Falling into Place (13 page)

That was perfect too, until one day she puked and there were little streaks of blood among the undigested food.

It was macaroni and cheese, she remembered. Little chunks of it, blood like sauce.

She was so terrified that she broke down entirely, sat against the wall and sobbed for a good half an hour, because three hundred people died every day from starvation, and here she was, trying to become one of them.

When the tears dried, she looked at herself in the mirror and swore she would never puke again.

Soon, though, she would go to a beach party and stare at the sky from the top of a tower of wishes. Soon they would be buying homecoming dresses, getting their hair done, arriving at the dance, and Kennie would tell them that she was pregnant. Soon she would watch Julia double her weekly supply of ziplock bags. Soon Liz would make out with Kennie's boyfriend, go home, and make plans.

Soon she will hate what she sees in the mirror and try to change it the only way she knows how: two fingers down her throat, her dinner in the toilet.

Five days before she crashed her car, that's exactly what she did.

She tore the kitchen apart. She sat on the white couch with the TV blaring, eating chips. She drank almost an entire liter of orange soda. There was a pecan pie in the pantry that she covered with vanilla ice cream and whipped cream and attacked with a fork. There was a plate of ribs from the restaurant down the street and an entire bowl of leftover ravioli from the Italian place in downtown Meridian.

She ate and ate and tried to keep it down.

How much shit can I hold in?

It was not a rhetorical question.

The answer:
No more
.

She set aside the Styrofoam container and the pie tin and the can of whipped cream and the empty ice cream carton and the soda bottle and the bag of chips, and she got to her feet. The floor creaked as it bore her weight.

Ten minutes later, she sat on the cold tiles, her head against the bathtub, too tired to move, too tired to ever move again. She thought of that day—it seemed like so long ago, seventh grade—when she had stared at herself in the mirror and made a promise she thought she would keep.

But that was the thing. It was a different time, when she kept promises. When she thought they were meant to be kept.

She knew better now.

She dragged herself upright and walked to the mirror. She stood, she stared at the girl in the mirror with eyes that held nothing at all, and she asked, “Am I beautiful yet?”

Beautiful like Julia, who was brave enough to be different—or used to be. Beautiful like Kennie, who saw how ugly the world could be but loved it anyway. Beautiful like anyone else, beautiful like everyone else. But she wasn't, so she wanted to be so thin that everyone could see what she was like on the inside, all failing heart and shattering pieces.

No, Liz Emerson wasn't beautiful, but soon she would be dead, and it wouldn't matter anymore.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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L
iam scrolls down his phone, opened to the
Meridian Daily
's website. He scans the new article about Liz and the crash, and notices that he is mentioned in passing. “A classmate of the victim saw the crash and called the police.” The article blames the crash on icy road conditions. It states that Liz was—
was
—the soccer team's captain and mentions that she scored the winning goal in the state championship last year. There are quotes about how Liz is a wonderful person, beautiful and always smiling.

Liam laughs under his breath and closes the tab.
Superficial article for a superficial girl
, but he doesn't really believe it. It irritates him that they whitewashed the truth and called Liz Emerson wonderful because she was beautiful. She would have hated it too.

Unfortunately, everyone else in the waiting room also seems to be reading that article, and after a few minutes, Liam begins to catch pieces of conversation.

“A classmate? Who was it?”

“Kennie or Julia, obviously.”

“No, they didn't know until after.”

“Maybe it was . . .”

“. . . or . . .”

Liam pulls his hood over his head and turns his face away, and prays that the average intelligence of his classmates will not increase within the next few minutes.

“Hey, weren't the police questioning Liam yesterday?”

Damn
.

“Liam? You mean the guy who plays flu—oh, hey! Liam. Liam!”

They swarm around him, and Liam has to remind himself to keep his misanthropy in check before he pushes back his hood and turns around.

“Yeah?”

“You were the one who found Liz, right? What was it like?”

It's Marcus Hills who asks. In the article, Marcus called Liz beautiful. In real life, he usually remarked upon her boobs.

I don't need to keep my misanthropy in check. It runs wild.

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HarperCollins Publishers

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S
he woke up and decided to take a drive. She grabbed her keys and headed for the interstate, and she drove along her crash route to test the road conditions.

Dry with salt, but still icy at the edges. And it would snow between now and then, anyway, and the turn, her turn, was a tricky one even in good weather. Her accident might actually end up being an accident, and she wasn't certain if she liked the idea.

Doesn't matter
, she decided.
Same result
.

The interstate rose over a half bridge, and Liz pushed down on the gas. The land sloped away, down and down and down until it melted to grass and trees.

There
.

She pictured it as she drove.
Onto the bridge. Tighten grip on the wheel. Accelerate. Brake. Skid. Jerk the wheel to the right. Break through the railing. Close eyes. Fall
—

Liz grappled with the wheel as the car swerved, catching the interstate railing and leaving a streak of blue paint behind. She swallowed hard and took a breath. She had started following her own instructions.

Four more days
.

She kept going, all the way to Cardinal Bay—still an unimpressive city, but it had a mall. Liz took the exit and parked. She headed for the closest store, even though the outside was too pink and expensive looking. Why not? What else did she have to do, four days before she died?

It sounded like a truth or dare question, the big cliché, the one that came late at night when everyone was tired and drunk and out of interesting questions.
What would you do with the last week of your life?

Surely she had answered it before, or some variation. She wondered what she'd said. Travel, maybe, or skydive, or say good-bye.

