Fall to Pieces (17 page)

“Are you sure?” Casey says.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m sure.”

Because I want to believe this.

I want to believe that I’m going to be okay. That we’re all going to be okay.

But I don’t and we won’t and I just can’t do this. Can’t lie to this poor kid so badly, because she was right the other day when she said that, in stories, the ending is always too happy. I open my mouth. “Casey,” I begin, but then someone else speaks. Cuts me off.

“What have you done?”

Heather’s got her hands on her hips, pressing today’s floral blouse into the curves of her body. Her face is red, red, red; and her lips are pursed. Bloodless.

I shrug and get to my feet, ready for a showdown. Or a meltdown. “I don’t have a clue. Why don’t you tell me?”

Doubtless this has something to do with Peter.

“How dare you,” she breathes. “How dare you waltz
in here and tell my son that he’s like
that girl
?”

I close my eyes.

That girl
.

Amy. My best friend.

My bitch of a best friend who is
dead
.

I’m too tired to play nice or to keep up my wholesome act. “Because,” I say. “Because it’s the truth.”

She leans in, way too close. “No,” she says. “It isn’t. My son is nothing like your friend. Like you.”

She spits out
you
. As if being compared to me is worse than being compared to a fucking ax-murderer. As if I’m a serial killer-arsonist-whore.

I can’t speak, can’t say anything to show her that she’s wrong.

But then Casey wraps her chubby, warm fingers around my knee.

It’s as if Casey’s grounding me, telling me that I’m not that bad. I’ve been stupid, and I’ve made mistakes; but I’m not that bad. I have love and hate and anger and sorrow and pain in this body, just like anybody and everybody else. Just like Heather and her son.

I keep my head high, hold my ground. Because I may not be the best person, but I’m not the worst, either. I tell Heather the truth. “He’s becoming exactly like us,” I say, “whether you like it or not.”

She steps back because she can hear in my voice that
I’m telling the truth. Because she really doesn’t want me to be telling the truth.

“How could—”

“We broke him,” I say. “He’s becoming like us because we broke him.”

Her nostrils flare. “Get out! I don’t need you here. I don’t want you here. Just get out. Get the fuck out.”

I want to argue with her. I want to stand there and tell her that I’m not poison, that I’m a worthy human being. But the words would taste false. Because to her, I’m always going to be the girl who killed her son’s spirit. To her, I really will always be poison, even though I’m trying to change. Even though I think I
have
changed since what happened with Peter.

So instead of pulling out defensive words, I step around her and walk toward the playroom. Toward the exit. Light streams through the glass doors, the glass windows.

We’re all just people in glass houses.

Peter’s still standing behind the registration desk when I come inside. I pause, stare at him. He can feel my gaze—I know because of the way he starts coughing. He shuffles and reshuffles the papers in front of him way too many times.

And then I’m heading back over to him. I’m heading back over to him because I have something to say. Because I don’t want the ghost of the girl I used to be to haunt me anymore.

I prop my elbows up on the blue counter. “Hey,” I say.

He edges back, away from me. “Shouldn’t you be gone?”

“Probably. Your mom’s going to kill me if she sees me still here.”

“But she can’t see you from outside,” he says, biting his lip. He looks so freaked-out.

I resist the temptation to roll my eyes. “Relax,” I say. “I’m not going to bite you.”

He stares at the table. Shuffles the papers. Again and again. Cough. Eventually, he looks up at me, his face all hard lines. Cut glass. “What the fuck do you want from me?”

“I just wanted to say...” Pause. I suck in a deep breath. Once I say this there’s no going back, no finding that old Ella with all the careless words and apathy. Once I say this I’ll no longer have any fucking clue about who I am.

I say it, anyway.

“I’m sorry.”

I
HAVE NOWHERE
to go. So I’m sitting right outside the center. Sitting beneath an oak tree on a carpet of smashed autumn leaves. Wind whips up and down the street. I bow my head against it, wondering what the fuck I’m still doing here.

But I know.

I’m waiting for Tristan in some ways. Waiting and waiting and waiting because he’s promised to show me what Amy felt like, and no one else has been able to make me that promise.

