The End Defines the Beginning : A Boarding School Coming of Age (Harlow Academy Series Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  To my husband James. Thank you for learning to cope with my crazy Sarah projects.

  CHAPTER ONE

  IT HAPPENED. HER big brother actually died.

  Pale light came through two windows at the far end behind the casket and central air conditioning pumped aggressively, making the room chilly despite it being summer. Fluorescent lighting that made the guests look dead themselves soured the main room. There were a lot of guests. Somewhere around one hundred people sat in hideous, old-fashioned chairs of gold-plated metal and maroon corduroy. Horrible granny flowers lined the walls. Emily decided that she hated that room. It smelled awful. It reminded her of the smell she discovered when playing hide and seek in her great-grandmother’s closest. Fusty mothballs.

  Worse yet, there were people she didn’t know all around.

  She finally showed her face in the parlor, thinking everyone would stare at her. Caught up in their own grief, most of the guests shared whispered conversation and were overall too distracted to notice her entrance. It was almost silent when she stepped onto the aisle carpet and started her procession toward the casket. It was like a morbid wedding. Strangers looked to her as she got closer to the white, polished casket and watched her most raw moment. She hated the sorrow-filled eyes and the pathetic looks of insincere sympathy. Why would these people want to come and watch such a tragedy?

  They wouldn’t know what it was like to go home without him. They didn’t even know Emily herself. She despised them all for their pity. She didn’t need pity. She needed to rewind a year and spend it all differently.

  The aisle seemed to go on forever. It was intimidating. Being on display bothered Emily at the best of times and she had to control herself, stop herself from running or walking much more quickly than she was. She knew that would only draw more attention to her.

  She finally arrived at the edge of the plinth and stepped up to peer into the casket that contained her brother’s body. Emily felt it took a lot of effort to mount the tall step, she seemed to weigh more than usual.

  Her brother, Andy, had looked half dead even before he had died. Emily had felt guilty thinking that at the time, when he had still been alive and breathing, but the truth was he had been pale and skinny. Gaunt with constant cracked lips, dry and flaky with dried crusty spit on the sides of his mouth, he had been scary to look at. Emily had thought he had looked like a victim of the holocaust in his last week or so. She had been riddled with shame thinking of him this way. Somehow it felt horrible to think about someone dying before they did.

  Now, she peered into the casket and he looked like some weird, porcelain doll. His face was like the white of a geisha, powdered in an old-fashioned way. Dabbed with round circles of blush, Andy’s face looked like watercolor paint was on the apples of his cheeks. The make up was faint and inhuman.

  She had looked up online that people’s hair and nails continued to grow even after they died. Andy had lost his hair during chemotherapy and never grew any back, but there seemed to be peach fuzz pushing through now on the top of his head. It was light and not brown, like when he was a child, before he grew out of being a blondie.

  He also had a tiny black mustache creeping through. It wasn’t coarse like a grown man’s. It was thin and wispy like a dark-haired baby. Emily couldn’t stop staring at it. It was new and unusual and she hated it. Why didn’t they shave that off? These people did not understand what a wonderful-looking boy he had been. Just a boy. Why let him look like a man with that horrible, ridiculous mousy mustache? Why let this be the last way we look at his beautiful face?

  When her Mom had told her that Andy had had cancer only a year ago, she had promised Emily that he wouldn’t die.

  She could still remember the day clear as a bright blue sky. Her mom had taken Emily to the living room. Her grandparents had picked up the little siblings and left Emily behind. Emily sat down first on the couch and Emily’s mom, next to her. It was a strange arrangement. Normally, two people in the same room would take entirely different furniture and Emily suddenly felt uncomfortable. Something wasn’t right.

  Emily’s mom clicked her nails. She clicked her nails a lot; it was a nervous habit. She would take one nail from one finger and then flick another nail… click, click, click. That was all that filled the silence that stood between them. Now Emily was certain something was not only not right, but possibly very wrong.

  It was just the two of them. Coming from a family of four kids, it was rare to have alone time with her mom. Emily wasn’t sure what was so special about today, but positive news didn’t seem on the cards if one was to judge her mother’s body language.

  “Em, I need to have a chat with you. I don’t really know how to say this…” her mother’s voice wobbled, and she took an unusually long pause, "… Andy has cancer.”

  Emily’s body stiffened. She held her breath. She had known something was wrong with Andy’s knee. She had thought he had just had a sprain or hairline fracture from basketball. Emily didn’t speak.

  Her Mom asked, “Do you know what cancer is?”

  Emily still couldn’t talk. She couldn’t even will her lungs to pull in oxygen. It was as if her body had teleported to another planet where the atmosphere was thick like melted marshmallow and if she wanted to breathe, speak or move, she’d have to contend with the gluelike nature of this unfamiliar world.

