Mark always swings by. He has ever since he got his license. But after Amy died, he only gives me lifts to school on certain days. Other days we go to the mall, Ghost Town, the local pool.
Once or twice we’ve gone to the barn.
“Listen, Jill. I’m so sorry, but I have to go. I’ve got something on the stove and it’s burning, but I look forward to seeing you when you get home!” She clicks the cordless phone back into its cradle and turns to me.
“You’re not waiting for Mark.” She glares at me for what seems like the millionth time this morning, as if she knows exactly what we’ve been up to. Her lips tighten into a toothpick-thin line. “I’m driving you to school.” She readjusts her suit, picks up her car keys.
Guess this business meeting’s over.
In the car, she insists on talking to me.
MOM: So how was the child care center yesterday?
ME: Sadistic.
MOM: Ella, I know it’s hard for you to see this right now, but I’m just trying to help. I’m not trying to be sadistic.
ME: I didn’t mean you. I meant that everyone there is a sadist, especially my boss. And the children are perverts.
MOM: I’m sure it’s not that bad.
ME: They’re either drawing some seriously fucked-up bananas or penises on that blackboard, Mom.
MOM: Watch your mouth.
Cue silence. It hums and thrums between us. Eventually, Mom departs from her usually perfect driving behavior: she takes her eyes off the road and trains them on me. They linger on my scabby knee.
Mom’s lip curls. This is not a face of concern. This is a face of Contempt and Shame.
She pulls into the school parking lot and reverse-parks expertly, settling the car securely between the white lines. She even manages to avoid the pothole at the back of this car space.
I swear, sometimes it’s as if my mother’s inhuman.
She stares straight ahead, through the windshield at the boring brick wall of my school, and swallows. “Ella,” she says.
Is it possible that I scare this woman?
“Ella, are you—”
“I have to go or I’ll be late.”
I open the door, kick my legs out of the car and onto the pavement. I turn back to my mother, a good-bye ready on my lips. But she’s opening her mouth again, and I’m sure something hideous is about to crawl out.
I slam the door shut before I can hear what it is. Her words pummel the window instead of me.
Meeting. Fucking. Adjourned.
But I know what she was going to say. I know. Her words stalk me across the parking lot. They ring in my ears, loud and clear.
I’m sorry, honey, so sorry; but this situation really is of your own making...
She’s said it before. She keeps on saying it. Every time she bothers to talk to me. Which is usually whenever I look too sad. Whenever I stop being fine, fine, fine.
It kills me, because I know she’s right. Despite what the school counselor told me in that one session we had right after Amy died. It’s not your fault. You should never think it’s your fault.
But who threw the party?
Who let wine and whiskey and beer and vodka-spiked punch into the place?
Who drank so much that she can’t remember shit about the party?
Me. Me. Me, again.
I’m a fucked-up daughter because I threw the stupid, stereotypical, suburban-idiot party. I’m a fucked-up friend because I didn’t look out for Amy.
Where the fuck was I when she fell?
What happened that night? It’s a question that’s always on my mind. It’s a question that I’m willing to sacrifice anything to finally answer.
Because I don’t think I can live with myself if I don’t know.
Still, I wish Mom wouldn’t constantly remind me of my failure. It’s not as if I tell her every time I see her that the situation with Dad is all of your own making, honey.
And that’s true, too.
Chapter Fifteen
THURSDAY PASSES LIKE any other school day: slowly. I attend half my classes and spend the other half sitting next to Amy’s old locker, fiddling with the combination lock. They’ve reset her password and given it to some other student already. A girl named Justine. I heard one of her friends calling to her this morning when she was standing beside Amy’s locker. Watched the swish of her blond hair as she turned to answer with a smile.
She seemed totally unaware that her locker used to belong to someone else. That her locker used to belong to the dead girl.
After school I make one last visit to that corridor. I take in the dust motes floating in the colorful light streaming through the stained glass windows—the space already feels somehow different. Somehow lesser.
