Her name was Emma.
That’s what everyone called her, anyways. Sometimes they would call her Em, sometimes someone would slip up and call her Emily. She was a part of our group of girlfriends growing up in a large town, not quite big enough to be a city but big enough that there was still privacy between neighbors.
We called ourselves the “Unbreakable Six,” because there was me, Summer, Mel, Nina, and Jules.
And there was Emma.
Emma started off as a practical joke by the other girls in the fourth grade. It was probably Jules that started it. She was always playing pranks of people. In high school, she even got suspended once for going too far, and had to babysit for hours to buy that girl a new cellphone. Or maybe it was Summer, who always seemed too busy with music and band to think of such an elaborate prank. Or maybe it was Mel and Nina, who were best friends and could have lived without us, always conspiring together like they were twin sisters.
Either way, I bought my lunch, cold cut sandwich and carrot sticks and a pint of orange juice (I couldn’t stand milk; it would account for how short I ended up being) and walked over to our lunch table. Jules looked excited, waving me over to them.
“Lotte! Look!” I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to be looking. “This is Emma. She moved here from Los Angeles!” We lived far inland and into the boonies. Los Angeles was glitzy and glamorous and chic compared to the flat houses and half-rate high school football that was the only real source of entertainment in the area.
“Uh, what?”
“Los Angeles, dummy,” Jules said, rolling her eyes. “She’s not in our class, she’s in Miss Lark’s, but she’s the same grade as us. Isn’t that cool?”
I still wasn’t sure where I was supposed to be looking. I sat down with my tray uneasily, wondering what I was supposed to see. “Who?”
Summer jabbed me in the side. “You’re being rude,” she hissed quietly. Summer was all about rules and manners. “Say hi to Emma.”
I looked around our table, from Jules to Mel to Nina to Summer and back to Jules, who was waiting impatiently. I don’t know. I was weak. I wanted to fit in. I didn’t get it.
“Hi, Emma.”
They seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief, like I was making everything awkward. “Charlotte’s weird sometimes, but her brother has a Nintendo that he lets us play sometimes.”
They kept on talking, chatting about whatever fourth grade girls chat about, and I ignored it. If they wanted to play that prank, then that was fine. I wasn’t going to buy into it. I was always a precocious child; I knew that what they were looking for was a reaction.
That’s how Emma became a normal part of our lives. It was crazy. We would buy her birthday presents, and they’d disappear like they were taken. I wonder how many candle making kits and Mancala games Jules had piling up in her closet after all these birthdays. One year, Mel even got Emma a really nice necklace, and that disappeared too.
We never went to her house. I asked Nina about it when I was sure that “Emma” wasn’t there.
She gave me this scandalized look. “Lotte, don’t be rude. Emma’s family doesn’t have that much money, she’s embarrassed to let us come over. She told Mel that, who told me, and it makes sense. I mean, what she wears all the time… I mean, we still love her, we’ll always love her, she’s one of us. But don’t rub in the fact that we can’t go to her house. That’s mean.”
After I was scolded so whole-heartedly by Nina, I didn’t ask again. They were covering their bases really well, and by seventh grade, I had to accept that they were taking this prank all the way.
