Fall to Pieces (21 page)

“Yeah, well,” Amy says. “I’m going to kill you for kissing Petal, when I’m sober.”

Not drunk enough to forget that, apparently. Her head lolls, and slobber falls out of her mouth
.

Mark peers around the camera, eyes flashing a warning as alarming as the red lights on an ambulance. I shoot him a look. “Don’t,” I mouth. “Not now.”

“What are you saying, Ella? What are you hiding from me?” Amy slips her toes over the edge of the roof and dangles them in the crisp night air
.

Mark goes off. He doesn’t even take his face out from behind the camera. “Oh, she’s only telling me not to get pissed at you for acting like a self-righteous bitch when I know you kissed Ella barely twenty minutes ago.” His words sting worse than the cold night wind
.

Amy is stunned, even in her stupor
.

Pet looks from me to Amy and then back again. “Wh-what?” she manages to say
.

“You heard me,” Mark roars. “Amy made out with Ella. Amy fucking said that the only reason she was dating me was because she couldn’t have Ella. Ella’s had her heart since forever, apparently.”

I bury my head in my hands. I want them to stop. I want them to stop. I want them to stop
.

But the words are spewing out of Mark’s mouth. “Fuck, Amy. Why the fuck couldn’t you tell me that you’re gay? That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

Amy’s crying now. She can’t look at him. And he’s moving over the tiles. They slip away, slide away
. Doof, doof, doof.
Beating into the grass in time with the rhythm of the music floating up from the party
.

Mark stands next to Amy, and now he’s crying, too. He drops a hand onto her shoulder. “Why couldn’t you tell me?” he demands. “I would have loved you, anyway. Best friend, girlfriend, it wouldn’t have fucking mattered. Why did you have to lie?”

I want her to say that she did love him. That she did fall in love with him once upon a time during those ninth-grade days when we were into ice-cream parlors more than drinking parties. I want her to say that she can love me and she can love Mark, because she’s bisexual or something. Because then it wouldn’t matter that she’s always pretended to be straight
.

None of us cares about her sexuality. None of us give a flying fuck
.

But she thought we would
.

I close my eyes. Midnight dew kisses the lids
.

Amy speaks. “Because, Mark. Because I was a kid and I was confused and I didn’t know what I was feeling. And I fucking hated it, you know? I fucking hated all of it. My parents kept
on telling me I would turn into a guy if I kept getting fat like I did—”

In that moment I want to kill Amy’s parents. I want to kill them for the subtle way their eyes would narrow when they looked over Amy’s figure. The way they’d linger on her belly if they saw even the slightest bit of fat. Amy sucked in her stomach around her parents. She walked like she had a stick up her ass, like she was afraid of breaking whatever peace she’d managed to broker with them
.

“My hormones would change and all—” She chokes. Tears flow past her lips and into her mouth, and she swallows. “So I thought, I thought that when I got thin—things would change. Or something
. You
were going to change me, Mark
. You
were going to save me.”

His head droops; his curls droop. If I could see his face, I bet even his dimples would be drooping; but he’s turned away. Shoulders heaving. Because he can’t be her savior; he can’t. And that’s when it hits me: She went for him because she wanted me
. I
was supposed to be her savior
.

It makes me feel like a bitter sin, sitting on mold-covered tiles
.

“
Please,” Amy says. “Please, forgive me...I, you were—You were so beautiful.”

Her sobs choke, choke, choke everything out of my world. For a second that’s the only sound. The stars and moon disappear and the tiles beneath my feet vanish and I’m just floating and that sound is knifing into my back. Pure pain
.

When the sound fades, Amy is standing, teetering on the edge of
my rooftop and Mark has taken a few steps back. His face is ghastly, paler than even the moonlight as he stares at her. “No, Amy.” He shakes his head. “Don’t.”

“It isn’t worth it,” Petal calls. “Whatever it is, whatever you’ve lost, it isn’t worth your life.”

But I’ve seen that look on Amy’s face many times before. The way her jaw clenches, the way she looks at the world through lidded eyes. It was the same look she gave us just before we broke into a convenience store at three in the morning. The same look she had on her face when she kissed me
.

