Fall to Pieces (16 page)

Now that thread has been snipped. Now everything feels broken.

I can’t trust them anymore.

What else are they keeping from me?

Nothing
. That’s what Mark said. But it was one of his sideways words.

I look up from my shoes and find Tristan staring at me.

“What?” I start to move once more. Walking instead of running. I’m giving him time to get his breath back, and he knows it. A ridiculous grin lights up his face.

“What?” I snap at him again.

“What?” He echoes me like a parrot, head tilted to one side, chin jutting out like a crazy violinist’s. “Where are you going, is what I was going to ask.”

“Oh. Right. Um, I want to go to Ghost Town if that’s okay with you.” This is my way of admitting that I want him to come with me. That I don’t want to be alone.

Because all the kids clear out of Ghost Town once it gets dark.

“Ghost Town?”

I sigh. Must this boy have everything explained to him? “The other side of the river. There’re a couple of abandoned houses there.”

“Seriously?” he asks. “All those houses on the other side of the river are abandoned?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry, there are no ghosts.”

He laughs, but I notice the way his fingers slide into the pockets of his jeans. I see his thumbs, pressing hard against the material. White, drained of blood. I wonder if he’s imagining Ethan’s ghost creaking through the Ghost Town houses.

I know I’m imagining Amy’s.

I’ve already started steering us toward Ghost Town when I remember that I left the gnome with Mark and Petal. I’m tempted to run all the way back up this gray, winding path to the barn just to get it. Because the gnome is my ref. The gnome is my safety blanket.

And without the gnome? Everything feels unstable.

I want to reach out and latch on to Tristan, bury my fingers in his jacket to regain my balance. But I know it’s emotional balance I’m lacking, not physical. So I gulp down air and keep walking.

“Why are you coming with me?”

He meets my eyes, and I hate him for it. I hate him for his ability to
look at me
. Because my best friends won’t even look at me.

“I told you I was going to help you find out what Amy felt like. And I meant it.”

I put my hands on my hips. It’s taking every last piece of resolve I have to keep my barriers up, to keep my tone harsh. “Well, you don’t seem too into Pick Me Ups. What do you propose?”

He’s unfazed. He plucks some hay from the bouquet I’m still holding. Steals one of my thoughts and slides it into his mouth. He puffs on the hay as if it’s a cigarette, or a pipe and he’s Sherlock fucking Holmes. Solving the mystery of my best friend’s suicide.

Or was it even that? The police were convinced, the
ambulance people were convinced. But we didn’t have to physically push Amy. Word after word after word could have prodded and poked her onto the precipice.

Snap
. Her neck breaking in the weeds.

It’s not just sticks and stones that break bones like everyone seems to think. Words break bones from the inside out. They sink into our bloodstream, into our bone marrow and eat away at us.

They break bones. They break hearts. They break souls.

And we’re still walking. And Tristan’s still puffing away on his cigarette-hay. And the sky is still blue, and the world still feels gray.

“Tristan?” I want him to speak, to say something because I don’t want to think anymore. “What do you propose? How can I really feel like Amy?”

I carry on a few short steps before I realize he’s stopped walking. Curious, I turn around, the bouquet of hay—my gathered thoughts—clutched to my chest like a shield as I wait for his answer.

He takes the hay out of his mouth and twirls it between his palms. I watch it, watch him. “Pick Me Ups make you feel a rush, right? They make you feel high?”

I give a small nod.

“Do you honestly think Amy felt high when she was about to die?”

He’s said similar things before, but not in this voice.
Not like this. Not so that it actually registered.

This. It hits me in the gut. Winds me. Of course not. Of course she didn’t feel high when she was about to die.

“Suicide isn’t about an adrenaline rush.”

He’s so right. It’s not. It’s about the opposite. It’s about the feeling I get when I’m coming down from a Pick Me Up. The sludgy black tar that tears at my intestines. The poison that seems to fill the air.

Adrenaline rushes are addictive. Suicide is not addictive, not at all.

But I stand my ground and stare at Tristan over the space that separates us. “What,” I ask, “do you propose?”

