The Fall

by James Preller

  SPIT AND SHAKE

  Our friendship was never the same after that scene in school when Morgan slapped me in the face. But on rare times, perhaps because we were both lonely, both confused and full of regret, we formed some kind of truce.

  Weeks passed. We still walked our dogs, found ourselves in the same place—almost as if by accident and not design.

  On those days we stood together like a pair of mismatched socks. Like nothing had ever happened. Somehow the physics wasn’t right, the way we stood in relation to each other. She pulled away, and I was more distant too. It was like in Earth Science, when two tectonic plates shift.

  (Yes, a 73 on the last impossible exam, thanks a lot, Mr. Hoffnagger.)

  We both had changed, I guess. Morgan’s changes were more obvious. She wasn’t the same girl anymore. It used to be that with me at least, she was more open. Now her guard was up. Our trust was gone.

  Okay, I am trying to be honest in these pages. I didn’t know what she was going to do. Nobody did. Otherwise, maybe I would have done things differently. I mean, I know I would have done things differently. I gave up when she needed exactly the opposite thing from me. When she pushed, I should have held on tighter, tried harder.

  When spring came, baseball season kicked into gear. I was on the school team, playing travel and rec, plus taking hitting lessons at Frozen Ropes. It sucked up all my free time, but I was happy. Baseball’s hard, for sure, but it’s a lot easier than regular life. You get a hit, you make an out. You catch the ball or you drop the ball. It’s all pretty straightforward. And I know this might sound stupid, but even the ball is perfect. Seriously. It’s the perfect object. Bowling balls are too heavy, footballs are too weirdly shaped, golf balls are too small. Baseballs have a smooth white surface and eighty-six stitches sewn with red thread.

  (Yes, I’ve counted. Kidding! I read that somewhere.)

  A baseball is the perfect machine, built to be thrown and caught. Most guys, I’d rather have a game of catch with them than actually sit and listen to them talk. As long as there’s a ball zipping between us, and we’re standing on a field of green grass, I’m as calm as a cow.

  Max wasn’t too happy with me those days, since I didn’t have time to give him proper walks—and when I did, it was short and quick. I began avoiding the field, steering clear of Morgan. One hot May night, those nights when it stays light long after supper, I took Max out for an exploration. We tramped through the woods behind the middle school, up through the cemetery (I know, I shouldn’t bring my dog there … but anyway!).

  Suddenly, Larry went crazy: Bark-bark-bARK-barky-BARK!

  The hairball was glad to see me.

  Morgan was sitting on the ground, her back up against a tree. There was no one else around. Just a girl hanging around under a tree, like an apple that had fallen to the ground.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “S’up,” she replied.

  It was weird at first, but after a couple of minutes, we started talking a little. She seemed jittery and, I don’t know, off somehow. Morgan told me she felt all hollowed out.

  “Have you been sick?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Not like that. Never mind. I’m used to it. I’ve felt like this forever. Nothing changes.”

  I don’t know, somehow it felt sad and uncomfortable to me. Spooky in a way. I didn’t want to hang for long. “Look, it’s getting dark. I should go,” I said.

  “You ever spit and shake?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Spit and shake,” she repeated. “You spit on your hand and shake.”

  She slurred her S’s a little. I noticed a red cup a few feet away. It might have been litter, but I didn’t think so.

  “Spit and shake,” she insisted. “Do you know it or not?”

  “Like a swear?”

  “Yes, a solemn promise.”

  “So, um, no, I never have,” I said.

  “If you tell me a secret, I’ll tell you something…”

  “Yeah, no,” I said, shaking my head. Something about her creeped me out. “I’d rather not.”

  “Ssssure,” she said. “It’s jussst that, I was thinking that maybe I dessserve to feel this way. Maybe this is exactly how I should be feeling.”

  “What are you talking about, Morgan?”

  “Nothing,” she answered. “It doesn’t matter.”

