Fall to Pieces

by Vahini Naidoo

  I stifle a laugh and turn my back on him, pretend he’s not there. His breathing still crashes around me. Waves against the shore. He wants to speak; I know he wants to speak. Because I do, too. Words leap to my lips every ten seconds.

  Do you miss your brother?

  Is it my fault? Do you ever feel like it was your fault?

  And then there are more innocuous things:

  What’s your favorite song? What do you think could break this silence?

  Who would you rather do? Stalin or Hitler? It’s Petal’s party question.

  I force these questions to ride the slippery slope back into my mind.

  I have no idea how long we sit there, but it must be a long time. Because eventually my legs feel like stone, and I can’t feel my body. The silence isn’t only around me; it’s in me. Flowing through my blood. Icing up my arteries. Freezing my heart.

  I become blue, blue, blue. So this is what it’s like to be isolated. This is how Amy felt.

  It’s an effort of will to stand here, full of silent thought, and keep myself upright. It’s an effort of sheer fucking will.

  And eventually, I break. I slide to the floor, and I’m shivering. I’m going into panic-attack mode. Crap.

  The ice turns to fire in my limbs. Kick, kick, kick. The dirty wooden floor of the house gives way beneath me. My legs curl into my chest. My head collapses into my chest. Teeth, chattering uncontrollably, collide with my lips. Blood.

  Blood spills.

  Tristan falls to the floor, falls through the dark to sit beside me. His knees hit the battered, bruised wood. He whispers, “Shit, this was a bad idea,” faintly in the background. But I’m already falling into the dark chasm that is my mind. I’m already going, going, gone.

  The bottle smashes on my fence. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, Aaron!” I singsong at the boy who broke it. He grins, shakes a lock of hair into his eyes. He thinks he’s a cute drunk.

  He’s wrong.

  “Get him the fuck outta here,” I snarl at his friends.

  They surround Aaron, ferry him down the side passage of my house, out of my backyard and onto the street. They slowly disappear. One of them pauses beneath the streetlight to salute me. I give him the finger, and drunken laughter floats back to me.

  “Fuck you, too, Ella. See you tomorrow.”

  There comes a point when you’re so bitchy all the time that no one gives a damn anymore. But hating everyone is exhausting, exhausting, exhausting. And Amy’s with me, and she’s drunk as fuck and trying to lick the shards of glass.

  I pick her up off the grass. She heaves in my arms, and vomit splatters the ground. “What happened to not drinking, huh, Ames?”

  She slurs something I can’t even hear. Doof-doof-doof, the bass beat in the house thumps.

  “Do you want to crash in my bedroom?”

  She sounds as if she’s choking, and she vomits again. Looks up at me with the baleful eyes of a drunk. Oh, right. Mark and Pet were making out in front of my parents’ bedroom. Amy’s best friend and boyfriend of the past four years.

  “Okay, well, let’s crash here then.”

  I tug on Amy’s hand, tug her out to a spot that’s free of glass shards and vomit. She flops down first, and I follow. The grass is a soft tickle, and the ground beneath it is even softer. This is the best bed ever. The stars are out, and the moon is out.

  In my peripheral vision the shards of the bottle pick up the moonlight. Amy is slurring on my other side, and I can’t hear what she’s saying.

  “Speak up, Ames.”

  The bass beat. God, my head hurts. I can’t believe I’m still sober enough to give a shit about any of this. I had so much to drink during that stupid game, but I’m still not under. Not quite yet. I’m tempted to grab a beer just so Amy and I can be drunk and miserable together.

  “You know,” Amy says, her voice thick. But she doesn’t bother to pursue her thought. Instead, she plucks a piece of grass and blows her nose with it. I laugh at her, and she joins in, tentatively at first, then hysterically.

  It’s the hysteria that tells me this moment can’t go on being peaceful forever. That this moment is going to shatter, like the shards of whiskey bottle in the moonlight.

  It’s going to fucking explode.

