“I sometimes take two, three baths a day,” she said. “But the water always gets cold, and then I feel like a slab in the morgue.”
“What?”
“A cold pancake!” she chirped brightly, performing a sudden, graceful twirl, her arms outstretched, spinning like a snowflake in a storm.
I stood there, drawn to her like a magnet, understanding none of it, not a word.
A corpse in a morgue?
“There’s nothing sadder than a cold pancake,” I finally said.
She stopped spinning to stare at me, staggering a little, still dizzy from her whirling dance. “You’re right!” she exclaimed. “Cold pancakes suck ass. Let’s climb a tree!”
Then she raced off, giddy, toward the tall pines.
I followed. What else was I going to do? Like I just wrote, I was metal (mental?) and she was my magnet.
MEETING WITH LANEWAY
I scoped out his office a few times, strolled down the hallway, checking out what’s what. One time the door was open and I spied Laneway at his desk. I half-stepped, half-leaned in, and said, “So this is where the magic happens, huh?”
He pulled on his mustache, closed the book on his desk.
“Hello, Sam.”
I glanced around the small, cramped office, bursting with books, boxes, piles of papers, articles and photographs torn from magazines and thumb-tacked to bulletin boards. “I see you’re a hoarder,” I joked.
He leaned back in his chair, hands hammocked behind his head, and looked around at the office as if seeing it for the first time. He said, “People usually ask me, ‘Why do you keep all this stuff?’ And I always wonder, ‘Why do you throw it all away?’”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” I said.
He didn’t say anything. Just looked at me, waiting.
“Well, anyway, just saying hi.” I inched out of the room.
“Are you free?” he asked.
I hesitated. “I’ve got band.”
“I could write a pass,” he offered. “Sit, if you’d like.”
So I sat.
“What’s up?” he asked.
I looked down at the hands on my lap. “I started a journal, like you suggested.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Sam. How’s it going?”
“I’m trying to keep up with it,” I said. “A little bit every day.”
Another silence. Maybe Mr. Laneway couldn’t think of anything worth saying. Maybe he didn’t mind the quiet.
Finally, he asked, “Has it helped?”
“Helped?” I repeated. “You mean, like with…”
“Morgan,” he said.
There were no windows in his office, and I really could have used a window right then. The air felt suddenly stagnant, the walls too close.
“I sometimes think it was my fault,” I said, unbelievably. I mean, I never intended to say that to anyone.
He sat up a little straighter. “Is there a reason why you feel that way?”
“A reason? Like one reason? No,” I said.
Then I talked for a while. Not about the message board, not that, in so many words. But maybe I gave him enough to figure it out. Mostly I talked about Morgan and me. The times we hung out. And how I rejected her at school. It was impossible to tell all of it. But bits and pieces came gushing out, like blood from a sliced thumb.
“And how are you feeling about all this?” he asked.
(Seriously?)
“Pretty crappy,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied. “Yes, Sam. I can see that. Let me ask you. Is this about her social media page?”
(He knew? He knew!)
I looked away from his serious, super-earnest face. All I could do was nod yes. “Some,” I said.
“I see.”
More silence, but a worse kind. This one was heavy, thick, sorrowful.
I studied the tile pattern of the floor.
“You participated in it?” he asked.
“I wrote some things,” I said. “Then I stopped.”
“Did you ever tell anyone?”
I shrugged helplessly.
“That must be a hard thing to live with,” he said.
At first, I thought he meant Morgan. Because, obviously. Then I realized he was talking about me. I was the one who lived.
Mr. Laneway pushed a box of Kleenex toward me. I frowned, wiped my eyes with the back of my sleeve. He stood up, walked away, returned with a glass of water. “Thanks,” I said, and drank it.
“In times like this,” he said, now leaning against the front of his desk, close to me, voice very quiet. “In these times,” he sighed, searching for words, “many good, decent people look within and find ourselves wanting. We can’t help but wonder.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, but the sound of his voice made me feel better.
