Emily Nutter
Emily screwed her face at Xander and Daniel while biting into her cigarette as if she had to eat a worm and they were the ones who made her do it.
„It’s none of your damn business where I get my cigs.”, she said in a breathy voice. “But if you really want to know, I get them from some, um, very shady types. The kind of people who would get-a-rid of your damn teeth if you looked at them the wrong way.” That was actually at least partially true. Before Eddie turned into a working class dad who listens to Phil Collins (Check out those drums in “In The Air Tonight”! They ROCK!), he mugged people in dark alleys and sold meth to the trailer trash.
Emily got so used to having those little sticks of death in her mouth that having it pointed out to her felt somehow violating, as if it was a gap in her teeth or a hideous mole on her cheek. But then she reminded herself that the chief reason why she made a resolution to make herself a metalhead version of a forties crime film character was to get attention and now she got a nice helping of it, in the most irritatingly bright, loud version possible. Wanting attention and then receiving was like asking your daddy to take you to an amusement park, only to find out that the carnival music is off-key, the carousels are making weird screeching noises and the clown is probably a child molester.
Or perhaps she just did not get attention from the people from whom she desired it. “"Nah. Unsinkable." "'Sides, Tommy let me use his bike a while, he ain't gonna miss it none."
“I don’t believe you. Your boat must be in, what do they call it, a state of disarray,” She picked that one from some old book, “because you have to steal bikes to pay for the repairs. Although I think that after this little trip you’ll be only able to sell it to the junkyard.”
It was more than just anger caused by what she saw as rejection that sublimated her voice into pure contempt. There was a sense of superiority too; as far as she was concerned, living in a log cabin was still a rung above rotting away in a trailer straight ouf of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Her anger and disgust momentarily subsided when she grabbed a brownie from Val without saying asking or saying thanks. She took hearty bites with her eyes closed, staining her pink lips brown and licking them like a cat. She rarely got cooking this good in a house will all males.
As they made it towards the forest, she put her headphones on and started blasting her music from hell, a perfect soundtrack for the apocalyptic landscape of skeletal trees. She bobbed her head to the rhythmic thrashing noise for a good minute, until the sound system suddenly went quiet. Her heart skipped: Dammit I must have forgot to change the batteries… She set out on this trip with all the optimism she could muster, but this was a bad sign.
A terrifying vision unfolded before her eyes: a day and a half of Danny’s jokes and Phoebe’s limp strumming with nothing to drown it out. The heat made her feel like a toy picked apart by a sadistic kid - the sun. She had to deal with the sun above picking her apart as if she was a beetle in the hands of a sadistic kid. As her forehead started to glisten with the musty sweat, she began to be overtaken by self-consciousness. She thought she looked and smelled like a swamp monster.
Yet soon after she entered the Champlain Forest, she could not help but inhale deeply the air which, although humid, was still invigorating and rich with the scent of pine needles, and she began to feel her heartbeat settling into a rhythm that was in a way as steady and reassuring as if she was in deep sleep. She was glad to feel small next to the trees so gigantic that they almost seemed to be the pillars supporting the clear summer sky, to hear the animals rustling in the bushes and the nervous staccato of woodpecker’s knocking that echoed through the forest like a series of gunshots. She felt as if she stepped into an ancient domain that was too grand and mysterious to pay her any attention; it was an eerie yet calming feeling.
At some point, she started to find Phoebe’s strumming surprisingly tolerable. She even found herself murmuring a melody she knew from the radio, hopefully quiet enough so that it could not be heard above the sound of her heavy boots trampling on the foliage.
As they reached the river, she was already drowning in sweat, but now she was too immersed into the rhythm of the march and the beauty of the surroundings to pay it any attention.
She scoffed at Phoebe’s ridiculous suggestion to “swim for it”. Emily herself could of course do it a heartbeat, but anyone else would certainly drown.
She watched Cecile try to impress everyone by crossing over first and as she observed him crossing the bridge, after he made each of his steps she was sure that the next one would be his last. Yet he passed it with an almost insulting ease and quickness. Then he disappeared into the forest like a mischievous spirit. Long enough time passed until he gave a sign that she thought that something bad might have happened to him. Then he emerged from the forest and started calling out to them, but they could not hear what he was yelling. Not that she was interested.
She watched Felix and Eliza pass the log. She saw Eliza get carried by the current and for a moment she was sure that it would end with tragedy. Even after Felix saved her, she could not get rid of a lump in her throat – perhaps because she was the teensiest bit afraid that something like this could happen to her. Yes, she was strong, but also big and clumsy. Her clothes were heavy with sweat, her arms strained with the weight of the backpack. She could her heart pounding.
As she walked on the log, she heard the soles of her boots thumping on the wood loudly even though she walked in tentative steps, placing her feet as gently as she could. The sound of the river beneath her was massive, a hum of the perfect machine. She exhaled with a wheezing sound as she made it to the other side.
Now was the time to see what Cecile was yelling about.