  “You know,” Amy repeats. Whiskey-whisper. How drunk is she? What the fuck is she going to say? And will it be true, or will it just be a product of her blood-alcohol level? There’s no way for me to know.

  “Mark and Pet together so doesn’t surprise me.”

  Her hand lashes out, bumbles in the dark, and finds my stomach.

  “It surprised me.”

  She turns onto her side so she’s facing me instead of the moon and then she says, “But you know, Ella.”

  I look at her and she looks at me, and I wish that she’d just stop saying “you know.” I wish she’d stop beating around the bush and tell me what she’s going on about.

  Suddenly, she’s so close and her foul breath is colliding with my cheek. “I’ve never really loved Mark. He was always just the next best. The next best, I could get because—” Her laugh floats like oil through the thick midnight air.

  She’s taking her time. It feels mysterious; and even with the rap music eating my ear off, I want to shout. It’s just what you do at midnight.

  But then Amy’s speaking. And I have to be attentive because she looks like she’s going to vomit again. And she does, only this time she word-vomits. “I never wanted Mark. I wanted—” She’s crying now, tears crawling down her cheeks like snails. “I wanted you.”

  “Oh, ha-ha, very funny,” I say.

  But we’re still looking at each other, and she’s so fucking close. “Amy?” I say, because she doesn’t look like she’s joking. But god, I don’t know whether this is Amy speaking or drunk-Amy speaking or what.

  And whoever it is, it doesn’t matter. Because I. Do. Not. Know. How. To. Handle. This.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  But she doesn’t say right, and the matter doesn’t blow over. Instead, the moment blows up. She leans over and starts to kiss me. She tastes of alcohol. And god, it’s clumsy. I try to concentrate on the glass sparkling in the grass rather than the whiskey lips pressing against mine.

  I’ve kissed girls before, on dares and whatnot, so I’m thinking that I can handle it.

  But then she starts trying to slip me the tongue, and my head is exploding like a supernova. White noise rings, rings, rings in my head. What. Is. She. Doing? Where does this leave our friendship? She’s drunk. She’ll regret this tomorrow morning.

  She’s my best friend; I don’t want to upset her. But I can’t let her do this.

  I reach out and put a hand against her chest. I push her, and she falls away easily.

  “Amy?” I say.

  She touches her lips. They tremble beneath her fingers. “Oh god,” she whispers. “Oh god. What have I done?” She’s still slurring. “You don’t...you’re not. You don’t swing that way.” She makes a ridiculous swishing movement with her hips, cutting through the grass. “You told me yourself, and you don’t lie about shit like that, do you?”

  “No,” I answer. I don’t know what else to say. And I don’t know who to be angry with anymore. Because if Mark is fooling around behind Amy’s back but Amy’s never really been into Mark, then I don’t know who’s at fault.

  God. Fuck morality.

  All I know is that I love them both.

  And then there’s a click and a flash of silver light. Camera. I turn around, and Mark’s standing there. Shit.

  “Just getting some party shots,” he says. “You and I cool, Amy?”

  She vomits in response, and he just watches us for a second.

  There’s something weird in the way he twists his fingers through his purple ninja-tied style bandanna. How long, exactly, has he been standing there? I ask with my eyes, and he shakes his head.

  Oh. Crap.

  That can only mean that he’s been standing
there forever.

  “Mark—” I say, but he’s already gone. The door swings shut, and he disappears, gets lost in the sounds of the party.

  Amy curls up beside me, crying as if she’s absolutely broken.

  And I am still. I am so still that I’m afraid the night is going to swallow me.

  My chest is tight. My eyes are wide. I’m vaguely aware of my body quivering against the rotten wood. But my mind has become a blank. A black screen saver with one word, all in caps, ghosting across it in fluorescent green: FUCK.

  What the fuck happened after Amy kissed me?

  Oh god, I feel so sick, and I’m shaking and my teeth are chattering. The sickness is in my bones, in my heart, in my mind, in my stomach. Bile at the back of my throat.

  It won’t go away. No matter how much I keep shaking. Tristan’s fingers tear at my arms as he tries to uncurl me, to stretch me out so I can breathe. But my mind is still a roar of white noise with swear words running through it.

