My reading schedule for the chapter “Various Tragedies” in Emily of New Moon fell during a time when my town was experiencing one large tragedy, which I am sure was the result of smaller, various tragedies – slits on ice that we all thought was thick enough to withstand – and I was afraid to read it.
A girl the same age as my daughter Hadley went missing and was found dead under the high school football stadium’s bleachers. The same bleachers I’ve sat on numerous times watching Hadley play soccer, watching her march in the band, the same bleachers I’ve watched my friends’ children work to pull out whatever it is they have, and offer it up for a chance to be a part of something greater than themselves. This is where she died.
In the days that followed, it seemed Ann Arbor was on fire with rage and sorrow. I continually bounced back and forth to the spring of 1994 when two of my own classmates were found dead in a car in the garage of one of their homes, to the present with Hadley and Harper – my babies who are teenagers, and who are not who they were when they were on my hip, holding my hand, when I was showing them the world. And the questions are the same: What happened? How did this happen? Who did this? (The police and the school assure us we are all safe, but they are only referring to one kind of monster.)
This then, was the state of mind I was in when I opened Emily of New Moon to find my bookmark waiting on “Various Tragedies.”
“Well, that’s some bullshit,” I muttered, cracking the spine and folding the book in half to begin reading it.
Read the rest, here.
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