“It’s a surprise,” he says, tapping his nose. “You’ll just have to wait and see. On Monday, after work.”

A
T MIDNIGHT I
find myself sliding open my bedroom window. The tree next to it, the one that brushes up against the side of the house at certain points, has become a close friend this month. I stand on the window ledge and step onto one of the lower branches, fastening my fingers around a branch that floats overhead.

Soon I’ve swung myself up onto that branch. Then the one above it. The one above that.

And now I’m on the roof. I’m on the roof, and I can see the spot Amy must have jumped from, because she took some of the tiles on the edge with her.

From up here you can see the entire street, the houses that glow like furnaces in the dark. Occasionally, in some of the uncurtained windows, silhouettes dance into my line of vision. But I don’t come up here for the view.

I come up here to close my eyes and imagine surfing down the sloping roof, tiles falling away beneath my
feet. I come here to imagine smashing into weeds just like Amy did.

A moth settles on my skin, and my eyes flicker open, flicker over to the patch of grass on my front lawn where my best friend died.

I asked my parents if we could move somewhere else after it happened. But Mom told me to stop being ridiculous. We’d have to wait a few years, at least, before it would be worth selling the house. No one wants to buy a house where a girl has died. Especially not for a premium price.

The putter of an engine cuts the still night air. A silver Lexus peels down the street and pulls up directly in front of our house. Dad. He’s getting out of the car now. Most of his face is shadowed, but weak moonlight dips over the tip of his nose. He starts toward the house, his shoes
thushing
against the damp grass.

He stops just before he reaches the front door, on the porch. He sighs and stares at the door for three heartbeats’ time. And then he’s heading back toward the car, opening the door, and climbing in. Once inside, he stares at the house. A man torn.

I keep waiting for him to notice me standing on the roof. Keep waiting for him to wave. But he doesn’t. So I creep across the roof and climb through the tangle of tree limbs, touching down in the garden.

But before I can walk out from beneath the shadows
of the tree, I hear the engine rev. I start running, but it’s too late—the Lexus is already streaking up the street at a dangerous speed. Dad has always driven too fast.

Except for when he was driving me to basketball practice. Then he was the world’s most responsible driver. I remember how he always insisted on playing the worst music on the way there, and how to make up for it he’d always take me for Mexican on the way back.

I wander to the middle of the yard. Bite my lip.

I never thought I would feel anything if my parents were out of my life. After all, it’s not like they’ve paid much attention to me since I hit my teens. But seeing Dad drive away like that, something knifes through my chest.

I look down at my feet. Dead, moonlit leaves curl around them. I watch the leaves until an icy wind blows them away, and then I climb back up to the roof, where I sit, waiting for god knows what. At two o’clock in the morning I unpeel my dry lips and scream at the sky.

O
N
M
ONDAY
,
BLOODY
Monday, when I get to the child care center after school, Peter is there, standing behind the front desk. Peter. Peter, who somehow got up the courage to ask Amy out that one time, and she threw back her head and laughed her scorn for all the world to hear. I laughed along with her.

Peter. Is. Fucking. Here.

Just when you think you can forget about the old you. Just when you think you can try to be someone better, along comes fucking Peter Paton to remind you of just how bad you were.
Are
.

He’s got his back turned. He hasn’t seen me yet. I want to keep it that way.

But I have to go over there and sign in for my shift.

Step. Step. Step.

I’m dragging this out unnecessarily because he’s already turned around and locked eyes with me. He
doesn’t react, doesn’t smile or grin or nod or shout a greeting, and that kills me. It kills me inside, because the Peter I knew, the one who arrived at our school not so long ago, that boy had a smile for everyone.

I reach the desk. Force a smile at him.

He doesn’t acknowledge it. Doesn’t even acknowledge that he knows me. But he stares at me. Stares at me and stares at me and stares at me as I write my name on the piece of white paper.

When I’m done, just about to turn away, he opens his mouth. “I heard about Amy,” he says.

I freeze, unable to respond.

“I read the article in the
Gazette
,” he says. A smirk tugs at the corners of his lips.

