Falling into Place(28)

All team practices have been cancelled for the day, so the waiting room is clogged with the second kind of people, the ones who aren’t surprised at all. They shrug and say that they were never worried, never mind the fact that they had all abandoned their homework out of their professed concern. They sit around the low tables and say that they always knew Liz was strong enough to pull through.

And then there is Matthew Derringer, who is just the slightest bit disappointed, because he has already ordered flowers for the funeral.



CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE


The Art of Being Alive


Julia has always been the good girl, Sunday afternoon activities aside. So her heart is nearly falling out of her chest when she grabs a pair of scrubs from a passing cart, pulls them over her jeans, and walks into the ICU with all the nonchalance she can muster.

It smells clean, clean like linens and antiseptics, like organized and monitored death. There are rows and rows of almost-corpses buried beneath white sheets. Julia has never shied away from blood or sickness, but this room makes her want to run and never look back. She doesn’t want to see Liz here.

But she does. As always, Liz Emerson is hard to miss. This time, it’s because, of all the patients, Liz looks furthest from reanimation. She looks beyond hope.

Julia’s legs are shaking as she walks over to Liz’s bed. She stops a good six feet away, afraid to go any closer, afraid that she will bump into one of the many machines and something will unhook and Liz will die and it will be her fault.

There is a chair by Liz’s head, and Julia stares at it for a long while before she decides to sit down. She slides her backpack from her shoulder, takes out a pre-calc textbook, and opens it to the chapter the class is studying.

She begins to read. I watch her lips move. They’re trembling too.

“‘For any point on an ellipse, the sum value of the distances from any given point to each foci will be a fixed value.’ I remember this chapter. Don’t worry. The test is easier than the homework, and she’ll probably curve the quiz. You won’t miss much. Anyway. ‘In the case of a hyperbola, however, the difference between the distances will be . . .”

Julia glances down at Liz’s face and begins to cry. She had tried to avoid it, looking, but it’s terribly difficult to not look at an almost-corpse, when the almost-corpse is your best friend.

Liz’s face is gray like air pollution. Her hair is a mess, and parts of it have been chopped off so the doctors could stitch up her scalp. There are shadows beneath her eyes and bruises all over one cheek, and worst of all, her eyes are closed.

Liz has always hated sleeping. Once, we read the story of Sleeping Beauty together—we didn’t understand much, because it was a harder version, and an unhappier one. Everyone was dead by the time the princess woke up, and maybe that was when Liz began to fear missing things.

The makeup is gone and her face is as naked as Julia as ever seen it. She sees the sadness, the exhaustion, the fault lines beneath the surface, and suddenly Julia is furious. If Liz had slept more, maybe she would have been a more careful driver. Maybe she wouldn’t have been so reckless and ruthless and lost.

A tear slides down Julia’s nose and falls onto Liz’s hand. Julia watches her face for a sign of life. For anything.

But Liz is motionless, a girl of wax and shadows.

“Damn you,” Julia whispers, her voice small. “We were supposed to go running tonight. Open gym for soccer starts next week.”

They would have gone too—Liz liked running through snow. She would go now, were her leg not broken in three places.

Well, maybe not.

For soccer, Liz almost waited. The chances of Meridian’s girls’ varsity soccer team winning the state tournament have gone down dramatically. Without their junior captain and star forward, it will be a miracle if they even pass sectionals, and Liz hadn’t wanted to be responsible for that failure too.

But she needed ice on the roads. She needed her accident to look as accidental as possible.

And she just didn’t think she was capable of waiting another three months.

Julia, however, knows none of this. She looks down at what remains of her best friend, and she thinks of all the times Liz was quiet and not really there. The times when she was the Liz everyone else knows, all snark and insanity, and the moments when she was the one that stared at invisible things and hadn’t truly smiled in a long time.

“God, Liz,” Julia says, and she closes her eyes to force the tears back. They overflow anyway, pooling somewhere deep inside her. “I can’t run in the rain alone.”