Fall to Pieces (25 page)

Amy’s hanging off the roof, suspended in the air
.

“Let go of her, Amy,” Mark calls. “Let go of her.”

And Amy’s voice floats back to us. “I can’t,” she says. “I’m so afraid—I can’t do this on my own. I need Ella.”

“I fucking need Ella,” Mark retorts. “Let go, Amy. Maybe Pet and I can save you, too, you shithead. Remember to try and land on all fours.”

She doesn’t say anything for a second. Then, “I don’t want to be saved!”

Her fingers slip from mine, and I’m aware that I’m whispering, “No, no, no.” My tears are practically hosing the roof. And then she’s falling, and the strength with which Mark’s pulling on my arm tosses me across the roof
.

I slide onto the tiles as I watch Amy fall. The world goes black
.

I get up as the memory fades away. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I leave the others and head back to the car. It takes god knows how long for me to slip over and around the rocks. I make sure to turn back and wave before I disappear from their sight. Just so they know everything’s okay. That I’m fine, fine, fine.

Like a fourteen-year-old who’s gotten drunk for the first time, I stumble to the car. I’m crying so badly that I barely manage to make out its door, and it takes me at least three minutes to find the handle. When I do, I pull it open and haul myself into the car.

It smells of gunpowder, of Tristan and the nightly wakes he holds for his brother.

I knock my head into the steering wheel and listen to the horn go off every time my body is wracked by a violent sob. The moon smiles down at me, and I want to flip it off. But I know it would make no difference. Not one little bit.

Amy would still be dead.

She would still have tried to kill me.

God, I don’t know if I can forgive her. I know I should, because she wasn’t herself and she wasn’t thinking rationally. But didn’t she hear the note of terror in my voice? Didn’t she freaking hear how terrified I was?

And if she did, did she just not care?

She wanted me to follow her into the dark.

I run my fingers through my hair and then beneath my eyes to get rid of the tears.

I guess this is why Pick Me Ups triggered my memories. Because Amy pulled me off the roof, and I was free-falling with her. I was falling, hanging over the edge of the roof. I can remember now: the knot of sick-angry-tired-scared rolling around in my stomach just waiting to be puked out.

That’s
how you feel right before you’re about to die. None of that life-flashing-before-your-eyes shit. Thought flees. You’re reduced to three things: skin, bone, feeling.

And that’s what Pick Me Ups did, too. Well, that plus the exhilaration.

And shit, maybe I didn’t lose my memories because I
was concussed or drunk. Maybe I
chose
to forget them. It feels ridiculously possible. Like all I wanted was to paint over what actually happened so I could be in control. So I could write a new story on that blank space.

A story where Amy made sense.

Where the world made fucking sense.

But there is no story where the world makes sense. Especially not the true story.

Amy repulses me.

Someone knocks on the window. I roll it down, still sobbing, still shivering, but trying to get myself under control. It’s Tristan. “Can I come in?” he asks as if his car is some kind of sacred place for me.

I guess it is right now.

“Yeah,” I say. And he’s kind of a sacred person for me right now.

I want to be saved.

Tristan gets into the car, and he’s quiet for a moment, fists stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. Finally, he says, “You have to forgive her.”

I keep on crying and don’t say anything.

“Ella, listen to me. Sometimes people do stupid things.” He laughs a little. “I’m a case in point there. Look, when I tried to help my brother—”

“That was different,” I interrupt. “He asked you to do that. I fucking begged her to let go of me.”

The sobs stop. It’s like speaking is a magic cure for the tears. I feel deathly calm now.

“Regardless. She was drunk out of her mind from what you’ve told me. She was in a crazy place. And I don’t know what else she was; but I do know that she was your best friend, and she probably couldn’t think through the consequences of what she was doing.”

The words are so rational. They sink into my skin, into my pores. I twist in my seat so that I’m facing Tristan and give him a salty kiss on the lips.

“What was that for?”

I shrug. “I couldn’t resist your multitudes.”

But really, it’s so much more than that.

I squeeze my eyes shut.