“We ask ourselves, ‘What could I have done?’” he said. “We feel—”
“Like failures,” I said.
“Yes, like failures,” he said. “But that’s only natural. It probably means that you’re a caring person.”
“I don’t know, doubtful.” I shook my head. “I really don’t.”
“I do,” he said. “When someone takes her own life, Sam, it’s a horrible, awful, heartbreaking tragedy. We can never fully understand why.”
I nodded, sniffled.
He said, “We can’t know what goes on inside someone’s head, or the circumstances of her life, or exactly why anyone does the things she does. Depression can be a devastating illness. We have to live with that unknowing.”
I looked into Mr. Laneway’s face. “My parents tell me that I have to move on, but they never told me how.”
CLEAR ALL
We never touched.
We never kissed.
I never put my arm around her.
Never held her hand.
But we did text.
And on the day she died,
after I heard, I cleared
every message in my cell,
wiping away the prints.
I wish I had that day back.
I would remember, then,
not to forget.
GROUNDHOG LIFE
“You ever see the movie Groundhog Day?” Morgan asked.
“Um, not sure.”
“You must have,” she said, knocking me on the shoulder with the side of her fist. “Everybody has. Bill Murray is a weatherman who gets stuck in a time loop, where he has to live the same day over and over.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, remembering. “I might have seen that.”
“That’s what my life feels like,” she told me. “I go to bed, hoping that after a long sleep I’ll feel better. But each day it’s exactly the same. Nothing changes. I can’t snap the streak.”
“Maybe you need to try something new,” I suggested.
She looked at me thoughtfully, in that way she had of looking at me. “You mean … something radical?”
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “Go on a hot-air-balloon ride, learn to play the banjo, take up painting, join the Y, go skydiving or something.”
“Skydiving!” she said.
“I don’t know, it’s super expensive,” I said. “How did he get out of the time loop in the movie?”
She paused, head tilted. “I don’t remember,” she said, smiling. “That’s funny, I have no idea how he finally did it.”
GOTTA GET GOING
I remember one afternoon—just an absolutely gorgeous postcard afternoon, the kind of day when troubles lift away—I was lazing in the cemetery with Morgan. She checked the time. “Oh shoot, oh crap, oh shoot!” she gasped, and got all panicky and flustered. “I gotta go, I gotta get going, I gotta go!”
“Huh, what?” I said helpfully.
“I gotta go, I’m late, oh shoot!” she said—and I saw that her hands became bees and her hair was tangled and her eyes were wide and wild and—
(She was crying.)
I didn’t understand the sudden stress.
&n
bsp; “What’s happening?” I asked.
She snatched up her things—her phone, her bag, her cigarettes. (Morgan had started smoking, stealing cigarettes from her mother.)
“It’s Wednesday. My father picks us up for dinner on Wednesdays at 5:00, and he’s super strict about the time—”
I checked my cell. “It’s, like, not even five now—”
“I still have to get home, dumbass!” she snapped.
(And I forgave her instantly, because she was obviously flustered to the maximum, as wigged as anybody I’d ever seen. And over what? A few minutes late? Her hands kept brushing and pulling and adjusting her clothes like crazed bumblebees.)
She sniped, “I can’t, like, travel back in time, okay? I have to run home—and he’s totally going to flip. I’m so dead,” she sputtered.
“Wait, what?” I called in utter failure.
She ran and ran, and I sat there blinking.
SHE QUIT DANCE
Sometimes we texted.
Morgan: I quit dance.
Me: Why? You love it.
Morgan: Doesn’t matter.
Me: But. You. Love. It.
Morgan: It doesn’t love me back.
Me: Okaaaaay.
Morgan: I feel relieved about it. Happy.
Me: Happy is good, I guess.
Morgan: Yes. It’s all good.
