The Family Photo That Didn't Have Me In It novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Photo
Emery takes her family's portrait at the campus gates, reads a note from her dying future self, and submits a transfer; then they take her studio and her speech, and she sends Amelie a file Amelie never opens.
"Emery, get the gates in. The whole arch, top to bottom."
Dad pointed at my phone and jogged back to the others.
Dad could talk a cop out of a ticket with one joke, and he used the same voice on me.
I took three steps back into the street and lined them up.
Mom and Dad stood on either side of Amelie, their hands making a heart over her head.
Dillon crouched to fix the hem of her white sundress.
Griffin leaned in behind her shoulder with two fingers up and his best smile.
Amelie and I have the same face, the same red hair, the same birthday.
Nobody ever asked who was holding the camera.
I tapped the screen to focus.
The camera vanished.
A note filled the screen, white with black text.
The clock at the top said 2:14.
The date at the bottom was five years from today.
"I'm dying, and they all say this is what I owe my sister."
"The night she drove drunk and killed someone, Mom and Dad got me drunk and put me in the driver's seat."
"Griffin lied under oath to make it stick."
"Emery, don't be so stupid next time. Being good will never make them love you."
The sun beat on the back of my neck, and I went cold to my fingertips.
It read exactly like me when I'm too tired to be polite.
"Emery!" Griffin called. "Today, please. Amelie burns in this sun."
I took a screenshot with a thumb that wouldn't hold still.
The camera came back.
I pressed the shutter, and they were perfect, and I wasn't in it.
I sent the picture to the family chat.
Then I opened the university portal, found the transfer form for the Far North Campus, and signed it with my thumb.
Nine hundred miles north, on a lake, at the end of the train line.
I hit submit before they finished admiring the photo.
"Look at the light on her," Mom said, holding the phone up for Dad. "Em, you have such an eye."
Griffin took Amelie's umbrella and held it over her himself.
I picked up my own duffel and followed them in.
At the housing desk the RA ran her pen down a list.
"Amelie Tilden, room 302, the quad on three."
She looked up at me and smiled for real.
"Emery Tilden? You're one of the state's top ten scholars. They gave you the studio on seven. Room 701, all yours."
She slid two keys across the counter.
Amelie's mouth trembled.
"A whole room by herself," she said softly. "I'll never sleep with three strangers. It's fine. I'll just keep taking my pills."
Mom's hand closed on my wrist, warm and gentle.
Amelie spent her first month in a plastic box in the NICU, and Mom has been standing at that glass for eighteen years.
I was the one who got to stand anywhere else.
"Honey, you're the strong one," Mom said. "You'll be fine anywhere."
Dad squeezed my shoulder. "Be the big sister here. We know you're a good girl."
Mom slid the 701 key out of my palm.
I let her.
The night before the state exams I had a fever of 103.
Mom locked me in the hall closet so Amelie wouldn't catch it.
I took those exams on a bottle of tap water and no sleep, and I made the top ten anyway.
And they'd just traded the prize across a counter to make Amelie stop pouting.
Griffin bent close to my ear.
"That's my good girl," he said. "I knew you wouldn't make a scene."
When I was eight, Dillon shoved me onto our gravel driveway and split my knee open.
Griffin wrapped it in his handkerchief and gave me a peppermint.
"Good girl," he said back then. "I'll protect you from now on."
He'd been using those two words to make me give things away ever since.
I picked up the key to the quad.
That afternoon they took us to a boutique in the mall across from campus.
Amelie came out of the fitting room in a white gown covered in tiny crystals and spun in front of the mirror.
I checked my notes app while she turned.
The memo was gone.
Only the screenshot was left, and I held on to that.
"It's perfect for tomorrow," Dillon said from the velvet couch. "You'll look like a star when you give the freshman speech."
I looked up.
"I'm giving the freshman speech," I said. "The dean picked me last week."
I'd rewritten it fourteen times.
Dillon waved a hand, but he didn't look at me.
"Come on, Em. You hate crowds. Amelie wants to sing for a living. She needs the stage more than you."
Dad was already handing the clerk his card.
"And if I say no?" I asked.
The boutique went quiet.
Griffin stood up and sighed.
"Why are you being so petty today? You'll win a hundred prizes."
"It's five minutes. Are you really going to wreck your family's day over five minutes?"
Amelie looked at me in the mirror with her eyes already shining.
Every face in that room was waiting for me to fold.
I thought of the girl in the note, who folded for five more years.
Not yet, I thought.
Let them have this one.
"Fine," I said. "She can have it."
I opened my documents and sent Amelie the speech.
She threw her arms around my neck. "You're the best sister in the world!"
Her hair smelled like the vanilla shampoo we had both used since we were nine.
While they looked at shoes, I walked out the front doors.
My phone rang on the plaza. A campus number.
"Emery Tilden? This is academic affairs. We have your transfer request for the Far North Campus."
"Yes."
"Once it's processed, you can't transfer back. Not for the whole degree. Are you sure?"
I looked back through the glass at my family, gathered around my sister and a pair of silver heels.
Nobody had noticed I was gone.
"I'm sure," I said. "Process it."
I hung up and checked the message I'd sent Amelie.
Under the file it said Delivered. Not Read.
She hadn't asked a single question about it.
I opened the speech myself and looked at the first line.
"Good morning. My name is Emery Tilden, and I'm a chemist."
Tomorrow at nine, my sister would stand in front of four thousand people and read my name out loud, cold.
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