  This unknown place affected even her thoughts. In her family Emily was often the last to think and the first to speak, but her tongue was heavy now. Her brain moved like a ship in fog.

  She knew what cancer was. Or at least she thought she did. Cancer was a disease that killed people. Like Great Aunt Florence.

  Finally, as if slowly coming back into the earth’s orbit, she pulled in oxygen and let out her breath slowly through her nostrils. Her Mom stared at her in time-frozen silence. Knowing that s
he didn’t have any right words for this conversation, she waited patiently for Emily to find her own.

  Finally, she said the only thing she was thinking.

  “Is he going to die?” She asked, feeling frightened of the response.

  “No” her mother replied almost too instantaneously, “No, of course not.”

  Her mom’s voice sounded like someone else’s, high pitched, as if she had just inhaled helium. She grabbed Emily quickly and pulled her to her chest, hugging her tightly.

  Emily could hear her mom’s words reverberating through her mother’s ribcage, “No, Em. Don’t worry about that. No. No. No. He’s not gonna die.”

  Lies. God damn lies.

  As soon as the funeral ended, the family piled into the car to drive to the wake. It was eighty-five degrees outside with humidity one could chew. Everyone threw down the windows to cool off the car as they waited for the air conditioning to kick in. It was hot as a furnace inside and Emily wondered how much hotter it would have to be to cremate a human being.

  She looked out the window; her face feeling hot and flushed, wishing it would have been dark and rainy outside like it was in the movies whenever someone died. This kind of day disrespected her brother. Even the sky should have cried today. She pushed her face as close to the window as her seatbelt allowed, to feel the steamy breeze. The air sounded loud in her ears and she welcome the white noise, as it drowned out all of her thoughts.

  Emily believed nothing could have been worse than the funeral. But the wake came close. Unlike at the funeral parlor, where people had murmured and had felt as though they should whisper, the wake was lively with conversation. These people, who had only moments ago felt too sad to speak, now ate and drank and cajoled as if nothing had happened.

  “Mom,” Emily said, grabbing her mom by the sleeve, “Do I have to be here? Can’t I just wait in the car?”

  “Sorry, honey. It’s too hot for you to wait in the car.”

  “I’ll just leave the air-con on.”

  “Em,” she replied, bending over to look her daughter in the eyes, “I know it’s not fun. I don’t want to be here either. But these people came to pay their respects. It’s a chance for everyone to share stories and… we just have to stay here. Okay?”

  It wasn’t okay. But without the keys to the car, her only choice was to sit outside in the blazing sun alone.

  Suddenly a woman approached her mom.

  “Oh Marie…” she said, throwing an embrace upon her mom.

  Emily would not have a chance to contest any further. She wandered to the edge of the room and leaned against the wall. Taking out her mobile, she poked around on puzzle app, glued to her cell phone screen.

  It didn’t take long before a lady about Emily’s mother’s age came up to her. She wore all black and smelled of baby powder.

  “My Emily,” she said, reaching out to touch push a tuft of hair behind Emily’s ear, “How are you, dear?”

  Emily looked at a person who seemed vaguely familiar but felt like a total stranger at the same time. She wanted to say, “Who the fuck are you and why are you touching my hair?”

  Instead, she mustered a polite but mildly annoyed, “I’m sorry, I don’t know who you are.”

  It turned out to be Erin, her mom’s cousin. Crowds of people she didn’t know, but that seemed to know her, all wanted to talk and reminisce. It was like an army of mourners lined up to pat her head and give her a hug.

  She decided to go outside after all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT WAS A long ride home and Emily hadn’t been at her house for days.

  When her parents had decided to sedate Andy for his last couple days, so he could die in peace and not in pain, they had sent the kids away.

  Her Aunt and Uncle had arrived a few minutes after a clinical looking hospice nurse had walked in to their house.

  The nurse had been there before, and Emily had tried her best to eavesdrop. Her dad, mom and the nurse spoke in the kitchen over a cup of tea after the nurse had had a consultation with Andy.

  The bathroom door wasn’t too far from the kitchen and Emily pressed her ear against it from the other side, hoping to catch a word. All she made out was, “…It’s the merciful thing to do.” Or something like that.

  The nurse had a sincere looking face yet Emily couldn’t tell if she frowned constantly, or if the years of looking sympathetically at parents and families of dying people had etched that look onto her face permanently. Emily’s mom seemed to want to usher her away from the children as quickly as possible.