Talking isn’t going to stop her. Action might
.

I get up and slip-slide over the tiles to where Amy’s standing. I lace her fingers through mine, handcuffing her to the roof. There’s no way she’s going anywhere without me now. “Sit down, Amy,” I say. “Sit down.”

I make my voice harder than steel, make my determination match hers, and she starts to sit. She starts to sit. As I go down with her, I notice that the camera is still rolling. Perched higher than all of us on the roof, it takes in our every move
.

I’m gasping. Sitting on the floor of Mark’s bedroom. My fingers claw at his white sheets, scrabble through the photos. The sound of fingernails down a chalkboard as I scratch at their glossy surfaces and reveal the matte beneath. Scratched faces, scratched skin.

I can only scratch the surface of the past.

“Ella,” Tristan’s shouting now, pounding the side of
Mark’s house. There’s a crash and a clatter as he kicks something—probably one of those stupid metal buckets that Mark leaves outside to catch rainwater. Mark’s into preserving things, into the self-sufficient lifestyle.

My tears come in floods, but I don’t really feel them.

I’m crying because now I know what Mark meant by “the video is worse.” I’m crying because now I know that the gnome wasn’t the only one who saw Amy’s last moments. I’m crying because I finally know where I was when Amy died: I was on the roof, watching her fall.

And now there’s this suspicious voice in my head...

What if it wasn’t a suicide?

God. It may not have been a suicide.

What did we do? What did I see? What images did my mind photograph that night that were so painful they had to be shredded? Forgotten.

“ELLA!”

Tristan’s roar is so loud that it’s almost silent.

I seize onto his voice as if it’s a rope swinging down to me in the abyss, an anchor. “Tristan.” My voice is not my own. It’s breathy. It slides up and down, plays a freaking piano scale.

“Tristan,” I say again, my voice sounding slightly more normal. I gather the photos along with my thoughts, wrap them up securely in the purple scarf. “Tristan, stop kicking shit. I’m coming down now.”

There may never be anyone home at Mark’s. But I’m pretty sure if Tristan continues to trash everything in the garden, the neighbors are going to notice something’s up.

Deep breath. Step. Deep breath. Step. Deep breath. Step.

I’m standing at Mark’s window again. I pop my head out, breathe in the air, and then look down. Tristan’s fuming. His head’s going to explode if he gets any redder. And I didn’t think hazel eyes could burn like forest fires—wild, angry flames—but Grenade Boy’s proven me wrong.

“Fuck, Ella. What happened? Did you have another panic attack?”

I don’t want to think this. I don’t want to suspect this. But it’s the only thing I can think of. My mouth dries out, and I swallow hard again and again. I close my eyes against the glare of the sun. But the world beneath my eyelids is orange, too fucking bright.

So I open my eyes. Face Tristan, face my own thoughts.

He looks so confused. The splinters are still breaking away beneath my nails. Everything is falling apart, breaking off. I won’t be surprised if the window frame collapses when I climb through it in a second.

I speak the words that change this from a chase to find out what Amy felt before she died to a chase to find a killer: “I think one of us may have pushed her.”

W
IDE EYES
. T
RISTAN
can’t keep his hands still. He runs them through his hair. They fiddle with the buttons on his shirt. He accidentally undoes a few of them. Shit, his chest is toned underneath that shirt.

I feel bad for thinking that at this moment in time. But I’m a horny teenager who’s been lying about having orgies and not actually having any.

His fingers eventually bury themselves in his pockets. He meets my eyes. I can feel the sparks, the explosiveness of him traveling between us. We breathe and we breathe and we breathe. And I realize that I don’t want to be a bitch to Tristan anymore.

I want to—Oh, god. I don’t even know what I want to do.

“Shit” is all he says.

“Yeah,” I reply. “I’m coming down now.” I fix him with a look of pure poison. “Don’t let me fall.”

He knows what I mean. If I fall, it will be like a Pick Me Up.

I throw myself onto the window, throw my legs over the edge. He takes a few steps back, and I can’t help but roll my eyes a little. I know I’m moving with a bit more verve than usual, but did I really look that bad before?

“What?” I glare at him.

