Falling into Place (5 page)

I almost put my hands on her shoulders—they're thin, sharp, just like Liz's—and tell her
It's okay, it's not your fault, she was already breaking
, but I don't.

It's hard to lie when the truth is dying in front of you.

Monica runs her fingers across Liz's raggedly chewed nails, and she still doesn't see. I forget the lies and try to whisper the truth in her ear, but she can't hear me over the beeping machines.

A nurse watches us. She gives us ten minutes, fifteen, before she breaks away from the clump of monitors in the center of the room. Her scrubs are covered in pink dinosaurs, and they look out of place among the grays and blues—
she
looks out of place, a little too hopeful, a little too brave.

She is very gentle when she touches Monica's arm and says, “I'm sorry. I can't let you stay any longer, ma'am. The risk of infection is too high.”

It's kind and very blunt, and I like that she doesn't hide behind bullshit. She doesn't say Liz is strong, because she isn't right now.

Monica almost refuses. But she takes a long look at the stranger who is her daughter, and after a moment, she nods. She reaches out for her, but at the last instant, her fingers tremble and she pulls back.

 

 

Liz is sitting on the kitchen counter, a Band-Aid on her knee. Monica is trying to hug her, and Liz is pushing her away
.

A little while before, she had been jumping rope by herself in the driveway, humming the theme song from
Arthur.
The world had started coming into focus by then, the sky had grown flat and distant, and I was starting to fade
.

She had jumped three hundred and sixty-eight times when a bug flew into her mouth. She screeched and tripped, her legs tangling in the rope. She fell and tore her knee open, and when I tried to help her, she didn't notice
.

She had gone inside, trying very hard not to cry. Monica sat her on the kitchen counter and patched her up, all the while telling her how brave she was. It went to Liz's head a bit, so when Monica tried to hug her, Liz pushed her away and said, “I'm fine, Mom! It's nothing. Just leave me alone
.”

Monica's heart broke a little bit, and she never tried to hug Liz again
.

Later, I would try to push them back together, but neither would budge
.

There were little gestures after that—a pat on the back on Christmas, a squeeze across the shoulders on the first day of school. But Monica was too afraid of being overbearing, and Liz tried too hard to be strong
.

So there were no more hugs in the Emerson household
.

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M
onica doesn't go back to the waiting room. She finds a chair and drags it to the hallway outside the ICU, and her arms are shaking so badly that she drops it twice. She positions it beside the doors, reaches into her purse, and pulls out her phone.

She makes three calls. The first, to her boss, to let him know that her daughter is in the hospital and she will not be going to work, or to Bangkok that weekend. The second, to the airline, to cancel her reservation.

And the third, to her daughter, so she can hear her voice on the recorded message.

“Hey. It's Liz. I obviously can't answer at the moment, so leave a message.”

Monica calls again and again, and she doesn't know why, but each time she expects a different ending.

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K
ennie half trips off the bus, stretching her sleeping leg as she wobbles across the parking lot. Out of habit, Kennie looks around for Liz's Mercedes, or Julia's Ford Falcon (which, despite Liz's endless teasing and the fact that Julia has access to both of her father's Porsches, she refuses to get rid of). They always went to each other's meets games and competitions—she had even sat through their soccer tournaments, every single one, though she never knew when to cheer. But then she remembers that Julia is buried alive in homework and Liz apparently had something else to do today, so no one is here to watch her dance.

That's the thing about Kennie—she has always liked being watched. Whereas Julia dislikes attention and Liz hardly seems to notice it, Kennie needs it like certain other people need cocaine. She's the kind of person who says things that make jaws drop. She likes it when people stare and talk and judge, because it means that someone is always thinking about her. It's what popularity means to her, and Kennie, frankly, has always been popular.

Meridian is a Small Town, the kind that's as faithful to football as religion, the kind with a number of strange habits that define
us
and
them
, the kind with an unspoken and unyielding caste system. Popularity in Meridian extends beyond high school—it encompasses the entire community, the churches and stores and workplaces. There's a clique of ten or so families that has been around for as long as Meridian, and they have spawned nearly all of the jocks, preps, and prom court members. A much greater percentage of the town falls into the social middle: those who live in the small gated community by the country club (because the elite does not, in fact, represent the economic pinnacle of Meridian, and is just the slightest bit resentful of those who do), and almost everyone else. And then there are the shamefully poor, the newcomers, the other anomalies; it is generally agreed that this group is not to be associated with.

Liz knew which group she would be in when she moved to Meridian. I wasn't sure it was a good idea, but she was—she was certain that she knew how to be happy.

The dance team takes their places on stage, and Kennie looks around the crowd again for Liz's face, or Julia's, and she gives a small huff when she doesn't see either.
I'm more important than homework.

She doesn't think about why she expects them, because her family belongs to the first group. Kennie is always surrounded by friends—her mother is a teacher at the elementary school and the high school track coach, her father is a church deacon and works at the bank and sits on the school board, and her great-great-great-great-grandfather's face is framed in the municipal building alongside the other nine original residents of Meridian.

Liz, a relative newcomer, should have fallen into the last group. For that matter, Julia should have too—and she had, until Liz pulled her out. Kennie doesn't pay attention to popularity much, because she's always had it, but she's suddenly very glad that Liz and Julia fell into the right group,
hers
, even if she doesn't quite know why.