THAT TIME I KIND OF TRIED
I once tried to talk about it with Morgan. You know, that thing that hung over her neck like an ax. The trolls online.
I learned never to try that again.
It was tricky from the get-go, because I’m not good at talking about, ahem, real things. As a rule, I’d rather not. Also, I didn’t want Morgan to know what I knew—or that I had been any part of the crapstorm on her social page. So I tried taking the long way around.
We were at a new place, for us. The playground behind her old elementary school. It was pretty sweet and absolutely empty. We sat up in an awesome pirate’s ship like a pair of seaworthy scalliwags.
“I can’t stand the way my teeth stick out,” Morgan complained.
“I never noticed.”
“I should have had braces when I was younger, but my parents…”
“You look fine,” I said. “No one cares.”
“When I get older, I’m definitely going for plastic surgery,” she said.
“What the what?” I said. “Are you going to buy a big set of plastic boobs?”
“Maybe.” She laughed. “Or a nose job, or a stronger chin. My lips are too thin. I look like a chicken.”
“Can you buy false lips?” I asked.
“Botox,” Morgan said. “Look at my face. I have a lazy left eye. My nose is sort of squished. And I have totally a white person’s lips.”
“You are totally a white person,” I pointed out. “You need to stop, Morgan. You are fine the way you are.”
(I know, I should have said “beautiful,” but: integrity! Plus, I didn’t want to send the wrong message.)
“Fine? That’s it, huh?”
“You look like yourself,” I said. “Like Morgan.”
“That’s the problem. I don’t want to look like me,” she said.
“Why are you suddenly so weird about yourself? Plastic surgery is gross.”
“I don’t think so.” Morgan shrugged. “If you can improve what you’ve got, and you’re rich, why not go for it?”
“But those Hollywood actors look so fake. It’s ridiculous. They can’t even smile,” I said.
Morgan stood, stretched, and went over to the slide, where she zipped down surprisingly fast. “That thing’s dangerous,” she warned, right after I came down headfirst. We messed around on the swings for a few more minutes, rode the ceramic pelicans on springs, then shifted over to a bench beneath a shady maple tree. We were six years old all over again, missing only individual juice boxes and a Tupperware container of Goldfish crackers.
Morgan checked her cell and it instantly annoyed me. “Seriously, Morgan,” I said. “Are you really looking at your phone again?”
“I really am, yes,” she replied. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”
“Maybe you could unplug every now and then,” I suggested.
“Oh please, Mother. Are you going to talk at me today?” Morgan said. “Unplug? That’s how they kill old people in hospitals.”
“Seriously, Morgan. What’s so great on there that you have to read it while I’m sitting here right next to you?”
She told me she was following the feed about some Disney celebrity who got arrested for drunk driving. Morgan claimed there were tons of embarrassing photos all over the internet. Everyone was slamming the celebrity on Twitter, nonstop one-liners. Morgan read a bunch to me out loud. At first the comments were clever, then cruel, and eventually just mean.
I said, “I sure hope she doesn’t read all that stuff.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wouldn’t want to read it if it was about me,” I said.
(See what I was doing there?)
“Look, Sam,” Morgan answered. “She nearly ran over a baby in a stroller, then she bit the cop who arrested her. Dude’s got to get tetanus shots! So I’m thinking she deserves whatever she gets.”
“Yeah, but…”
(This wasn’t going as well as I’d hoped.)
I tried again. “The trolls write such awful things. Look at the kids in our own school. Some of them say horrible things about people.”
Morgan swiveled her head to look at me in a searching sort of way. “What are you talking about? This doesn’t have anything to do with our school.”
“Nothing, I don’t know,” I said.
“If I were some big celebrity, and people were talking about me, I’d want to know about it,” Morgan said. “Burying your head in the sand isn’t going to help.”
“I don’t agree. When you read those idiots, you disrespect yourself,” I said, my voice rising.
She stared at me. “Wait a minute, Sam. Are you talking about me?”