  “Ellaellaellaellaella.” My name on repeat, the words bleeding into one another. It’s almost like I don’t know who I am anymore. Because I can’t fucking remember.

  The trembling is starting to recede. I can feel the splinters that have hooked themselves into my skin. Sharp pieces of wood spiked through my palms, my knees. The pain clears my head.

  “Ella?” Tristan laughs. “Oh, thank god.”

  Thank god for what? Does he not realize that I’m poison for him, for anyone? Amy died.

  He’s opened the window. Moonlight waltzes into the room, caressing me.

  “Got some of your memory back?” he asks. His voice is like butter, falling in chunks through the moonbeams.

  I nod. My teeth are still chattering, still clacking into each other and threatening to turn my mouth into a war zone. “T-h-errre was a cammm-er-ra.”

  “What?”

  And that’s when I realize what I have to do. I have to find the camera, find the pictures—please, god, don’t let Mark have erased them. Maybe then I’ll know whether he took a shot of Amy kissing me. Maybe then I’ll know when the last shot of vodka went down. And why Amy went down.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  MY MOTHER’S WAITING for me when I get home. And as soon as I’m through the door, she starts to throw a fit. I’m shocked. Fucking shocked that she even realized I was gone.

  “I called you fifteen times!” she yells at me. “Fifteen times. And your cell was in your room.” She waves my tiny silver phone around in the air. “Jesus Christ, Ella. Why do I even buy these things for you?”

  And I’m trying so, so hard to be better than myself right now. But I still can’t help letting her know the truth. Because I don’t know when I’ll see her again, when she’ll act as if she gives a shit about me again. If Dad could just drive away in the middle of the night, then Mom can certainly go back to her old, workaholic self.

  “Because you’re never around, and you think you can buy my love,” I tell her.

  She turns off the TV. Ooh, so this is serious then.

  “That hurt,” she says.

  “Well, Mom, the years of neglect have kind of hurt, too.”

  “Neglect—”

  “How many conversations have we had in the past year? Come on, I can count them on one hand. Most of them have happened this month.”

  She adjusts her suit, runs her tongue over her lips. “Look, Ella, I’m trying my best, but I’m so busy with work—”

  “Exactly,” I say. “So why don’t you just leave me alone? I’m not complaining. Please, do me a favor and go back to not caring.”

  She shakes her head. “I can’t. I can’t do that. Not when I know that you’re in some kind of trouble.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Trouble?”

  “Your best friend died—you’re grieving, sweetheart—”

  Amy’s death flipped some switch in my mother. Some switch that made her actually want to mother me. Maybe adults aren’t that different from teenagers. Maybe they look at us, and they think we’re going to live forever, just like we do.

  Until one of us dies and shatters the illusion.

  “Ella,” my mother says, “you need me.”

  But I don’t. I haven’t needed her since I was ten and she stopped talking to me.

  And god, I want to cry. Because I should need her. I should need my mother. But it’s been too long. It’s been far too long, and I can’t even listen to her saying these things anymore. It’s like a stranger’s professing her love for me.

  It feels fucking weird.

  So I head toward the stairs, toward my bedroom. All I want to do is slither between the sheets and pretend to sleep. And think about how I’m going to get my hands on Mark’s camera.

  “Ella, get back here,” my mom practically shrieks. “I’m your mother.”

  “When you choose to be.”

  I start making my way up the staircase, taking them two at a time.

  “Don’t you dare walk away from me!”

  “Why not? Dad sure did.”

  “Your father and I are getting a divorce,” she says, even though I’ve still got my back turned to her. I’m nearly at the landing now. “I was going to tell you; I didn’t want you to find out like this—” I’ve never heard my mother this inarticulate before. “You know it just wasn’t working out between us—it hasn’t been for years. But it’s different with you. You’re stuck with me for life.”

  I keep heading up the stairs.

  When I’ve made it to the safe zone of the landing, I hide in the shadows and finally turn around to look at my mother.

