Fall to Pieces (12 page)

Even last year my arms would have given out.

But after Amy died? God, the number of times I’ve climbed the tree outside my bedroom window. The number of times I’ve sat on my roof at midnight and thought about smashing into the weeds in my garden—not dying, but smashing into the weeds.

The sun is falling around me, and it feels as if the sky is melting into the tree. I feel my feet against the branches, feel how easy it would be to slip and fall.

Splat
. In the grass.

But the gnome isn’t here, and there are no weeds to lose myself in.

So I just haul myself up onto the next branch and let my legs dangle above the ground. The thin branch bends, and there’s this moment when I’m thinking,
Snap, come on, snap
.

But then I see someone jogging down the road, cutting through the melting sunset. It’s E. And when he sees me—and the bending branch—he breaks into a run. A run so fast he goes from grenade to bullet.

I have no idea why he insists on giving a shit about me, and I have no idea what he thinks running’s going to do. I’m up a tree; it’s climbing skills he needs right now.

As he nears the tree, it becomes clear that he’s barreling along so fast he’s not going to be able to stop.

Wham!
Bark crashes down around him. He topples back onto the prickly carpet of grass.
“Oof,”
he says.

Maybe I should flip him off. Or I could tell him to go away and never come back. But I decide to play things cool. I kick my legs through the chilly evening air. “How you doing, E?”

He glares up at me. “It’s
Tristan
, Ella,” he says. “I know you want to get with me, but turning our names into some screwed-up alliteration isn’t going to do the trick.”

I raise my eyebrows and pull a Mark. “Coooooeeeeee!” I call into the fading light. Then I start singing “Humpty Dumpty” really loudly because I know it’ll piss him off. I can see him connecting the dots in his mind. Ella’s sitting on a wall. Ella could fall off the wall, and would all the king’s horses and all the king’s men be able to put her together again?

But Ella’s a bitch. And Humpty was just a nice egg of
a guy, so we really can’t draw any parallels between the two stories, can we?

I wait for him to interrupt me, but he doesn’t. When I glance at him he’s totally silent, rays of sunlight dying behind his head, setting him on fire.

I sing louder. So loud that someone opens their window to yell “Shut up!” at me.

I’m not sure where the voice came from, so I give the finger to every house on the street. The lacy curtains in one house drop back into position quickly. Trust the owners of lacy fucking curtains to be spoilsports.

Amy’s parents owned—own—lacy curtains.

In the process of laughing and making sure my finger is pointing straight at the curtain owners, I slip. My adrenaline spikes, flies away into the twilight as I begin to fall. But I manage to grab the branch just in time.

E’s shouting up at me, “Ella, come on. Come down. This won’t solve anything.”

“What won’t?” I ask him, dangling.

“Jumping like Amy.”

“Fuck off. I wasn’t intending to do that.”

“Okay, so that’s why you should come down.”

Bullets cannot be gentle. Grenades cannot be gentle.

He’s still holding back.

“Relax, I’m not going to kill myself. I just wanted to see the pretty scenery.”

“So come down for fuck’s sake.”

And there it is. An explosive voice, for my Explosive Boy. “Okay, I’ll jump down—”

“That’s not what I meant!”

“But it’s how I want to get down. Are you forgetting what Pick Me Ups are? What we’re doing to always remember Amy?”

“But you’re not trying to remember Amy, are you?” He’s shouting, hands tangling through his hair.

The lacy-curtain owner yells something about the police at us. I’m surprised to see he’s a big man with a beer belly. Normally the threat of police, of authority would make me budge. But I feel about as dead inside as the twigs spattered over the ground.

So I yell, “Oh, go fuck yourself !”

At the same time as E yells, “The cops can fuck themselves!”

We both burst out laughing. Lacy-curtain-beer-gut shoves his window shut.

“Good riddance,” I mutter.

“Come down, Ella.” E’s voice is softer now.

“What do you mean I don’t want to remember Amy? And I don’t even know you. Why do you care about me? Why don’t you just, sort of, go away?”

