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Emily

I'll never forget the day Emily breezed into town. That first day, with her long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, faded blue jeans and fitted black t-shirt. By looking at her, if you didn't know better, you probably would have thought she belonged here. But something about her…we all knew she didn't quite belong.

To be fair, no one really took the time to get to know her. They took one look at her tight clothes and the frog that poked out of her belly ring and took to gossiping.

Now, there ain't a soul in Haden that doesn't wind up on the losing end of a bit of coffee hour gossip now and then (I remember one time this rumor was going around about the preacher's wife from the Baptist Church), but what they did to Emily…it made me, for one, ashamed for all of us.

I watched from across the street as Emily moved into the tiny apartment above the drug store. I might have offered to help her carry her things up the narrow stairs, but when she opened the hatch on her little blue Toyota (I had never actually seen a Toyota – everyone in Haden drives Chevy's or Fords or Dodges), I saw that she wouldn't need me. Her entire load consisted of an old brown suitcase and a medium-sized cardboard box. She took everything in one load, the box balanced on one hip, then came back to shut the hatch and lock the car.

The next morning I learned I hadn't been the only one to watch her move in. All over town they were talking about Emily, and the way she had moved in without so much as a davenport or a quilt.

"Wonder what that girl's, running from," Betty Lou hissed at Norma Johnson as she checked her grocery order at the Super Value.

I can't say I wasn't intrigued at the thought of that pretty little brunette hopping in her Toyota and racing away from the scene of a crime, or from an abusive husband in the city. My mind raced as I pedaled my bike across town. I was determined to get to the bottom of this girl's story.

By the time I had pedaled to the spot where I had seen her the day before, I still hadn't come up with a plan for how I was going to approach her. I have never been much of a talker, and I had a feeling I wasn't going to be magically touched with the gift of speech as I stood face to face with a pretty girl I had never met.

I was so busy trying to think of something brilliant (or, at the very least half way intelligent) to say, at first I didn't hear the voice behind me.

"Hey, kid!" she yelled as I rode by. She yelled it again and this time I stopped and turned to look. There she was, leaning against the brick front of the drug store, smoking a cigarette. She was dressed in a short black skirt and white blouse tied in a little knot above her belly button. This was when I first noticed the belly button ring, and the sparkly green frog that adorned it. That wasn't the only thing I noticed, though. She had a tattoo, too. The light shining through her blouse showed me the outline of a tattoo just above her bra line. I had never seen a tattoo on a woman before, and I know I stared. I might have even drooled.

"Kid?" she said again with a little smirk I would see again many times. It meant I had amused her in some way, and I would later spend nights trying to find ways to get that look from her.

"H-h-hi," I finally said, cursing my tongue for tripping over the word, the way it had tripped over so many words before.

"I'm Emily," she said, as if I had asked. She took long drags off the cigarette, wrapping her pink lips around it in a motion so casual it could only come from her.

"B-b-benji," I said.

"Benji? That can't actually be your name!" She laughed, but I didn't feel like she was laughing at me, the way the kids did at school when I tripped over my words. She was laughing with me. "Is it short for something?"

I nodded.

"Benjamin? Is it short for Benjamin?" she asked.

I nodded again, and from that day on she was the only person in town who called me Benjamin. I loved the way my name sounded coming from her lips, the same lips I had admired as she smoked, and the same lips that would get her into so much trouble later.

We talked there on the street while she finished her cigarette and put it out under the toe of one black high-heeled shoe. She waited patiently as I carefully sounded out the words, never once impatient or mean. When she was done smoking she smiled at me, ruffled my hair, and said she was off to get a job.

I sat there on my bike and watched her as she walked down the street, hips swaying seductively in her tight skirt. I thought to myself that she was one of the sexiest, most sophisticated women I had ever met. I suppose I exaggerated a little, but only a little.

I didn't see Emily again for three days, but that didn't mean I stopped thinking about her. How could I, when everywhere I went she was the hot topic everyone was whispering about?

She had indeed found the job she had told me she was off to get. Mabel at the Hilltop Café had hired her to waitress, most likely so she could get the scoop on all the gossip. So, the next time I saw her she was walking down the street in the pink Hilltop uniform with the white apron. Her hair was tied up tight in a bun with chopsticks sticking out of it. She looked worn out, but she saw me riding toward her, she smiled.