And I am sick. I am so sick at this new, sadistic Peter. At the way that he’s fucking gloating over Amy’s death.

How can he have forgotten how beautiful she was?

My hands curl into fists. I want to hit him, even though, shit, what was I expecting from this boy?

“I heard,” he says, tone mild, as if he’s talking about the weather or something, “that she jumped off your roof. Does it suck knowing that maybe, just maybe, if you didn’t have a three-story house, she wouldn’t be dead?”

And it’s at this exact moment that Tristan shows up. It is these words that he catches, and he looks at me with all this sympathy. And even though I don’t want to see
that look on his face, that look of pity, I can’t do anything. Can’t say anything. Because I’m afraid I’m going to fucking explode. So I just stand there trembling. Trembling, and wondering how the fuck Peter Paton can say this to me.

Wondering when he started his love affair with cruelty.

“Man,” Tristan says when it becomes clear that I’m not going to speak. “What is your problem? That’s just not cool.”

Breathing, it’s a fucking battle right now. So I do the only thing I can think of to center myself: I smash my fist into the desk. Pain shoots through my wrist, hot and cold. Pins and needles. Thorns and briars. Pain burns away my fragility, stops me from trembling.

“What are you
doing
?” Peter stumbles back.

He’s looking at me like I’m a psychopath. And I don’t have an answer to his question that won’t confirm that I am one. So I stay silent. We both stay silent and keep staring at each other. Neither of us wants to seem too afraid to meet the other’s eyes. But the truth is, I’m scared shitless.

I’m scared shitless, because I fucking did this. Or at least I partially did this. Me and Amy, and everyone else who stood by and watched us say the things we said to this boy. Mark and Petal. The entire student body of Sherwood High.

“It’s sad,” I say eventually.

The silence splinters all around us.

“What’s sad?” Peter says. And his voice is so sharp that it cuts into me.

It’s sad that Amy’s parents haunted her out of her skin. And then Amy haunted Peter out of his skin.

“You are so much like her now.” I’m close to tears. “You don’t know it,” I say, “but you’re just like Amy.”

“Don’t compare me—”

But I head outside before he can put up a meaningless defense.

Casey sits alone as usual, a piece of red chalk jammed between her fingers. She’s scribbling blood-colored dust over the dull gray concrete.

When she sees me, she smiles.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.”

I sit down next to her, ignoring all the other children racing around the play equipment, buzzing with energy. Tristan will be with them soon, and I’m pretty sure that Heather doesn’t want me dealing with any of these kids.

Except for Casey, apparently.

I look at her. Her head’s bowed, with curtains of mousy brown hair blocking her face from view. But words
are trickling from her mouth, and I can hear them. “What do you think my life’s really going to be like?” she says without looking up at me.

I want to sing to her. Want to sing, “
Que sera, sera
, whatever will be, will be.”

But I’m not cruel enough to do it.

“Why do you want to know?” I ask.

She shrugs. Her shoulders are tiny. God. She’s tiny.

Ten years old.

“Just do.”

Ten years old and wrapped in weariness from head to toe. I don’t know what’s wrong with Casey. But I know
something’s
wrong.

“Okay,” I say. I’m not sure how to answer, though. I don’t know how to unravel her life’s story for her. I don’t even feel in control of my own life’s story most of the time. I feel as if I’ve been telling it all wrong.

“Okay,” I repeat. I’m not sure where to begin.

“My story is just okay?” Her words are biting, each of them a tiny piece of disappointment. “What does that mean?”

I clear my throat, willing an answer to float into my brain. “It means that you’re going to be okay. In the end, we’re all okay.”

My finger dances through dusty gravel. I draw swirls, swirls, swirls.

I’m not even sure if I believe what I just said.

Because Amy was my best friend, and in the end she wasn’t okay. She had her moments where she floated up high—breaking into supermarkets, dancing in fountains, mooning the local pastor—but in the end she hit the ground. In the end she wasn’t okay. She was all wrong, crossed out, a stain of a body sprawled among the weeds in my garden.