“Go away?” His laugh slices through the air. “Okay, number one, you were a part of a plan to shove me off a
bridge. And then you saved my life. Whether or not you like it, you know me. We’re fucking
acquaintances
at the very least. I care about you because I’d care about anyone who was sitting in a tree like an idiot. And I can’t go away because I’d feel guilty forever if I kept walking to the supermarket and left you here.”

Oh, thank god. The knots in my stomach untie themselves. He didn’t come here looking for me; he’s just going shopping.

I realize he’s waiting for a response. So I shrug, because it seems like a safe thing to do. No one can like you, hate you, feel anything about you if you go through life shrugging.

He fixes me with this look. This look that tells me he knows I’m playing with him and he’d really appreciate it if I dropped the act.

I shrug my shoulders again. To piss him off, yeah. But also because really, this is who I am. I am all act with nothing underneath. I have constructed myself like an IKEA kitchen. Sturdy on the outside but hollow and unstable on the inside.

I really only have one mode, one attitude. Maybe that’s why it pisses me off when Explosive Boy goes from gunpowder and smoke to Kid Whisperer to fucking chivalry, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Like he doesn’t feel he has to be a certain way all the time.

“Can I ask you a question?” E asks, cutting through my thoughts.

“Just did. And I’m answering: no.”

He ignores me and continues. “Can you just be nice for one goddamn second?”

“Another question. But sure I can.” I make my voice sweet, sugary. “How can I help you, sir?”

He shudders. “Not that nice. That’s just scary—what I’m saying is, be a normal person and get out of the freaking tree, okay, Ella?”

“But I’m not normal.”

“Pretend. You know you’re good at it.”

What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

I don’t want to hear the answer, so I don’t ask.

Instead, I act as if I’m thinking about his proposition seriously. I even scratch my chin and toy with an imaginary beard. “Well,” I say eventually, drawing out the word, “what’s in it for me?”

“If you come down,” he says, “I promise to help you find out how Amy
really
felt before she died.”

Leaves whisper against my skin, and I turn my face to catch the sunlight, only to find it gone. Darkness curls around me. “No one could possibly know how she felt.”

My voice is so low that I’m surprised he catches the words.

“No, that’s true. No one could ever fully understand. But I’ve been to that place with someone else before. My brother. He was suffering all his life, Ella. Everything—” Fiery sobs in the still night air. Explosive Boy is not meant to do this. He’s not meant to implode like this.

It hits me then that yeah, I’m messed up; but this guy’s got some problems, too. Should’ve guessed based on the fact that he smells like gunpowder and skips class in the middle of storms to take mud baths out on the football field.

“Right,” I say. “Right.”

Somehow my weak voice gives him the courage to go on. He swallows the fire. But now that I know it’s there, I can see it, burning through the blood that pumps under his skin. Struggling to get out.

“Everything went wrong for Ethan.” He meets my eyes now. “I used to call him E—”

Guilt trips me, makes me want to fall off the branch onto the grass below. If some dipshit started calling me Ames every ten seconds, I’d probably strangle them.

So E’s going to be Tristan from now on. “Shit. Sorry. You should have said something.”

And I still sound like a bitch. My cold, unfeeling, metallic voice makes the night air tangy. Rusty.

Tristan
takes it like a man. Doesn’t bat an eyelid, an eyelash. “Ethan took pills when he turned sixteen. I was
fourteen then. My brother died in my bedroom.” And suddenly he’s gone—not literally, but I can see him running in his mind. Avoiding the memory.

Eyes glazed over. Lips trembling. “He vomited a lot at the end—”

I’m reminded of myself in the park, of the vomit that Tristan could barely look at. Things are snapping into place now, the way a broken bone does when a doctor sets it. “Right.”

My vocabulary is obviously limited to
right
and
fuck
at the moment.

“My sheets were all messed up.”

His
sheets
? Yeah. Like that’s the most important thing that got messed up. Reading between the lines, I’d say Tristan wants me to replace
my sheets
with
my life
,
my mind
,
my world
. Because when someone you love does that to themselves, everything in the universe starts to spin like a top.

And you get so dizzy that you know the world’s going to topple and so are you.

“Come down, Ella.”

