by Zhang,Amy
Jake was drunk when he showed up, and their pictures showed it. Liz told him not to drive and he told her to relax and then to fuck off, and by then she was pissed enough to let him go.
He arrived in one piece, though, and they grinded for maybe two songs before Jake disappeared, and Liz grabbed another boy and wondered why she was surprised. A scavenger hunt, a yes—did she really expect that to mean that Jake would change? People never changed.
She went to get a drink and hovered by the door to the gym for a moment, watching. There was a wall of heat there, and it smelled like the boys’ locker room. The floor was damp with sweat, and when she finally went back in and grabbed Thomas Bane’s hand, his shirt was so wet that it stuck to his torso.
She didn’t care. She danced and danced and closed her eyes, and when the DJ announced the end and the lights came on again, she grabbed Julia and Kennie so they could go party.
They didn’t, however, end up going anywhere.
Instead, they sat in the school parking lot inside Liz’s Mercedes and listed off the things they knew.
First, that Kyle Jensen would break up with Kennie if he found out. Kyle had colleges considering him for tennis scholarships and he would never jeopardize that, and he was an asshole besides. They wouldn’t tell him, because he would have dumped Kennie for much less.
Second, that they would keep it a secret. No one but Kennie, Liz, and Julia would ever know. Liz would get Kennie whatever she needed. Kennie must never, ever tell her parents. They would kill her. They would literally throw her out on the streets.
Third, that Kennie had to get rid of the baby.
“Wait,” Kennie said into the silence. “What?”
“Kennie,” said Liz, staring ahead into the dark parking lot, “you can’t keep the baby. You know that.”
Kennie curled over, her arms wrapped around her middle, her head on her knees.
“Liz,” she said, trying to keep the tremor from her voice.
Liz ignored her. “We’ll get you an appointment as soon as possible. Before it’s too late. How long have you known?”
“Liz.”
“Damn it, Kennie. God, if you ran out of condoms, why didn’t you go buy some? You live a freaking mile from the gas station. It would have taken two seconds. Damn it all. You could have asked either of us. God, Kennie. I have birth control in my fucking purse. God. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. We’ll get rid of it.”
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CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Fourteen Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Liz got back onto the interstate after her single detour. She wiped her eyes and thought of Newton’s Third Law. Equal and opposite reactions. That was the one she had struggled with the most. Moving objects, not moving objects, force and mass and acceleration—she had been able puzzle those out, mostly. But for their unit on Newton’s Third Law, the law of action and reaction, Mr. Eliezer put hyperlinks and videos on his website and told them to just go for it. It was supposed to teach them critical thinking and twenty-first-century skills and time management and other useless crap.
Naturally, most of the class sat on the countertops and shot rubber bands at each other.
Liz liked being in control, and she had the necessary leadership—manipulation—skills, but she was also a bit lazy. She never did today what she could do tomorrow, and she always believed herself when she used eventually as an excuse.
This inevitably led to late-night cramming sessions, which was exactly where she found herself the night before the test on Newton’s third law. Unfortunately, Mr. Eliezer decided to surprise them with an essay test instead of multiple choice.
Liz’s conclusion had read: NEWTON WAS A SPECTACULAR MAN AND MR. ELIEZER, I’D REALLY, REALLY APPRECIATE A D ON THIS TEST.
He gave her a D minus and a warning to study for exams. Liz had promised that she would, because at the time, she’d had every intention of doing so, eventually. But soon after, things began to slip downhill very quickly, and Liz gave up. The week before exams was her last week ever; she knew exactly which day she would get out of bed and never return, and her promise to study Newton the virgin felt more distant than a dream.
She knew it was stupid to try to understand now, since there were an infinite number of things she would never understand, so why should Newton’s Third Law of Motion matter more than any of those? She, Liz Emerson, was going to cease to exist in mere minutes, and everything she knew would disappear. It didn’t matter at all, what she did or did not understand.
She started thinking about all of the things she had done, all of the horrible things she had set in motion, and she wondered why none of them seemed to have had equal and opposite reactions. She thought about Julia’s addiction and Kennie’s baby and Liam’s sadness and all of those other people she had kicked to pieces, and she thought about how she was never caught. Never. She was never punished for any of it. She had never gotten a suspension or an expulsion or a deportation, though she probably deserved all of them.
Liz Emerson had dished out a lot of sadness in her short and catastrophic life, and no one had ever done anything about it.
She did not realize that the equal and opposite reaction was this: every terrible, horrible, bitchy thing Liz had ever done had bounced back to her.
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CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
All These Impossible Things
Kennie had always been happy as a follower—a good thing, because she had always been a follower. She had grown so used to following that when the topic of abortion came up, Kennie almost agreed without considering what she wanted.
