Sarah Allen - The Girl Who Chased the Moon

“So, you two knew my mom?” Emily finally asked, as if she couldn’t wait any longer.

“We knew her well,” Stella said. “Dulcie and I were in a close-knit group of friends.”

“Sassafras?” Emily said.

“Right. Sawyer dated a girl named Holly who was in the group, so he was one of our honorary boys.”

“You weren’t friends with Julia?”

“I wasn’t friends with anyone back then,” Julia said.

Emily turned to her, curious. She had pizza sauce on her upper lip. Julia smiled and handed her a napkin. “Why not?” Emily said, wiping her mouth.

“Being a teenager is tough. We all know that. Sassafras made it look easy. I looked like the truth.”

“What did Sassafras do?” Emily asked. “Community service? Fundraising?”

Stella laughed. “We weren’t that kind of group. Let me get the yearbooks.” She tossed her pizza crust into the box, then left the kitchen. She swished back in minutes, possibly the only person in the world who knew where to find her high school yearbooks without digging through closets or calling her parents. “Here we are.” She set a green and silver book emblazoned with the words HOME OF THE FIGHTING CATS! on the table in front of Emily, then opened it. “That’s Sassafras, with your mother in the middle, of course. We held court on the front steps of the school every morning before classes. There’s your mother at homecoming. There she is as our prom queen. There’s Sawyer on the soccer team.”

Sawyer shook his head. “I rarely played.”

Stella cut her eyes at him. “That’s because you didn’t want to risk hurting that face.”

“A valid excuse.”

Stella turned the next page. “And there’s Julia.”

It was a photo of her eating lunch by herself on the top row of the bleachers on the football field. That was Julia’s domain. Before school, at lunch, when she skipped classes, sometimes even at night, that was her safe place.

“Look how long your hair was! And it was all pink!” Emily said, then looked closer. “Are you wearing black lipstick?”

“Yes.”

“No one knew what to think of Julia back then,” Stella said.

Julia smiled and shook her head. “I was harmless.”

“To other people, maybe,” Sawyer murmured, and Julia automatically pulled her long sleeves farther down her arms.

“Julia’s father sent her to boarding school after our sophomore year,” Stella told Emily, and Julia turned back to them. “She didn’t come back for a long time. And when she did, no one recognized her.”

“I did,” Sawyer said.

Stella rolled her eyes. “Of course you did.”

Emily was poring over the yearbook now, flipping through pages, stopping every time she came across a photo of her mother. “Look!” she said. “Mom is wearing her charm bracelet! This one!” Emily held up her wrist.

Julia found herself staring at Emily’s profile, a familiar yearning in her heart. Without thinking, she reached over and pushed some of Emily’s hair out of her eyes. Emily didn’t seem to notice, but when Julia looked across the table, Sawyer and Stella were staring at her like she’d just grown another head.

“Who is this with my mom?” Emily asked, pointing to an elegant dark-haired boy in a suit and bow tie. “He’s in a lot of pictures with her.”

“That’s Logan Coffey,” Julia said.

“ That’s who he was talking about.” Emily sat back and smiled. “I met a boy named Win Coffey today. He mentioned that his uncle was Logan Coffey. He seemed surprised that I didn’t know who he was.”

Oh, hell , Julia thought. That can’t be good .

“Was Logan Coffey her boyfriend?” Emily asked.

“We all wondered. He and Dulcie denied it,” Julia said cautiously. “Basically, he was just a shy, mysterious boy your mother tried to coax out of his shell.”

“Does he still live here? Do you think I could talk to him about my mom?”

There was a conspicuous silence. No one wanted to tell her. Julia finally said, “Logan Coffey died a long time ago, sweetheart.”

“Oh.” As if sensing the change in atmosphere, Emily reluctantly closed the book. “I guess I should get back home. Thank you for letting me look through the yearbook.”

Stella waved her hand. “Take it with you. That was twenty pounds ago. I don’t need to be reminded.”

“Really? Thank you!” When Emily stood, so did Julia. Julia walked her to the door and said good night, watching until Emily evaporated into the darkness under the canopy of trees next door.

When Julia walked back in, Stella was standing there, her hands on her hips. “Okay, what’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you acting that way around her?”

“I’m not acting any way around her.” Julia frowned. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’m just surprised, that’s all. I mean, come on. You’re the least maternal person on the planet.” Stella laughed, but stopped when she saw the look on Julia’s face. Julia had gotten used to people saying that to her, but it didn’t make it any easier to hear. It was the price you paid when you were thirty-six and had no apparent interest in sharing your life with anyone. “Oh, I didn’t mean it in a bad way.” And Julia knew Stella didn’t. Neither did Julia’s friends in Baltimore when they said, You love your independence too much . Or You couldn’t be a mom because you’d be cooler than your teenager . “Let’s go out on the back porch and have wine.”

“No, thanks.”

“Julia…”

“I know you have something sweet in here,” Sawyer called from the kitchen, followed by the banging of cabinet doors.

Stella rolled her eyes. “That man can find my stash of Hershey’s Miniatures no matter where I hide them.”

“Let him have them before he tries to raid my kitchen,” Julia said as she headed for the staircase. “I have work to do.”

EMILY SAT on her balcony when she got home, the yearbook on her lap. Earlier that day, she’d gone through the closet and all the drawers in her bedroom, in search of… something. Some clue to her mother’s time here. She’d begun to feel strangely suspicious, like there was something she needed to know that no one was telling her. But there was only her mother’s name on the dusty trunk at the foot of the bed to give any indication that Dulcie had ever even lived there. There was nothing personal. There were no photos, no old letters, not even a scarf or an earring left behind. That’s why Emily had gone over to Julia’s. She’d felt awkward about it at first, but now she was glad she’d done it. The yearbook was such a treasure, if a little confusing. One of the tenets of Roxley School for Girls was that there was no caste system, no superlatives, no elections. How could her mother have been prom queen?

Emily remembered her mother never let her go to the mall because of the open competition there to have something as good as or better than the next person. She always said that fashion should never be a factor in determining someone’s self-worth. So of course Roxley School had uniforms. Yet, here in the yearbook, her mother was in the trendiest clothes of the time, and she had mall hair .

Maybe she’d been embarrassed by who she’d been as a youth. Maybe she thought her grassroots reputation might have been hurt by her tiara-laden past.

Still, that seemed like such a peculiar reason never to come back.

Emily looked up from the yearbook when she heard voices gliding through the still night, coming from the back porch next door. A woman’s laughter. A tinkling of glasses.

Sitting at the old patio table she’d cleared of leaves, she smiled and leaned back. The stars looked twisted in the limbs of the trees, like Christmas lights. She felt like part of the hollow around her was filling. She’d come here with too many expectations. Things weren’t perfect, but they were getting better. She’d even made friends next door.