The Schooling of Emery Dixon (Ending #1)

Rehab, or run away? I let readers vote on the ending to my story about Southern girls, good intentions, and bad choices; this is the ending that more than half of you chose. (And here’s the one you didn’t.)

Read the first part of the story here, and for lots more about this joint project with Medium and Ploughshares, click here.

The Art House has a pantry-moth infestation, but this is not its biggest problem. The biggest problem is a hole in the roof that Sara is treating like a work of art, hanging origami cranes from fishing line tied to the rafters beneath it. She takes time-lapse photos of them and becomes particularly excited when a storm blows in, when the birds flutter and end up drenched and ruined.

Emery lives in a closet behind the kitchen, where there also are pantry moths, brown and shimmery, landing on her when the lights go out. She sleeps in a sleeping bag on an otherwise bare mattress and sweats through the night, thinking of the other places she wishes she were, like her parents’ house, maybe even Boney’s bed, her head on his chest, legs on his damp sheets.

Hunger rips through her body. She palpates herself, pausing on her stomach, more concave than it’s ever been. She grips her hip bones and thinks of how she’d like a milkshake, how she could drink one now without worrying, and she imagines ordering one from the cross-eyed woman at the pharmacy near Cooley. She thinks of how the woman would look at her, might recognize the suffering behind her eyes, might notice how one year has worn her down. It’s as if, night by night, someone had come and whittled her away, striking away at her bones, her baby fat, the rules she lived by.

She gets up when the morning sun fills the room. She slips on her jeans and walks into the kitchen, nodding to Sara, who is drinking coffee and reading Camera Obscura at the kitchen table.

“Are you waiting for coffee?” Sara asks. “You can have some.” Her face is not quite kind, and Emery knows immediately that this is a temporary situation. She is a burden, a problem. She is always a burden or a problem. And that’s not everyone else’s fault, she knows.

“Thanks,” she says, pouring only half a cup.

“Your parents are looking for you.”

“I know.” Emery sighs and leans against the counter, takes a sip of her coffee. Something stops her from sitting at the table with Sara. She’ll show her that she understands, that she doesn’t want to be trouble.

“You know?” Sara braids her hair over one shoulder and then picks at the braid with her fingers, giving it an intentionally messy look.

“I mean, I figured. It’s probably more about saving face than it is helping me.”

“Do you need help?”

The kitchen is quiet. A breeze comes through the open window and rustles Sara’s papers on the glass-top kitchen table, which are pinned down by a heavy psychology textbook.

“I need money,” Emery says, staring down at her bare feet, thinking for a moment of how her mother has pedicures every five weeks. Emery will cut her own toenails, and her feet will age. She will not have expensive, embarrassing dresses but no dresses at all.

And then there is the problem of food, and the greater problem of cocaine, both of which her body wants, maybe even needs.

Two days later, her long hair curling over her shoulders and bony clavicles, Emery stands with one foot on an overturned crate, nothing but a pale blue shawl draped over her. Six grad students, all male, put money in a coffee can in front of the crate. Their eyes crawl over her skin, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that she hasn’t eaten and she doesn’t have the strength to hold herself upright. She is shaking. Her teeth chatter and her nose runs. She thinks about finding a bathroom and washing up, taking a nap there. She thinks of the cold tile—

“Hold still.”

“When you move, you change the shadows.”

One of the students approaches her after the session is over. He has a greasy blond ponytail and has a charcoal pencil behind one ear.

“You need money right now?” His voice is deep, secretive.

“Probably. But I’m not going to sleep with anybody.” How funny, she thinks, that I might still have rules for myself.

“Of course not,” he says, holding up a hand. “My friends and I are doing a video project and we need models.”

“How much?”

“One hundred?”

She follows him to a brick ranch. There are broken lawn chairs in the yard and a baby pool filled with beer bottles. He offers her a glass of water in the kitchen, and she takes it.

“This is a commentary about the South,” he says, as he prepares his camera.

“What kind?”

“Does it matter?” He doesn’t look up.

He shows her to a place on the kitchen floor between the cabinets and the humming refrigerator. The unswept linoleum is red and pockmarked with cigarette burns. An old dog pants in the corner.

“I want you to get down on your knees.”

Emery kneels and looks up at him.

He gets behind his camera, then shakes his head. “I’m sorry, but it’s not visually compelling. Take off your clothes.”

She does. It feels like peeling off her skin. I am not being abused so much as I am abusing myself, she thinks. Phrasing it this way makes her feel in control.

“Now I’m going to pour barbecue sauce on your head and I want you to sing the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

She can feel the grit on the floor underneath her knees. The barbecue sauce is strangely cool as he empties a bottle onto her head. It drips down her back and into her eyes.

“Glory, glory, hallelujah—”

“Louder!”

“Glory, glory, hallelujah.”

“Pick it up with your hands and smear it on your face.”

She tries to do what he wants, but she doesn’t understand it and suddenly she is choking, then crying, then on her hands and knees on the floor, sobbing.

“Good,” he says. “Good. I like your face. It’s an interesting face.”

Walking down Main Street, the central artery through campus, she is aware of the energy in town: the start of a new school year, and everyone preparing for the night, and all the things that come with a night like this. Two men wheel a keg out of a restaurant and lift it into the back of a truck. Three blonds exit a boutique, clutching bags. One touches up her lip gloss, brushing her finger across her mouth in a quick, practiced motion. She smacks her lips.

Part of her wants to see her mother’s Volvo on the street, flag it down, and accept a rescue. There is the brown lake, the burned hills of her grandfather’s farm, the fine paper pages of the hymnal in church, her mother’s painted fingernail moving across the lyrics, telling her what to sing. Perhaps she will sleep in the library or go downtown until something happens, until someone finds her.

Tonight the weather is warm, and she walks to the bridge and looks down at the water. She senses the new girls in their sundresses passing behind her; they have spent hours in their dorm rooms brushing their hair, bleaching their teeth, highlighting their cheekbones. She turns to watch them walk, and what she envies is their freshness. They are so clean. Watching them is watching herself. It is standing outside of her body, seeing its beauty for the first time, and watching it walk far away, past the statue of General Johnson and the beautiful girls, underneath the wet paper cranes, until finally it is out of reach.