And in the deepening night, I make my way back down. It’s not as smooth a process as it was going up. Rough bark scratches my skin. Two of my nails break.

I reach the ground and stand next to Tristan. Our breaths rise in puffs, clouds that intertwine in the evening
air. We face the lacy white curtains, and I point at them and say, “What a dick, right?” so that we don’t have to talk about
why
I was up a tree or his brother anymore.

He laughs, and it’s at that moment that we hear the rumble of an engine. I look at Tristan, look up at the tree, look at the long road ahead. Shit, there’s a police car at the top of it.

“Run?” he asks. As if running away from cops is a decision that needs to be made in a democratic way.

“Hell, yes!” I reply. But then I just stand there, shocked that for the first time ever someone really did call the cops on me.

It doesn’t matter that my insides feel like molasses because the car is moving slowly, like the cop knows it’s Mr. Lacy Curtains who’s narced on us and he doesn’t have to worry.

But Tristan,
he’s
looking worried. His eyebrows stitch themselves together, and he seizes my hand and starts to run. “Come on, Ella. Come on.”

As we pick up speed, I shake him off. Run on my own. Because on my own is how I do things. But as finger after warm finger slips off my hand, I remember letting go of another hand in another place and time.

Two wrists in the moonlight
.

“
Starlight, star bright,” says Mark. “Starliiiiight.”

He’s watching us. Me and Amy, standing there with our fingers
curled through each other’s. We’re in my garden. In my peripheral vision, I can see the gnome
.

“Are you in, Ella?” Amy says
.

Doof, doof, doof.
The beat of the music makes it easy, so easy for a head to bob up and down in a nod. But I shake off the music, shake my head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Her hand slides from mine. Finger after finger after finger. And then suddenly my hand is free, all of her warmth and weight gone. My fingers trail through the cool inkwell of evening, feeling disconnected. How long have I been holding Amy’s hand? How long have I been holding on to her?

“I’m going to find more beer,” she says
.

And then she is gone
.

I’m outside my house again. Breathless from the combination of the memory and the run. Tristan grins at me and pats me on the back. “Are you asthmatic?” he asks. “Or just really out of shape?”

I give him the finger to tell him exactly what I think.

“Careful, Ella. You never know; I might call the cops on you. Oh, these young teenage vandals and their need to climb trees and sing loud nursery rhymes.”

I laugh. “Given that I live here,” I say, pointing to the house, “I think I’m allowed to sing nursery rhymes as loudly as I want.”

“With your voice, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised
if the neighbors tried to sue, anyway.”

I’m tempted to give him the finger again, but I resist. Because I am a mature, sophisticated young woman. “I bet your own tones are hardly dulcet.”

He smiles and inches ever so close to me before breaking out into a rousing chorus of “We Will Rock You” by Queen. His voice is surprisingly good. Tuneful and smooth. He sings almost as well as Petal does. Almost, but not quite. Petal’s singing can charm the birds out of the trees and fill you up with the satisfaction you usually only feel after eating Thanksgiving dinner. E’s singing, while lovely, would only ever stir a sad man to tears.

He smirks when he’s done and says, “So, will you let me rock you?”

“Maybe,” I say, pausing for dramatic effect, “if you were the last guy on Earth.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Believe it or not, that’s not what I meant. I was trying to ask whether you want me to help you see how Amy actually felt before she died?”

I look away, straight to the space on my lawn where Amy lost her life. I let my eyes bore into the grass, remembering the way her black hair fanned across it that night. “I still don’t think you know,” I tell him, turning down his offer of help. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” he says with a heavy sigh. “See you.”

He tucks his hands into his pockets and wanders down my street. I watch him disappear into the meandering night before I head back inside, let the empty house swallow me whole. Sometimes I worry that one of these mornings it won’t spit me out again.

I
DON
’
T MAKE
it to school the next day. Hiding in my bed, pretending I’m in another house, on another planet, is much more fun. Mark calls four times and Petal calls six, but I don’t know what to say to them, so I ignore my beeping phone and bury my face in my pillow. It makes it difficult to breathe, and that gives me something to concentrate on.