Falling into Place (11 page)

Then there was homecoming during junior year, just a few months before. Liz was about to break up with him once and for all, and then he did something that made her wonder about love again.

She opened her locker after her last class, and a flower fell out. There was a ribbon tied around the stem, and some sort of Shakespeare quote written on it in Jake's scrawl, which should have turned her off right away. Julia liked Shakespeare. Liz liked the cynics—Orwell, Twain, Swift, Hemingway. But she had just come from the homecoming pep rally; the hallways were loud and her hair was messy from the wind and the flower and ribbon were so beautiful that in that moment, she felt beautiful too.

IT IS THE EAST, AND LIZ IS THE SUN
, the ribbon said (and truthfully, a part of Liz cringed because Jake was just so goddamn cliché).
GO EAST, SUNSHINE, TO THE PLACE WHERE WE FIRST MET
.

So she did. She went to the middle school, about three hundred feet east of the high school. The first time she had ever talked to Jake had been sixth grade. They had arrived at the water fountain by the gym at the same time, and he had gallantly stepped back. For a moment, she thought it was incredibly sweet that he had remembered, but as she walked toward the middle school, a twinge of suspicion grew inside her. Jake was not the sentimental type—he could hardly remember what had happened last week, much less what had happened five years ago.

She went into the building and stopped in front of the water fountain by the gym, read the waiting card.
YOUR LIPS ON MINE
,
UNDER THE STARS
. At the movie theater parking lot, she picked up the waiting teddy bear and took the note from its paws:
WHERE WE HAD OUR FIRST DATE
,
A TEA PARTY WITH TEDDY BEARS
. The hospital, where she had visited him after he had broken his collarbone playing football. She had brought him a mug of chai tea (which Jake had ignored in favor of his hospital-issued chili dog) and a get-well bear as a joke. They had ended up making out in the hospital bed until a nurse had come and asked Liz, none too politely, to leave.

The scavenger hunt led her all over Meridian and wasted an entire tank of gas, and at the end, she found herself parked at the edge of the overgrown field by the elementary school. Jake was standing in the middle of it, holding a sign with the last clue written in black Sharpie.

It said
WILL YOU GO TO THE DANCE WITH ME
?

She said yes.

Liz had a generally hard time believing in love, and she was not in love with Jake Derrick. She was in love with the things he did. Turned out, though, her suspicions were correct—the scavenger hunt was beyond the imagination of her self-involved boyfriend. Jake had known that Liz's friends would do the majority of the work. Really, all he had to do was stand there.

But that afternoon, in the abandoned field by the elementary school, Liz pretended that they were. In love. She lied to herself. Her world was almost beautiful. She didn't care that it was false.

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T
here are three kinds of people after the surgery is pronounced successful.

There are the ones who are breathless, shaking, crying in that crushing and desperate kind of relief—namely, Liz's mother and Julia. When the doctor first told Monica that her daughter had not died on the operating table, she went to Julia and held her, because she couldn't hold Liz.

All team practices have been cancelled for the day, so the waiting room is clogged with the second kind of people, the ones who aren't surprised at all. They shrug and say that they were never worried, never mind the fact that they had all abandoned their homework out of their professed concern. They sit around the low tables and say that they always knew Liz was strong enough to pull through.

And then there is Matthew Derringer, who is just the slightest bit disappointed, because he has already ordered flowers for the funeral.

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J
ulia has always been the good girl, Sunday afternoon activities aside. So her heart is nearly falling out of her chest when she grabs a pair of scrubs from a passing cart, pulls them over her jeans, and walks into the ICU with all the nonchalance she can muster.

It smells clean, clean like linens and antiseptics, like organized and monitored death. There are rows and rows of almost-corpses buried beneath white sheets. Julia has never shied away from blood or sickness, but this room makes her want to run and never look back. She doesn't want to see Liz here.

