Falling into Place(20)


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.



CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


Fifty Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car


She 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.





SNAPSHOT: PROMISE


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.

Zhang,Amy's Books