My stomach twists with guilt, anger, rage. It’s like a mixed drink in there, and the only thing this punch hasn’t been spiked with is forgiveness. “Tomorrow you will make so much sense. Tomorrow I’ll be able to listen,” I say. “But right now I just want to be angry.”

I’ll forgive her tomorrow. I hope.

W
E DECIDE TO
spend the night at the lake and drive back in the morning. Tristan sleeps in the car, but Mark and Petal and I stay outside. Under the stars. None of us has words for one another; but Petal finger-combs my hair, and occasionally Mark skips stones across the lake, and it feels like a few things, just a few things, are right with the world.

They’re not lying to me anymore.

In the morning when we reach Sherwood, all I want to do is head home, fall down on my couch or my bed or the floor. Never get up again. But that’s not what I do.

Tristan drops off Mark and Petal first, and somehow it feels right that we’re the only ones remaining, even though I’ve known them for years and him for days. He’s driving toward my house; but when he gets to a red traffic light,
I unglue my chapped lips and say, “Take me to the child care center, please.”

“But Heather doesn’t want you to come back—”

“Fuck what Heather wants. This is important.”

He gives me a skeptical look, as if he’s not sure I can handle any of it, any of my life right now. But then he turns the car around and heads toward the child care center.

I’m still crying at intervals. I can’t help it, can’t stop myself. My best friend, she fucking tried to kill me; she was that messed up. I’m trying not to fall apart in the front seat of Tristan’s car. Trying not to bash my head into the glove box again and again and again like I did with the steering wheel yesterday at the lake.

My entire body feels cold. Ice has stabbed through my skin, sunk into my bloodstream. It’s spread throughout my body. God, I’m freezing, freezing, freezing.

Tristan pulls up outside the center. Kills the engine. “What are you going to do?”

“What I should have done ages ago,” I say.

What I should have done for Amy when I realized that something was up with her.

I can do this
, I tell myself.
I can do what I’m going to do now, and I can know that it is the right thing. I can hope that, maybe, it will make a difference
.

It’s the first time in years that I’ve bothered to wear a seatbelt. I unbuckle it and open the door.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Tristan asks. He’s looking at me, and I love that he’s looking at me. That he can still look at me as if he cares when I can see in the side mirror that my hair’s a bird’s nest and my mouth’s become an ugly, ugly line of pain.

“No,” I say. “I’ll be fine on my own.”

And for the first time in my life, I think it might be true.

I find Heather sitting on the bench in the corner of the courtyard. The green paint goes well with her pink-and-peach floral blouse. Some kids are curled up at the end of the slide, waiting for their friend at the top to come down and barrel into them.

“Hey,” I say when I’m standing in front of Heather. “What are you going to do about Casey?”

“What are you doing here? I thought I told you to get out. I meant to never come back.”

“Yeah, I don’t care,” I say. I’m too cold to care right now. I dig my fingers into the pockets of my jeans, duck my head, and glance at her. She must have noticed how messed up I look, because she’s got this curious look on her face and she isn’t yelling at me or attacking me.

It doesn’t matter. I’m just here to do what I have to.

“What are you going to do about Casey?” I ask her again.

“What do you mean?”

“Something’s wrong with her.”

“What’s wrong?”

I rub a hand over my forehead. “I don’t know. Something. Her mother smokes cigarettes when Casey’s around and doesn’t give a damn. And Casey likes to say the word
fuck
way too much—”

“Bet you taught her that...”

I ignore her shitty comment. “And she’s obsessed with her future, and she thinks she’s a green-shaped blob, and she doesn’t believe in happy endings. She’s a ten-year-old nihilist, Heather, and you have to do something about that.”

“She’s entitled to view the world the way she wants,” Heather says. She watches the kids on the slide as if they’re the most fascinating things in the world. And maybe they are. Maybe humans, especially children, really are the most fascinating things in the world, because they’re cruel and innocent and beautiful and terrible all at once.

And then they grow up into people like me and Amy, and they’re just terrible and cruel. And I have to keep speaking, have to convince Heather, because I don’t want Casey to lose the parts of her that are innocent and beautiful.

