Fall to Pieces

by Vahini Naidoo

  So why the fuck is Explosive Boy here? Why the fuck is he sitting in a circle with a bunch of kids surrounding him?

  I’m heading toward the bench in the corner because I don’t want to talk to anyone right now. I want to slump onto the rusty old bench with its peeling green paint and run my hands over my face and find stray eyelashes and blow them off the pads of my fingers, wishing with all my heart that Amy will come back to life and reply to the text messages I’ve sent.

  But Casey sees me before I can hide away. She waves at me, small hand swaying back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. “Ella!”

  And her face is brighter than the fog lights on Mark’s car, Cherry Bomb. And the other kids, they look like sharks from this distance. To them, her brightness must taste like blood. To them, she must be a meal waiting to happen.

  And maybe I really am sorry about Peter. Maybe that’s why something about Casey’s face makes me move. I wave back and walk over.

  The new kid, Explosive Boy with his firebrand hair, is teaching them origami. Using long pianist’s fingers to twist a blue scrap of paper into a crane. The kids are fascinated. They give him their undivided attention.

  So now he’s Explosive Boy the Kid Whisperer.

  What the fuck?

  “Tristan, Tristan!” one little boy says, drumming a chubby hand against the elbow of Explosive Boy’s beaten leather jacket.

  “Yes?”

  “Can we play duck, duck, goose?”

  “Man,” Explosive Boy says. He’s got just the right amount of air in his voice to sound casual, approachable. Just the right amount of flame to sound warm. “Heath, I haven’t played that game in over ten years—”

  He looks up at me. I look down at him.

  His eyebrows snap together for a second. Then he gets to his feet and smiles at me. A maple syrup smile. I back up, because Explosive Boy isn’t meant to have a smile like that. But he extends a hand and catches mine, stops me from backing up any farther. Up and down, he moves our knotted hands in some kind of screwed-up handshake.

  He smells of gunpowder. Maybe he’s an arsonist. Probably my kind of guy.

  “I’m Tristan,” he says. “I’m volunteering here. Guess you are, too. What’s your name?” He’s smiling at me.

  He probably thinks I’m going to be his new best friend or something.

  “Ella. And you look more like an E to me,” I say. E for Explosive Boy. E because I like having the power to rename him whatever I want to.

  Something shifts behind his eyes. He drops my hand faster than my mother drives. He drops my hand at 180 mph.

  The warmth’s gone from his hazel eyes. And then he’s running his hand through his hair; and I see fingernails chewed down to the quick, and I think This is more like it. This is more like the Explosive Boy I was expecting.

  He gives me a frost-burn look before turning around. “Okay, guys. Heath’s going to get his wish. Let’s split into two groups and play duck, duck, goose. Ella,”—he jerks a thumb at me as if I’m as noteworthy as a carton of milk—“will lead one, and I’ll lead the other.”

  The little boy with the brown hair, Heath, jumps up and down and punches his tiny fists through the air. “Yessss,” he says. It’s so cute it hurts to watch.

  E’s taken a few steps away from me, his back purposefully turned. An ocean of kids already swims around him.

  I’m a lonely island. There are three kids in my group, and they’ve placed a healthy distance between themselves and me. My bitch-face must make me relatively childproof. Halle-fucking-lujah.

  Casey’s stepping toward me now, but she hesitates inches from where E’s standing.

  “What’s up?” he asks her with that maple syrup smile.

  She’s silent, but her dark eyes are looking at me. Looking at me and then looking back at Tristan. Is she going to sidle into the space beside him and join the dark side? For a moment I’m so sure that she will, but then she says “Nothing” to him and bounds over to my side.

  “Hey,” I say, somehow relieved, even though she’s the child here. She’s supposed to be relieved to have me.

  “Are you going to be a duck or a goose?” It’s such a casual question, or at least it should be. But her tone is probing, ponderous. As if she’s just asked me whether I’m going to win or lose, do or see, be or cease.

  “Duck.” Because it’s easier to sit by and do nothing than it is to chase after something.