She can't afford to think about it too hard, because the position she holds is an extraordinarily uncomfortable one and the music is about to start, but thinking doesn't take too much effort. Liz is
Liz
. Popularity, Kennie decides, has a lot to do with confidence. And to Kennie, Liz has more confidence than the rest of Meridian put together.

Despite the fact that Kennie is one of the few people in the world who has seen Liz cry and lash out in frustration, who has seen the part of Liz Emerson that the rest of her tries so hard to hide, Liz is still invincible to her. Whatever Kennie's life looks like from the outside, there is little stability where she stands. Liz is her constant. Liz keeps her steady when her parents fight and her grades dip and her world wobbles.

Kennie counts down the last beats, and bursts into the rehearsed spins and leaps and toe touches, and she doesn't think anymore.

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“A
nd where did you say you were headed, son?”

“Costco,” says Liam. He faces the cop but watches the door out of the corner of his eye. It opens again, and this time the night carries in Lily Maxime and Andrea Carsten, who are undoubtedly here to confirm the rumors. They hate Liz Emerson because she ignored them. Their eyes are red, and they start sobbing when they reach the group of Meridian students huddled around a low table.

There are a hundred and forty-three students in Liam's graduating class, and a good third of them are here tonight. He can't figure out why. Liz Emerson slipped on the goddamn road—clearly tonight is not a night to be driving around in the dark.

“I was running errands for my mom,” he adds.

“And you saw Elizabeth's car as you drove past?”

Liz Emerson
, he corrects automatically in his head. She is always Liz Emerson to him. He doesn't think he knows her well enough to call her exclusively by her first name. But then again, he doesn't know her well enough to think of her as often as he does, either.

“Yeah.”

“How did you know it was her car?”

“I'd know her car anywhere.”

This he says without thinking, and regrets it when the police officer asks, “Were you good friends?”

“No,” says Liam. “Not really.”

Not at all
.

The police officer gives him a strange look. Liam doesn't care. He is watching his classmates again, huddled around each other and whispering, crying into each other's shoulders. Not just crying—sobbing these awful sobs that made everything shake, and Liam wants to scream that she isn't dead. She is alive right now, down the hall somewhere—not whole, but alive, and everyone is sobbing like she's already gone.

Half of these people have no reason to be here. Most of these people, really. Liam wonders what Liz Emerson would do if she knew that Jessie Klayn, who flips her off once a day when her back is turned, had already gone through an entire box of tissues. And Lena Farr too—Lena Farr, who had spent all of lunch today ranting about what a selfish bitch Liz Emerson is. Liam had heard it all from the next table over.

Laugh, probably. Liz Emerson would laugh, and he is glad she wasn't here to see it, because Liz Emerson did not have a nice laugh anymore. She had a laugh like a knife on skin.

“All right,” says the police officer. “Well, that's it for now. We might track you down later, though, kid.”

“I'll be here.”

He doesn't know he means it until he says it aloud.

Liz is not a selfish bitch.

If she were, she wouldn't have planned anything, everything.

But she did.

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I
t was January 1, and Liz had just come home to an empty house after a New Year's Eve party.

She was drunker than she had ever been in her life, and it was not a particularly enjoyable experience. She stumbled into the foyer and leaned against the door to keep herself upright, and swallowed a few times to delay the puke. When she closed her eyes, she could still see the pulsing lights impressed upon her personal darkness, and it made her dizzy. She gave up, and slid to the floor, her head pounding, everything spinning. She needed someone, anyone, to touch her and remind her that she wasn't the last person in the world.

She opened her eyes and found the chandelier instead. The light was blinding, like angels, like angels falling and flying and coming for her, and she tried to think of a reason to go on.

She couldn't.

But she could think of a thousand reasons to give up. She thought of her father dying. She thought of how her mother wouldn't be home for another week. She thought of Kyle Jordan's lips on hers and his hands on her body, just an hour ago. And she closed her eyes, and thought about how he was Kennie's boyfriend, but she had kissed him back anyway, because she had never felt so alone as she had then, drunk and stupid and trying not to cry at a stranger's party.

But, god, how could she explain that to Kennie?

She couldn't, ever. She opened her eyes again. The light still stabbed and the angels still fell, and she began to plan her suicide.

She thought of stuffing herself with pills. She thought of filling her bathtub with water and making those long cuts across her arms. She thought of scarves and pantyhose, and hanging from the loft like an ornament. She thought of a quick shot, a bright explosion. But did they didn't have a gun. Did they?

Liz couldn't remember. She couldn't remember anything.

She was curled in a ball in the middle of the foyer when the numbness faded and the tears came, and she sobbed with her face pressed against the hardwood. She washed the floor with her tears and polished it with her snot, and finally she had three rules.

First, it would be an accident. Or it would look like one. It would look like anything but suicide, and no one would ever wonder what they did wrong, what made her give up. She would die, and maybe everyone would forget that she had ever lived.

Second, she would do it in a month. Well, three weeks. She would do it on the tenth anniversary of the day her dad fell off the roof and broke his neck. She would give her mother just this one day of sadness every year, instead of two.

And three, she would do it somewhere far away. She wanted a stranger to find her body, so no one she loved would see her broken.

They didn't work, her rules.

Liam found her. Liam, who had loved her since the first day of fifth grade, was driving down the interstate when he turned and saw her, the bright green of her sweater visible through what remained of the window.