There was, of course, the fact that Liz was right. God, her parents would disown her. She would never go to college. All of Meridian—half of which went to her church and would think of her during every single sermon about fornication—would give her dirty looks for the rest of her miserable, collegeless, homeless, parentless, unequivocally suckish life.
After Liz dropped her off, Kennie went inside, cried so hard that she puked, and somehow made herself believe that it was morning sickness, never mind that she was only about six weeks in. She took a shower and then suddenly it was all very real to her, this pregnancy. When the purple positive sign first appeared on the test, her heart had fallen out of her chest, but she had told herself that it was a hoax and ignored it. When her period never came, she finally told Liz and Julia, and now, Kennie put her hands on her stomach and believed for the first time that there could be a person inside her.
So sometime between shampooing and conditioning, she stopped being stupid and started falling in love.
It was kind of amazing, that there was something inside her, alive, breathing in and out—metaphorically, of course—and growing with each moment. It was very precious to her, suddenly, life. She had never valued it as much as she did then.
She wanted to keep the baby.
Kennie had always loved babies.
She had never taken care of anything before. Her parents were the definition of overprotective, and where they did not interfere, her brother did. Kennie had grown up so safe and sheltered and spoiled that she had learned little during her life except how to lie—a necessary skill if she wanted to have the barest semblance of privacy. In her heart, Kennie was younger than Liz or Julia, and she didn’t like it.
In the shower that night, Kennie cried harder than she had ever cried before. She cried until the shower was icy rain all around her, because she wanted impossible things.
After her mother pounded on the bathroom door, demanding what was taking so long, Kennie came out, got dressed, and stayed up all night.
She sat in the darkness and tried to sort out her options. She put her hands on her st
omach and hugged the growing life inside her, and tried to find a path wide enough for both of them.
She had $639.34 left in her savings account from her summer job at McCrap’s. That might cover a month in one of those really disgusting apartments by the highway. Of course, her parents had guardianship over her bank account, and they’d probably lock her out of it.
She could call her brother, but he was halfway across the country now, and it didn’t seem likely that he would help her. Never mind how many babies his girlfriends had probably aborted—he would side with their parents.
Maybe she could stay with Liz or Julia. But she’d still be in Meridian and people would still find out. Of course, she wouldn’t even have to stay with Liz or Julia unless her parents kicked her out, and her parents wouldn’t kick her out unless they knew she was pregnant, and if they found out, they’d tell the entire town anyway. She was going in circles.
Around three o’clock, she ran out of tears and decided to stop thinking about what to do.
Instead she thought about the baby.
My baby, she thought.
She didn’t care about the gender. An hour later, she had names picked out for both, perfect names. She wanted to buy baby clothes. She wanted a car seat. She wanted a future that she could build all by herself.
But when she curled up beneath the covers and listened to her breath bouncing off her blankets, she began crying again because she knew she couldn’t do it, not really, not ever.
She couldn’t.
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CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Thirteen Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Liz fumbled to get her phone out of her back pocket. The car swerved a bit, and her breath caught. A strange thing rose in her chest; she didn’t know if it was fear or anticipation, but then it burst and she was hollow again.
She unlocked her phone and opened Facebook, and scrolled through her pictures until she found the one she was searching for. It was from the summer before eighth grade, and the three of them stood with the state fair in the background. Julia was wearing a pair of sunglasses she had just bought from the vendor behind them, and Kennie was holding a dish of deep-fried pickles.
That was the last time they ever went to the fair, though Kennie brought the pickles up on a regular basis as a not-so-subtle hint. The appeal of carnival games and rides beneath an open sky had disappeared.
In the picture, Julia was still beautiful and brilliant and fully alive. Clear too, without the poison leaking out at the edges. And Kennie. She was laughing, of course, laughing like she used to—so loudly that an echo reached Liz through all the years and secrets and mistakes. God, how long had it been since she had heard Kennie laugh like that?
This was the before picture, and it broke Liz’s heart.
Liz stared at her phone. She wanted to go back. She wanted to be a little girl again, the one who thought getting high meant being pushed on the swings and pain was falling off her bike.
I want to go back.
I wanted her to come back too.
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CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
The Abortion Clinic
Silence in the Mercedes.
And then.
“Want me to go with you?” asked Liz.
Kennie bit her lip. Her eyes were closed, but Liz could see her eyelashes glimmering with the tears she was trying so hard to hold back. Kennie wasn’t wearing any makeup. Liz couldn’t remember the last time she had seen Kennie without makeup.
Liz couldn’t stand it. She leaned forward and hugged her tight, and tried to swallow the lump in her own throat. “Hey,” she said, but her voice was a plea. “It’ll be okay. Okay?”
Kennie nodded against her shoulder but said nothing. She got out of the car.