“Nothing, nothing.” He shakes his head. “Just, you’re back to being a bitch. So I know everything’s normal.”

He grins, and I try to grin back. But it feels like I’m splintering into a million little pieces. I can’t stop thinking about Amy. About the fact that it may not have been a suicide.

“Right,” I say, trying not to dwell on it.

I twist my body around to start sliding down when I catch sight of something. “Shit!” I reach out and grab the inside edge of Mark’s window. Splinters, cutting into the palm of my hand. About ten of them.

“Hang on, there’s something I have to see,” I call to Tristan.

“Well, I’m enjoying what I’m seeing,” he says. I can practically hear the laughter in his voice, and realize that he probably has a very unflattering view of my ass right now.

“Fuck you,” I growl as I haul myself up, back through the window as ungracefully as the last time. I’m
obviously not made for petty crime such as breaking and entering.

I stumble into the room and across the carpet like a drunk in heels. There’s something hanging on the back of Mark’s door. He’s taped a message to it.

PETAL. ELLA
.

It’s addressed to us, in capital letters. The sight of our names, in bright red was what caught my eye before. Another one of Mark’s cryptic clues, and I don’t know what the hell it means yet.

The words beneath our names:
GONE FISHING
.

Under that is a picture of a fish chewing on what I can only guess is some bread crumbs.

Mark. Has. Gone. Fishing.

Mark’s not exactly the sit-in-a-boat-for-ten-hours type. Because, if nothing bites, he’ll be bored as hell and just jump into the water or some shit.

Except. Apparently, he’s gone fishing, for an extended period of time. Otherwise he wouldn’t have felt the need to inform the world. He’s planning to be gone long enough that we’d come here looking for him.

“What the hell?”

I rip the piece of paper from the door, fold it into a tiny square, and slip it into my pocket. Then I slip-slide-fall my way out the window again. Tristan catches me, and he’s just sort of holding me. Our faces are so close and I think
he’s going to kiss me and allmythoughtscrashtogether like ice cubes in a glass of whiskey.

But he doesn’t kiss me in the end. He just puts me down and half turns away, looking awkward. Smelling of gunpowder.

His hands are stuck in his pockets again. “So, um, what was it?”

“I’ll tell you on the way to Petal’s house. We need a car. Do you happen to have one?”

He shakes his head a few times and then says quickly, “Ella. Breaking and entering, okay. Cool. But grand theft auto, not so much.”

I punch him on the shoulder and wink. “I’ll make a criminal of you yet.”

“I have a car,” he says. “I have a car. If we walk to my house.”

But he seems so nervous. So fucking nervous.

“You don’t have to come—You could just give me the car—”

“I’m fucking coming. Deal with it,” he snaps.

T
EN MINUTES LATER
, we’re standing in front of tristan’s house. It’s not what I imagined. Somehow—I suppose it was the constant smell of gunpowder—I was expecting something grittier. I thought my Explosive Boy would live in a bomb of a house.

But his house is a suburban dream. Red bricks, ivy. Fucking lattices, and lace in the windows. Only the picket fence isn’t white; it’s blue. I glance at it and raise my eyebrows. “Subversive, dude,” I say.

“Dude?” he returns. “Since when do you speak like a pothead?”

“Since now, obviously.”

“Come on, the car’s in the garage.”

We head over, and Tristan pops open the garage door, revealing his wheels.

I lean back a little and whistle. Well, his house may not be a bomb, but his car sure is.

He shakes his head at me. “Unimpressed, I see, Princess Ella.”

“Understatement. I’m like anti-impressed. Kids who smell like gunpowder should drive good cars, in my opinion.”

“Gunpowder? What is up with you and all this gunpowder shit?”

“Come on,” I say. “You mean you haven’t noticed that you smell like you wear fucking matchsticks for cologne?”

“No.” He bites his lip. Bites it and bites it and bites it and doesn’t say anything. “No,” he repeats finally. Heavily.

“Let’s go to Pet’s, okay?” I say to break the silence.

He nods and walks me around to the side of the car. Opens the door. “Come on, Princess.”

He’s mocking me. So I mock him right back. Fluttering eyelashes. Stepping as if I’m walking on balloons. “Coming, Prince Charming.”