Falling into Place (6 page)

Her mother is crying silent tears in the hallway outside the ICU, whispering her daughter's name and her husband's name, over and over again like a prayer, the tears pooling on the backs of her shaking hands and falling, falling, falling.

And I won't forget. I promise her what no one else can. I promise her,
always
.

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HarperCollins Publishers

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I
t's very quiet. Distant buzzing, background beeping. The waiting room is mostly empty. Liam has fallen asleep. The zipper of his hoodie is caught between his face and the window, imprinting the pattern of teeth across his cheek and lips. In his pocket, his dying phone vibrates with yet another call from his frantic mother, but it isn't enough to wake him up.

Down the hall, Monica Emerson is asleep too, her head against the wall. The nurse with the pink dinosaurs on her scrubs walks by and sees her, and goes for a blanket. As she tucks it around Monica's shoulders, Monica stirs and whispers her daughter's name.

Upstairs, Julia sits in the cafeteria with her fingers wrapped around her third Red Bull. Tonight is the first time she's ever tried one. She doesn't like the taste, not at all, and she hates the tremors, but at least she's awake. She must stay awake, and she repeats it to herself as though it'll keep her eyelids from fluttering shut. She can't sleep tonight. She won't. She must be awake when—if,
if
—bad news comes, because she cannot bear the idea of waking to it.

Kennie is just getting home. The competition results got delayed due to some scoring mix-up, and they were there for hours longer than they should have been. It doesn't matter. They won.

Cheeks sore, stomach cramped.

She slips through the garage door into a dark house. Her parents are both awake in their separate bedrooms, her father working and her mother reading, but she doesn't want to see either of them. She needs to charge her phone—it is dead in her pocket, and their coach has a strict “no phones at competitions” rule, anyway. They're supposed to focus or bond or some other crap, though no one would have agreed to it had there been any service at all. She plugs it in and goes to the bathroom.

Shower. Sparkles and spandex for a worn pair of pajamas.

She comes back and checks her phone in the dark—her mother has just yelled for her to go to bed, she has school tomorrow—and opens her Facebook app.

Wet hair atop her head, a story through statuses.

Oh my god I can't believe it Liz Emerson crashed her car she's in the hospital she doesn't look good she's dying she's dead she's not she is be safe Liz we're praying for you we're praying praying praying.

She screams for her parents and runs into the hallway with the screen of her phone glaring. They refuse to let her drive to the hospital.

She goes back to her room with sobs tearing her apart. She lies in the darkness, surrounded by pillows and an impossible amount of fear.

 

 

We're on the roof. It's flat, a balcony that they never added a railing to. A few feet away, Liz's father is fixing a leak
.

She is pulling the chalk across the freezing surface and singing. Her breath hangs in the air. She draws two little girls, as always. The first looks like her—a bundle girl today, boots and hat and puffy cloud coat. The second is never the same
.

Today, I wear a pink sequined dress. I have the hair of her favorite doll and a pair of shoes she's designing herself
.

The wind invites the powder snow to dance, and the sun is everywhere. Soon, we will get bored and put the chalk away, but right now, we are happy. We draw. We sing
.

She finishes the heel of my shoe. Her fingers are chapped
.

It is the last picture I will ever be in.

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HarperCollins Publishers

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S
he was still in Meridian then, just turning onto the interstate. Her backpack was beside her in the passenger seat—exams started next Monday, so it held every single one of her textbooks. She had filled it out of habit, and now she wished she hadn't. Textbooks were expensive.

Her grades were still mostly decent, if only because someone was sure to notice if they had nose-dived. She was glad her GPA was still intact. At least something was.

But, she supposed, none of that mattered anymore. She hadn't finished the last physics project; her grade, which had been hovering precariously at a C minus, had surely dipped with that zero. She'd managed to keep an A until they started talking about Newton—whom Mr. Eliezer had introduced as a lifelong virgin, like,
Let's study this dude who was so obsessed with physics that he didn't even want to have sex, isn't he incredible?
—and somewhere in the sudden flood of velocity and inertia and force, Liz had started falling behind.

She just didn't get physics. So there were all these theories and laws, and they'd spend weeks picking them apart, and in the end, Mr. Eliezer would tell them that they had to factor in air resistance and friction and all this other crap, so most of them couldn't even be applied. It seemed sketchy to her, a science dependent upon the uncertainties of life.

Still. It was nice, the idea that she would never have to stress about homework or grades or Newton the goddamn virgin ever again.

But she turned onto the on ramp too sharply, and her backpack kept moving in one direction while the car turned in another. It thudded to the floor of the car, and Liz starting thinking about moving objects and Newton's First Law.

Objects at rest stay at rest, objects in motion stay in motion.

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L
iz has always hated missing school. She hates making up work and wondering what happened without her. Did people talk about her? Did they call her slut and skank and worse things while she was gone? She always talks about people behind their backs, so she assumes that everyone else does too. Liz has gone to school with hangovers and migraines, bruises and sprains, colds and stomach flus, and once with a sore throat that started an epidemic of strep throughout the entire district.

But today, with a missing spleen and a broken leg and a shattered hand and a ruptured lung and too much internal bruising to document, it seems unlikely that Liz Emerson will attend school.

Julia too stays at the hospital with what must be her tenth can of Red Bull wobbling in her hands. Monica is there, of course, and Liam, who hadn't intended to stay at the hospital, is still asleep against the window.

Everyone else is already at school. Within the walls of Meridian High School, there is a hush like smoke, like smog. Breathing it is like breathing January air—it stings with each inhale, freezes inside each lung. An hour away, Liz is dying in St. Bartholomew's, but here, she is already dead. The rumors have made it very clear that there is little hope for Liz Emerson.

