Fall to Pieces

by Vahini Naidoo

  “To me you’re still the same person.”

  I realize—too late—that this is the wrong thing to say. She wants to have changed, to have become better. Freshman and sophomore years weren’t just about losing her weight; they were about losing her personality—her lame, geeky personality.

  How much of this running around and breaking into shopping centers at midnight shit is her? How much of it is her making herself up?

  Who is my best friend?

  It doesn’t really matter, because I don’t even know who I am. What matters is that I love her and that she’s shattering right in front of me. I take her hand and whisper as we ascend the stairs. “It’s okay, Ames. It’s okay. We loved you then and we loved you now. Always will.”

  And then we reach the top of the stairs, the top floor of my house. It should be silent, because I’ve warned everyone to stay away from here or else face annihilation. But the darkness has a certain animalistic breath. It reeks of alcohol even worse than Amy and me.

  “Oi,” I say, spotting a black shadow shape in the corner against the door of my parents’ bedroom. “Who’s there?”

  The couple leaps apart, jumping as if my words are flames burning guilt into their skin.

  I can’t believe it: Mark and Pet. Staring back at us.

  As of this moment, I want their guilt to burn them.

  “Amy,” Mark begins, taking a step toward us. “Amy, I can expl—”

  She’s gone, slipping away from me, from us, again. Splintering heels on stairs. Sob, sob, sob. It sounds as if each of the steps is cracking beneath Amy’s feet.

  I stare at Mark and Petal. “What the fuck are you doing?” I ask them.

  Mark said he could explain. Please, God, let him be able to explain.

  I open my eyes. Another dart zooms into the space next to my belly. I feel sick again. I’m surprised to see Tristan with his arm raised, ready to throw his dart. He’s too far away to be able to see my face fall, tumbling like a house of cards.

  “STOP!” I yell. “STOP!”

  Because if Mark has an explanation, I want to hear it right now.

  Chapter Ninteen

  HE DOES HAVE an explanation, but it’s so unbelievable I don’t know if I ever want to talk to him again.

  I look up at the gnome. Swallow, find my voice.

  “What were you on? Both of you. What the fuck made you think kissing Pet would help you figure out how to make Amy happy?”

  Mark cradles his head in his hands and rocks back and forth. “I’m an idiot,” he moans.

  “Me, too,” Petal says. “Such a fucking idiot.”

  “In more ways than one,” Tristan says to Petal. “I mean, you could do a lot better than him.”

  I swear, Tristan’s jokes always come at ridiculously inappropriate moments. I glare him into silence, meet the eyes of my two best friends in the world, and say, “What happened that night? What else happened that you don’t want to tell me about?”

  “Nothing.”

  But like always, there is something so stilted about the way Mark says it. He’s lying. He’s been lying all along, and his story is finally starting to unravel. Like a thread from the end of a T-shirt, if I pull and pull and pull, all the lies will eventually fall out.

  For instance, he still hasn’t answered my question about why in god’s name he thought “kissing lessons” from Petal were a good idea. This shit about not being able to “please” Amy and thinking he needed some practice is completely insane. I need to keep pulling at that thread.

  “Seriously? Nothing? Where was I, then? When Amy died? Was I with you or Pet?”

  The questions pour out of my mouth. Black and ugly and impossible to run from. Like tar on the surface of a road. I force myself to pause, to wait for the answers.

  “I don’t know where you were—” And it feels like the millionth time that I’ve received this bullshit answer. He looks at Pet, and she shakes her head, too.

  “I don’t know, either,” she says.

  I’m probably imagining things. I hope I’m imagining things. But for a second there it seriously looked like Mark’s eyes widened, that he warned Petal off saying something. I look from one to the other, trying to find the secret that lies between them.

  Petal’s fingers twist in and out of one another. She’s always been a bad liar.

  “Amy was pissed off at us for what we did. She ran off, and none of us saw her after that.”

  But now she’s tearing a piece of hay to pieces. She can’t even look at me.

