You Are Here by Jennifer E. Smith Page A

the path. It took him a moment to notice she’d fallen behind, and when he did, he spun around with his eyebrows raised high above the rim of his glasses. They remained there like that for a few beats too long, squared off and uncertain, each nearly lost to the darkness.
    “I’m sure they had their reasons,” he said eventually.
    “Well, I want to know what they were,” she said. “I mean, maybe something really bad happened. Maybe there was an accident or something, or someone wasn’t watching him carefully enough, and—”
    “Emma,” Peter said, cutting her off, a look on his face that fell halfway between sympathy and impatience. “This isn’t a movie. Bad things just happen sometimes.”
    She was struck by the sound of his voice, so full of reproach. After a moment he turned to start walking again, his head bowed and his arms held stiffly at his sides.
    “That’s it?” she called after him. “ That’s your answer? Bad things just happen sometimes?” She shook her head, then pushed past him, plunging farther down the path on her own. “That’s not good enough. At least not for me.”
    She could hear his footsteps on the dry ground, the snap of twigs as he followed her. She wasn’t sure whether he had an answer for that, whether he’d planned to respond, because before either could say anything more, they broke through the band of trees and stumbled out into a clearing. Emma stared at the sight before her, rings of gravestones like crop formations rising from the wine-colored shadows. There were rows upon rows of unmarked headstones fanning out in half-moon shapes, tiling the manicured lawn.
    “What is this?” she whispered, following Peter between the lines of pale stones, which spiraled outward like veins across the bruised and broken land. The whole ghostly formation centered around a looming monument, the white marble bright in the dark, and it was here that Peter paused. After a moment Emma realized that he was speaking, his voice low and his head bent, murmuring almost unconsciously.
    She moved closer, standing just beside him, so that their shoulders were nearly touching as they tilted their heads to look up at the monument.
    “Peter?” she asked, but he didn’t look at her.
    “Lincoln’s address,” he said, without any trace of embarrassment. “This is about where he made it.”
    Emma nodded, falling quiet again to let him continue, listening as he chanted the words as if in prayer. And when he finished, she closed her eyes.
    “‘The world will little note,’” she said softly. “I like that line.”
    Peter nodded. “‘The world will little note,’” he repeated, “‘nor long remember what we say here.’”
    “They thought it would be just a footnote,” she said, thinking how they couldn’t have possibly known, those soldiers buried beneath this very ground. They couldn’t have realized that this speech, this battle, this particular moment would live on so powerfully. It had refused to stay a footnote. It had refused to be forgotten.
    Peter swept an arm across the cemetery. “Some people say it’s haunted.”
    “You believe in that sort of thing?”
    “Not really,” he said with a little shrug. He seemed about to say something more, then changed his mind, turning to start the walk back. But Emma stood where she was, suddenly reminded of another cemetery—the ending point to this trip—and of her brother, who had been buried there after only two short days in the world. Emma rubbed her hands together, suddenly cold. She closed her eyes, and it was almost as if he were there beside her, not a ghost or a memory, but just a feeling of great comfort, like she suddenly had at her side the one person in the world who would ever understand her.
    She smiled, letting her eyelids flutter open again, but when she turned to look, it was not her brother—neither real nor imagined—but Peter who was standing just inches away from her, lost in thought and smiling,