Unfortunately, even if the guy had been his favorite teacher, Bryce still would have been late. Every morning was a chore to make sure his mom was up and alert or she would never make it to her job at the cheese plant. If he didn’t push her, he would come home from school before heading to his own part-time job at Lucas Construction to find Terri either drunk again or still in bed nursing a hangover, eight hours after he had left the house.
As he stood in the bookstore, the memory of that day eight years ago flooded back, vivid and painful. He could almost smell the musty scent of the school hallway, feel the cold metal of the lockers against his back.
Emma had come out of the principal’s office looking triumphant and defiant, a dangerous glint in her eye that both thrilled and terrified him.
“What are you so happy about, Em?” Bryce had asked, startled by the unfamiliar expression on her face. It had been so long since he’d seen her genuinely happy that the sight was almost jarring.
“You can be the first one to congratulate me. I’m done here.”
“What do you mean? Done with what?” he had asked, feeling slow and stupid, as he often did around her.
“School. This whole shit show.”
He had stared at her, dumbfounded. “What do you mean? You can’t drop out! We still have another trimester before graduation.”
He could have told her exactly how many days they had left in school, down to the hour. He had been looking forward to that day for most of his life, when the endless torture session he called school could finally be over.
She had shrugged and hurried to her locker, which had been right next to his. As she yanked it open, she said, “I just took my last final. I have enough credits to graduate now. I could flunk every single class in the final tri and still graduate with a B-plus average. I’ve had enough.”
“Of what?”
“All of it. School, Wood Briar. My mom. I’m done. Kevin has a job offer in Vegas so I’m going with him. We’re going to find a little apartment off the Strip. Maybe I’ll get a job as a cocktail waitress at a casino or something.”
“You’re only sixteen. You can’t be a cocktail waitress unless you’re twenty-one.”
“I’ll be seventeen this summer. But fine. I’ll get a job at McDonald’s, then. Anything is better than here.”
Bryce had been stunned and upset, unable to reconcile this hard-edged Emma with the girl he thought he knew. There was a brittleness to her voice, a coldness in her eyes.
“What about prom? Graduation? College? I thought you were accepted to Oregon State?”
“You think I give a flying eff about any of that?”
Her words hit him like a slap. What happened to the brainiac who had once been on track to be their class valedictorian? He struggled to understand what had changed her so drastically over the past year.
“Does your mom know you’re leaving town with a pot dealer who is eight years older than you are?”
Emma paused in her frantic locker-emptying. “No. And you can’t tell her either. Not until I’m gone and she can’t do a damn thing about it. Swear it, Bryce.”
“No.” He slammed his locker door closed. “It’s not right. He’s a grown man and you’re still a kid.”
Anger flashed in Emma’s eyes, and she whirled on him.“What I do is none of your business. Got that? It’s my life. Keep out of it, Bryce, or I’ll tell everyone in school you were the one who snuck into the faculty lounge and put laxatives in the coffee machine. “
That hadn’t been enough of a threat. He wouldn’t have cared if she told the whole school, even if it meant he was suspended. Again.
But even then, he had realized the futility of trying to stop her. Emma had been on a twisted path for more than a year, since her dad died, and she was determined not to let anybody drag her off of it.
Back in the present, Bryce was struck anew by the shock of seeing her again, so much the same but so different.
She still had the same high cheekbones, the same vivid green eyes that had haunted his dreams for years. She still had the same auburn hair as Rosie, like liquid fire, though now Emma’s hair was tipped and streaked with purple highlights and she had plenty of piercings in her ears, her nose, as well as ink coloring the creamy skin of her arms.
He knew enough from the little Rosie had said about her daughter and granddaughter to know Emma’s life hadn’t been easy after she left town. The details were fuzzy, but he gathered it involved living on the street for a time, drugs and even a brief stint in jail. Then she had become pregnant with Olive when she was barely twenty.
Despite it all, or maybe because of it, Emma looked beautiful and wild. There was a strength to her now, a hard-won resilience that drew him in even more than before. Bryce felt the old attraction flaring up, stronger than ever.
That didn’t matter.
Bryce sighed, paid for the stack of magazines and the coloring book he always picked up for his mom to help her pass the time at her memory care center, and left the bookshop.