Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (19 page)

I was pretty sure he was right. Over the years I’d overheard
conversations here and there between my dad and mom or between my dad and other engineers about the emergency procedures. And so now I saw my dad, standing there in the control room in his white PCs—maybe even my mom too. (PC was the term they used for “protective clothing.” It has nothing to do with “political correctness.” Don’t forget, this was a nuclear power plant we’re talking about. The last thing a nuclear power plant worries about is political correctness.) I saw him standing there in those little booties they were all required to wear. (In fact, my dad wore booties over his booties. There were very special ways you got in and out of your clothes, even your gloves. There were “change-out” pads and a whole “change-out” protocol.) And suddenly I knew I was going to be sick. I got up off the couch, stepping on PJ’s leg on the way—he yelled at me and I ignored him—and ran into the bathroom and started vomiting into the toilet. Andrea was right behind me, holding my hair away from my face and rubbing my back. I was puking and crying and I couldn’t stop for, it seemed, forever.

When I was done, I was surprised that no one was in the doorway watching. Asking me if maybe I had swallowed some pills I shouldn’t have. Andrea explained that they had come to see what the hell was going on, but she had made them go away and leave me alone. Then she ran some hot water and helped me to wash my face. We were sitting together on the side of the bathtub.

“You didn’t take something wacky, right?” she asked.

“No. It was just … just those people in the plant.”

“That’s why you were crying?”

“Uh-huh.”

See what I mean about what a great sister Andrea was? Looking back, I wish I had confessed right that moment that I was imagining my parents in the dark in that control room. Maybe if Andrea had known who I was, she would have stayed. Sure, in those days most of Vermont hated anyone who had anything to do with Cape Abenaki, but I don’t think Andrea would have cared. I really don’t. She was that kind of friend.

When I reread what I’ve written so far, I seem to be crying a lot. I guess I do cry pretty easily. I’m sorry.

But, in all fairness, I was in kind of a bad place. I think it would have been way weirder if I wasn’t crying all the time—or, at least, as often as I was.

For a while I wandered aimlessly around the tents and blankets on the grass in Burlington’s City Hall Park that first afternoon. If you didn’t know the world was ending, you might have thought it was a Phish concert, except the crowd had a lot more old people and a lot less dope. The air smelled mostly of fear. Eventually I dropped my bike on the grass beside this little amphitheater garden, and then I collapsed on the ground right beside it. It was early in the afternoon and I had picked a spot between a family of five on these Disney beach towels and two senior citizen grandparents with a little hibachi. Everyone wanted to feed me, and I let them. It was a bit like a picnic, except for the teeny-tiny detail that everyone was still scared to death that the plume was going to come this way, and everyone was cursing the company that ran Cape Abenaki and everyone associated with the nuclear power plant. It was kind of a hate mob mentality.

But we all still had to eat, and I was famished. I ate a couple of these Smucker’s Uncrustable prepackaged peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which a few weeks later would become one of my favorite munchies when I was stoned off my ass, and I ate grilled lamb and onions on wooden skewers. The Uncrustables were courtesy of the younger family, and the lamb was from the older couple.

After we ate, the Disney dad offered to bring me over to the Red Cross tent and see about getting me some help, but I wasn’t
sure I liked the sound of that plan. The Red Cross would try and get me—Abby Bliss—reconnected with my parents, and no good was going to come from that. Pretty quickly they’d figure out that I had made up this name and then they’d figure out who I was. And I wasn’t convinced people would be real excited to meet Bill and Mira Shepard’s daughter. Meanwhile, that grandmother—who was actually spreading face cream on her cheeks and offering me sunscreen, like our biggest problems that day were wrinkles and sunburn—was suggesting that I visit the shelter for homeless teens not far from the north end of Church Street. She had read an article about it in the newspaper the day before yesterday. I thought about my options and decided that the shelter strategy seemed a lot more promising, especially because there I could pretend I was just a run-of-the-mill runaway—not a walker who needed to find her mom and dad. I’d have to convince them I was eighteen, but I figured I could make that work for a while. All I was trying to do was buy a little time to figure out what I was going to do in the long run.

And so about six-thirty I showed up at the front door of the shelter.

The weirdest thing that happened my first night there? Someone stole my bike.

Here is that list of Interesting People Named Emily I promised. Again, my rule is interesting, not famous—though most of these women are somewhere between sort of and seriously famous.

