Because the Night

stay away

Diego was Highland royalty? His parents owned the place? Not only that, they ran the place? Lily couldn't hide her shock fast enough. While explaining the photo, Emma's eyes met Lily's. If Lily could trust her perception, she could've sworn that Emma gave her a little wink.  

A perfect flutter. The kind of wink that took practice. In the mirror. Just like Emma's whole appearance, casual yet not a strand out of place. No one woke up like that. Right? 

"As for this little guy?" Emma said, tapping her knuckle against the glass where Diego sat smiling, forever. "You might pass him one of these days in the hotel. He's currently teaching the tango workshop. A warning, though — he doesn't look much like this anymore." 

What Emma didn't say was obvious: He looks big! Sprawling! Muscles visible from his shirts, and his shirts bursting! Oh, no. She was thinking about Diego again. 

Diego Jackson. Diego, a Moody. The joke explained himself. No wonder he was so moody. 

"Right?" Emma asked, looking at Lily. Everyone else turned at looked at Lily too. She just remembered she was wearing her blue dress. "Some of you might know Diego."

"Oh. Yes. Right," Lily said. She turned to everyone. "He, uh, definitely doesn't look like that anymore." 

You know the feeling of sudden heat when your cheeks well up with stored-up embarrassment? Then it gets worse because other people see you and notice? Yeah, Lily stayed burning for a good 30 seconds, by which point the tour was distracted by a very cute baby photo of a side of the Moody clan that retired to a hut off the grid in Maine. 

Lily trudged along the rest of the tour which, after all, had only just begun. Emma opened up a locked door to the side of a hallway, where an old office was perfectly preserved from its days as Ruth Moody's office and quilt-making room. She showed off her favorite view of the lake, available in a porch at the end of the West Wing. The sun was glittering. 

Down below in the lake, Annabelle and Al splashed each other with water and felt like teenagers in an '80s movie. Up here, Lily felt like a teenager in the year 2016: Anxious, thinking only of herself, sweating a bit too much.  Get it together, Lily, you're 22! You can drink now!

That seemed to toughen her up. Even though she was getting hungry from all that dancing and was tempted to waited until the end of the tour to talk to Emma. 

Parked once again at the Grand Staircase, Lily watched as Emma answered questions from lots of older people. Some seemed happy to see Emma again and asked how her "fishing was going this year." Clearly, she had fans. That guy who hit on her at the tour? He was back, too, but quickly got pulled away by his grandma who said, "Talk to girls after  Gran gets her lunch!"

Immediately, Emma walked straight to Lily. "Phew, that took forever. I thought you were going to scamper off." She put her arm around her like they were friends, to Lily's shock. "I've been waiting to talk to you. But here's not the right place. Too many moles."

The hotel was bustling. There were people checking in at the front desk. People in bathing suits trampling out the porch door to the dock to rent paddle boats. This is to say, one looked like a character out of The Matrix. 

"What do you mean?" 

"I know what you're thinking," Emma said. "Everyone is on vacation! But how do you explain him?" She asked, pointing to a man standing at the entry of the library, eyes flickering from group to group. "Security at Highland is designed to blend in. We wouldn't want to take away the atmosphere of vacation, now would we?" 

She pointed to her ears. "But they're always listening. Come on. Game room. It's safer there."

Lily waited to follow Emma. Emma wasn't having that. "You lead the way. You were paying attention on the tour, right?" 

Well, the truth was, she wasn't. Not really. Emma let Lily almost make a disastrously wrong turn toward the dining hall before sighing and saying she really was quite directionally challenged. They turned around and headed towards the game room. 

Lily tried to make small talk. "How long have you worked here?" 

Emma deflected. "It seems like since the start of my adulthood." 

"And do you like it?" 

"Do you like your life?"

After a few rounds of verbal sparring, Emma broke down laughing. "I'm just messing. But I like you. You can keep up." They were just getting to the game room. "So when I tell you the truth about Diego, I expect you to listen."

She leaned on the handle to the game room. Opened it with her hip and pushed the door open with her torso. Then she closed the door and rested her body on the back so no one could get in. Emma's perfectly shaped almond eyes stared upwards for a second. 

"I trust you, and I trust you to believe me when I say this," she said, looking up at the ceiling. Then her eyes shot down, boring right into Lily's. "Stay away from him."

Emma wouldn't elaborate on what made Diego so toxic. "Just, trust me. I've seen things happen to girls like you," she said, twirling her hair and not making eye contact with Lily.

Lily scoffed. Girls like me? She didn't know who Lily was. Lily could be a karate master who once blinded someone with a drop kick, for all Emma knew. Actually, if she were a karate master (which she definitely wasn't), she'd try such a kick now, actually.

She didn't say anything, just stood there with an eyebrow raised, stung. So Emma scrambled.

"It's not that I think you're stupid or susceptible to men's sorcery or anything like that. There's just something about him," she said. She rolled back and forth on her heels a few times, revving herself up to leave the conversation. "Anyway, I have to go. Kayaking ends in half an hour. Gotta get my laps in."

"One more thing before you go," Lily said. "If Diego is so dangerous, why were you in his room the other day?"

"I didn't say he was dangerous."

"What did you say, then?"

"I said to stay away with him. I've seen thing happen to girls – like you. Which you would've known if you were listening. Toodles," she said. She really did say that, too.

Years later, when Lily remembered that week in the hotel, her cheeks would burn with the fresh sting of Emma saying "toodles," then turning on her heels and heading down the hallway with a ruler-straight spine, the kind of posture designed for an audience. Lily felt obligated to watch Emma disappear, and pay reverence to the moment: She had just made her first nemesis.

She wanted take the ugly feeling that was bubbling in her stomach and condense it into something small and compact, like a shiny onyx, maybe, which she could carry with her. And any time she saw Emma again, she'd hold the stone in her hand and remember who she was, how she made her feel: Small, silly, with a second-guess accompanying every decision.

Was Emma giving her advice out of genuine concern? Or was there something else behind Emma's playful eyes? Something that Lily wanted to rip out and expose?

The afternoon was still just getting started. The day stretched on. Lily, once aimless, had a goal: She had to find out the kind of girl she was.

Whatever "kind of girl" Emma thought she was, Lily would be different. Lily was not small, or silly.

Lily was going to Diego.