Falling into Place (19 page)

Kennie sniffles. “I wanted to hit him too,” she says, and begins crying again.

Julia sighs and puts her arms around her. “What now?”

“She's going to kill me,” Kennie says with a muffled wail.

“Why?” Julia asks. Because honestly, there could be a number of reasons. All the crying, for example. Liz hates crying.

“Because,” Kennie sobs, “I didn't get it on video.”

Julia stares at her.

Suddenly they're both laughing, and it's a relief. They're laughing as hard as they were crying, and everyone is staring, and for once, neither of them cares. And there are so many things to laugh about—they've done so many stupid things. They are a group of idiots in a world of idiots, and Liz was the most idiotic of them all.

Finally, when they calm down and wipe away the laughing tears as well as the sad ones, Kennie stands up, wobbly.

“Where are you going?” asks Julia.

“To get a picture.”

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J
ulia gets up too. Monica is standing guard by the door to Liz's room, but she gives Julia a hug and a shaky smile, and walks away. Julia goes in. There's a nurse wearing scrubs with pink dinosaurs, adjusting one of Liz's tubes.

“How is she?” Julia asks.

The nurse turns and smiles at her, and Julia can see in her eyes that she's considering a lie. But in the end, the nurse says, “Honey, she is an absolute mess. But she's holding on.”

Julia can't help it. She begins to cry. She rubs her eyes furiously because everyone is crying, and honestly, she's sick of it. She sees why Liz hates it so much.

But she can't stop.

The nurse gives her a sad smile and leaves, and Julia sits down in the chair that Liam vacated moments before. She touches one of Liz's hands, and it's so cold that a tremor runs through Julia. Liz always had cold hands. Bad circulation. Julia takes Liz's fingers in hers, careful to avoid the needles and tubes, and tries to rub some warmth into them.

But Julia's hands are cold too, as she stares at Liz's quiet face. There were many days when Liz was strangely, inexplicably quiet, but not like this. There were many parties at which she had found Liz crying, but they had never really talked about why. Behind all of her wildness and anger and insanity, Liz was a girl of silence, and Julia always let her keep her secrets.

Now Julia wonders exactly how many secrets Liz had.

Julia didn't drink at that first party.

She didn't like the smell of beer, and she was already drunk on the fact that they were there at all. Kennie was curious, but not, at that point, enough to try it.

Liz, on the other hand, celebrated by forgetting everything she had ever learned in health class. She had three Solo cups of beer and was completely wasted.

Near one in the morning, when Kennie's brother arrived to pick them up—having been paid fifty bucks to keep all of their parents ignorant of their whereabouts—Julia realized Liz was missing.

She found her upstairs, in bed with Zack Hayes, and he was trying to get Liz's shirt off.

Liz was trying to say no, but she was too drunk to get the word out.

Zack leaped off the bed when Julia entered, and Julia, after getting over her initial shock, decided that the best thing to do was to get Liz out of there. She dragged Liz down the stairs to find Kennie pushed against the wall, wrapped around some senior whose hands were already at her shirt buttons. Julia grabbed her too, and she pulled them out into the night.

Something changed that night. Liz was different after that.

That night, Liz's self-respect began to chip away, and then she had let it fall, piece by piece.

I think Julia is beginning to realize this. She remembers what the doctor told Monica yesterday, what Monica told her, what she told Kennie, and what Kennie told everyone else: that Liz will only pull through this if she's determined to.

The nurse escorts her back to the waiting room. She had run into Liz's room after hearing a crash, and she found Julia beside an overturned chair, shaking.

Julia doesn't struggle. She's held silent by the overwhelming fear that Liz Emerson, her best friend and the most obstinate person she knows, no longer wants to fight.

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K
ennie wanders around the hospital until she finds Jake seeking comfort with a young, pretty, overly sympathetic nurse. She hears a bit of what he's saying as she walks closer, “something real” and “in love” and “lost without her.” She thinks about hitting him again, or maybe kicking him this time, but in the end, she doesn't. She takes a picture of his brilliantly purpling eye, flips him off, and starts back to the waiting room.

Unfortunately, Kennie's sense of direction is virtually nonexistent, and within a minute, she is hopelessly lost.

She sees an elevator and heads for it. She begins hitting buttons, figuring one of them will take her back to the emergency room. None of them do. She passes the pediatric ward, the cancer ward.

And then she finds herself at the maternity ward.

She steps out of the elevator. She hears the faint, thin wails of babies, and her hands go automatically to her stomach. The flatness makes her throat close, and all she wants is to sit and curl around herself, around the baby who is no longer inside her.

On the day of their junior homecoming, the humidity was at 100 percent.

Liz didn't bother trying to curl her hair. Julia helped her stack it all atop her head while Kennie struggled with the iron and the hair spray, and when they were finally dressed and ready, they went to the beach to take pictures.

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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L
iz 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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K
ennie 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.