Fall to Pieces

by Vahini Naidoo

  Our words are high-pitched knives in the dark, arrows zinging through the silence as we shred one another to pieces. Mark tells Amy that he saw her kissing me.

  In the here and now, Petal looks surprised—maybe she was too out of it to remember that detail. Or maybe she had chosen to forget some memories of her own.

  And then there’s a cutoff image of Mark, his body only visible from the waist down. I watch the way his body language changes. Languid to fluid. Laid-back to intense. Rage, bitterness in the way his shoes bite into the tiles. His steps are so drawn into themselves that he barely makes a sound against the tiles of my rooftop. They don’t flake and clatter away beneath his feet like they did under mine.

  I can’t see Amy or myself in any of the shots. But I can hear her laughing, laughing so wildly. And then I can hear the ceramic tiles falling away. That must have been when she spun around me like a ballerina, forcing me to dance with her and almost fall off the roof.

  Her words, crackly but still so intense, come next. “I need Ella.”

  And then the jump.

  Mark’s bent down, his face swimming into the frame, yelling to Petal. Panic flickers, flames to life on his face. She stumbles into the frame and then she and Mark are both leaning down, and Petal’s foot collides with the camera.

  It tumbles farther down the roof, and suddenly Amy and I are on-screen. I’m slipping. Amy’s already way over the edge, and I’m hanging on by just a few fingers.

  Mark’s fingers close around my wrist, and he’s pulling and he’s pulling and he’s pulling. But right now, I’m not focused on him; I’m focused on the very edge of the camera screen. It’s a shot of our hands, mine and Amy’s, twined together.

  At the very last second, when I’m yelling something incoherent and Mark’s pulling so hard, Amy’s fingers slip from mine.

  I’m crying and crying and crying as I watch her fall off the screen.

  Petal leans over the edge and makes a grab for her, but it’s useless.

  Then there are a series of brief, unfocused images and then darkness.

  And in the barn, there is nothing but the sound of us breathing.

  “She’s gone,” I say. “She’s really gone.”

  And I’m weeping from the realization and the relief. Because Amy, she pulled me right down to the brink of death with her, but I got a second chance at life. I got a second chance. And I wish, wish, wish that she’d gotten a second chance, too.

  No one else seems to know what to say to that. There’s silence for three heartbeats’ time, then Mark breaks the memory card in half. Like Humpty Dumpty, like Amy, it can’t be put back together again. He throws the halves into the grave. Tiny blue pieces of technology surrounded by huge walls of dirt.

  It disappears into the hole we’ve dug, and Mark draws his sleeve across his eyes. I pat him on the back, and Petal puts her arms around his neck.

  “It’s better this way,” she says. “It’s better to remember and move on.”

  “Right,” I say. “That’s why we’re here.”

  I lift the dartboard with both arms. “Good-bye,” I whisper as I toss it into the grave.

  My body still sometimes craves the adrenaline, the high-definition picture of the world that comes after the fall, after a dart zings past your head. But this is the end of it. Pick Me Ups won’t be so hard to resist anymore. They’re finally getting buried.

  Petal flings the dress over the dartboard. “I’ve wanted to give this back to you for a while,” she says as though Amy is there.

  And who knows, maybe she is.

  The records and posters, possibly the most important things in the world to Amy, go next. Then Mark reaches into his pocket and pulls out the purple scarf, the one that held all the photos.

  “Nice breaking and entering, by the way,” he says. “My next-door neighbor got an eyeful of your ass. He’s a perv.”

  I wonder whether you should be allowed to mention things like that when you are saying farewell to your best friend.

  “This was Amy’s favorite scarf,” Mark says. He unfolds it, revealing the photos from that night and dumping them into the grave.

  We’re all misty-eyed, but we don’t acknowledge that we’re crying. If no one speaks about it, we can always deny it later.

  “We done?” Petal asks.

  Tristan nods, as if to say She was your friend; I don’t have anything to add.

  Mark nods. He’s done. Photos gone, posters gone, records breaking into the earth. Music for Amy’s grave.

  They all turn to me. I clear my throat. “I’m not done.”

  I pick up my backpack off the floor behind me and brush away the stray pieces of straw. I used to brush Amy’s hair away from her face like that sometimes, when her bangs obscured her eyes.

  Then I close my eyes and let myself feel the pain.

  Because ignoring it isn’t going to make it go away, no matter how hard I try.

  I open my backpack and pull out the gnome. For the past month I’ve kept it in my bedroom, a constant link between Amy and myself. “I thought I should—” I stop speaking. There’s no need. They know what I want to do, and they’re in total agreement.

  Good-bye, only witness to Amy’s death.

  Good-bye, Ref.

  The gnome falls into the grave and smashes one of the records in half.

  The shattered pieces sink into the damp earth, sticking out like wedges of pie.

  “Now I’m done.”

  We all nod and get down on our knees again. We sweep the mound of dirt back into the grave. Bit by bit, we cover up the pieces of Amy’s spirit. The spirit that deserved so much more. The pieces disappear, eventually, becoming a part of the earth.

  The gnome is no longer watching.