“What the hell are you doing?” Rhaina asks.

Emma brings her attention back to Rhaina. “Why do you care?”

“You’re acting really weird!”

“What does that have to do with you?”

Rhaina is visibly sweating. She’s watching everyone else watching them, and she clearly isn’t enjoying it. Emma, on the other hand, feels lighter than she has in days.What’s a good fact for the letterD?

“Look,” Rhaina says quietly, taking Emma by the elbow and leading her away from the small crowd that has gathered. “You weren’t born weird, okay? So take it from someone who was: it’s not any fun. It’s actually kind of awful. Don’t do it. Try to blend in. Avoid being an outcast. Go back to being the popular girl you used to be.”

Emma blinks at her. “Go back to the girl I used to be? Wow. Thanks for your input, but that’s impossible. A lot of things would have to havenot happened.I’d basically need to time-travel.”

Rhaina says, low and urgent, “The people here—they can be vicious.”

“I know,” Emma says. “But they can say whatever they want about me. I don’t care.”

And it’s astonishing to realize that she actually doesn’t. When the flat well-wishes flooded into her text messages after her mother died, she felt cared for … until she actually responded honestly to the people who asked how she was doing.

She was supposed to say she was okay, she was supposed to act like she was okay, she was supposed tobeokay. Anything else just meant emotional work for someone else, personal responsibility, and time spent away from furthering their own lives. Lives that would play out on a stage where the lights were dimming, and the actors were pretending not to notice.

“I don’t care,” Emma says again, relishing in the freedom of it.

“Well, I do,” Rhaina says. “I care about you, even though I shouldn’t, after how you treated me when—”

Emma is startled. “When what?”

But Rhaina only shakes her head, a clear veil ofdisappointment shrouding her eyes. “You don’t even remember.”

“I don’t,” Emma admits. “But I am sorry. Actually, truly sorry.”

Maybe Emma even likes Rhaina a little now, for being the one person brave enough to come up to her. But still.

“Just stop,” Rhaina pleads.

“I can’t,” Emma says. “The things I’m talking about are way bigger than you or me. Way bigger than Ridgemont.” She lifts her chin and yells, “Dis for desertification, which is occurring thirty-five times faster than it used to!”

“You really don’t see it, do you?” Rhaina says, stepping back from Emma. “You think you’re going to make this big impact on the world, but all you’re doing is dragging everyone around you down.”

Emma stops, finally listening to someone else. “That’s not true,” she begins, but Mrs. Coleman, her French teacher, suddenly appears and says, “Ms. Blake, you’re coming with me.”

“Bonjour, madame,” Emma says quickly. “Je préférerais ne pas aller avec vous—”

“I don’t care if you’d rather not,” says Mrs. Coleman through clenched teeth. “Youare.”

“Au revoir!” Emma calls to Rhaina, who’s standing alone in the hallway now. “Fis for fucked! As in we’re all—”

CHAPTER 12

“EMMA BLAKE, I’M pleased to meet you,” says Ridgemont Academy therapist Lori Bly, her voice warm and low.

“Are you now,” Emma says dryly, gazing around the office, taking in everything from the black-and-white photos on the wall to the therapist’s chic black suit and elegant silver bob. Emma thinks she’d wear her hair like that someday—no dye, no highlights—if she had any plans to get old. Which she doesn’t.

“Can you talk to me about why you’re here?”

“It was kind of a ‘go-straight-to-the-shrink, do-not-pass-go’ sort of thing,” Emma says. She’s sitting on a hard wicker chair, though Lori told her to make herself comfortable on the overstuffed couch. Her stomach grumbles. She missed breakfast, and now she’s missing lunch. If she keeps going like this, she’s going to starve before she burns.

“You’re smiling,” Lori says, producing one of her own.

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