hair will not be fine, Jack. And this is my ex-fiancé’s wedding. It will be as fun as a hanging.”
“The food will be better, though.”
“Hardly. They’re vegans.”
“Now you tell me. When I’m trapped on a plane.”
Emmaline was pretty enough when she smiled, Jack thought. Granted, she looked a little on the homeless side at the moment—scraggly hair and no makeup, gray sweats that screamed don’t look at me—I’m sexless.
He wondered if she was. She always seemed pretty sparky to him. Granted, his contact with her had been limited to “Hi, Em/Bye, Em” at the police station or O’Rourke’s and the occasional body check during a hockey game (much more fun than checking Gerard Chartier), but she seemed to have a little something going on.
“We don’t know each other that well, do we?” he asked.
“I guess not.” She started fiddling with the tray back again, so he took her hand.
“Relax,” he said. “It’s not like we’re flying off to face the firing squad.”
“That would be a cakewalk compared to this.”
The plane began taxiing down the runway. Emmaline took her hand away so she could clench the armrests. “So do you like having sisters?” she asked.
“No. You want some?”
“I already have one. Angela. You’ll like her. She’s very beautiful.” Her knuckles were white.
“Tell me about the bride and groom,” he said.
She took a deep breath. “Right. Kevin Bates and Naomi Norman.”
“The Norman-Bates wedding?”
Another smile tugged at her lips. She had a pretty mouth, pink and full and sweet.
Ah. She was talking, her words rapid-fire. “Yeah. So, he was my boyfriend from eighth grade on. We went to the same college and lived together and seemed pretty happy, more or less. I was, anyway. Then he fell for someone else and...that was that.” She shrugged and looked out the window.
Jack had grown up around females. He’d been the date for a lot of women in the past few years. Actually, he’d always been good for that sort of thing. He’d asked Eve Mikkes to the prom many years ago because Eve was nice and funny and had been in a fire when she was younger, which had left some pretty severe scars on her face and hands. He’d gone to five high school reunions in the past few years, three weddings and a fiftieth wedding anniversary. He had the aforementioned sisters.
So he recognized a woman who’d had her heart broken.
“The love of your life, huh?” he asked.
She glanced at him, then returned her gaze to the clouds. “Yep.”
He took her hand once more and squeezed it. “Stick with me, kid. I promise you we’ll have fun.”
* * *
EMMALINE MET THE ONE in eighth grade during dodgeball, a game that further proved that gym teachers hated children. A few years before, someone’s parents had sued the school to eliminate dodgeball, but then someone else’s countersued to have it reinstated, and while there was currently a lawsuit to have it banned once more, the dreaded sport was still allowed, apparently, because Ms. Goldberg was smiling her snakelike evil grin and fondling her whistle.
Bad enough that Emmaline was already a target of her classmates. She didn’t need to be pelted with red rubber balls. But worse than that, as everyone knew, was the choosing of the teams.
She tried to look nonchalant and unconcerned, even as her palms sweated and her heart thudded, as the horrible ritual began. Lyric Adams (daughter of a middle-aged rock star and his fourth wife) and Seven Finlay (son of an award-winning British actress and her third husband) were the popular kids, and anointed by Ms. Goldberg to do the honors of bolstering or destroying the egos of their classmates, one by one.
“Ireland,” Lyric called, and Ireland, who was the daughter of big-deal producers, bowed her head graciously as if accepting her own statue and cantered over to her best friend’s side.
“Milan,” Seven countered.
Most of Emmaline’s classmates were named for a place—in addition to Milan, there were two Parises, three Londons, a York, a Dallas and a Boston. It sounded more as if Lyric and Seven were in a geography bee than gym class, but hey. Emmaline wasn’t kidding herself. She would’ve loved a cool name. Would’ve loved to have been one of the popular kids, even though she recognized their cruelty. She would’ve settled for less, even...would’ve loved to have been able to turn to the new boy and make a joke about all the map names and how the two of them were outcasts because of it.
That wasn’t possible, however.
“Jupiter!” Lyric called with a hair toss.
“Diesel,” Seven countered.
Her fellow pariah had moved from a town that most of Em’s classmates had never heard of...Tacoma or something. His parents didn’t work in the entertainment industry, and he was therefore already marked as an undesirable. Also, he had a human name, which didn’t help.
Kevin. Kevin Bates.
Kevin was also—insert dramatic pause—fat.
In Malibu, it was far more socially acceptable to be a heroin addict or murderer than to be overweight. When he walked into Algebra, Emmaline’s classmates stared at him as if he had a nipple growing out of his chin. To be fair, many of them had never seen a fat person in real life. Not in Malibu. Not on the pristine beaches or exclusive mountains where their families cavorted. Being fat? Who would’ve dared?
Why hadn’t his parents sent him in for gastric bypass? A tummy tuck or lipo? At the very least, why not a fat camp? Surely if there had been a surgery to fix Em’s problem, her parents would have jumped on it. Why not fix something that made life so hard? In Malibu, it seemed that imperfect children were tossed into the ocean, or sent to live in a more normal state.
On his first day, the teacher asked Kevin to tell the class about himself and the other kids had peppered him with questions... Granted, he was fat, but that would be tolerated if he was, say, Steven Spielberg’s son.
Kevin’s mother was an accountant; his father was a computer programmer.
The death knell. It wouldn’t have mattered if Kevin’s mom won the Nobel in economics or his father invented time travel; it didn’t matter that his parents happened to make a very comfortable living. Kevin didn’t have dinner with movie stars, he didn’t come to school in a limo and he was fat. He was no one, buh-bye.
Em knew the feeling. She wasn’t fat. She wasn’t tiny, either, by SoCal standards; she was solid, lacking mouselike bone structure or an eating disorder. But her problem wasn’t her size.
It was her stutter.
Words had always fought her. Years and years of speech therapy hadn’t done much. The only way she got past it was if she was relaxed or spontaneous or had a patient audience, and even then it was a struggle.
And patience wasn’t a quality associated with children. Not being able to get out an answer, not being sure if her throat would lock and the horrible sounds would start and stop, start and stop as her classmates watched in gleeful horror... It made her an easy target.
It didn’t matter that Emmaline got her black belt in aikido at the age of eleven. That she was great at sports. That she was tall and smart and, except for class participation, got really good grades. Her classmates were led by the mean popular kids, vampires who only seemed happy if they were feeding off someone else’s misery.
When they were smaller, Em got into a lot of fights, back in the good old days when “acting out” was more acceptable. In fifth grade, however, Asia Redding’s parents had threatened to sue