  I sit next to Casey, cross-legged like I’m back in the fucking third grade. Gravel presses into my jeans, presses against my skin.

  “So,” I say. “Who’s going to be the first goose?”

  The other three kids elect a girl named Maddy, but Casey doesn’t speak. She draws invisible images in the gravel with the tip of her index finger, not daring to lift her eyes.

  We go through the motions. The other kids run around, selecting each other as geese. The boy, Marcus, is even brave enough to pick me, although the circle is so small that I barely have to reach out my arm to tip him and sit back down.

  But no one tips Casey. No one. It’s as if the other kids don’t even see her. She’s given up pretending to trace Da Vinci masterpieces in the dust and is now just tying and retying her shoelaces.

  I want to tell the other children that they have to include her in the game, that they have to tag her. But wouldn’t that make her look like a loser? I glance over at Explosive Boy’s circle. All the kids seem happy, content.

  When I meet his eyes, he doesn’t smile. Just looks pointedly at Casey. At the sadness caressing her face. Sometimes I forget that childhood isn’t easy-breezy like the cover of a magazine. That every hurt I felt when I was six, seven, eight, nine, ten knifed through me exactly like the hurts I feel now.

  Anna, a little redhead, is the goose of the moment. She tags me, and when I stand, I know that I’m going to tag Casey. I’m going to get her involved. She doesn’t realize what’s happening at first—I’m already back in my seat by the time she’s up, confusion hanging on her face like the storm clouds in the sky today.

  “Go,” I tell her. “Go, go, go.”

  She tags Marcus, and it turns out the girl can run. Fast. Faster than any of the other kids.

  When Casey’s sitting down again, she doesn’t let on that anything’s changed. She’s right back to dancing her fingers through the dust. But there’s this tiny smile crawling over her face.

  After, when we’re finished, I say, “Did you like the game?”

  She looks up at me. All big brown eyes and recalcitrance. “Dude,” she says, “I’m ten. Way too old for this.”

  Girl’s got spunk.

  “Well,” I say. “I’m seventeen, and that game nearly blew my mind.”

  Casey laughs at that, really laughs. Ignoring all the other children watching her, she throws back her head and lets the sound pour forth.

  And suddenly it makes sense. Why I’ve been so annoyed at the other kids for treating her badly. Why I’ve been wanting to punch and kick and make Casey’s world safe.

  Because her laugh? It’s pure joy and adrenaline. It’s heartbreak and happy-dance. Beautiful glass crystal shattering in the air.

  It’s Amy’s laugh.

  I cry.

  Not with the children all around. Not as a sitting duck.

  I cry in an alleyway behind the center after everyone’s gone home. A place hidden from all eyes. The last two hours with Casey have been torture. She is Amy, age ten, in so many ways. From the pigtails to the slight chubbiness to the isolation to the silver-framed glasses to the laugh with so much freaking life in it.

  I wrap my arms around myself, lean into the wall. My shadow streaks up the alleyway, long and lanky, beneath a perfect blue sky with streaks of orange sunset.

  Fuck it. Fuck this day for being lovely.

  I kick an empty milk carton off a pile of trash. It hits the wall at the same time that the door next to me crashes open.

  Explosive Boy.

  Seriously? Did he really ha
ve to decide to leave the center through the back entrance that Heather told me no one ever uses? I run my sleeve over my face hoping to catch some tears, to hide them away in the blue material.

  I stare at the filthy ground, at the bird shit clumped around my sneakers. He can’t see me crying. He can’t.

  “Um,” he says. “Hey.”

  Why doesn’t he just go away? Why does he have to stand there watching me like some kind of sadist?

  Maybe he doesn’t know I’m crying. Doesn’t matter. I ignore him, hoping he’ll pick up the hint. Fuck off, E.

  The sound of his footsteps echo through the alleyway. I breathe a sigh of relief, thanking god he’s gone. But then I smell gunpowder. And I realize he’s standing close, too close. I try to back up, but I’m already against the wall.

