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needed to feel important and safe and beautiful.
    “Just be careful, Emmy,” I repeated, that time serious since I wasn’t sure anymore what I thought of sex or what I thought of Emmy giving herself away like that, even if Dylan was a good guy.
    Stella was painting in the living room, and I could smell the fumes leaking out the window screens when Emmy reached into her bag and pulled out a flask, unscrewing the top and tilting the silver bottle back. It was easy to imagine the liquid burning down her throat as she sucked on the lip until her eyes began to water.
    “I swear this town is eating me alive,” she said. “You know, I’ve never been farther away than visiting my grandparents in Miami. Who the hell wants to go to Miami?” she said. “I want to go somewhere great, you know? I want to see the Mississippi River and the Grand Canyon and that place with all those guys’ heads carved on it.”
    “Rushmore,” I said as I waved her smoke away from my face.
    “I need to see Mount Rushmore,” she said. “Shit.”
    It was hard to imagine what it would be like to have stayed in one place growing up, to know the same town and the same group of people for so many years that things became predictable. Stella never let us stay in one place for longer than two or three years before she’d pick a new destination and announce we were moving again. I never got a say about where we went: Each uprooting was always nonnegotiable. I figured I would be a different kind of mother than Stella, and I thought about the way she was still trying to control me even though I would be a mother myself soon. But then I heard Emmy breathe in wet and heavy, and I realized she was crying, so I took her hand and leaned over to rest my head on her shoulder.
    “Did you hear about Bobby Elder?” she asked when she pulled away. She leaned down to put the flask on the floor.
    I nodded and said, “Yeah, I heard,” because everyone in Morgantown had heard about Bobby Elder by then. Emmy and I just hadn’t talked about it yet.
    Bobby was a twenty-three-year-old kid who’d worked on cars down at Ervin’s Auto Repair on Kingwood Street and gotten killed by a roadside bomb near Kabul a week earlier. The local paper did a feature story about his family and his childhood, about how he was supposed to play football at WVU but lost his scholarship after a knee injury. He joined the Army Reserve instead to help pay his tuition. He wasn’t a soldier, the paper wrote. He was a kid. A linebacker and a mechanic. He was a college student who was studying physical therapy. It was the most miserable thing Morgantown had been hit with in a while, and everyone was talking about it except for me and Emmy because I wasn’t sure what to say to her about Bobby Elder.
    “He was, like . . .” She turned her head away from me, so I could barely hear her say “so young.”
    I nodded and looked at the shadows being thrown around at our feet by the porch light on the wall behind us. It had rained that afternoon, so the air was thick with the smell of mud and bugs and water, and I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t look at Emmy either, sitting next to me feeling so shitty and depressed. It made me crazy because I didn’t have the words to turn the conversation into something good.
    “My dad and Bobby were at Camp Dawson together.” She turned her face to look at me. “I think he helped my mom out once when her car broke down on Interstate Sixty-eight.”
    We sat there for a while, but eventually I found the nerveto ask her if she’d heard from her dad since he left.
    “Just an e-mail,” she said as she ashed her cigarette on the wood-slatted floor of the porch.
    “How’d he sound?” I wanted her to tell me that he sounded good. I wanted her to say he made some jokes and wrote about how the war wasn’t really that bad after all. I wanted her to say the e-mails were light and cool and easy, just like I remembered her dad being.
    “Hot,” she said