Falling into Place (8 page)

When she had me.

She rolled up her sleeve and wrote her three rules across her arm, so she wouldn't forget. She underlined them, and added:

HERE LIES LIZ EMERSON
.

 

 

The house is white with blue shutters, and there is something indefinably cozy about it. To the side, Liz is behind a bush, her hands pushing the leaves apart. We have played at least a thousand games of hide-and-seek here. Liz counts to a hundred and then searches everywhere, as though she can't hear me giggling, as though I ever hide anywhere except behind the brown couch
.

Soon Liz will begin to grow up. The older she gets, the less interested she will be in searching, the more easily distracted she will be by television and snacks and stories, the less she will care if I am ever found
.

One day, she will count, and I will hide behind the brown couch
.

She will forget to seek
.

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S
he was sharply aware of the time slipping through her fingers, and she wondered if it had always passed this quickly. Yesterday she was getting her first bra, and the day before that she was graduating from elementary school. A week ago, she had taken the training wheels off her bike all by herself and had ridden almost five feet before the entire bike fell apart because she had loosened one screw too many.

If only time had moved as quickly during physics class.

Outside the car, it had started snowing again. Little specks like dandruff.
Gravity
, thought Liz.
Goddamn gravity
, and all of a sudden those suppressed twinges of sadness flared into something much greater. She would never understand, would she? Gravity and inertia, force and mass and acceleration—she would never know
why
.

She glanced at her clock and thought,
I still have time
.

Objects at rest
.

But it was like taking a timed test, and her mind did what it always did during timed tests. It wandered, and soon Liz was thinking about fourth grade, the year before her mother was promoted and they moved to Meridian. They were all objects at rest, then.

Fourth grade was fuzzy—she remembered only the most vague and cliché of events—playing kickball at recess, cutting in the lunch line, getting caught and subsequently sentenced to five minutes on the Wall. Fractions.

Liz had no real friends back then. There were people with whom she was friendly, she sat in a big group at lunch, and she had a reasonable amount of fun. But her friends were interchangeable. Somehow, they all felt temporary.

And she certainly hadn't belonged to the group of girls who wore matching skirts and sneakers from Target.
That
Liz Emerson had been content in her place just outside the spotlight. She was comfortable with her quiet half anonymity.

There was one girl in particular, Mackenzie Bates, who was enormously popular by fourth-grade standards, which mostly meant that she brought the best lunches in the prettiest lunch boxes and was the tallest girl in the class. When Mackenzie spoke, the fourth grade listened.

A few months into the year, a girl named Melody Lace Blair arrived at school. Her parents were hippies from California, and Melody came to class in overalls—
overalls
, the deadliest and ugliest sin. That would have been enough reason to exclude her even if Mackenzie hadn't developed an immediate and intense hatred for her.

Not only did they share initials, but Melody was exactly one inch taller than Mackenzie.

It had started small. Snide whispered comments. Glares from the opposite side of the room. But soon Mackenzie got her group of matching friends in on it, and things began to escalate.

At one point or another, most of the fourth graders remembered all of the antibullying assemblies they had sat through. They recalled how eagerly they had agreed to speak up if they saw someone being bullied.

But slowly, then with more force, the fourth grade came to agree with Mackenzie. Melody was different, different was weird, weird was bad. It was simple. Maybe they didn't actively participate in the undoing of Melody Blair, but it was their silence, their willingness to look away, that lent Mackenzie her power.

So as everyone else became blind in matters concerning Melody, Liz kept watching. She tried to understand why everyone was so afraid of being different—why she was too. A hundred times she opened her mouth to speak up for Melody, and a hundred times she closed it. It would have been a one-way ticket to the center of the shooting range.

Say something
, I told her, and told her again.
Say something. You promised
.

She wasn't listening.

The final showdown happened in early spring, one of the first days after they were allowed outside for recess again. Maybe Mackenzie was bored, or maybe the change in the weather also called for a change in playground patterns, or maybe she was just experiencing early puberty—whatever the reason, she cornered Melody and tore her apart with words.

It didn't take long for the rest of the fourth graders to notice and migrate over. Liz had been on the monkey bars with some other girls, but one by one, they left to watch. Finally, Liz did too. She couldn't help it. There was a certain dark allure in destruction, and who was Liz to defy it?

Standing as part of the silent majority, Liz was not the only one who felt guilty. Guilt, however, wasn't enough of a force to push them from the winning side. So Liz and everyone else stood and listened as Mackenzie and her friends grew more and more vicious.

“You're so ugly that you probably break every mirror you pass.”

“Your clothes are, like, totally hideous.”

“You smell so weird. Take a shower, loser.”

Amid the hoots and jeers of his group of miniature-jock friends, Mack Jennings shouted something about Melody being fat, and within minutes, everyone had arranged themselves into a loose ring. One by one, they went around the circle and stated one thing that they disliked about Melody.

When Liz found herself in that circle, she did not move.

I tried to push her, but I didn't have enough force, either.

They were barely a quarter of the way around when Melody began to cry. She stood surrounded, wide-eyed and lost, shaking and afraid and confused and searching for answers in eyes that refused to meet hers.

“Why do you always walk with your nose up in the air like that? Do you think you're better than us or something?”

“Is there something wrong with your feet, or do you always walk like a cripple?”

Then it was Liz's turn. When she hesitated, everyone turned to look at her, and Liz looked at Melody. She looked at the tear-streaked face and the red eyes, and she saw something that made her want to cry too.