  I think she was trying to open a door that night. Did she want to let me inside? Maybe. And you know what? I didn’t want to know. I just didn’t.

  I started to go. “Are you leaving?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, and after a few failed flicks, held a lighter to a cigarette.

  “You shouldn’t smoke, it’ll kill you,” I said.

  She laughed. “I’ll quit someday, jussst for you.”

  “Spit and shake on it?”

  “Not today,” she said, pointing a finger at my face. She took a deep drag and blew rings into the night air.

  “You’re seriously going to stay here by yourself?” I asked.

  “Sure beats home,” she said.

  “School tomorrow,” I reminded her.

  “You know what? I never see lightning bugs anymore. You ever notice that?” Morgan asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “It’s a summer thing, anyway.”

  “I remember chasing them when we were kids. We called them living lights, rising like sssparks into the sky. My sissster and I would run and catch them. We kept them in jars with holes in the lids.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I remember,” she continued dreamily, “how I wanted to keep them so badly. My father was like, ‘No, no, you have to let them go,’ but once I hid the jar in my backyard under the bushes. The next day, I forgot all about them. I was a kid, you know?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She squeezed the fingers of her right hand, three times each finger from the base to the tip, a new nervous habit. “When I found the jar, weeks later, they were all dead. I killed every firefly.”

  “That’s sad,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “I cried and cried. And my father got sooo mad.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  It was like we were almost friends once, but we weren’t anymore. Now she was just a weird girl, getting drunk and smoking cigarettes under a tree. She scared me, I guess.

  “Let’s go, Max,” I said, and got out of there.

  KNEW HER

  “I knew her,” I said. “We were friends.”

  Morgan’s sister looked at me, uncomprehending.

  I could be such a loser. Couldn’t even make a sentence.

  I said, “Your sister, Morgan. I knew her a little bit.”

  Sophie didn’t take her hand off the button to the water fountain. The water continued its liquid arch into the porcelain sink and down the drain.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  I shrugged helplessly. Looked away, stared into the fountain. “Are you going to—?” I said, gesturing at the water.

  She caught herself, released the button, and the water stopped. She looked at me strangely, as if she were afraid of something I might do, or might be.

  “I thought you should know,” I said. “If you ever, you know, wanted to talk.”

  Her fingers automatically went to a ring on her right hand. She twisted it, a thoughtless habit. I could almost hear Sophie swallow. A dry, parched gulp.

  “Here,” I said, pressing the chrome button to the fountain. “Take a drink. I’m buying today.”

  She nodded, as if from a great distance, dutifully bent and took a short sip of the clean, clear water. She held back a few loose strands of hair, keeping them from getting wet in the sink. I recognized the ring on her finger. I’d seen it before on Morgan.

  Sophie rose up and wiped the water from her lips with the back of her hand. “Thanks,” she said.

  Three girls appeared beside us, curiosity in the latest fashion. They were probably wondering why Sophie was s
peaking with a skinny, ridiculous, younger boy. One said, “Sophie, are you coming? Mary J said she’d drive.”

  “In a minute,” Sophie replied. “You go ahead. I’ll catch up.”

  The girls gave a chorus of affirmations and left.

  Sophie turned her focus back to me. “You helped me with my locker once. I remember now. What’s your name again?”

  I told her my name.

  And without thinking, these words rose up from that same deep, dark well. “You must miss her,” I said.

  Sophie’s mouth opened as if to speak. Her eyes flickered with something, a thought, a memory. The mouth closed. “I have to go,” she decided. “My friends—”

  “We could walk if you want,” I offered.

  “No, no. Not today,” she said, and just like that, abruptly hurried away.

  SUMMER MEETING

  This is the last time I saw her, maybe.

  I hadn’t seen Morgan since school ended, almost eight weeks ago. I looked for her every once in a while, but a lot was going on in my life—summer vacation on the Cape, travel baseball, hanging out—and it wasn’t like Morgan was my big priority. Life goes on, right? I never saw Morgan out with the dog, or even in front of her house the few times I pedaled past.