I’m also waiting for the end of time. Infinity. Forever. Because I can’t leave this place, can’t leave Sherwood, even though I want to more than anything.

People think that only small towns are stifling, only small-town life slings nooses around people’s necks and leaves them to hang. Sherwood isn’t a small town—Sherwood is big and sprawling and packed
with stately houses. And still, I’ve always wanted to escape.

I’m convinced I’ve been singing the Big Town Blues since the day I was born. And I’m convinced that Amy was, too.

But she’s dead and gone now and I’m here, squished against rotting autumn leaves on a deserted road. Still. Life is as still as death today.

I bury my head in my hands.
Don’tthinkdon’tthinkdon’t think—

Three days before Amy jumped, we went back to the park. To the jungle park where we used to get so tangled up when we were young. We played hide-and-seek again. And we raised a bottle of vodka. We drank to each other’s health. We laughed. We danced. We pretended to be fairies just like when we were five.

And after the energy fizzled from us—escaped our bodies through our toes and our heads, gusted out of our open, laughing mouths—we lay down on the ground and stared up at the sky. That day, that day when we were dreaming, I was so sure I could snatch a cloud out of the sky, pop it into my mouth, and taste cotton candy. Taste hope.

There were branches above us with leaves dripping down, glowing golden in the light. The earth was soft beneath us.

We smiled at the world that day. The world was infectious that day.

“Ella,” Amy said. “You’ve got to help me find the horizon before we go to college together.”

“The horizon? Are you serious?”

“Yeah! We’ll steal Cherry Bomb—grand theft auto, you
know
you want to—and we’ll just drive until we slam into it. Or until everything feels like sun around us.”

“You’re so weird right now. Been messing with your boyfriend’s stash?”

“Nah. I just want his car and his body, not his drugs.”

She was lying.

That was two days before she died, two days before my party. Two. Fucking. Days. She couldn’t have had such a radical change of mind in two days, could she?

I don’t get it.

I just don’t.

Why did she tell me all that if she was going to die? Why did she tell me that we’d be going on some crazy road trip to the horizon together, that we’d be going to college together, if she was going to leave me alone in Sherwood?

Part of me can’t help but wonder whether, maybe, she wanted to reach the horizon so she could see if there was anything on the other side.

I feel like an unnecessary piece of garbage dumped at the airport.

It doesn’t help that the center’s about to close and the parents are showing up in their SUVs and sports cars and Hondas. They look down at me. And then the kids start to come out of the center, and they look down at me, too. Down, down, down their noses.

They can see her. The ghost of the girl I used to be, who will haunt me forever. And Amy. Sometimes I think Amy’s death is as visible on us—me and Mark and Pet—as our clothes, our hair, our fuck-off stares.

Today, I don’t, can’t shoot anyone with my glare. Instead, I stare through strands of brittle black hair at the concrete, at the bruised autumn leaves.

The kids—Nike, Reebok, Nike, Converse, Converse—get swallowed up inside the cars, which cruise away down the street. The engines drone off into the distance.

And then the sound dies and I’m alone again.

Waiting for Tristan.

Where is he?

I turn my head looking for him. Searching him out. But all I can see are sapling trees and the twigs of the oak crisscrossing overhead, brown bars preventing me from leaping into the gray sky. It takes me a moment to realize that there’s actually another person out here, too.

Casey.

She’s sitting right in front of the entrance to the center,
leaning against the base of a streetlight. Her legs kick across the now-smudged lines of a hopscotch game, the edge of an electric blue
3
curling out from beneath her feet.

I wave when I catch her eye. Because this is what friendly, nonbitchy people do. They wave at ten-year-olds who seem as if the world has washed over them, washed into them, washed them out.

She waves back. Tugs at her hair. Even at this distance I can see that something’s making her uncomfortable. And that’s when I notice the car crawling toward the center. Battered. A blue version of Cherry Bomb. Blueberry Bomb. The driver’s got the window rolled down, and rock music and cigarette smoke float out the window.

There’s a voice crawling out the window, too. “Casey, get in the car.”