The worst place is the cafeteria, where most of the school congregates before the bell rings, copying homework and gossiping. I get a glimpse as I walk by, a glimpse of the shock and tears, and it's so strange, the silence, the sniffling.

How Liz would have hated it.

She would have known that most of them aren't crying for her. They're crying for themselves, for fear of death, for the loss of faith in their own invincibility, because if Liz Emerson is mortal, they all are.

The teachers are having an emergency faculty meeting, where they receive hastily photocopied sheets of “Things to Say to Distraught Students.” The principal breaks down when she tells everyone that the only reason Liz is still alive is because a machine is moving her lungs.

But I think at least a few of the teachers must be relieved, just a little, that Liz Emerson is no longer going to be attending their classes. Spanish, because Liz blatantly texted every single day and never participated in class. English, because Liz deliberately formed opinions directly opposite those of the teacher's. Definitely study hall, because Liz Emerson's very presence inspired everyone else to do stupid things.

It isn't that Liz minds authority, exactly. It's just that she once liked being Liz Emerson and she liked showing it, and that meant challenging teachers and daring them to challenge her back. And it doesn't matter that she grew to hate it—she couldn't stop.

The teachers who cry: Ms. Hamilton, who teaches psychology and cries at everything; Mrs. Haas, who teaches world history and was actually worried out of her mind; and Mr. Eliezer, Liz's physics teacher.

He scratches his jaw, and no one notices the tears in his eyes. It seems unlikely that Liz will ever get her physics grade back up.

Liz Emerson had failed physics so utterly that she couldn't even crash her car right.

Upstairs, Kennie's sobbing fills the hallway—it's louder, perhaps, than strictly necessary. Everyone is watching her, and a small and despicable part of Kennie enjoys the attention. She doesn't bother feeling guilty about it. Her best friend is dying, and her other best friend didn't even call her with the news.

Kennie finds comfort in not being alone; Julia finds it in the quiet. So Julia is skipping school and is still at the hospital, where Monica has finally found her, and Kennie is a mess of running mascara.

Liz, though, found her brand of comfort—numbness, forgetting—in throwing things and watching them shatter. She found it in taking her Mercedes out and driving thirty, forty above the speed limit, with the sunroof open so that the wind whipped her hair all around her. She found it in being reckless, careless, stupid.

Once, Liz found comfort in me. Once, she found it in holding my hand and dreaming until our dreams came true. Once, she found it in simply being alive. Eventually, she could no longer find comfort in anything. By the end, she was just another girl stuffed full of forgotten dreams, until she crashed her car and she wasn't even that.

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HarperCollins Publishers

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L
iz has photography first hour, and nothing gets done without her. Kennie and Julia are supposed to be in this class too, but they don't make it. The majority of the class—the girls, at least—sits in tears, and Mr. Dempsey, the art teacher, is more than willing to let them take it easy. He is terrified that he might actually have to use the “Things to Say to Distraught Students” handout.

He goes to his office and pulls Liz's portfolio out of his filing cabinet; he flips through her photos, black-and-white prints, colored and edited ones, and tries to remember the girl behind the camera. Most of the shots have hasty Bs dashed across the backs.

Mr. Dempsey is the kind of teacher who gets so caught up with a piece of canvas that he often fails to notice when students walk in and out of class. He ignores bells and schedules, fails to hear fire drills (though, admittedly, that's only happened once so far), and he typically grades haphazardly, at the last minute. It's not that he doesn't care. It's just that he usually forgets.

Liz has never made much of an impression on him. He knows Julia much better, because she's the most talented student he's ever had, and they have had long discussions about aperture and different lighting techniques and the best brand of Earl Grey tea. And he has no choice but to know Kennie, because he's always telling her to shut up or sit down or not to spill that particular caustic chemical. Liz, though—this was perhaps the one class that Liz Emerson sat through quietly. This class appealed to the little girl she wasn't anymore, the part of her that was still amazed every time she clicked the shutter and captured a moment.

And her photos. Mr. Dempsey's vision blurs slightly as he sifts through them. There are close-ups of gravel strewn across a lawn. Tire tracks in the parking lot. Flowers too close to the road. Trampled, frost-choked grass. A cloudy sky through bare branches.

The emotion disarms him. He has never noticed the rawness of Liz Emerson's photos before, and now he sits guilt-stricken as he realizes that this is the first time he has really looked at them.

The photos slide off his lap and onto the floor. He makes a halfhearted attempt to catch them, but then lets them fall, watching as they drift down around him.

He leans back in his chair and just looks at it all, the final diary of a dying girl.

Second hour pre-calc is filled with jocks and preps and other social elites whom Liz considered more than acquaintances but less than friends. They considered themselves much more than that, though, so when Ms. Greenberg says, “Take out last night's assignment,” the class just stares at her.

Finally, a braver and slightly desperate student speaks up. “C'mon, Ms. Greenberg. You can't really think that we're able to concentrate at a time like this. . . .”

Ms. Greenberg fixes him with her piercing signature stare. “Were you at the hospital last night, Mr. Loven?”

“No,” he mutters.

“Then I expect you were neither physically nor emotionally incapable of completing your assignment. Please take it out.”

Turns out, most people didn't finish the assignment. Ms. Greenberg docks points from all of them.

After going over the homework and answering questions for the three people who actually did it, Ms. Greenberg, ignoring the incredulous stares of the class, hands out note packets for the lesson. She writes Liz's name across the top of one and puts it in the folder marked
ABSENT
.