Falling into Place(19)

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.