“Liz,” Mackenzie said impatiently.

Liz opened her mouth and said in a quiet rush, “When's your birthday?”

There was a small, confused silence. In it, Liz saw Melody's hope grow infinitesimally, so Liz looked away when she ripped it to shreds.

“I think I'll buy you a dictionary,” she said. Still rushing, the words falling and splattering like rain. “So you can look up ‘normal.' You obviously don't know what it means.”

Mackenzie laughed. Everybody laughed.

Liz stared at the ground.

I tried to take her hand, but she was slipping away.

Then, suddenly, Melody pushed through the mob and ran into the building. The recess monitors, who were busy trying to wrestle the kindergarteners off the climbing wall, noticed nothing. Mackenzie didn't move for a moment, disoriented now that her circus act had disappeared. Then she blinked a few times and skipped away with her friends. Bit by bit, everyone else broke off too.

Except Liz. She waited until no one was watching, and headed inside.

She checked the classroom and the cubby room, and when she didn't find Melody, she went to the girls' bathroom. Sure enough, she heard the sobs as soon as she pushed open the door. She stepped carefully, her sneakers almost silent against the tiles, and she saw Melody's feet dangling beneath the stall door as she sat and cried.

But in the end, Liz did nothing. She watched for another moment, and then she went back outside and joined her friends by the monkey bars.

Liz would remember that day while sitting in pre-algebra with a blank pop quiz in front of her. Mackenzie was the inspiration for the piece of paper she sent around the class, on which everyone wrote one thing they disliked about the new girl with the weird clothes, and it was partly because of the dangling feet, watching them, that she ultimately befriended Julia.

One day, years later, Liz went to the beach with Kennie and Julia. Kennie was in the water and Julia was asleep in the sun, and Liz was trying to clean the sand off her phone when she saw an obituary for a girl named Melody Lace Blair, who had been found dead in her bathtub. The police suspected suicide.

Her old school had held a memorial service, according to the obituary. When the students gathered together to remember Melody, one girl gave a moving speech about the beautiful, strong, wonderful person Melody had been, and how she would never be forgotten.

Funnily enough, the speaker had the exact same initials as Melody.

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S
he gripped the steering wheel and wondered if Melody had known.

That Liz had been there.

That she had watched her feet dangle.

She couldn't have
. If she had, she would have said something. After all, they had been alone. Melody could have insulted Liz all she liked—she would have, if she had known Liz was there, surely she would have. She could have said the most awful thing in the world, and Liz wished that she had. Because then she could die believing that humans were inherently crappy creatures, and maybe her conscience would be a little lighter on this particular drive.

But part of Liz wondered if Melody had already learned what it had taken Liz sixteen years to figure out (and even then, only by ripping off the Gandhi quote she'd come across in her history textbook): that taking an eye for an eye left the whole world blind.

Objects at rest. Standing and watching, watching and standing.

How do you gather the force to push an object into motion
?

Was it a riddle? A test question? It didn't matter. She knew the answer.

She drove faster.

 

 

Liz is holding my hand. The credits for some children's show are playing in the background. It had been about good people and bad people, and it put bullying and being mean into very simple terms. Liz had reached for my hand, and now she asks me to promise with her to be good people forever. To never hurt anyone's feelings. To stand up for what is right, always
.

I see the sincerity in her eyes, the faith that we can be heroes, so I agree
.

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J
ulia drives to the hospital with her eye on the gas gauge. The pointer is dipping uncomfortably close to E, and she doesn't have her credit card with her. Her wallet is still on her bed. She forgot to grab it when she left for the hospital yesterday afternoon, and she hadn't wanted to go home for it. Her father had left her a voicemail telling her exactly what he thought of her spending the night at the hospital, and she doesn't want him to know that she skipped school too.

Julia's relationship with her father is an estranged and rather bitter one. She blames him for his affair and the subsequent divorce, and besides, he is always disappointed in something. On the rare occasions when Julia looks back on her childhood, she only sees her shortcomings, because that was all anyone seemed to focus on. There was never a best, only better, and her greatest fear was always disappointing people.

Liz is afraid of silence, but Julia has long grown used to it. It's thicker in her house than in Liz's house—she avoids her father most nights, and he does nothing to change that. Julia is not entirely sure she wants him to. She has too many secrets, and so long as he doesn't pay attention, she can continue using his bank account.

Julia drives and tries not to think about that. She glances at her rearview mirror. Hanging from it is a pair of bouncy balls, hot glued together and tied with yarn, and Julia reaches for them.

They had gone skiing at a crappy little resort that was all that could be expected of anything within two hours of Meridian. The ski hill had looked stunted from the bottom but could have been Everest from the top, and try as she might, Julia simply hadn't been able to gather the will to lean forward and fall. Liz glanced at her face and, for once, kept quiet. They rode back down on the ski lift and left, and Liz waited until they had pulled out of the parking lot to start laughing.

“Grow a pair,” she said as Julia coaxed her Ford Falcon onto the interstate.

Julia loved her car, which she had fondly nicknamed Mattie (short for Matilda) and everyone else had, less fondly, nicknamed Piece of Crap. She loved the way it smelled, like an old book with a hint of cigar smoke. She loved that it had a story, albeit one that the car dealer had refused to tell her. She hadn't minded—she made up a history of her own, one that included a rich Southern philanthropist and a short-lived love affair and an abandoned orange cat.