And it’s a fear, a fear that makes itself heard above the constant ache from my bruises. The world will move on. The world will move on without Amy, and I’ll be left there standing still in a river of time. My hands splashing desperately through the waters around me, trying to catch the truth, trying to catch something, and always finding nothing.
I avoid Mark and Petal in the parking lot. Don’t even dare to look over at Cherry Bomb as I walk on by. Because my body may crave a Pick Me Up. But today my mind is too wrecked to play their games. To deal with Mark’s sideways smile, Petal’s extended silences.
I go straight home instead.
I go straight home; and in my bedroom, with so many useless, desperate thoughts to avoid and nothing better to distract me from them, I devour my homework as if it’s a Family fucking Feast.
I speed through my calc questions, English notes on Act 1 of Hamlet, science and history. When it’s all gone, when the notes for each subject are taken and lying in piles on my desk with colorful, annotated tabs sticking out the sides, I’m winded.
As if I’ve run a marathon.
I choke and wheeze among piles of homework. Because when there’s nothing else, no homework to distract me, no lying friends to puzzle the truth out of, I feel myself starting to lose it.
My fingers are shaking. My hands are shaking. I clamp down on the desk to try and stop the tremors passing through me, but that doesn’t work. The table just rattles along with me. Fuck. This. Shit.
Anxiety attacks are, apparently, normal when you don’t like the fact that your best friend threw herself off your roof. And landed in front of your garden gnome.
I get up, take a few deep breaths. It feels as if I’m running over jelly instead of carpet when I cross the room, open the door, and zip through the hall. Slide out the front door.
Run and run and run and run. I’m still barefoot. Grass slips between my toes. Sun-warmed pavement smashes into my blisters, burning me. I wince but keep running, and the ground starts to fall away beneath me. Starts to feel slippery like jelly, all too easy to sink into.
I’ve had panic attacks before—before Amy died, that is. I used to have them on game days for basketball, when I was all keyed up and so terrified of passing the ball to the wrong person.
That’s why I gave up basketball. Because I was scared of making mistakes.
I wonder whether I gave up on Amy for the same reason. Because I was afraid I’d screw up things.
I keep blaming it on myself. And I know I shouldn’t, because it’s whiny and because the school counselor’s a professional, an expert; and she told me that it wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t my fault.
But what if it is?
I brought it up. I almost suggested it to Amy, didn’t I? But maybe it was like Mark and Pet said before, how you can tell stuff about a person sometimes. Apparently, I’m an open book full of blank pages, but even E can read my cover.
How long can she keep up this way? he wondered.
“Forever,” I wheeze. “Forever,” I spit defiantly at the brilliant blue sky, at the pavement, at the grass that I step onto. It tickles my feet as if greeting my defiance with laughter.
And the grass is right to laugh because, crap, I’m not a machine. My panting breaths h
it the grass; my hands hit my knees.
On the upside, when blood roars through my head like this, when my breath comes in short, sharp gasps, the world solidifies. The sensation of running through jelly and sinking into quicksand disappears.
I’m in someone else’s yard, and I reach out and wrap my arm around a low-hanging tree branch to steady myself. And before I know what I’m doing, I’m swinging my legs up, too. Arms circling the branch, feet crossed over the wood. My body hangs, suspended. Wind rushes through the crevice between my stomach, my knees, and the branch.
Blood rushes to my head because of the almost upside-down position I’m in.
I swing, swing, swing myself upright.
My teeth chatter as I stretch out my hands to catch the next branch. I’m swinging again, twisting myself up and over. In eighth-grade gym class, my teachers said I showed some promise on the bars—flips, back rolls, hanging positions, they were all easy for me—but I was never this good.
Even last year my arms would have given out.
But after Amy died? God, the number of times I’ve climbed the tree outside my bedroom window. The number of times I’ve sat on my roof at midnight and thought about smashing into the weeds in my garden—not dying, but smashing into the weeds.