  Then, one day, there she was.

  She looked bad.

  I murmured like a cartoon hypnotist, “You seem sleepy … verrry sleepy. Seriously, Morgan, you’ve got dark bags under your eyes.”

  She frowned. “Are you trying to tell me I’m ugly? I already know that.”

  “What? No, nothing like that. It’s just that your eyes are bloodshot. You look exhausted.”

  “You sound like my sister,” she replied.

  I stood there with my foot in my mouth, chewing on the toes. There was no way to talk myself out of this awkwardness. Our friendship, or whatever it was, had ended. Now we had only this distance and regret. “I’m just saying,” I bleated.

  Her smile was wan—there was no other word for it—a wan smile. Lacking in energy or happiness. The mouth smiled crookedly, but her eyes said otherwise. “It’s okay. I don’t sleep much,” she confessed.

  I nodded, grateful for the opening. “About once a week, I’ll crash hard. I’ll go to bed super early on a random Wednesday. Next day, I’ll feel great. Last Saturday, I slept until 12:15, a new personal best. You should try it sometime.”

  Her gaze followed the dogs as they sniffed their way toward the stream. A sparse forest of trees stood beyond that. I heard that kids partied in there, smoked, drank. To me, it wasn’t a world I knew much about. Stories and rumors, that’s all. Not my world. Even so, I smelled the odor of alcohol on Morgan’s breath. I watched as she fished a cigarette out of her pocket and lit it with a disposable lighter. She inhaled deeply, let the smoke ease out of her nostrils.

  “Is smoking a regular thing now?” I asked.

  “I don’t sleep,” she said again, quietly and matter-of-factly.

  “What do you do all night?” I asked.

  She shrugged, bored with me. “Stuff. The internet.”

  “I have to sneak my phone into my room at night,” I said. “My parents make me unplug at 9:00, unless they forget.”

  “I’d kill myself if my mother ever tried that,” she said.

  (I know, she really said that. I know.)

  She yawned and really did look dead on her feet.

  “Sounds drastic,” I said.

  “Yeah, no worries. My mom wouldn’t dare take my internet away.”

  And that was it. The last time we talked. It’s amazing how little we ever said, as if we didn’t know the same language. She was a bird up in a tree, singing a mournful song. And I was just a dog, barking at the clouds.

  THINGS SHE SAID

  It’s raining crazy hard today with fat drops like water balloons. The howling wind shifted and now the rain falls slantways, drumming against the windowpanes of my room, like sticky radio tunes I can’t keep out of my head.

  I love wild weather, big weather, when I can feel the awesomeness of nature and my own smallness in the face of it. We’re all just nobodies, dancing specks of dust. Here and then gone.

  (Not that I need to experience a tornado. The Wizard of Oz was enough; I’m good.)

  Maybe it’s the rain, but tonight I keep flashing back on things I remember Morgan saying. Small remarks, favorite expressions, random observations. It’s weird how in books, a line that seems unimportant in the early chapters can grow in significance later on. So you remember the words in a new way, weighted with new meaning. The present keeps circling back on the past, the way Max will keep coming back to me on a trail in the woods, then race off to the next thing, then back again. That’s how it’s like now for me, thinking of Morgan. Everything that ever happened is filtered through the present, the things I know now: She’s the girl I used to know who killed herself.

  “I don’t want to embarrass you,” Morgan once told me. At that moment, she hit the nail on the head. I was embarrassed to be seen with her. That must have hurt her so much. But what Morgan didn’t understand was that it said so much more about me than it did about her. My insecurity, my stupidity. If I felt better about myself, I could have stood beside Morgan as her friend. But instead I hid, afraid of what other people might think.

  Every moment in our past has been trampled, tainted by what came after.

  That’s sad, a distortion of everything that ever happened between us. She’s not just the dead girl. I can’t let that be my memory of her.

