“What are you doing, Emerson?”
“I was sleeping. It’s late, Dad. I have school tomorrow.” I tried to make my voice sound small and penitent. He had food bits stuck in his mustache, and I wondered what he’d been eating. My fear was strong, but I was hungry enough in that moment to zero in on that detail.
His eyes narrowed as they adjusted to the darkness. “What in the hell did you do to your hair?”
“Nothing . . .” I reached up automatically to twirl my hair, but there wasn’t much left of it. I cursed myself for destroying the one thing I used as a coping mechanism.
“Nothing?” he screamed. “Doesn’t look like nothing!” He towered over me like a cartoonish, belligerent giant. I stood up weakly in his shadow and combed my fingers through my boyish cut. “I . . . I . . .”
“Shut up, you stupid, stupid girl. You’re just like your stupid mother.” He shook his head with such disappointment and disgust. “Get to bed.”
I didn’t know what version of my father I would get from one day to the next. At that age, it was hard for me to understand what he had gone through, losing the only job he knew how to do, and then his wife, all in rapid succession. Still, his alcoholism and rage couldn’t be justified by his bad luck.
Curling up in a pile of blankets on the floor, I closed my eyes and prayed that one of us would disappear. Him or me—it didn’t matter. When I heard him in the kitchen pouring another drink, I relaxed. He would drink until he passed out, I knew that. It was his routine, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be there when he woke up with the mother of all hangovers. I stayed awake for a while longer and listened to make sure he wasn’t coming back. Before I dozed off, I put a hardcover copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in the back of my pajama pants and fell asleep with my face buried in a pillow. Sometimes he would come in to spank me in the middle of the night, oftentimes for no reason. I wondered if all parents did that. I was ten, after all. I didn’t exactly go around asking people these things.
By morning, I was so tired that my bones felt dense and my brain hazy. I didn’t know how I would get through a whole school day. But the fear was too much to keep me home. School was my refuge, and books were my friends, so I got ready and headed toward the door. I tiptoed out of the house and went to sit on the short, brown fence in the front yard until Jax came out. I cried as I waited, sad that I didn’t have a mother and that I didn’t have any friends.
He came up behind me and flicked my hair. “We were joking. You shouldn’t have cut it all off.” I looked up at Jax and watched as understanding spread over his face. He knew I had been crying. That moment of sympathy was the exact moment that Jackson Fisher became my one and only friend.
“What’s wrong, Emerson?”
“I got in trouble for cutting my hair. My dad was really mean about it.”
“So you’re crying because of your dad, not what I said to you, right?”
I nodded. “I don’t want to cry anymore.” My voice was hoarse.
“I’m really sorry.” He said the words like he meant it: pained, remorseful . . . gentle. His eyes were sincere. There was unfeigned honesty in his expression, even at that age. It was a look I would never forget. “It’s not your fault your dad’s an asshole,” he said. He dug into his backpack and pulled out a Pop-Tart package. He took one pastry out for himself and then held out the other one toward me. “Hungry?” I grabbed at it like a feral animal and began chomping away. “Geez, slow down, Emerson. You’re going to make yourself sick.”
“I know, I know.”
“Come on, we better get going.”
Once we boarded the bus, Jax took the seat right behind me. When Mikey got on board, Jax said to him, “Sorry, this seat’s taken. Find somewhere else to sit.”
Ms. Williams, our fourth-grade teacher, could barely see past the first row of kids, let alone to me in the back of the classroom, so no one ever asked why I didn’t have a lunch to carry out when the bell rang. We didn’t ever have much food at home. My dad would give me a dollar here or there, and I would buy the cafeteria lunch, but most days I would just find stuff other kids threw out. That day, Jackson found me in the library as I was coming out at the end of our lunch period. He didn’t say anything, just handed me half of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I said, “Thank you,” went into the bathroom, and devoured it before the bell rang.
Later that afternoon, before we parted ways at the end of the road, Jax said, “Meet me behind the shed in an hour?”
The shed housed a bunch of old tools that no one used anymore, and it was just beyond a small patch of trees where our property line met the Fishers’. You couldn’t see the shed from either one of our houses.
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
“No, you’re scaring me.”
He shook his head. “Don’t be scared. I cleaned it out. I go back there all the time.”
My eyes widened. “I’m not scared of the shed . . .”
“You’re scared of me?” He put his hand to his chest. “I’m trying to help you.”
“Why?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“How are you helping me?”
“I was going to bring you a plate of food. My mom leaves us casserole on the nights she has to work. I just didn’t want Brian to know.”