Liz sat in the parking lot alone. There it was, the silence again. It grew and pounded until at last she moved, savagely, jammed the keys into the ignition and backed up with a squeal. She drove down the street to the gas station, where she grabbed a pack of condoms, slapped it on the counter, and dared the cashier to comment.
She went back to the clinic, and when Kennie came out, Liz gave her the condoms. Kennie stared at them.
“I can’t,” she said. “Not for a month, at least. I’ll tell Kyle I’m on my period.”
For a month? Liz wanted to say. She didn’t. “Just in case.”
Kennie closed the condoms in her fist. She shoved them in her purse and didn’t look at Liz.
And only then, when it was too late, Liz wondered if she’d made a mistake. Here, she’d wanted to say. You still have Kyle. You have us.
Liz dropped Kennie off and watched her walk into the house, and she began to cry. She cried as she drove, and she didn’t care that she couldn’t see the road.
You still have me.
The worst part of being forgotten, I think, is watching.
I watched her cry. There had been silent tears and ones that barely leaked out. There were tears that heaved from her in great sobs. They all slipped through my fingers when I tried to catch them, they fell around her in oceans.
I watched her carve her mistakes in stone, and they arranged themselves around her,. They became a maze with walls that reached the sky. Because she learned from so few of them, she was lost. Because she didn’t have faith in anything, she didn’t try to find a way out.
I watched her try to face her fears alone, too proud to ask for help, too stubborn to admit she was afraid, too small to fight them, too tired to fly away.
I watched Liz grow up.
You still have me.
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CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
One Day Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
After lunch, they had a Random Pep Assembly.
Their principal had established RPAs—because that was actually what they were called—last year to “boost student morale,” the lack of which became the official excuse as to why Meridian’s test scores had failed to meet state standards yet again. No one complained because it meant shorter classes and an afternoon of doing nothing.
Today, the teachers would have a free-throw competition, and the Future Farmers of America (a club that Liz often ridiculed) held a fund-raiser for their spring trip to the National Dairy Expo (seriously, they made it too easy), letting students buy votes to nominate a teacher to kiss a pig. They raised more than two thousand dollars.
Liz remembered why she used to like school. It was an escape from her enormous, silent house. School was always noisy, filled to the brim with different and irritating people. But between sophomore year and junior year, she began to want to escape school too, because now the hallways were filled with people she had torn apart.
On her way to the gym, she saw Lauren Melbrook. After she, Julia, and Kennie had spray-painted SLUT across her front lawn, Lauren had kind of faded. Liz knew that she used to be part of that Ralph Lauren sweater-set group, but of course they had pushed her away after the pictures made their way around Facebook. There were rumors that Lauren was now on heroin, and though Liz knew that she shouldn’t put too much faith in gossip, Lauren was indeed walking with a group of verifiable dealers.
Liz took her seat in the front with the other kids who went to the right parties and wore the right clothes and kissed the right people, but as she sat, she caught sight of Sandra Garrison’s round stomach. She had gotten pregnant about a year after the pregnancy and abortion rumors had made the rounds. Since everyone thought Sandra had already been pregnant once, she figured that she might as well live up to expectations. She was a senior now, but no way
was she going to college. A pity—she had been on her way to being valedictorian.
And there was Justin Strayes, sitting alone at the edge of the bleachers. His GPA had nosedived after the drug dog incident, and now he was on the brink of failing every single one of his classes. And he had been voted Most Likely to Succeed at the end of eighth grade.
A cheer erupted from the gym floor—Mr. Eliezer had just won the free-throw contest. The girls around her were screaming their heads off, because Mr. Eliezer was the youngest teacher in the school, and hot.
Kennie was on the floor with the dance team, Julia was waiting to sing with the rest of the show choir, and even Jake was on the sidelines, waiting to give a speech for the student government.
Liz felt very small after spotting each of them. Everyone around her was just bursting with talent—except perhaps Jake, who, for the sake of the nation, she hoped would never be allowed to have anything to do with the government. Still, even Jake was funny and almost smart, and once he grew up a bit, Liz thought that he could make someone happy. Maybe.
In that moment, Liz Emerson felt that she was forever looking up at people who were much, much better than she ever could be, and the only thing she was really good at was pulling them down to her level.
A part of her couldn’t help but hope that she simply hadn’t found what she was meant for yet, so when the assembly ended and everyone headed for the parking lot, Liz slipped through the crowd and headed to the guidance counselor’s office.
Yesterday, she had told Julia to get help. Here was a chance for her to not be a hypocrite, and surely she owed it to herself to take it.
Liz was reluctant because she and her counselor had had a deep and unspoken hatred for each other ever since she had blown up in his office last year, after he had tried to impress upon her that she simply didn’t have the intellect to take AP classes and refused to change her schedule to accommodate the classes she wanted to take.