defense had been to pretend (miserably) not to care. She mastered the dead-eyed stare and wore Doc Martens and black clothes. She learned sign language for the rude phrases her stutter wouldn’t let her say.
Her parents told her to laugh it off or ignore it. But her parents were child psychologists, so they had no idea how kids really acted. At least pretending to be tough protected her from having the mean kids know how much it hurt.
Next to her, Kevin heaved a sigh. Emmaline sneaked a look. His expression was amused and tolerant. He glanced at her, and his mouth pulled up in a smile. “Sucks to be us, huh?” he said.
Us. That had a nice sound to it.
“Chord,” Seven called.
“Birch,” Lyric said.
“Guess his parents hated kids,” Kevin murmured. “Birch? Seriously?”
A smile started in Emmaline’s chest. There was something about Kevin. He had...swagger. Here he was, fat in the land where sixteen-year-old girls got breast implants for their birthdays, where boys had personal trainers and professionally done highlights before they started high school. Fat? Fat? It was a rejection of the very fabric of society. Almost James Dean in terms of rebellion.
Kind of thrilling, really.
“Journey.” This was said with a sigh, as Journey was the product of a first marriage whose parents were still together, and therefore not nearly as cool as the other kids. Not on Emmaline’s and Kevin’s level, but still pretty far down. Also, he was named after a band and not a place, so...
Now there were only two of them left.
Emmaline sneaked another look at Kevin.
He looked back. Rolled his eyes. Not at her...at this, the horrible ritual of crushing the human spirit. She smiled.
“Kevin, I guess,” Lyric said. “Whatever.”
“Great,” Seven said. “I’m stuck with Eh-eh-eh-Emmaline.”
Em glanced toward Ms. Goldberg, who was jotting notes on her clipboard, pretending not to have heard. She wouldn’t chastise Seven, Em knew. And Em wouldn’t be able to tell her about it.
“Asshole,” Kevin muttered, then sighed and walked over to join his teammates, Gulliver among the Lilliputians.
That day at recess, Kevin waited for her by the door. “Want a Twinkie?” he asked.
She took the strange, tubular cake in wonder. Her parents were on a macrobiotic kick these days, tragically. “Th-thanks,” she said.
“So you stutter?” he asked.
“S-s-somet-t-t-times.” Most times.
“I’m fat,” Kevin said.
He had beautiful dark eyes—amazing eyelashes—and curly black hair. If you looked closely, he wasn’t really that fat. Husky, that was the word. And, yes, soft. But he was tall, about the same height as she was, and the truth was, he was kind of...handsome.
“Want to be friends?” he asked, so of course she fell for him.
Around Kevin, her stutter wasn’t quite so pronounced, and when it did come up, he waited. Not like her parents, who stared at her, waiting, waiting, waiting. Maybe if they hadn’t been riddled with PhDs and gurgling with words like transference and empowerment and self-actualization, Em would’ve felt a little less freakish.
Mom and Dad knew exactly what the recommended method was for dealing with a stutterer (or a nonfluent speaker, as they liked to call her). “We have all the time in the world,” Mom would say. That was another thing. There was always a we. There was never I. “Don’t feel pressured. We’ll wait as long as it takes.”
Which made the stutter even worse. Their take on her speech impediment was relentless reframing (Em knew all the terms). “We love your stutter, because we love you!” Dad said once, which was just ridiculous.
She hated the stutter. She pictured it as a skeleton dressed in a black suit, rising up, wrapping its sharp, hard fingers around her vocal cords and squeezing, smiling as it did.
Kevin got it. He liked himself; he didn’t like being fat. He liked her; he didn’t like her stutter.
They kissed for the first time in April of eighth grade, when they’d been friends for months. His lips were soft, and he didn’t do anything more than just kiss her...no tongue, no groping. It was lovely. He smiled afterward. “Want to go to the movies this weekend?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said. “What do you want to see?”
Not one stutter.
Unfortunately, the idea that the two freaks of eighth grade were dating was deeply offensive to their beautiful, oddly named classmates. The bullying got worse. Emmaline found a used condom in her locker, such a disgusting sight that her throat locked for the entire day. One day when she went into music class, all the other girls burst out laughing for no apparent reason. Someone put a pregnancy test in her backpack, which caused her mother to deliver a lecture on sex and readiness, ignoring Emmaline’s protest that she and Kevin had kissed and that was it.
But it was when Lyric threw a lit match at her in science class that shit got serious, as the saying went. The match went out before it landed in her hair, thankfully, and Emmaline shoved Lyric, who then screamed as if she were being chased by cannibals. Em was suspended for a week. Worse, she had to apologize to her bully, and, no, a note wouldn’t do.
But she had Kevin.
Then came the news. Kevin got into his dad’s alma mater boarding school. In Connecticut. Kevin was wise beyond his years, it seemed; he knew they were only fourteen. Of course he’d be going.
Her only true friend. The boy she loved.
She sat down at her computer at home and wrote her parents a letter. She wanted to go live with Nana and go to high school there, because she just couldn’t keep fighting the good fight.
Nana, her mother’s mother, lived in Manningsport, New York, a lovely little town on a big lake where Em spent each summer. Nana was the epitome of a grandmother—she cooked, she clucked, she cuddled. Those summer weeks were fantastic, filled with plenty of gluten and red meat and sugary desserts. Bike rides and morning swims in the chilly lake, hikes and waterfalls and visits to the candy store. Nana even invited a couple of other girls over to play, and, unlike the Malibu crowd, these girls seemed nice. When one heard her stutter the first time, she put her hand on Em’s arm and said, “Don’t worry. I have epilepsy, so I’m different, too.”
Em stuttered less there. Still stuttered a lot, but not as much.
Her parents were all too supportive of the idea of her moving.
“Very empowering,” Mom said, pretending she had something in her eye.
Dad cleared his throat. “This is a healthy decision. We support you.”
All three of them knew they couldn’t fix her or her problems.
In a sense, she was running away, but the idea of leaving her mean-spirited peers filled her with such relief and excitement that she didn’t care.
The kids in Manningsport viewed a native Californian as exotic and fascinating, not minding that she didn’t talk a lot and, when she did, viewing her stutter as a little bit glamorous.
Em’s relationship with her parents improved, too; she had more to say, not having to look into their faces; the phone and email made communicating a lot easier. And telling them that she, who had never joined any school club before, was now on the hockey team and in chorus, because singing didn’t awaken the stutter like talking did... Well, she could hear their relief.
Nana’s house was a cozy bungalow with clever little cupboards and wide windowsills, and a stained glass window on the way up the stairs. In the nice weather, Nana sat on the sweet little front porch, chatting with passersby (which just didn’t