Emma

Kira
“You want to help her,” Scott said. “But you can’t. You can’t save someone from themselves.”
“You’re hurting her,” I snapped back. But he had a point.
“Not directly,” Scott said.
Still true. Damn.
We were talking about Emma.
Emma was two years older than I was. I knew about her from my friend, Liam’s friends. Dancers at Susan B. Anthony Academy weren’t ranked and there was no equivalent to “Most Valuable Player” award. But Emma was the best and everyone knew it. She’d gotten more paid jobs dancing than anyone else and she was also modeling, showing off the trim figure she picked up from dancing excessively. She was a trust-fund child and would probably make her living off dance after high school while everyone else was waiting to get engaged at college. But she wasn’t well-equipped to deal with the amount of competition involved. Everyone knew that she would come home, drugged out and unnaturally skinny, a complete mess as a punishment for being so talented.
I didn’t meet Emma until I transferred into her school. She got invited to the same places I did, but she couldn’t go. She was always busy with dance and schoolwork. Her parents loved telling people that. They believed that her grueling schedule would prepare her for anything, while the rest of us were prepared for nothing.
They had it reversed. Learning social skills not fine-tuning dance routines would make it easier to deal with people. And people are more dangerous.
Emma was never officially Meda. But they affected her. When they came, she started skipping classes and doing things for fun, like going to the movies, rather than things that would look good on her résumé. Nothing to hurt herself, but we knew that wouldn’t last. With Scott giving speeches about ending currency and money, the dance team fell apart. The one thing she could cope with was gone. She loved raves, the only place left where she could dance. When she went, she never got high. She smiled while she walked around with her friends who were high. Emma thought it was all a theme park. It wasn’t real to her.
She met Byron about a month after I did. I tried not to learn too much about Byron; he wanted to die. Emma had never been exposed to suicide outside of textbooks. She’d never met someone who was suicidal. She read that anyone who thinks about suicide has only a one in a thousand chance of committing suicide, but she didn’t realize how many people consider it and that it’s a spectrum. Byron was on the far end.
Emma thought that dance could keep Byron alive. Byron used to be a professional dancer, but he got burnt out. Something happened-to this day I’m fuzzy on the details. There was a family emergency or an injury or he couldn’t get a job or something that made him take time off his career. Whatever it was, it kept him from getting it started back up again. And then, a few months later, he wanted to die. He would have gone to a therapist if he had the money to do so. Would have gotten the medication if he could afford it. But he never made that much money and suicide was his only option. So I took him in and kept him at arm’s length. We had about two conversations together before he died.
“You were the only other person who knew him,” Emma said.
Only someone with that little experience would believe it. Someone like Emma who never had time to have more than a few conversations with her friends.
Emma and Byron both quietly opposed to Meda. Emma hated the philosophical aspect of it- she didn’t believe a society could exist without money or corruption. Byron was opposed to the hypocrisy. They protested quietly, by dancing. Scott didn’t want them to dance. Scott didn’t Believe In It. The three of us, with some others, created dances with cryptic stories that Scott didn’t want anyone to know woven into them. Without media coverage, they were the best device we had to keep other people from forgetting what had happened. Byron and Emma weren’t supposed to associate with each other. She was quietly Meda and he was quietly Medax- anti-Meda. But they did. And she talked Byron into giving life a second chance. He agreed to die in April, but he extended it to May.
“I don’t have to kill myself, right?” He asked me.
“You don’t have to,” I said. “But you want to.”
I sincerely believed that being in like with Emma wouldn’t keep him from killing himself. I’ve changed my mind since then, but Byron only made it two weeks after he said he would kill himself.
Bryon died under sketchy circumstances, from stab wounds. But he may or may not have done them to himself. The entire thing happened in one of the buildings were the ambulances, not wanting to get in the middle of our fight, refused to come. His corpse was removed for sanitary reasons, but there was no autopsy. No one ever made a definitive ruling whether or not they were self-inflicted. When I confronted Scott, he told me he never ordered his execution but never said Byron should stay alive. And Scott hired a lot of sketchy people who wouldn’t have thought twice about killing him to do other things for him- sell drugs and most importantly punish anyone who spoke out.
Emma couldn’t handle it. She started doing drugs. One night, she passed out in a car that wasn’t hers. And someone lit it on fire. Her body burnt.
To this day, Emma is considered missing, not dead. But so many people killed her. The car burnt in front of a house full of people, but no one came out until it was too late. She wouldn’t have passed out if Byron hadn’t gotten stabbed. She might have kept Byron at an arm’s length if her parents let her into the outside world.
I taped Byron and Emma dancing. Her smile lives on.