  I want to shout that she’s lying, that it’s not true. But a broken image comes to me. I hear their echoing voices chasing me down the stairs as I chased after Amy.

  My head falls into my hands. My palms attempt to rub the wrinkles from my forehead. Why can’t I remember any more? What is my mind refusing to show me? What are they refusing to tell me?

  I thought our friendship was worth more.

  But then I remember Amy, how far we let her go; and I wonder whether these friendships were ever really as strong as I thought they were if we were ignoring stuff like that.

  If we were ignoring Amy never getting a tray in the cafeteria. Amy looking hollow, looking like a coffin. Like death.

  And then an idea hits me, and my heart feels as if it’s sitting at the bottom of my belly. What if I was with her when she jumped?

  “Was I—” My words are swallowed into my stomach, too. I want to sink to the floor and stay there, but I don’t. I remain standing. I enunciate slowly and carefully. “Was I with her when she—you know?”

  They stare back at me, stricken. I’m not sure whether it’s because I’ve found out their secret or whether it’s because they’re just shocked at the idea. My stomach twists, spins like a hurricane. My heart is caught up in the eye of the storm.

  Mark swallows. “No,” he says. “No, no way. You couldn’t have been.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we would have seen you on the roof when we ran out. And you weren’t; you were on the ground with us.”

  Except. I can climb down that tree in less than a minute. I could have met them on the ground, and no one would have known. Everyone who saw me that night saw me looking at her body, thought I was flaking apart. Crumbling.

  The photos show me white-faced with bloodshot eyes, sobbing, hair sticking out at weird angles. And my hands. In the pictures, my hands look like blurs, because I couldn’t stop them from shaking.

  What if that reaction wasn’t just grief?

  But I say, “Okay.” Because accepting what Mark’s saying makes it easier to get up and walk around the barn. It makes it easier to pick up my thoughts, pluck them out of the hay, and arrange them. Annotate them like I do my homework.

  “I still don’t get it, Mark. What were you on?”

  He shakes his head. “Only pot. Jason gave it to me,” he says. “Petal wasn’t on anything that I’m aware of.”

  “Just drunk,” she says. She’s crying. Not those noisy sobs that demand attention but this quiet kind of crying. Almost as if her soul is washing away with her tears.

  This isn’t all there is to it. I can just feel it. I can see it in the way Mark scuffs his shoe across the ground and darts his eyes from piece of hay to piece of hay. He refuses to look at me, and I won’t look at anything except him and Petal.

  And she’s still not looking at me, either.

  Why is it that my two best friends won’t look at me and the random new kid will? Why is it that Tristan’s staring at me with this weird expression on his face? As if he thinks my mind is a puzzle that he can work out if he concentrates hard enough.

  But my mind is not a puzzle. Like everyone else’s mind, it’s a fucking maze. Twist, turn, twist, turn...turn, turn, twist. No matter how hard Tristan tries to delve into my mind he’s going to get lost. Because god knows I feel lost inside my own head, and if I can’t sort this shit out then no one else can, either.

  And Mark is still looking at the ground, at his
shoelaces. And Petal is looking at Mark’s shoelaces, too, and her chipped red nail polish and the roof of the barn. She starts humming some goddamn country song, and oh, my god.

  Oh, my god.

  I’m not sure I can handle them kissing each other the night Amy died. Because I’ve been blaming myself, but what if it wasn’t me? What if it was them?

  Does it even matter who or what it was? Nothing changes the fact that Amy became a scribble on my front lawn. All of us still ignored the fact that she was breaking until it was too late. Nothing will ever change that.

  I’m crying like Pet now. Crying and pacing, trying to gather my thoughts. But for each thought that I slot into position, more thoughts escape, slip through the strands of my hair and through the hay like smoke.

  “I need—”

  Cut-off sentence, disappearing along with my jumbled thoughts. I don’t know what I need; I don’t fucking know.

  I can’t take it anymore. The silence, the tense, fucking silence that Mark and Pet refuse to break with the truth. They’re not going to tell me. I know they’re not going to tell me, so what’s the point?