  Her step-dad, Pepper, jumped to it and moved the nurse into Andy’s room. Emily knew she was the nurse of death. Wasn’t it strange to allow her into the house so generously? Emily felt the urge to give the woman a dirty look and immediately felt ashamed to be so ungrateful. Taking away her brother’s pain could only be a good thing. Emily tried to think of her as an angel of mercy, but when she did, all that she could find in her mind was a desire to lash out in anger and tell the woman to get out of her house.

  Andy died that same evening. She, Katie and Joey had stayed at her Aunt and Uncle’s house for several more days after his passing, while funeral plans were set and so on. It had been a fantastic relief to be out of the house. Away, she hung out with her cousins and siblings, having fun. Her Aunt and Uncle had entertained them with anything they had wanted: ice cream, giant bubbles outside, the slip and slide. Andy’s death hadn’t felt real for those few blissful days.

  The car stopped in front of her middle American modest little house. Contemplating the exterior, she suddenly realized how little it felt like home before Andy had died and wondered how she would ever make it feel like home now.

  Dragging her heels, she ambled up the back steps. Once in the house, she couldn’t help but go first to Andy’s room.

  The doorway was like a portal. The moment her foot stepped off the wooden hallway floor and onto his carpet, she transported to another place. A place where he had been. It was eerie and scary. How could she feel so afraid among her brother’s things? All so familiar? But she did. She felt like an intruder, a voyeur. A morbid peeping tom. As though somehow, she shouldn’t have been looking. His room, before his privately guarded abode, was now there for her to defenselessly invade.

  Andy’s room was dimly lit. It still had a hospital bed in it. She swore she could still see the outline of his body, the silhouette of a young man with so much promise. So much talent. He was the smart one. The sporty one. The one who never did anything wrong. He was perfect. The things that she once felt disdain for, she now all at once love deeply and wanted back with every desperate nerve in her body.

  The air was thick and musty; it smelled like vinegar mixed with sawdust. Although it was sunny outside and it was summer, the windows were still closed and the curtains were drawn, just the way he had wanted it in his last days. The days when he slept all the time and only woke up to give a meek call for someone to lift the water to his dry and cracked lips.

  She saw that his oversized cup with a sippy straw was still on the bedside table. Her Mom wasn’t a very tidy woman, so a lot of mess remained. Maybe her Mom couldn’t bear to clean it away, making the last traces of his life disappear. It would probably be there to gather dust for weeks.

  Staring at the straw, she recalled their last moment together. Emily had been watching TV in the living room when she heard a faint call from his room. She ran to Andy, knowing he couldn’t lift a cup to his lips anymore. He probably needed her help.

  When she entered his room, his big, saucer-like eyes stared at her. He didn’t blink. He smacked his lips twice and said faintly, “Water.”

  It was such a scary moment to see her hero so fragile. But she did as he wanted and lifted that straw to his lips. When he finished, she set down the cup, and he placed his weak hand on hers.

  That was the only time he had ever told her that he loved her.

  “How did this happen,” Emily thought to herself, “How does a perfectly
healthy teenager die in only a year? How does a seventeen-year-old die at all?”

  Her body melted. The heaviness of tears or something like it weighed down every part of her but her eyes. She had never been big on crying. She didn’t know why, but she just didn’t do it. Not that her parents had told her crying was bad, but she supposed she had seen it as a sign of weakness. But for the first time in her life, she actually tried to cry.

  She walked over to a binder that held his Panini card collection. It reminded her of the time he has flicked her hand simply because he had thought she might touch one. She turned over the front cover and flipped the plastic-coated sleeves containing his treasure. Andy had organized his cards like an archeologist sorted pieces of ancient pottery.

  Their grandpa had started Andy off with his Panini collection a couple years earlier, and the collection was worth a few hundred dollars now. Emily marveled at the potential value of the silly cards. She had always thought her brother would become an amazing business person one day.

  She put her hand on the plastic sheet her brother had once touched and furrowed her brow, willing tears to come out. They didn’t. She went to his laptop, the one that a charity gifted him as his last wish. She touched the keys and tried to feel his presence, the warmth of his fingertips. She imagined him tapping away with that concentrated, cheeky smile on his face. Emily squeezed her eyes with all her inner might until she found they were dry as a bone.

  Her lack of tears confused her. Why couldn’t she cry? Had she not loved him? Does she not still love him? Of course she did. But anger masked her sadness. Anger was so much easier.

  Why did her mom tell her he wouldn’t die? Why did her mom give her hope that he could survive cancer? She felt angry that she couldn’t trust childhood anymore. She felt angry that she no longer had someone to stick up for her and to tell her what to do. She felt angry that such a terrible thing could happen in this world. She felt angry that she used to believe in God before all of this, but now… she wasn’t so sure.

  CHAPTER THREE