“Before I do,” Ema said, “I wanted to show you something.”
“Okay.”
She started pulling up her shirt.
“Uh,” I said, because I’m good with words.
“Relax, perv. I want to show you a tattoo.”
“Uh,” I said again.
“You’ll see why.”
Ema was loaded up with tattoos. This helped cultivate her bad-girl image. She wore them almost like a fence, warning people to stay back. Yes, I know a lot of people have tattoos, but Ema was only a high school freshman. Many of the kids were intimidated that a girl so young could have so many. How did she get her parents’ permission?
I had wondered that myself.
But more recently I learned the simple truth: The tattoos were temporary. She had a friend named Agent at a tattoo parlor called Tattoos While U Wait. Agent liked to try out designs before putting them on someone in a permanent way. He used Ema’s skin as a practice canvas.
Ema turned her back to me. “Look.”
There, in the center of her back, was a familiar image to Ema, Spoon, Rachel, and me.
A butterfly. More specifically, the Tisiphone Abeona butterfly.
That image haunted us. I had seen it on a grave behind Bat Lady’s house. I had seen it on Rachel’s hospital room door. I had seen it in an old picture of hippies from the sixties. I had even seen the image of that butterfly in an old photograph of the famous Lizzy Sobek, the young girl who led children to safety during the Holocaust. I saw it atop my father’s “maybe” grave, on the back of a photograph in Bat Lady’s basement, even in a tattoo parlor.
“You told me about that,” I said.
“I know. But I went back to have it redone. You know. Have Agent make it bright or change it. The tattoos usually wear off after a few weeks.”
I felt a small chill ripple across my back. “But?”
“But he couldn’t.”
I knew the answer but I asked anyway. “Why?”
“It’s permanent,” Ema said. “Agent said he doesn’t know how that happened. But the butterfly is there. For good.”
I said nothing.
“What’s going on, Mickey?”
“I don’t know.”
We sat there in silence. I finally broke it. “Tell me about your missing boyfriend.”
For a second or two, she didn’t move. She swallowed, blinked a few times, and then stared at the floor. “Boyfriend may be putting it a little too strongly.”
I waited.
“Mickey?”
“What?”
Ema started twisting the skull ring on her right hand. “You have to promise me something.”
Her body language was all wrong. Ema was about confidence. She was big and confident and didn’t care who noticed. She was comfortable in her own skin. Now, all of a sudden, that confidence was gone.
“Okay,” I said.
“You have to promise you won’t make fun of me.”
“Are you serious?”
She just looked at me.
“Okay, okay, I promise. It’s odd, that’s all.”
“What’s odd?” she asked.
“This promise. I thought you didn’t care what people think of you.”
“I don’t,” Ema said. “I care what you think of me.”
A second passed. Then another. Then I said, “Oh,” because I’m really, really good with words. It was, of course, a dumb comment on my part—the stuff about her not caring. Everyone cares what people think. Some just hide it better.
“So tell me,” I said.
“I met a guy in a chat room,” Ema said.
I blinked once. Then I said, “You hang out in chat rooms?”
“You promised.”
“I’m not making fun.”
“You’re judging,” she said. “That’s just as bad.”
“I’m not. I’m just surprised, that’s all.”
“It’s not like you think,” Ema said. “See, I’ve been helping my mom with her social networking. She’s clueless. So is her manager and her agent and her personal assistant—whatever. So I set some promotional stuff up for her—Twitter, Facebook, you know the deal. And now I watch it for her.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Anyway, in this chat room, I met this guy.”
I just looked at her.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“You’re judging again.”
“I’m just sitting here,” I said, spreading my hands. “If you see something more on my face, that’s more about you than me.”
“Right, sure.”
“I’m just surprised, okay? What kind of chat room was this anyway?”
“It’s for Angelica Wyatt fans.”
I tried sooo hard to keep my face expressionless.
“There you go again!” she shouted.
“Stop looking at my face and tell me what happened. You’re in an Angelica Wyatt chat room. You start talking to a guy. Am I right so far?”
Ema looked sheepish. “Yeah.”
“Are you using an alias?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Why would I? No one knows I’m Angelica Wyatt’s daughter.”
Not even me until I followed her from school last week. In school, Ema was the subject of much speculation. Every school, I’m told, has that one kid who seems to come out of the woods to school every day. No one knows where he or she lives. No one has been to his or her house. Rumors start—as they did about Ema. She lived in a cabin in the woods, some speculated. Her father abused her maybe. He sold drugs. Something.
Ema actually encouraged those rumors to hide the truth: She was the daughter of a world-famous movie star.
“I use my own name in the chat room,” Ema said, “so I can be just another fan.”
“Okay, go on.”
“So anyway, I started chatting with this guy. Then we started e-mailing and texting, that kind of thing.” Her face turned red. “He told me about his life. He told me he used to live in Europe but they had moved to the United States last year. We talked about books and movies and feelings. It . . . it got pretty intimate.”
My face twisted into a grimace.
“Ew, gross,” Ema snapped. “Not that kind of intimate!”
“I didn’t say—”
“Stop, okay? And never play poker, Mickey. You’d be terrible at it. I mean, we talked. We really talked and opened up. At first, okay, I figured that maybe this guy was a fake, you know? Like I was being played.”