Free Sealed with a promise by Mary Margret Daughtridge Page B

research interests, would find her more desirable than a Navy SEAL.
      Emmie shook her head and her hair, which had worked its way under the sling again, and tugged her scalp viciously-reminding her that thinking about Blount only brought pain. She freed her hair with a sigh.
      Caleb was probably right. She was just feeling vulnerable because she couldn’t deal with him from a position of authority. So what if she didn’t like feeling rescued? She needed his help, and he was generous enough to give it to her. Her grandmother would tell her it was her duty to accept it graciously without reading anything into it. She had to get the cake taken care of, and the sooner the better. This situation was affecting her judgment.
      It was time to remember her purpose for asking him to help her. This was for Pickett.
      Emmie didn’t know what she would have done if Pickett hadn’t come into her life. When she tried to imagine it, she’d get a mental picture of herself becoming flatter and flatter until she became completely one-dimensional and then turned into a design on the wallpaper.
      She had been caught in a positive feedback loop. The child of missionaries, she had been sent “home” when she was twelve to a place where everyone was a stranger. At an age when kids crave acceptance like oxygen and want more than anything to fit in, she had been an oddity. She didn’t wear the right clothes, understand the slang, or follow their code of behavior. She had been homeschooled by her mother far beyond her classmates. Inevitably, she gravitated to the one area where she shone, her schoolwork. The more she succeeded intellectually, the further she moved from kids her age. Still living at home with her grandmother, Emmie entered college at fifteen and graduated two and a half years later.
      At eighteen she went to another university to begin her Ph.D., and that’s where she got lucky. Her grandmother insisted she live on campus in a dorm, and since Emmie was eighteen, she was assigned a freshman roommate-Pickett.
      Pickett had a kind heart and a gift for listening. With gentle and inexorable patience, she drew Emmie out. Emmie’s inability to carry on teenage chatter was no barrier-in fact, Emmie thought she had offered Pickett a challenge to sharpen her fledgling therapist skills on.
      Pickett grasped that Emmie was uniquely suited to a scholar’s life but insisted Emmie had to develop herself in other areas. Emmie had a nice soprano voice-Pickett alternately cajoled and nagged her until she joined a choral group. Emmie could sketch-she needed elec-tives in art. What Pickett didn’t say, but Emmie now knew, was that both disciplines had a long tradition of respecting the dedicated amateur, and both were tolerant of nonconformists.
      Pickett took Emmie to Shakespeare festivals and bluegrass festivals. Emmie developed a passion for Shakespeare, an interest in antique musical instruments, and a slight proficiency on the Autoharp. And when Emmie’s grandmother passed away halfway through that first year-from then on, Pickett took Emmie home with her.
      Whenever Emmie remembered those years of exploration, she feared Pickett had been a better friend to her than she had been to Pickett, even though Pickett disagreed that the relationship was one-sided. There was one way Emmie had changed Pickett’s life for the better. She had recognized something was wrong with Pickett physically. She was only sorry that it had taken so long for her to put all the clues together. She might not have if she hadn’t read an article on gliadin proteins that mentioned celiac disease. Researcher that she was, she immediately looked it up-and recognized Pickett.
      Only she understood how much of Pickett’s self-concept had been eroded by not having the energy, the stamina, and the vigor expected of a person her age. Her high-achieving family had believed Pickett had a character flaw that kept her from doing her best, and