Falling into Place(13)

Down the hall, Monica Emerson is asleep too, her head against the wall. The nurse with the pink dinosaurs on her scrubs walks by and sees her, and goes for a blanket. As she tucks it around Monica’s shoulders, Monica stirs and whispers her daughter’s name.


Upstairs, Julia sits in the cafeteria with her fingers wrapped around her third Red Bull. Tonight is the first time she’s ever tried one. She doesn’t like the taste, not at all, and she hates the tremors, but at least she’s awake. She must stay awake, and she repeats it to herself as though it’ll keep her eyelids from fluttering shut. She can’t sleep tonight. She won’t. She must be awake when—if, if—bad news comes, because she cannot bear the idea of waking to it.


Kennie is just getting home. The competition results got delayed due to some scoring mix-up, and they were there for hours longer than they should have been. It doesn’t matter. They won.

Cheeks sore, stomach cramped.

She slips through the garage door into a dark house. Her parents are both awake in their separate bedrooms, her father working and her mother reading, but she doesn’t want to see either of them. She needs to charge her phone—it is dead in her pocket, and their coach has a strict “no phones at competitions” rule, anyway. They’re supposed to focus or bond or some other crap, though no one would have agreed to it had there been any service at all. She plugs it in and goes to the bathroom.

Shower. Sparkles and spandex for a worn pair of pajamas.

She comes back and checks her phone in the dark—her mother has just yelled for her to go to bed, she has school tomorrow—and opens her Facebook app.

Wet hair atop her head, a story through statuses.

Oh my god I can’t believe it Liz Emerson crashed her car she’s in the hospital she doesn’t look good she’s dying she’s dead she’s not she is be safe Liz we’re praying for you we’re praying praying praying.

She screams for her parents and runs into the hallway with the screen of her phone glaring. They refuse to let her drive to the hospital.

She goes back to her room with sobs tearing her apart. She lies in the darkness, surrounded by pillows and an impossible amount of fear.





SNAPSHOT: TWO


We’re on the roof. It’s flat, a balcony that they never added a railing to. A few feet away, Liz’s father is fixing a leak.

She is pulling the chalk across the freezing surface and singing. Her breath hangs in the air. She draws two little girls, as always. The first looks like her—a bundle girl today, boots and hat and puffy cloud coat. The second is never the same.

Today, I wear a pink sequined dress. I have the hair of her favorite doll and a pair of shoes she’s designing herself.

The wind invites the powder snow to dance, and the sun is everywhere. Soon, we will get bored and put the chalk away, but right now, we are happy. We draw. We sing.

She finishes the heel of my shoe. Her fingers are chapped.

It is the last picture I will ever be in.



CHAPTER FOURTEEN


Fifty-Eight Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car


She was still in Meridian then, just turning onto the interstate. Her backpack was beside her in the passenger seat—exams started next Monday, so it held every single one of her textbooks. She had filled it out of habit, and now she wished she hadn’t. Textbooks were expensive.

Her grades were still mostly decent, if only because someone was sure to notice if they had nose-dived. She was glad her GPA was still intact. At least something was.

But, she supposed, none of that mattered anymore. She hadn’t finished the last physics project; her grade, which had been hovering precariously at a C minus, had surely dipped with that zero. She’d managed to keep an A until they started talking about Newton—whom Mr. Eliezer had introduced as a lifelong virgin, like, Let’s study this dude who was so obsessed with physics that he didn’t even want to have sex, isn’t he incredible?—and somewhere in the sudden flood of velocity and inertia and force, Liz had started falling behind.

She just didn’t get physics. So there were all these theories and laws, and they’d spend weeks picking them apart, and in the end, Mr. Eliezer would tell them that they had to factor in air resistance and friction and all this other crap, so most of them couldn’t even be applied. It seemed sketchy to her, a science dependent upon the uncertainties of life.

Still. It was nice, the idea that she would never have to stress about homework or grades or Newton the goddamn virgin ever again.