  She’s standing between our two couches, staring at the room as if she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She picks up a cushion, brings it to her chest.

  A lump barges into my throat. Maybe I should head back downstairs. Maybe I should open up to her about everything, cry on her shoulder like she seems to want me to.

  But I can’t. It would be too weird to cry on the shoulder of a woman I barely speak to beyond hellos and good-byes and good mornings.

  But I hope that maybe this is a first step, a step closer to each other. Because right now, I can imagine wanting to cry on her shoulder one day. I can imagine choosing to be her daughter one day.

  And I couldn’t imagine that this morning.

  I shut my door quietly and slip between the covers even though I know that this is just a show I put on for myself. Even though I know that I’ll swing my way out the window, Tarzan style, and climb up onto the roof in an hour or so.

  I think about the memory that snapped into my brain when I was thrashing on the floor of that house in Ghost Town. And with the covers curled up all around me, the world totally shut out, I press my fingers to my lips.

  I still can’t believe that Amy kissed me.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  WE’RE STANDING IN front of yet another window this morning. So many opportunities sliding into my life lately.

  I look up. Slice of pie-blue sky. I look down. Loose soil beneath my feet.

  Tristan stands next to me, whispering a constant stream of swear words because we should be at school right now. Not about to commit a felony.

  I turn to him. “Hoist me up?”

  He shakes his head. Once, twice, three times. “I—Ella. What are we doing?”

  “Breaking and entering, obviously.”

  I’m aware that my attempt to play it cool probably just looks stupid. After all, yesterday I was twitching on the floor of an abandoned house.

  He rolls his eyes. “Obviously. Obviously.”

  “You’re the one who said you wanted to ‘help me’ get over Amy, right?”

  “I wasn’t aware it involved breaking the law.”

  “Well, it does. Now help me up if I need it, okay?”

  Mark’s bedroom window is on the ground floor, but his yard’s on a steep slope, so there’s a bunch of concrete foundation underneath the house to make sure everything’s level. Which means his window is something I can on
ly just reach with my fingertips.

  I remind myself that this is not weird. I’ve done this before, when Mark and Amy and I sneaked out to a concert in tenth grade, and he and Amy and I crashed at his house after. God knows, Amy and I didn’t want to go home and face our parents.

  And Mark’s parents just didn’t give a shit.

  The soil slips a little beneath my feet, and I reach up, curling my fingers around the window ledge.

  I catalog the differences between this time and last time.

  Last time, it was night. Last time, Mark and Amy were laughing like maniacs. Last time, I had permission to enter.

  This time, I’m breaking in because I don’t trust my oldest friend. And, shit, I’m beginning to sound like those girls who have fights with their friends in the school bathrooms. They’re always going on about “trust” and what it means, and it’s like blah blah in my head when they speak.

  I don’t want to be like them, blah-ing on forever, so I stop thinking and start pulling myself up. My feet scrape against the side of the house. I look down and see the peeling white paint dancing away beneath my feet, falling to the ground like snowflakes.

  My feet continue to scrabble. I’m not getting anywhere. It feels as if I’m running on a treadmill, kicking out against the same square of white wall over and over again. I lunge a little, dig my nails into the wooden sill, and hiss, “Tristan!”

  “Oh, right.”

  He moves to stand under me, and suddenly his hands are beneath my feet and he’s lifting. My arms get a little breathing space. I keep one hand on the sill and fasten the fingers of the other around the latch at the side of Mark’s window and pull. It slides open.

  Now to deal with the screen. Mark put it in a few years back when his house was getting invaded by cockroaches and ants. Except, being the lazy idiot he is, he didn’t do it properly. The screen isn’t attached to anything; it’s placed against the inside of the window, and there’s a little bit of tape on the side—I’m not kidding, he used fucking tape—to make sure it doesn’t fall off.

  I remove the tape, and the screen falls onto my head. Guess I should have thought that through a little more. “Ouch,” I say, rubbing my scalp as Tristan’s soft laughter floats up to me.