Emily Dickinson:
Poet and recluse. She might, in fact, be the world’s most well-known recluse, and it’s not easy to be famous and private. That’s an impressive accomplishment and makes her
very
interesting.

Emily Watson:
Actress. I’ve seen two of her movies, and she’s very good. Plays crazy people and moms. I approve.

Emily Stetson:
Claimed to have put stakes through the hearts
of twin vampires in a village in Wales in 1905. Was never charged with a crime because there were no missing persons and they never found any bodies. But here’s what makes her so interesting: she was thanked by the vicar for digging up two graves in the church cemetery and giving a pair of souls their much-deserved rest. The village loved her.
Loved
her.

Emily Post:
Stupendously OCD about manners.

Emily Brontë:
Gave us
Wuthering Heights
. ’Nuff said.

Emily Paulsen:
First girl to play running back for a high school football team in Vermont. Broke her ribs in ninth grade, her left leg in tenth, and had a concussion in twelfth. But her junior year? She led the state in rushing yards.

Emily Blunt:
Another actress—and, like Emily Watson, British. Also like Watson, she’s great at playing women about to go mental.

There are also a couple of nineteenth-century women’s rights activists named Emily, but I couldn’t finish reading the web pages I found about them. Way too boring. They are not (just my opinion) very interesting. Sorry. Maybe they weren’t crazy enough for me. Maybe my definition of interesting is “crazy.”

I slept like a dead person my first night in the shelter. I don’t recall a single dream.

My room was slender and not all that long and there was absolutely nothing on the walls. It had a bed and a dresser and a window. It faced out on an alley and a brick building, but I really didn’t care about the view. It was on the third floor, and so it was a little steamy in June, but I knew I was lucky to have it, as bare and Spartan as it was. It was, after all, the last room the shelter had left, and I only got it because they had just moved the girl who was in there before me—one of their success stories—into a little apartment of her own. And while a few other kids told me later that they’d been pretty frightened their first night in the shelter, I think I was too exhausted to be scared. Besides, I had no idea of the drama I was in
for: the endless, energy-sucking, always-on-the-edge-of-hysteria drama queenitis that was Situation Normal for most of the girls there. And I thought that once upon a time I had been high maintenance? Yeah, right. I didn’t know the meaning of the expression “high-maintenance.”

Anyway, in the morning I woke up feeling so good that I began to believe my parents might not really be dead and were out there somewhere looking for me. They were worried and desperate—which made me excited and hopeful. And so even before I had showered, I asked the girl in the room across the hall if I could use her phone. (This would, of course, prove to be a gigantic mistake.) Her name was Camille and she was a runaway from Barre, Vermont. Her mom and dad both worked in a company that specialized in caskets for infants. No wonder she was so fucked up: her parents made coffins for babies. But she handed me her phone, and immediately I called my mom and dad and left them both messages. I told them where I was and to please come get me. Then I figured I’d hang out at the shelter until they called.

But, of course, I wasn’t allowed to hang out at the shelter. They had told me the night before that I was supposed to be out of there by eight in the morning, but I didn’t think they’d really care. They did. So I borrowed Camille’s cell a second time and left the number for the shelter’s drop-in on my parents’ phones and said they could find me there. I said to ask for Abby Bliss, and I’d explain why when we were together.

I became a part of Edie’s caseload right after breakfast, and I spent the rest of the morning making up stories for her—and the other therapists and counselors she introduced me to—about this Abby Bliss person. I talked about a high school I never went to and a neighborhood I could only barely envision. A lot of what I was describing I probably didn’t really remember: I was building a world from photos I’d seen on my parents’ computers or in the photo albums that lined a couple of shelves in a bookcase in our den. (For a while, my mom actually printed out photos and put them in albums. That stopped when I was about nine or ten, I
guess. Then the photos just piled up in drawers. Who had time? Besides, by then we were keeping our photos on our phones and Facebook and Tumblr.)

Once Edie had decided that I wasn’t homicidal, suicidal, or schizophrenic—I guess that’s the big three you want to avoid if you run a teen shelter—she wanted to call my mom or dad. But I kept stalling. I told her I didn’t want them to know where I was and, besides, they were on a cruise somewhere in the Caribbean. I begged her to please wait until they were back. I implied there were
serious reasons
why I’d had to leave home. She probably didn’t buy any of it, except for the idea that I was eighteen. And since I seemed so freaking well behaved, she was going to let it slide for a few days and see what developed.