Such a Fun Age

Before leaving, Emira swoops Briar into the guest bathroom and prepares for their goodbye. Zara saves Emira more time by loudly singing “We Shall Overcome” (290) in the hallway of the home as Tamra and Laney try to get her to stop. Emira gently kisses Briar’s cheek and says goodbye.

Zara and Emira have almost made it out of the house when Emira realizes she doesn’t have her backpack. Emira runs inside the house, grabs the backpack, and Mrs. Chamberlain blocks the exit, saying, “Are you kidding me?” (292). Mrs. Chamberlain begins questioning Emira, but Emira avoids her, rushing towards the front door. As Emira pauses before leaving, Mrs. Chamberlain shouts after her, “Everything we’ve done was for you” (294). In retort, Emira realizes there’s something she can do for Briar, saying, “You gotta act like you like Briar once in a while. Before she like […] really figures it out” (294). Silence falls over the house, and Emira leaves with Zara in an Uber. 

Chapter 27 returns to Alix Chamberlain’s past, when she was a senior in high school and still Alex Murphy. At the end of that school year, she cleaned out senior lockers as a school council member duty. Young Alex worked in trepidation of getting closer to Kelley Copeland’s locker. When she finally found it, it was basically empty and not very dirty. Before she finished, her rag caught on something in the top corner, where there was something stuck in between the locker and the one below it.

Alex discovered five letters she had written Kelley, all stuck between his locker and Robbie Cormier’s. For the last weeks, Alex had wondered how he could have done this to her, but even now that she had proof that Kelley hadn’t done anything, she still felt she had “the freedom to follow the narrative that suited her best” (298). In a few short years, she wouldn’t have to even think of it as a lie: “Kelley was the guy who ruined her senior year, much in the same way that her name was spelled A-l-i-x” (299). 

Although Emira really did follow through on her plan to work for the Green Party, within five weeks she began working as an assistant to a regional director for the US Census Bureau. Over time, her new boss, Paula, coached her into taking on more responsibility.

Emira did not get back together with Kelley and ignored his one text a week after the TV interview. She saw him one time in a farmer’s market, where he “stood next to a light-skinned black woman” whom he was dating (303). Later that year, Emira would also see Briar from afar while the small child tried to get a painted pumpkin that she had made at a carnival. Over time, though Emira developed her own life, she would often “wrestle with what to take from her time at the Chamberlain house” (305), wondering if Briar would be “a self-sufficient person” or “just hire someone to do it for her" (305).