  Screw this.

  So I do what I seem to be doing a lot of these days when things get hard. I leave.

  I walk straight out the door, past a shocked Mark, Pet, and Tristan. I pick up pieces of hay, fragments of thought, as I walk. And then I’m out of the barn, away from their scrutiny. The sky examines me; and I continue, wandering, sorting through the bouquet of hay bunched in my hands.

  I walk down the winding path toward town. Then I change my mind and walk back in the other direction. And I break into a run, because it’s the only thing I know how to do. Run and jump off things and do my homework.

  The thump of my feet against the ground. The thwack of shoes against dirt. It should feel like something; it should send vibrations curling up my legs. But it’s too much; it’s all too much, and I can barely breathe right now, let alone feel anything.

  And then someone yells, “Hey, wait up!”

  I stop. Because I’m dumb like that, listening to people and shit. I turn to see who it is. Again, because I’m stupid. It’s Tristan. I want to groan; I want to keep running until I’m just away.

  “Ella!”

  Something in his voice stops me. It’s so—raw. My name’s exposed like a broken cord, a copper wire twisting out from the black rubber.

  And it stops me, and he sprints toward me doing his whole bullet-run again. I know he can’t stop himself, so I dodge to one side to prevent him from barreling into me. He manages to stop by wrapping an arm around a stop sign.

  He breathes heavily, hands on knees. He stares up at me with those pretty hazel eyes, waiting for me to speak, but I have nothing to say. Nothing.

  “How you doing?” is what eventually comes out. Just like at the tree the other day.

  “Fine, fine.” He runs a hand through his explosive hair. Straightens up. His breathing evens out. “It’s not me who just discovered a petty love affair that occurred on the night of her best friend’s death.”

  I punch him in a jokey way but still hard, because I’m goddamn pissed. “Yeah. And don’t use that cheesy voice again or else I will actually hurt you.” I do a few threatening uppercuts, fists slicing through blue sky, almost reaching the fluffy clouds.

  Mark did this exact same thing when we were walking through the park on our way back from the bridge.

  It seems like eons ago. Everything was hanging by a thread then. I had a feeling that they were hiding something, but now I know that I was right. And I know some of what they were hiding.

  Now that thread has been snipped. Now everything feels broken.

  I can’t trust them anymore.

  What else are they keeping from me?

  Nothing. That’s what Mark said. But it was one of his sideways words.

  I look up from my shoes and find Tristan staring at me.

  “What?” I start to move once more. Walking instead of running. I’m giving him time to get his breath back, and he knows it. A ridiculous grin lights up his face.

  “What?” I snap at him again.

  “What?” He echoes me like a parrot, head tilted to one side, chin jutting out like a crazy violinist’s. “Where are you going, is what I was going to ask.”

  “Oh. Right. Um, I want to go to Ghost Town if that’s okay with you.” This is my way of admitting that I want him to come with me. That I don’t want to be alone.

  Because all the kids clear out of Ghost Town once it gets dark.

  “Ghost Town?”

  I sigh. Must this boy have everything explained to him? “The other side of the river. There’re a couple of abandoned houses there.”

  “Seriously?” he asks. “All those houses on the other side of the river are abandoned?”

  “Yeah. Don’t worry, there are no ghosts.”

  He laughs, but I notice the way his fingers slide into the pockets of his jeans. I see his thumbs, pressing hard against the material. White, drained of blood. I wonder if he’s imagining Ethan’s ghost creaking through the Ghost Town houses.

  I know I’m imagining Amy’s.

  I’ve already started steering us toward Ghost Town when I remember that I left the gnome with Mark and Petal. I’m tempted to run all the way back up this gray, winding path to the barn just to get it. Because the gnome is my ref. The gnome is my safety blanket.

  And without the gnome? Everything feels unstable.

  I want to reach out and latch on to Tristan, bury my fingers in his jacket to regain my balance. But I know it’s emotional balance I’m lacking, not physical. So I gulp down air and keep walking.