  He digs around in his pocket, produces a packet of tissues, and holds them out to me. When I make no move to take them, he shoves them at me. I can’t see anything except white tissues and blue packaging. It’s right up in my face, the plastic about to crackle into my nose.

  I take the tissues. More to regain my vision than anything else.

  E step, step, steps away. He heads back through the door, hands stuffed in his pockets. But he turns around just before the door closes, and I can see it twisting his face. Pity. Then he’s gone.

  He pities me. He fucking pities me.

  I slam my shoulders into the wall behind me, let the pain rip through my already-bruised body. Because no one is supposed to pity me. No one. Especially not this boy, this strange, intense boy.

  Ever since Amy died, I haven’t been myself. I haven’t been the girl with energy and anger burning up inside her all the time. Instead, I’ve been the girl with apathy simmering in her stomach.

  But the little pity party E just threw me? It rekindled my flames.

  I stuff the packet of tissues into my pocket.

  Oh, I’m definitely going to light Explosive Boy’s fuse.

  Chapter Four

  “CAN I COME in, honey?”

  Mom’s already in my room, so I don’t know why she’s bothering to pretend she respects my personal space. I’m sure as hell not bothering to reply. I draw the covers up around me.

  Morning silence slumbers over us, broken only by my mother’s sharply drawn breaths. They’re as crisp as her business suits.

  “How was yesterday?” she asks.

  “Wholesome.”

  “How was it really?”

  I press my face more deeply into the pillow. The cotton sticks to my face, making it difficult to breathe. When I finally raise my head to gulp down air like a dying goldfish, the covers fall off me. There’s no getting out of this conversation now.

  I twist to face her. She’s mostly a slim, long silhouette standing beside my empty bookshelf; but morning light falls in dribs and drabs across one side of her face, illuminating half of her aristocratic nose and one bright brown eye. She’s applied her makeup so perfectly that it looks as if she has no crow’s feet.

  “So,” she says. “How was it?”

  “Pretty bad,” I lie. Because really, it wasn’t too bad. “But it’s there or sitting with Roger, right?”

  “Right,” she says, sweeping some of the dust off my bookshelf and straightening her suit. “I’m so glad I organized this for you, honey.”

  I nearly snort. Organized. She fucking bribed Heather Paton to let me volunteer. But I let it slide, because it’s the morning and I could be—should be—sleeping right now. Besides, no one ever wins arguments against my mother.

  Sometimes I think that’s why Dad stopped coming home.

  “I’ll see you when I get back,” she tells me, heading toward the doorway. She pauses, turns to me with this expression that’s softer than my pillow. It’s not an expression I’m used to seeing on my mother’s face, and it leaves me more disoriented than the ray of light slinking through the shutters.

  I squint to avoid blindness.

  When I look back at the doorway, Mom’s gone.

  “Yeah,” I call after her. “See you.”

  But that’s a lie, too. I never see my mother in the evenings. She gets home from work so late, and she just crashes. And I get home from school, or wherever I’ve been after school, a mess. Wanting to throw myself off the third story of the barn, cry my eyes out, or climb up onto my roof and watch the garden, the space where the gnome used to sit.

  Sometimes I want to do all three at once.

  I tend to keep my bedroom door locked, and she tends to keep her bedroom door shut.

  There are locks on our mouths, too. We never talk about Dad. We’ve adopted a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. She knows where he is—I’m certain that she knows where he’s disappeared to for the past few weeks—but she’s sealed away the words, and I don’t care enough to crack her open and pry them out.

  The number of appearances Dad makes at home has been thinning for a while now. Over the past few years he’s been drifting away from his trophy house, the wife who was supposed to be a trophy but who liked her work too much, and his fuckup of a daughter who couldn’t get anything right: not the schoolwork, or the boys, or the basketball. It was after I quit basketball in tenth grade that Dad and I really stopped talking, that Dad really stopped coming home.

  But I get it. I mean, what’s here for him? A kitchen island that all of us sit around together—but apart. Gleaming stainless steel appliances, wide-screen TVs, rich carpets, and an ache. An ache of what was supposed to be in this house, the dreams that were meant to be lived out here but never will be. All of those dreams got buried in our front garden when Amy jumped that night. And our house became even more tomb-like.