She sure as hell didn't say
nothing
, but that's what she wanted to do now.

A perky bell and a perkier sales clerk greeted her the moment she stepped through the door. “Hi!” she said, and looked critically at Liz's hips. “Two? Let me show you our jeans, they're all on sale, this weekend only! Follow—”

“No,” said Liz. She meant to add a
thanks
after, but it got lost on its way out of her mouth. She wandered off by herself.

It was definitely more of a Kennie store—preppy jeans and floral cardigans, lace and frills. She felt like she was interrupting a tea party, and the store was too small to really wander through. Liz liked to wander when she shopped. She liked to weave through racks, one earbud in and the other dangling by her thigh, a cup of coffee in her hand. She liked not being watched.

“. . . um . . . I'm sorry. I don't mean to push the issue, but . . . I don't understand. Why didn't I—I mean, I just . . .”

Liz leaned around the dressing rooms and saw an office at the end of the hall. She pretended to examine the discarded and rejected rack, and listened.

“I'm sorry,” a second voice said flatly. “The decision is final.”

“I respect that,” the girl said, desperate, “but I'd like to know why I didn't get the job. For future reference.”

Liz leaned back again and caught a glimpse of a woman behind a desk. “Oh, dear, you just don't have the image we look for here at L'Esperance.”

“What image?”

“We don't carry anything over a six, dear. We market our clothing lines for people who are, well—
shaped
differently than you are. How would it look if one of our employees wasn't even able to fit into our shirts?”

Silence, then, and the manager added, “I'm sorry, dear. Thanks for applying, but I'm afraid you just don't belong in our store. But you'll find something, I'm sure! Best of luck.”

Liz watched; the girl opened her mouth, closed it, and walked out. Her face was blotchy, and Liz wasn't sure if it was because she was angry or if it was because she was crying. Liz felt like both herself. The woman followed and caught sight of Liz.

“Hello!” she said brightly, glancing up and down Liz's body. “Are you here to apply?”

Liz looked after the girl, but she was already gone, the bell ringing cheerfully behind her. She looked at the woman and said, “Fuck you.”

Back outside, holding her coat, she closed her eyes. The wind clawed her arms raw, and the snow stung where it touched her—and she remembered, suddenly, the way they used to celebrate the first snowfall. It was their very own holiday. Did the snow hurt then? She couldn't remember.

Then she got into her car, put her face in her coat, and screamed.

Had the world always been like this? Why had it seemed so much kinder when she was younger? Why had it ever seemed beautiful?

Liz Emerson looked around and saw that laws didn't have to be followed if you could get away with breaking them. She saw that snow wasn't always beautiful. She saw that the past was a dead thing and the future held no promises, and as she leaned her forehead on the steering wheel and closed her eyes, the tears came and it really hit her that she didn't want to open her eyes ever again.

Funny things, aren't they? People
. They only believed in what they could see. Appearances were all that mattered, and no one would ever care what she was like on the inside. No one cared that she was breaking apart.

As the sky grew dimmer and the streetlights came on, Liz remembered that there was a party that night, so she did the only thing she could think of. She backed out of her parking spot, bumped into the car behind her, and drove off with the other car's alarm blaring.

She drove past the turn and the hill and the tree, and she held her breath and didn't dare look. She was afraid that if she turned her head and saw it all in the falling dark, she would go, right now.

Alas, she was on the wrong side of the interstate.

Instead, she texted Julia. They were going to a party that night. Julia was going to drive. Liz was going to get drunk.

 

 

It is snowing
.

Liz's mom is taking cookies out of the oven, and her father is setting up the record player by the fireplace. It is their own holiday, the first snowfall, a day in a snow globe, a day to turn off all the lights and pretend the world is being born
.

Liz and I are outside, and this time we don't run around like Tinker Bell caught in a storm of fairy dust, we don't make wishes, we don't make snow angels. Today, the snow is white and swirling, the sky is close, and the world is so big and beautiful and infinite that we don't need to pretend. All we know is already perfect
.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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L
iz spent a minute trying to remember the exact wording of Newton's Second Law of Motion—something about acceleration being directly related to the net force and inversely proportional to the mass—so there were only forty minutes left when she decided it didn't matter. She knew the equation, anyway. Force equals mass times acceleration.
F = ma
.

The unit on Newton's Second Law was more math oriented than the first or the third, so Liz had managed to get a decent score on that test. This, however, was more of a testament to her ability to push buttons on her calculator than any true understanding, and forty minutes before she crashed her car, she still didn't fully appreciate the relationship between force, mass, and acceleration.

The textbook made the world black and white and drew a very uncompromising line between what was and what could never be, as though everything was already dictated and Liz's only job was to keep breathing.

She wished they had talked more about how all of the equations were derived. She wanted to know how Galileo and Newton and Einstein discovered the things they discovered. She wanted to know how they could have lived in the exact same world as everyone else but see things that no one else did.

Forty minutes before she crashed her car, Liz began to think about Liam Oliver, who always seemed to see things that no one else did, and didn't seem to care that it was strange.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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W
hen Liam first saw Liz's car, he nearly crashed his own.

This was his favorite stretch of highway. Of course the only Costco was over an hour away, goddamn middle-of-nowhere Meridian—but he enjoyed the trip wholeheartedly because he was driving his mom's car and using her gas. She'd had to take his sister to piano lessons, so he'd agreed to bag his homework and run her errands. He liked these long, lonely drives. They allowed him to sort out his thoughts, and he had a lot of thoughts to sort out today.