You Are Here(11)

He willed his face to return to its usual shade, a color pale enough to make his freckles stand out. “It’s just that I thought she might be gone longer.”

“Nope,” Mrs. Healy said as she deposited two plates full of runny eggs onto the table, then snatched the newspaper from her husband’s hands. “Back on Monday.”

Peter realized that Emma must not have told her parents about the full extent of her plan either. It was his experience that people who lied were either hiding something or looking for something, and he wondered which was the case with her. He frowned at the eggs on his plate, then stabbed at one with his fork. There was far less confusion in things like math and history, with their straightforward numbers and dates. It seemed that people were a great deal more difficult to figure out.

Chapter five

Emma was halfway to taking a bite of her burger—mouth open and breathing in the sharp smell of onions—when she caught a glimpse of something white streaking past the rest stop. She lowered her hands and looked off toward the straggly woods to her back, where a thin layer of trees separated the expressway from an office complex that lay just beyond. Seeing nothing, she turned her attention back to her burger, and she was just about to bite down again when a few of the kids from a nearby table began to scream and laugh and jump up and down.

It took a moment for Emma to realize it wasn’t a wolf. Standing a few yards away in the grass and eyeing her burger with an unblinking gaze, a huge white dog was balancing on three legs. What had once been his fourth—the front right one—was now no more than a stump, cut short just above where the knee would have been. But there was something about the way he carried himself, like he didn’t even know it was missing. He looked like a husky that had had a run-in with a bottle of bleach, pure white and enormous, but with a crust of mud along his belly and a collection of thorny brambles caught in his fur, which—along with the lack of a collar—gave him away as a stray.

He took a few hobbled steps forward, waving the stump of his leg up and down as if to say hello. Emma could see that one eye was brown and the other a startling shade of blue, as he sat down a few feet away from her and wagged his tail. Behind her a few people hastily shuffled their kids away or grabbed their trays and headed for another table. But Emma watched, fascinated, as he approached her.

She’d always loved dogs, but her parents had never allowed her to have one, and this, to Emma, seemed completely illogical: Wouldn’t the best way to remedy irresponsibility be to have something to be responsible for? She’d spent years campaigning against the decision, dragging her parents down the street whenever she spotted a puppy, twice bringing home stray dogs (both of which were reclaimed within a few hours) and even once kidnapping the neighbor’s puppy (also reclaimed within a few hours, though not quite as joyously).

And so now, as the white dog stood trembling a few feet away, his coat muddy and smelling of mulch, she held out one of her French fries. And when he took a tentative step forward, she tossed it in his direction, watching as he tipped his head back and caught it handily, snagging it in midair with a clean snap of his jaw. Each time she looked up from her burger, he had inched a bit closer, scooting along the pavement until he was settled near the end of the picnic table. And when he was near enough to rest his chin on her sandaled foot, Emma reached down and offered him another fry, which he took from her fingers with a well-mannered wag of his tail, his whole body wriggling with gratitude.

All her life Emma had dreamed of someday being a vet, even as her science grades continued their steady downward plunge. In fact she’d come so close to failing chemistry this year that her parents had forced her to have weekly tutoring sessions with Patrick, who spent hours rattling off formulas over the phone while Emma stared out her window, only half listening. Her grade had just barely improved—enough for her to pass the class, anyway—and her family was able to go on thinking of their youngest daughter as a scientific dunce.

But she knew there was more to being a vet than just science, even if her family didn’t. Something about her shifted when she was around animals; she had a calming effect on them, a certain affinity that couldn’t be learned from a textbook.

“It’s not enough to think puppies are cute,” Annie had told her. “There’s a lot of science involved. And math.”

“That’s that subject with all the numbers,” Patrick had pointed out, while Mom and Dad looked on with indulgent smiles.

Emma had always known she was different from her siblings, but that was the first time she’d felt it, really felt it, something sharp and sudden as a bee sting.

She’d grown used to being the token unexceptional one in a family of uncommon intellect, but sometimes it was an awfully lonely position. And though Emma was used to being on her own—may have even preferred it, in fact—she suspected this was only because it had become a habit, like anything else. It made her different from most kids her age, who clung to friendships like lifeboats, terrified of drifting too far. But Emma knew that if she were to allow someone into her life, then they might just discover what she secretly feared: that perhaps she was just as odd as the rest of her family, only without the brains to back it up.

The way she figured, it was okay for poets to be quirky. Professors are supposed to be absentminded, and geniuses are notorious loners. But Emma wasn’t any of these things, and still she found herself easily distracted, prone to daydreaming and wandering, with a habit of zoning out when anyone attempted to explain things to her. She hated directions and instructions and had little patience for studying. She was almost seventeen and had no real friends. She wasn’t exactly normal, but she wasn’t exactly abnormal enough either.