The sun is falling around me, and it feels as if the sky is melting into the tree. I feel my feet against the branches, feel how easy it would be to slip and fall.
Splat. In the grass.
But the gnome isn’t here, and there are no weeds to lose myself in.
So I just haul myself up onto the next branch and let my legs dangle above the ground. The thin branch bends, and there’s this moment when I’m thinking, Snap, come on, snap.
But then I see someone jogging down the road, cutting through the melting sunset. It’s E. And when he sees me—and the bending branch—he breaks into a run. A run so fast he goes from grenade to bullet.
I have no idea why he insists on giving a shit about me, and I have no idea what he thinks running’s going to do. I’m up a tree; it’s climbing skills he needs right now.
As he nears the tree, it becomes clear that he’s barreling along so fast he’s not going to be able to stop.
Wham! Bark crashes down around him. He topples back onto the prickly carpet of grass. “Oof,” he says.
Maybe I should flip him off. Or I could tell him to go away and never come back. But I decide to play things cool. I kick my legs through the chilly evening air. “How you doing, E?”
He glares up at me. “It’s Tristan, Ella,” he says. “I know you want to get with me, but turning our names into some screwed-up alliteration isn’t going to do the trick.”
I raise my eyebrows and pull a Mark. “Coooooeeeeee!” I call into the fading light. Then I start singing “Humpty Dumpty” really loudly because I know it’ll piss him off. I can see him connecting the dots in his mind. Ella’s sitting on a wall. Ella could fall off the wall, and would all the king’s horses and all the king’s men be able to put her together again?
But Ella’s a bitch. And Humpty was just a nice egg of a guy, so we really can’t draw any parallels between the two stories, can we?
I wait for him to interrupt me, but he doesn’t. When I glance at him he’s totally silent, rays of sunlight dying behind his head, setting him on fire.
I sing louder. So loud that someone opens their window to yell “Shut up!” at me.
I’m not sure where the voice came from, so I give the finger to every house on the street. The lacy curtains in one house drop back into position quickly. Trust the owners of lacy fucking curtains to be spoilsports.
Amy’s parents owned—own—lacy curtains.
In the process of laughing and making sure my finger is pointing straight at the curtain owners, I slip. My adrenaline spikes, flies away into the twilight as I begin to fall. But I manage to grab the branch just in time.
E’s shouting up at me, “Ella, come on. Come down. This won’t solve anything.”
“What won’t?” I ask him, dangling.
“Jumping like Amy.”
“Fuck off. I wasn’t intending to do that.”
“Okay, so that’s why you should come down.”
Bullets cannot be gentle. Grenades cannot be gentle.
He’s still holding back.
“Relax, I’m not going to kill myself. I just wanted to see the pretty scenery.”
“So come down for fuck’s sake.”
And there it is. An explosive voice, for my Explosive Boy. “Okay, I’ll jump down—”
“That’s not what I meant!”
“But it’s how I want to get down. Are you forgetting what Pick Me Ups are? What we’re doing to always remember Amy?”
“But you’re not trying to remember Amy, are you?” He’s shouting, hands tangling through his hair.
The lacy-curtain owner yells something about the police at us. I’m surprised to see he’s a big man with a beer belly. Normally the threat of police, of authority would make me budge. But I feel about as dead inside as the twigs spattered over the ground.
So I yell, “Oh, go fuck yourself !”
At the same time as E yells, “The cops can fuck themselves!”
We both burst out laughing. Lacy-curtain-beer-gut shoves his window shut.
“Good riddance,” I mutter.
“Come down, Ella.” E’s voice is softer now.
“What do you mean I don’t want to remember Amy? And I don’t even know you. Why do you care about me? Why don’t you just, sort of, go away?”
“Go away?” His laugh slices through the air. “Okay, number one, you were a part of a plan to shove me off a bridge. And then you saved my life. Whether or not you like it, you know me. We’re fucking acquaintances at the very least. I care about you because I’d care about anyone who was sitting in a tree like an idiot. And I can’t go away because I’d feel guilty forever if I kept walking to the supermarket and left you here.”