  Hey, Morgan. You were so much more when you were alive.

  She complained, “I don’t think I can stand another year of school.”

  (Wow, the wind is violent now. A big tree branch just fell on the neighbor’s car! I hope the power doesn’t go out. Wait, I’m going to find a flashlight just in case.)

  Hold on.

  (Back, whew: And it took forever! Did you notice? Carry on!)

  She used to say how much she hated getting out of bed in the morning. Not a big deal, everybody says that. But there’s a storm outside and I’m here in my room listening to music, remembering.

  Another thing before I go: I’m also not remembering. Which freaks me out. She’s slipping away. I forget more each day. Some details are hazy, the way she—

  (Crap. Knew it! The lights just went out. Darkness.)

  THE DAY I HEARD THE NEWS …

  Life rolled on like a nursery rhyme.

  Diddle-diddle, Fiddle-fo-fum. Ma’s

  tea kettle boiled and blew, the merry

  mailman came, our black lab barked,

  and the dish ran off with the spoon.

  Nothing and everything changed.

  I sat in my idiot room, still dis-

  believing text messages of shock

  and swoon. I powered off the phone.

  Waited there on the edge of my bed,

  feet pressed to the floor in fear

  I’d otherwise float into space,

  & just vanish too, like Morgan.

  I stared at my dumb white hands,

  the tips of my awful fingers, thinking

  only this: Useless. Useless. Useless.

  THE GIFT

  It came in the mail about two weeks after she died. A tattered paperback. Well worn, as if it had been read a few times, folded, mangled, left in the rain. Corners of the pages had been turned down. On the inside front cover, I read her name in black marker: MORGAN MALLEN.

  My heart was in my chest, the usual spot, but it felt like it had swollen to twice its size. Bloated, belly up, like a sick fish. I felt unable to breathe, stuffed with crap, a closet too jammed with junk.

  (Sorry, I suck, can’t describe this feeling. Is anyone ever happy with their words?)

  I was afraid to turn the pages. Would there be a note for me? Some message for my eyes only? Flipping through the first few pages, I didn’t find anything. It was just a book in an envelope, addressed to me.

  Morgan had talked about it before. And I
think—now that I can think, now that my brain has awakened—it’s possible that she wanted to give it to me in person. She hinted about it, how I should “definitely” read The Bell Jar someday. Morgan said that it was as if the author, Sylvia Plath, had somehow peered deep into Morgan’s own soul. She quoted the book once, as far as I know.

  We were talking things over in our usual spot, on the log in the woods. This was back when we were still friends, before she found out that I was one of the trolls on her web page. Morgan was unhappy that afternoon, and sat there like a bump, wishing it were not so. She said, “If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.”

  I thought those were such sad words. “You can’t look at life that way.”

  Morgan kind of shrugged. “I didn’t make it up. Sylvia Plath wrote it in The Bell Jar.”

  “Great, remind me not to read it,” I said.

  She looked at me for a moment, as if a bird had landed on my head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just … nothing.”

  And now the book had found its way into my hands. How was that possible? Was regular mail that slow? She must have mailed it more than two weeks ago. It couldn’t have taken that long to reach me. A mystery.

  I studied the front cover, and the back. Not yet, I thought, I can’t. I didn’t dare. I didn’t want to know.

  But Morgan wanted me to have it, her gift to me, from one world to another.

  I started to read.

  DAD SAYS

  My dad shrugs, says:

  “Sometimes

  You zig, other times

  You zag.”

  Point being, my dad says:

  “We all stand one day

  On the crossroads,

  and we have to decide

  About this life.”

  I get it now:

  With each action

  I create my new

  Self.

  Get ready.

  Because tomorrow I’m gonna zag

  (just when you thought

  I was going to zig).

  PUBLIC SPEAKING

  It was a big deal in school this year. Talking, talking, talking. We had to work on speaking in public—and we were graded on it too.