In The Beginning

In the picture, there are three cousins standing naked by the window in the bathroom of a beach house in Kennebunkport. Their backs are to the camera. Dave is the dark-haired boy on the right, eight years old. Jordan, on the left, looks like a girl with his long blond hair and thin body. He is six years old. The little girl in the middle is Emma. She is two. The boys have their arms around her shoulders and her back. One, two, three cousins in a row. Dave and Jordan are brothers, and Emma is an only child. It will stay this way for the rest of their lives, although they don’t know this yet. The boys hold Emma, and she tries to stretch out as tall as she can so she can see what they can see out the window.

2002

This is the year that Emma’s father dies. Emma is six years old when it happens. The brain cancer was a shock to the family. The death, after a long and painful year and a half, was not. Even when Emma’s father was in a wheelchair, the family still made it up to Kennebunkport in the summer. Everyone’s smiles were strained that summer except Emma’s. Her father would let her wear his eyepatch and they both would pretend to be pirates.

When Emma’s father died in his hospital bed in the dining room, Emma’s mother told her to go upstairs to her room so she wouldn’t have to see his body being taken out of the house. Emma watched from the staircase instead. She felt the carpeting under her feet, and her muscles ached from trying not to move and staying quiet. She thought he looked like a royal sleeping emperor when the big men carried him out of the house.

Jordan and Dave loved their Uncle Dan fiercely. When he died, the fact of Emma’s life occurred to them in a new way. There was a spot of coldness and ugliness in the world that could now reach her and sink its hungry jaws into the nape of her little white neck. This was the year that Dave and Jordan looked at Emma and for the first time saw something breakable.

They fought constantly, sometimes passively, sometimes aggressively, over whose arms would be Emma’s protective wall. Emma accepted all four arms on most occasions, even when she didn’t quite know why they were there.

2003
The family returned to Kennebunkport in the summer of this year one member short. It was the summer Jordan and Dave tried to teach Emma how to fish. She got easily frustrated and gave up, wrapping herself in a Mickey Mouse towel and resigning herself to sitting on the edge of the dock and kicking her feet in the water while Dave and Jordan kept trying to reel something in. The boys snuck up behind Emma and pushed her in the lake, towel and all.  When Emma resurfaced, angry, the first thing she heard was the sound of laughter. She looked at the rest of her family, sitting under umbrellas on the shore, and connected the sound of the laughter with their mouths. She started to cry.

Emma had experience with the idea that if you were hurt, people had to stop laughing at you and pay attention to how you were feeling. Her sobs escalated. Her mother comforted her but she still had laughter in her voice when she did it. Emma kept crying in the hopes that the laughter would stop. Eventually it did, but instead of turning to pity for her, it turned to annoyance. Don’t whine, Emma, it was just a joke, Emma, don’t be so sensitive, Emma!

Emma pretended that she was sucking up all her tears through a straw and that they made their way down into her stomach, where they started to boil and bubble and hiss with shame and embarrassment.

2004
Emma is eight years old. She starts day camp in the summer of this year. The rest of the family stays home and does not go to Kennebunkport.

Jordan is twelve, and the hip-length blond hair he has been growing all his life finally gets cut short. People stop mistaking him for a girl. Dave is fourteen, and starts to wear Hollister shirts and shark-tooth necklaces and worn-out baseball caps. He starts to curse. When he does it in front of Emma, her mother scolds him. He and Emma exchange secret smiles when this happens. Emma tries out a few of the words alone, in her bedroom. She wants to get them perfectly right so that when she whispers them to Dave one day, he’ll laugh.

Emma frequently catches her mother talking on the phone to other relatives about silly things that Emma has done. Emma cries and tells her to stop. Her mother says in a voice that Emma believes that of course honey, she’ll stop. Emma catches her doing it again the next week. This time, when Emma cries, her mother says that sometimes she just can’t help it. She doesn’t do it to hurt Emma’s feelings, she just loves her so much that she wants to tell everyone who will listen how funny Emma is.

Emma wants to be funny, but not like that. Her stomach starts to boil again. Her insides are becoming raw and red with anger.

2005

Dave starts working as a counselor-in-training at the day camp where Emma goes. She is nine and he is fifteen. Emma likes the friends she has made at camp, and she likes it even more when she can laugh with them about Dave. She loves to laugh at him when he is around because she is proud of him. When he waves to her and she smiles back she feels like her cheeks are glowing.

This doesn’t last long.

The two have a fight one the bus one afternoon on the way home. Dave said something personal about Emma in front of his friends. Emma was embarrassed and angry, and she screamed at him so loudly everyone drew back in their seats. The bus driver told her to calm down, and she slid down further in the green upholstered seat, burning scarlet and dripping tears. Dave did not apologize. Neither did Emma.

2006
This is the summer that Emma quits day camp and starts overnight camp. She tells her mother it’s because she doesn’t like going to camp with boys. So she ends up at an all-girls camp. Emma has never in her life lived with so many girls in one space. She wishes that they would play super gladiators with her. Super gladiators was the special game she invented and played with Jordan before he started talking about high school and didn’t want to play it anymore. Emma is desperate to share the games they used to play with someone. But the girls won’t let her use any of their pillows or magazines to make marble obstacle courses. They do, however, teach her how to braid hair and how to make string bracelets. She tells all the girls in her bunk that she likes doing those things better than playing super gladiators anyways, but when the girls pull her hair or when she messes up a stitch in her bracelet, she knows that what she says isn’t true.

The family starts going out to Dim Sum when everyone is in town. Emma makes herself suppress her laughter at Dave’s jokes because the two are still not speaking. Emma has become quite good at suppressing her laughter when she think it isn’t appropriate. She never thinks her laughter isn’t appropriate at these family lunches. Only short and sweet laughter is acceptable, because Emma is in middle school now and she wants to be mature.

Emma clings to Jordan, not in words but in gestures. She is always looking back at him after she finishes a story, always hanging on his every word. She tries the foods he tries.

Dave burns, watching them. He kicks Jordan’s leg under the table. He wants to kick Emma’s too, but doesn’t. Emma is smart like Jordan is smart. They both read lots of books and write stories and get good grades in school. Dave does not. He starts to think that maybe it was fate that he and Emma had that fight. He hates himself for thinking that and takes his anger out by getting into a heated debate with his grandfather at the table.

Jordan has won, and now Emma only needs - only wants - two arms to protect her.

2009
It is the summer before Emma starts the eighth grade. Seventh grade was a bad year for her. The summer is meant to cleanse her of bullies, braces, and one particularly unfortunate haircut. Jordan is about to start the twelfth grade and wants to apply to Ivy League schools. Emma knows that he got a perfect score on his English SAT. Emma heard from her mother during the school year that Dave was “invited not to come back” to his college because he partied too much and failed so many classes. Emma is proud that she got all A’s in the past school year. She doesn’t talk to Dave about college, but her pride becomes an exoskeleton that she can wear into battle if she needs to.

The family continually praises Jordan when he talks about applying to Brown. They hope that Emma will have such high hopes one day. They know she will. They do not talk about Dave.

All the cousins are teenagers now, and all are blatantly aware that there is a major barrier between the life of a teenage girl and the life of a teenage boy. Emma and Dave continue not to speak to each other. Emma and Jordan begin to talk less and less and less. The less they talk, the harder Emma tries to get them to notice that she is changing. Every time she sees them she wants them to know that she is different than she was before. She tries incredibly hard.

Nevertheless, she always walks out of family gatherings feeling defeated. She starts to second-guess everything she says, wondering if even now, people are still making phone calls to their friends so they can laugh at Emma’s mistakes.