  So I won’t ask Mom where Dad’s gone to, because I know why he’s gone, and that’s enough.

  I get out of bed, for the same reason I have each and every morning since Amy died: to escape this place. To escape the silences, the shadows and dust. The hollow spaces. Wandering through my house, it’s clear that a family used to live here. Once upon a time.

  God knows where they’ve gone.

  Brittany Evans tracks me down outside my locker. She thinks we’re friends or something. I don’t know what to tell her. I guess we are, if breathing the same polluted air daily a friendship makes. Her lunch table is just a few over from mine. We go to the same school, attend the same parties.

  She was there that night. At my seventeenth birthday party. I’m pretty sure it’s why the news of Amy’s death spread so quickly. Why, when I returned to school after a week, the first group of freshmen I passed were discussing how Amy had done it. Whether she’d used a rope or a gun or a kitchen knife or a bungee jump without the bounce.

  It’s something I haven’t been able to fathom since Amy died. How people, especially people who knew her, could take the ending of her life and make it another piece of gossip. How they could use it for shits and giggles along with the celebrity fuckup of the week.

  “So,” she says. This is how Brittany always begins a conversation. “So, have you heard about the new boy?”

  She’s probably referring to Explosive Boy, but I haven’t heard about him. I’ve heard from him. “No,” I say, dumping all my books into my locker.

  Brittany snakes an arm past me and picks up one of the books. Hamlet. “You have English Lit first period on Tuesdays, right?”

  She knows my timetable. How very fucking disturbing. “Right,” I say, taking the book from her and tossing it back into my locker. “What do you want, Brittany?”

  Up go the hands. Stop right there, thank you very much, Queen Bitch Ella. That’s what they seem to say, but that’s not what Brittany’s saying. She’s saying, “Whoa, just wanted to talk to an old friend.” I wait for more, because Brittany Evans never wants to just talk to an old friend. “And I was wondering whether you’d heard about the new boy. Tristan? He’s a senior, red hair, kinda cute?”

  I shake my head, even though it’s obvious she’s talking about E.

  “Well,” she continues. �
��I don’t know, but I’ve heard some weird stuff—he’s into burning things, Ella. Shawn Robson saw him give this Bunsen burner the creepiest look in chemistry. And he smells of gunpowder, you know?”

  “Right.”

  “Liz Wu said she saw him yesterday rolling around in the middle of the football field in all that mud. She thinks he was trying to wash away the smell of the gunpowder or something. Maybe he killed someone.”

  I roll my eyes, even though I smelled the gunpowder myself yesterday. “Maybe he just smokes weird shit,” I say.

  Brittany shakes her head. “No,” she says. “Liz swears she smelled gunpowder. What are you going to do, Ella?” She pushes her glasses up her nose, brown eyes wide, shining with excitement.

  Brittany wants me to break this guy because she thinks he’s explosive. She wants to see sparks. I want to break this guy because he dared give me his fucking pity. The whole thing is so ironic that I can almost taste the metal.

  I’m wearing the same pair of jeans as yesterday. Explosive Boy’s packet of tissues is in the pocket. What I’m going to do is make sure that before the day is out he needs those tissues way more than I do. But letting Brittany in on that would be like giving away a war plan to the entire school.

  So I stare her down. “What are you going to do?”

  I slam my locker shut and walk away.

  Chapter Five

  EXPLOSIVE BOY HAS the nerve to smile at me when he walks into English Lit. Has the nerve to sit down directly in front of me. Has the nerve to claim Amy’s seat.

  The smell of gunpowder is even more intense than yesterday.

  I subtly flip him off by trailing my middle finger over the bridge of my nose.

  Mark, who’s sitting beside me, lets out a yelp of laughter. “Being your usual friendly self today, I see,” he says.

  I shrug and kick my feet into the back of Explosive Boy’s chair. Amy’s old chair. Knock, knock, knock, E. Who’s there?