She stood, hands on her hips.
“No,” I said. “No, no. I mean just anybody.”
“I think it’s funny,” she said. “Nobody takes any of that stuff seriously.”
I didn’t say anything, just sat there and felt depressed. We were quiet for a minute. Morgan standing, scrolling through her phone, tapping away; me resisting the urge to throw it against a brick wall.
Finally, Morgan wondered, “Hey, Sam. Do you think my hair’s too thin?”
SOMETHING
It wasn’t a date, but I guess it was something.
Our secret something.
We decided to see a movie together. We were a boy and a girl, yes, but it wasn’t that.
I’m not even sure how it came about. Oh yeah. One afternoon by the log (we had discovered the most perfect place to sit in the woods behind the elementary school and christened it cleverly “the log”), Morgan was really perky and she started talking about this thing she really wanted us to do. And I mean: really-really.
“I want to go to the movies with you and sneak in tons of food,” she said. “It’ll be hilarious. Huge foot-long sandwiches, bags of candy, chips, drinks. A total feast.”
“How are we going to smuggle all that in?” I asked. “Excuse me, young man. Is that a foot-long sandwich in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?”
(Ha, she laughed. “Good one!”)
“We should do it,” Morgan urged.
“We should,” I fired back before thinking.
“All right, let’s,” she decided.
Um …
“This Saturday,” she said. “We’ll go to the earliest show.”
And I was like, “Sure!” before my brain caught up to my mouth and screamed: WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?
Too late.
This wasn’t a date. To be clear.
But still! It was something. The idea of it felt different.
The movie couldn’t have been more r
andom. Morgan couldn’t care less what we saw. This was her deal. She opted for a scary movie—The Haunting or The Conjuring or The Corn or whatever it was called, Paranormal 16!—at a theater on Elm Avenue, a long bike ride away. It was the easiest theater we could get to by ourselves, without involving parents and a million questions neither of us wanted to answer.
But also this: I felt it was going to be our time. No one to see us, no one to judge. We’d do it on our own. Forget the wicked old world for a few hours.
I worried.
“Don’t worry,” she said, reading my mind. “No one goes to movies at 10:30 in the morning.”
And she was right, and she was wrong.
No one was there.
But I should have worried. Looking back, this was our happiest, purest few hours together—and the beginning of the end. Within two days, she would hate me.
(I’m not ready to tell that part yet.)
First we pedaled to Marco’s Deli. Again, totally Morgan’s idea. She was the mastermind—and loaded with cash. “My treat,” she said.
“No, no, no,” I protested.
“Yes, yes, yes! I’ve got gobs of birthday money,” she said. “Let me.”
I looked at her, uncertain.
“Really,” she insisted.
I ordered a turkey sub with bacon, because: bacon! Morgan wandered the aisles and returned clutching packages of gummy worms, chocolate, soda, chips, all kinds of junk.
“Breakfast of champions,” I noted.
“I know what I’m doing,” she said.
I picked out an Almond Joy bar from the candy display.
“Coconut is evil.” She frowned.
“Right,” I said, putting the candy bar back on the shelf. “What was I thinking?”
She stuffed everything into a huge cloth bag and slung the bulging sack around her neck.
“This will actually work?”
“They never check inside a girl’s bag,” she replied. “Trust me.”
And I did trust her. We were good to go.
The theater was practically empty. Morgan was right about that too. We huddled in the last row, far-left corner. A few stragglers filtered in, lonely types with uncombed hair and massive buckets of popcorn, nobody I recognized. After the previews, we brought out the feast. Sound the trumpets! We ate like the Knights of the Round Table. Morgan whispered all through the movie, comically commenting on everything that happened onscreen: “Don’t go in there! Is she a moron? This actress sucks nugs. I would never leave that huge knife out on the counter—not a good idea, Sugarlips,” and on and on.
The Fall Page 5