  “Why are you coming with me?”

  He meets my eyes, and I hate him for it. I hate him for his ability to look at me. Because my best friends won’t even look at me.

  “I told you I was going to help you find out what Amy felt like. And I meant it.”

  I put my hands on my hips. It’s taking every last piece of resolve I have to keep my barriers up, to keep my tone harsh. “Well, you don’t seem too into Pick Me Ups. What do you propose?”

  He’s unfazed. He plucks some hay from the bouquet I’m still holding. Steals one of my thoughts and slides it into his mouth. He puffs on the hay as if it’s a cigarette, or a pipe and he’s Sherlock fucking Holmes. Solving the mystery of my best friend’s suicide.

  Or was it even that? The police were convinced, the ambulance people were convinced. But we didn’t have to physically push Amy. Word after word after word could have prodded and poked her onto the precipice.

  Snap. Her neck breaking in the weeds.

  It’s not just sticks and stones that break bones like everyone seems to think. Words break bones from the inside out. They sink into our bloodstream, into our bone marrow and eat away at us.

  They break bones. They break hearts. They break souls.

  And we’re still walking. And Tristan’s still puffing away on his cigarette-hay. And the sky is still blue, and the world still feels gray.

  “Tristan?” I want him to speak, to say something because I don’t want to think anymore. “What do you propose? How can I really feel like Amy?”

  I carry on a few short steps before I realize he’s stopped walking. Curious, I turn around, the bouquet of hay—my gathered thoughts—clutched to my chest like a shield as I wait for his answer.

  He takes the hay out of his mouth and twirls it between his palms. I watch it, watch him. “Pick Me Ups make you feel a rush, right? They make you feel high?”

  I give a small nod.

  “Do you honestly think Amy felt high when she was about to die?”

  He’s said similar things before, but not in this voice. Not like this. Not so that it actually registered.

  This. It hits me in the gut. Winds me. Of course not. Of course she didn’t feel high when she was about to die.

  “Suicide isn’t about an adrenaline rush.”

  He’s so right. It’s not. It’s about the oppos
ite. It’s about the feeling I get when I’m coming down from a Pick Me Up. The sludgy black tar that tears at my intestines. The poison that seems to fill the air.

  Adrenaline rushes are addictive. Suicide is not addictive, not at all.

  But I stand my ground and stare at Tristan over the space that separates us. “What,” I ask, “do you propose?”

  “It’s a surprise,” he says, tapping his nose. “You’ll just have to wait and see. On Monday, after work.”

  Chapter Twenty

  AT MIDNIGHT I find myself sliding open my bedroom window. The tree next to it, the one that brushes up against the side of the house at certain points, has become a close friend this month. I stand on the window ledge and step onto one of the lower branches, fastening my fingers around a branch that floats overhead.

  Soon I’ve swung myself up onto that branch. Then the one above it. The one above that.

  And now I’m on the roof. I’m on the roof, and I can see the spot Amy must have jumped from, because she took some of the tiles on the edge with her.

  From up here you can see the entire street, the houses that glow like furnaces in the dark. Occasionally, in some of the uncurtained windows, silhouettes dance into my line of vision. But I don’t come up here for the view.

  I come up here to close my eyes and imagine surfing down the sloping roof, tiles falling away beneath my feet. I come here to imagine smashing into weeds just like Amy did.

  A moth settles on my skin, and my eyes flicker open, flicker over to the patch of grass on my front lawn where my best friend died.

  I asked my parents if we could move somewhere else after it happened. But Mom told me to stop being ridiculous. We’d have to wait a few years, at least, before it would be worth selling the house. No one wants to buy a house where a girl has died. Especially not for a premium price.

  The putter of an engine cuts the still night air. A silver Lexus peels down the street and pulls up directly in front of our house. Dad. He’s getting out of the car now. Most of his face is shadowed, but weak moonlight dips over the tip of his nose. He starts toward the house, his shoes thushing against the damp grass.