Falling into Place(14)

But she turned onto the on ramp too sharply, and her backpack kept moving in one direction while the car turned in another. It thudded to the floor of the car, and Liz starting thinking about moving objects and Newton’s First Law.

Objects at rest stay at rest, objects in motion stay in motion.



CHAPTER FIFTEEN


One Day After Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car


Liz has always hated missing school. She hates making up work and wondering what happened without her. Did people talk about her? Did they call her slut and skank and worse things while she was gone? She always talks about people behind their backs, so she assumes that everyone else does too. Liz has gone to school with hangovers and migraines, bruises and sprains, colds and stomach flus, and once with a sore throat that started an epidemic of strep throughout the entire district.

But today, with a missing spleen and a broken leg and a shattered hand and a ruptured lung and too much internal bruising to document, it seems unlikely that Liz Emerson will attend school.

Julia too stays at the hospital with what must be her tenth can of Red Bull wobbling in her hands. Monica is there, of course, and Liam, who hadn’t intended to stay at the hospital, is still asleep against the window.

Everyone else is already at school. Within the walls of Meridian High School, there is a hush like smoke, like smog. Breathing it is like breathing January air—it stings with each inhale, freezes inside each lung. An hour away, Liz is dying in St. Bartholomew’s, but here, she is already dead. The rumors have made it very clear that there is little hope for Liz Emerson.

The worst place is the cafeteria, where most of the school congregates before the bell rings, copying homework and gossiping. I get a glimpse as I walk by, a glimpse of the shock and tears, and it’s so strange, the silence, the sniffling.

How Liz would have hated it.

She would have known that most of them aren’t crying for her. They’re crying for themselves, for fear of death, for the loss of faith in their own invincibility, because if Liz Emerson is mortal, they all are.


The teachers are having an emergency faculty meeting, where they receive hastily photocopied sheets of “Things to Say to Distraught Students.” The principal breaks down when she tells everyone that the only reason Liz is still alive is because a machine is moving her lungs.

But I think at least a few of the teachers must be relieved, just a little, that Liz Emerson is no longer going to be attending their classes. Spanish, because Liz blatantly texted every single day and never participated in class. English, because Liz deliberately formed opinions directly opposite those of the teacher’s. Definitely study hall, because Liz Emerson’s very presence inspired everyone else to do stupid things.

It isn’t that Liz minds authority, exactly. It’s just that she once liked being Liz Emerson and she liked showing it, and that meant challenging teachers and daring them to challenge her back. And it doesn’t matter that she grew to hate it—she couldn’t stop.

The teachers who cry: Ms. Hamilton, who teaches psychology and cries at everything; Mrs. Haas, who teaches world history and was actually worried out of her mind; and Mr. Eliezer, Liz’s physics teacher.

He scratches his jaw, and no one notices the tears in his eyes. It seems unlikely that Liz will ever get her physics grade back up.

Liz Emerson had failed physics so utterly that she couldn’t even crash her car right.

Upstairs, Kennie’s sobbing fills the hallway—it’s louder, perhaps, than strictly necessary. Everyone is watching her, and a small and despicable part of Kennie enjoys the attention. She doesn’t bother feeling guilty about it. Her best friend is dying, and her other best friend didn’t even call her with the news.

Kennie finds comfort in not being alone; Julia finds it in the quiet. So Julia is skipping school and is still at the hospital, where Monica has finally found her, and Kennie is a mess of running mascara.

Liz, though, found her brand of comfort—numbness, forgetting—in throwing things and watching them shatter. She found it in taking her Mercedes out and driving thirty, forty above the speed limit, with the sunroof open so that the wind whipped her hair all around her. She found it in being reckless, careless, stupid.

Once, Liz found comfort in me. Once, she found it in holding my hand and dreaming until our dreams came true. Once, she found it in simply being alive. Eventually, she could no longer find comfort in anything. By the end, she was just another girl stuffed full of forgotten dreams, until she crashed her car and she wasn’t even that.