But she does. As always, Liz Emerson is hard to miss. This time, it's because, of all the patients, Liz looks furthest from reanimation. She looks beyond hope.

Julia's legs are shaking as she walks over to Liz's bed. She stops a good six feet away, afraid to go any closer, afraid that she will bump into one of the many machines and something will unhook and Liz will die and it will be her fault.

There is a chair by Liz's head, and Julia stares at it for a long while before she decides to sit down. She slides her backpack from her shoulder, takes out a pre-calc textbook, and opens it to the chapter the class is studying.

She begins to read. I watch her lips move. They're trembling too.

“‘For any point on an ellipse, the sum value of the distances from any given point to each foci will be a fixed value.' I remember this chapter. Don't worry. The test is easier than the homework, and she'll probably curve the quiz. You won't miss much. Anyway. ‘In the case of a hyperbola, however, the difference between the distances will be . . .”

Julia glances down at Liz's face and begins to cry. She had tried to avoid it, looking, but it's terribly difficult to not look at an almost-corpse, when the almost-corpse is your best friend.

Liz's face is gray like air pollution. Her hair is a mess, and parts of it have been chopped off so the doctors could stitch up her scalp. There are shadows beneath her eyes and bruises all over one cheek, and worst of all, her eyes are closed.

Liz has always hated sleeping. Once, we read the story of Sleeping Beauty together—we didn't understand much, because it was a harder version, and an unhappier one. Everyone was dead by the time the princess woke up, and maybe that was when Liz began to fear missing things.

The makeup is gone and her face is as naked as Julia as ever seen it. She sees the sadness, the exhaustion, the fault lines beneath the surface, and suddenly Julia is furious. If Liz had slept more, maybe she would have been a more careful driver. Maybe she wouldn't have been so reckless and ruthless and lost.

A tear slides down Julia's nose and falls onto Liz's hand. Julia watches her face for a sign of life. For anything.

But Liz is motionless, a girl of wax and shadows.

“Damn you,” Julia whispers, her voice small. “We were supposed to go running tonight. Open gym for soccer starts next week.”

They would have gone too—Liz liked running through snow. She would go now, were her leg not broken in three places.

Well, maybe not.

For soccer, Liz almost waited. The chances of Meridian's girls' varsity soccer team winning the state tournament have gone down dramatically. Without their junior captain and star forward, it will be a miracle if they even pass sectionals, and Liz hadn't wanted to be responsible for that failure too.

But she needed ice on the roads. She needed her accident to look as accidental as possible.

And she just didn't think she was capable of waiting another three months.

Julia, however, knows none of this. She looks down at what remains of her best friend, and she thinks of all the times Liz was quiet and not really there. The times when she was the Liz everyone else knows, all snark and insanity, and the moments when she was the one that stared at invisible things and hadn't truly smiled in a long time.

“God, Liz,” Julia says, and she closes her eyes to force the tears back. They overflow anyway, pooling somewhere deep inside her. “I can't run in the rain alone.”

It was right before cross-country season, junior year. It was pouring outside, and Julia was curled on the window seat with a book and a cup of soup when someone began ringing her doorbell insistently. She opened the front door and found Liz standing on her porch in nothing but a pair of rain-soaked shorts and an obnoxiously green sports bra.

“Come on,” said Liz. “Let's go running.”

Julia gaped. “What the hell are you—it's raining!”

“I've noticed,” Liz said impatiently. “Go change.” She looked at Julia's chest critically. “You'll start an earthquake if you let those things bounce.”

“Liz, it's
wet
.”

“No shit, Sherlock. Now
come on
.”

Julia closed the door in Liz's face and waited to see if Liz would leave.

She didn't, of course, so Julia went upstairs to change into a sports bra and her Nikes.

And they went running.

The rain was warm and smelled of beginnings. Liz and Julia ran unevenly, their footsteps syncopated: right right foot, left left foot. After a few minutes, Julia fell back a bit, because her strides were longer than Liz's—it was kind of awkward trying to run beside her, because she had to take a normal step, and then a smaller one so that Liz could match it—and she was already wheezing. Breathing in the contents of ziplock bags did nothing to improve her lung capacity.