"Benjamin! How are ya?" she asked. When she smiled I saw the most beautiful row of perfect white teeth you could see. I imagined that she must have brushed them once an hour to keep them so nice.

"G-g-good," I said.

"Wanna come up for a soda?" she asked me, cocking her head toward her apartment, which was about a block away.

I grinned and nodded enthusiastically. Okay, maybe a little too enthusiastically, but what can you do?

"Well, come on then," she said, and I followed her to her apartment, leaving my bike at the bottom of the stairs. I thought about throwing in some metaphor here about leaving my innocence at the bottom of the stairs with it, but it wasn't really like that, and fluffing up the details isn't going to help the story any.

What happened that day wasn't much more than a talk between two friends. Emily made me feel like her equal as she handed me a soda and sat next to me on the couch. (There was already one there when she moved in, the apartment was actually cluttered with quite a lot of furniture. I thought about telling this to the ladies at the grocery store who thought Emily needed a davenport, but it wouldn't have done any good. It never does much good to call attention to one's self in Haden, I have learned.)

Emily didn't seem to notice that I was just some kid off the street who had a hard time putting two words together. She talked to me like we'd been friends forever, and she called me Benjamin. When I walked back down the stairs to my bike an hour later, I'm sure I had stars in my eyes. But no one was paying much attention to me that summer. All eyes were on Emily.

Over the next seven weeks, more days than not Emily and I would have a soda on the couch in her apartment, or sit on a bench in the park and watch the kids play, or she'd walk along the sidewalk while I rode my bike and she would stop in at the grocery store to pick up a carton of ice cream for us to share. It was the best summer of my life. It's too bad it had to end the way it did.

Emily had been in Haden for almost two months to the day the night she decided to go to Dyer's after her evening shift. I don't know what made her decide to go into the bar that night, sit down and order a beer, because to my knowledge she had never been in there before. Maybe it had been an especially hard day and she wanted to unwind. Maybe she was just walking by and heard a song she liked wafting through the air from the jukebox. I never got a chance to ask her.

The rest of the story I have pieced together from assorted rumors, sifting through what people say and what they don't until I think I have figured out something at least pretty close to what happened that night.

It was a typical night at Dyer's, with the usual crowd of rowdy guys warming their bar stools looking for something to do, and when Emily walked in, I bet the eyes on those old boys just lit up. Not long after Emily sat down, Danny Brighton, a big, gentle-looking guy who is anything but came over and sat right down next to her.

He knew her name, of course, but I doubt she knew his. You could probably go through your entire life and not know Danny Brighton unless you walked into Dyer's, or frequented places like the shooting range and the park in the middle of the night. No, Emily had never run into Danny before.

Sitting there next to her he was probably quite charming at first, telling her how it was nice to meet her, asking why he hadn't seen her around? It wouldn't last, though. The version I heard from the bar tender's daughter Lita is that Danny was going on and on about what beautiful lips Emily had, and she was getting a little upset. When he leaned in to try to steal a kiss from her, she kneed him right where it counts and walked out of the bar.

That was the last time most anyone in Haden saw Emily.

Danny Brighton and his horrible posse slammed out the back door of Dyer's a few minutes after her, though, and I can just imagine what happened next. Emily would have been walking down the street toward her apartment when they came up on her in that big old Chevy pick-up of Danny's. I bet she was terrified when they got out. Don't know how they got her inside, but I imagine they probably had to carry her. Emily wouldn't have gone along easily.

They never did find out what happened to Emily. The next day her little blue Toyota was still parked out in front of her apartment above the grocery store, and the next week. People said she must have up and decided to leave town, but I know better, and I think they do, too. No one did anything about it, though. The sheriff didn't go and look for her. He probably knew more about what happened than I did, considering his last name is Brighton…

A few days after Emily disappeared I was at the cemetery (sometimes I go there early in the morning with a book, it's the quietest place in town to read), and I saw a grave that looked as though someone had been freshly buried. It hadn't been there the week before, and I know as well as anyone that no one had died in Haden since February.

I went and picked some flowers and put them on the grave, and then I went home to get a notebook and write the story of Emily, and the thing that happened to a girl from the city with a brown ponytail and a jeweled frog in her belly button ring when she got mixed up with the town of Haden. Someone had to remember.

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