And I’m on my feet, not sure why, not sure what I’m going to do. There’s a part of me that’s dying inside for Casey, because the woman in the car—her mom I’m guessing—doesn’t care enough about her to put out the fucking cigarette. But it’s more than that. It’s the tone of her mother’s voice.

Shrapnel to my ears.

Casey stands, drags her feet to the car.

The woman blows out a huge plume of smoke. “Hurry up.”

Casey doesn’t respond. She opens the car door, gets inside. Her face is blank. Slack jaw, empty eyes.

Blueberry Bomb begins to move. I look up as it goes past me, and Casey’s staring straight at me. “Fuck,” she mouths, grinning. Like this is her secret rebellion or something.

Kid’s got premature teen spirit.

Wheels turning, burning by, and then they’re gone, speeding up the street way too fast.

And now I know
for sure
that something’s up with Casey. That she is well on her way to becoming exactly like my best friend, the girl who swears too much, parties too hard, drives too fast, drinks too much, and eats too little.

When you’re that age and you’ve got someone like that woman in the car, it’s so hard to know what to be.

I’m about to sit back down when I see Tristan emerging from the center.

“Hey,” he says, walking over to me. “I didn’t think you’d wait for me.”

Why not? Why not, when he’s offering to show me what Amy felt, what Amy thought? That’s all I want, and he’s offering it to me.

“Anyway, sorry I’m a bit late. I was busy punching out that Peter guy for ratting on you to Heather.”

“Really?”

He may just have stolen my position as the worst volunteer.

“No, not
really
.” His eyebrows are about to soar off into the sky, he’s so shocked that I believe him. “Do I look like the kind of guy who randomly punches people?”

I remember the
thwack
his fist made when it collided with Mark’s cheekbone.

I want to tell him that, yeah, he does. But he seems so incredulous. I’m pretty sure that’s not the answer he’s expecting.

I shift. Weight on my left foot, weight on my right. And then I shift again, because I still don’t know what to say. Because he’s got explosive hair, and he’s dressed in black and gray and blue, and he smells like fucking gunpowder.

What does he want me to say?

“Well—”

He runs a hand through his hair. “Okay. Don’t answer that question. Let’s just go.”

“Where?” I say. “Ghost Town?”

He seemed pretty interested in it on Saturday, but he didn’t actually say that we’d be going there.

“You don’t find out until you get there. Don’t be a
curious bitch.” He throws my words back at me, a tiny smirk edging the corners of his lips.

God. I hope this doesn’t end with him tossing me off a bridge.

I
NEED THE
gnome.
This is the only thought sandwiched inside my skull as I walk with Tristan.

We’re walking beside the jungle path of my childhood. Memories threaten to leap out of the trees and drag me into the shadowy undergrowth.

Tramp. Tramp. Tramp
. Our footsteps reverberate off the concrete, the sound zinging into the sky. Suddenly, he breaks off the path, heads into the jungle. I hesitate before following him.

Weeds underfoot, branches overhead. I can barely make out the sky. I can barely resist the temptation to open my mouth and call,
Amy, come out, come out, wherever you are!

It’s been more than a month since she died, and it still feels as if I haven’t processed her death. I still forget that she’s gone, that I can’t speak to her.

My breathing gets heavier.

Silence sits between us for too long, grows uncomfortable. We shift within it. Our footsteps become clipped. More clipped. The clipped-fucking-est.

“Where are we going?”

“Do you
want
me to blindfold you?”

“Fuck you,” I mumble before I can think it through.

Guilt stabs through my stomach.
Bitch
. It’s not as easy a personality type to shake as I thought it would be. Careless words seem to fall out of my mouth more easily than breaths.

Tristan’s warm, hazel eyes go dull for a second. And then, nice guy that he is, he turns my rudeness into a joke. “Oh, are we up for the orgies part then?”

“Yeah, we just need to find some other participants. Two people do not an orgy make, honey.”

“Honey?”

“It’s a part of my vocabulary,” I say. “Don’t take it too seriously.”

He holds his hand to his chest. As if I’ve shot him. “So wounded, Ella. So wounded.”