Oh, thank god. The knots in my stomach untie themselves. He didn’t come here looking for me; he’s just going shopping.
I realize he’s waiting for a response. So I shrug, because it seems like a safe thing to do. No one can like you, hate you, feel anything about you if you go through life shrugging.
He fixes me with this look. This look that tells me he knows I’m playing with him and he’d really appreciate it if I dropped the act.
I shrug my shoulders again. To piss him off, yeah. But also because really, this is who I am. I am all act with nothing underneath. I have constructed myself like an IKEA kitchen. Sturdy on the outside but hollow and unstable on the inside.
I really only have one mode, one attitude. Maybe that’s why it pisses me off when Explosive Boy goes from gunpowder and smoke to Kid Whisperer to fucking chivalry, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Like he doesn’t feel he has to be a certain way all the time.
“Can I ask you a question?” E asks, cutting through my thoughts.
“Just did. And I’m answering: no.”
He ignores me and continues. “Can you just be nice for one goddamn second?”
“Another question. But sure I can.” I make my voice sweet, sugary. “How can I help you, sir?”
He shudders. “Not that nice. That’s just scary—what I’m saying is, be a normal person and get out of the freaking tree, okay, Ella?”
“But I’m not normal.”
“Pretend. You know you’re good at it.”
What the fuck is that supposed to mean?
I don’t want to hear the answer, so I don’t ask.
Instead, I act as if I’m thinking about his proposition seriously. I even scratch my chin and toy with an imaginary beard. “Well,” I say eventually, drawing out the word, “what’s in it for me?”
“If you come down,” he says, “I promise to help you find out how Amy really felt before she died.”
Leaves whisper against my skin, and I turn my face to catch the sunlight, only to find it gone. Darknes
s curls around me. “No one could possibly know how she felt.”
My voice is so low that I’m surprised he catches the words.
“No, that’s true. No one could ever fully understand. But I’ve been to that place with someone else before. My brother. He was suffering all his life, Ella. Everything—” Fiery sobs in the still night air. Explosive Boy is not meant to do this. He’s not meant to implode like this.
It hits me then that yeah, I’m messed up; but this guy’s got some problems, too. Should’ve guessed based on the fact that he smells like gunpowder and skips class in the middle of storms to take mud baths out on the football field.
“Right,” I say. “Right.”
Somehow my weak voice gives him the courage to go on. He swallows the fire. But now that I know it’s there, I can see it, burning through the blood that pumps under his skin. Struggling to get out.
“Everything went wrong for Ethan.” He meets my eyes now. “I used to call him E—”
Guilt trips me, makes me want to fall off the branch onto the grass below. If some dipshit started calling me Ames every ten seconds, I’d probably strangle them.
So E’s going to be Tristan from now on. “Shit. Sorry. You should have said something.”
And I still sound like a bitch. My cold, unfeeling, metallic voice makes the night air tangy. Rusty.
Tristan takes it like a man. Doesn’t bat an eyelid, an eyelash. “Ethan took pills when he turned sixteen. I was fourteen then. My brother died in my bedroom.” And suddenly he’s gone—not literally, but I can see him running in his mind. Avoiding the memory.
Eyes glazed over. Lips trembling. “He vomited a lot at the end—”
I’m reminded of myself in the park, of the vomit that Tristan could barely look at. Things are snapping into place now, the way a broken bone does when a doctor sets it. “Right.”
My vocabulary is obviously limited to right and fuck at the moment.
“My sheets were all messed up.”
His sheets? Yeah. Like that’s the most important thing that got messed up. Reading between the lines, I’d say Tristan wants me to replace my sheets with my life, my mind, my world. Because when someone you love does that to themselves, everything in the universe starts to spin like a top.
Fall to Pieces Page 9