“Sure,” I say. “For sure, she’s allowed to have her own views. I’m not asking you to teach her to think she’ll get a
happy ending. I’m asking you to do something to show her that a world without happy endings is still worth it. That
being
is worth it.”

“Are you high?” She’s standing up now.

“No. I’m not
high
.”

Why is it that when anyone says anything that matters, people assume drugs are part of the equation? I’m brave enough to say stupid philosophical shit without being drunk or high.

“Look, you have to leave—”

“Have you heard that girl laugh?” She has the laugh of a dead girl. The laugh of a dead girl who tried to kill me. A dead girl whom I’m pretty sure I hate right now. “Have you looked at her eyes? You must have noticed that she cries every day? Seriously, I would go to her school with this, but I don’t know where it is; and I would go to her mom with this, but to be honest, she freaks me out.” I pause, take a deep breath. “So I’m coming to you, because you’re trained to deal with kids, and you can get her help.”

Heather stares at me. Readjusts her floral blouse. “Well—”

“Just get her help,” I say. And I’m so glad, as I walk away from her, that I imitated my mom’s meeting-adjourned voice perfectly.

When I get back into the car, I tell Tristan, “Now take me home.”

And he says, “What did you do?”

“Stopped Casey from turning into Amy, hopefully.” I crash my head back into the headrest and close my eyes.

“So you still love her then?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, I’ll forgive her. Just not now.”

I
think
I’ll forgive her, anyway.

Please, god, let me forgive her. Let me forgive her tomorrow, because I can’t live with this storm of sadness and anger brewing inside my body. I don’t want to remember Amy this way.

T
OMORROW TURNS INTO
the next day, which turns into next week, which turns into next month.

But I do forgive Amy gradually. Bit by bit. With all my memory snapped into place, it’s impossible not to remember everything before that cold night. Impossible not to remember more than the fact that she tried to pull me off a roof.

The day she photocopied her homework for me to copy.

The day she taught me how to pick a lock ’cause I was always forgetting my locker key.

The day she spent two hours braiding my hair so that I’d look “pretty” for some guy I’ve forgotten.

The day she said, seriously, with a poker face and tears in her eyes, “I’m bulimic.”

That was why Mark liked her better when she was fat. That was what he was trying to say: Amy, we love you
either way. Amy, you don’t have to slowly kill yourself, because we love you.

My response to Amy’s news? I put my arms around her and squeezed hard, as if that would prevent her from slowly disappearing. I nodded into her shoulder and said, “I’ve noticed.” Because it’s hard not to when your best friend begins to turn into a wraith.

I remember all the times I let Amy down. The time I was supposed to wait for her at the movies when we were twelve, and I got impatient because she was five minutes late. I left without her. I left my friend behind, practically stood her up.

The time I spilled coffee all over her favorite book, and she just laughed it off. And of course, that time in ninth grade when I waged war with Amy over some stupid boy we both liked. She got together with Mark later that month, and it all blew over.

The memories flit into my mind, each one a little piece of sunlight pushing away the overwhelming black hate. Piece by piece by piece it disappears.

Tristan helps, too, by being his softly logical self.

He drives me home now. We’re going out or something—I’m not really sure what to call it. It’s not as if we can tell people “See, we enjoy saving each other.” And Mark puts up with it, even though sometimes I can see from the way he looks at my Explosive Boy that he’d
rather punch him in the gut than on the shoulder. That he’d rather say “Fuck you” than “Hey, man.”

Mark has a hard time getting over things. Kinda like me.

It happens one morning as I’m about to head to school.

I feel at peace with Amy.

Mom’s sitting on the couch, dressed in a blue suit, puzzling over a crossword in the newspaper. When she hears my feet creaking over the wooden floors, she looks up and smiles. “You look happy this morning,” she says, tilting her head to one side. “It’s a good look for you, honey.”

Mom has surprised me by not giving up on me after that night when I told her to leave me alone. She has continued to try and worm her way into my life. She still doesn’t feel like a mother to me—we’re not close, but we manage to exchange words beyond
hello
s and
good-bye
s these days without fighting. She’s been kind enough to not make me see Roger, despite my departure from the child care center.