But Liz didn't say anything and didn't care that she wheezed, and Julia was thankful.

She closed her eyes and threw her head back. The rain hit her face and slid down her shoulders. Her legs were muddy and her shoes were so heavy with water that they released a small wave with every step. She just ran, and there was something eloquent in the sound of rain and footsteps.

“Watch it, gimp,” Liz said when Julia veered into her. Julia's eyes snapped back open, and she found Liz running backward and smirking at her, and Julia laughed because she loved the ache in her legs, the stretch in her muscles, the heavy thudding of her heart, the rain that was everywhere.

She failed to notice that the wetness on Liz's face wasn't rain. She didn't realize that Liz was drowning, or that Liz was crying because she knew that she could never outrun the things she had done.

“Where are we going?” Julia asked, but Liz didn't answer. Julia was okay with that. Liz rarely ran the same route twice, and Julia didn't mind following.

So they just ran, and eventually they turned a corner and Julia saw Barry's Pond, which a disgustingly rich old couple from Florida had recently purchased. It had been a controversial sale—Meridian generally disproved of outsiders. Julia slowed as the grass turned to sand, but Liz went faster. Julia opened her mouth to say “What the hell,” but before she could, Liz ran onto the dock and over the edge without stopping, and disappeared in a flurry of bubbles.

“Crap,” Julia said under her breath, and then, louder, “Liz?”

But Liz didn't come up, and after a minute, Julia began to panic. It was raining harder now, and she could hardly see. She ran onto the dock and stood at the edge, waiting for Liz to pop up, but she didn't.

“Liz!” Julia shouted, bending over the water. “Liz—!”

Then she screamed, clear and shrill, as Liz shot out of the water, grabbed her, and dragged her under.

Julia came up choking. Liz was choking too, because she had been laughing as she pulled Julia into the water. Julia wanted to snap about fifty waspish things at Liz as she coughed the water out of her lungs, but as she turned to, she saw Liz laughing and breathless and brilliant and beautiful and hers.

So she splashed her.

Liz splashed her back, and they chased each other through the pond and the rain, their heads thrown back to drink in the sky, their fingers wrinkled, their hair plastered to their scalps.

Eventually, they dragged themselves back onto the dock to lie in the rain, which had faded into a drizzle. It tickled and left behind a fogginess that made the world blurry at the edges and just for them, only them.

As Julia lay there, her eyes closed, the splintering dock digging into her back in a dozen places, she heard Liz say quietly, “Thanks for coming with me.”

Julia smiled and sighed an unintelligible response. She spread her arms wide and felt the elastic of her sports bra tightening with every inhale, and for a moment, she couldn't feel where she ended and the world began.

“I love you guys,” Liz said suddenly, fiercely. “You and Kennie. God, I don't know what I'd do without you two.”

Julia opened her eyes. Liz was lying beside her, her bare stomach rising and falling very slightly. Her hair had fallen out of its ponytail and framed her face like a nest, and suddenly Julia was afraid, because Liz, her Liz, always kept her heart locked away.

“Are you drunk?” she asked, uncertainly.

“No,” Liz said, and she smiled.

Julia had seen Liz in homecoming dresses and in pajamas, Ralph Lauren blazers and flip-flops from Target, but she had never seen Liz as beautiful as she was then, with her eyes closed and her lips just barely, barely curved, because until then, Julia had never associated the word
peaceful
with Liz Emerson.

Liz sighed. It was a soundless thing, only a parting of lips. “Sometimes,” she said, so softly that Julia wasn't sure if she was meant to hear, “sometimes I forget that I'm alive.”

So, in the hospital, looking over an utterly different Liz, one who looks everything except peaceful, Julia leans forward and whispers two words to her, suddenly, fiercely.