Falling into Place(30)

Julia opened her eyes. Liz was lying beside her, her bare stomach rising and falling very slightly. Her hair had fallen out of its ponytail and framed her face like a nest, and suddenly Julia was afraid, because Liz, her Liz, always kept her heart locked away.

“Are you drunk?” she asked, uncertainly.

“No,” Liz said, and she smiled.

Julia had seen Liz in homecoming dresses and in pajamas, Ralph Lauren blazers and flip-flops from Target, but she had never seen Liz as beautiful as she was then, with her eyes closed and her lips just barely, barely curved, because until then, Julia had never associated the word peaceful with Liz Emerson.

Liz sighed. It was a soundless thing, only a parting of lips. “Sometimes,” she said, so softly that Julia wasn’t sure if she was meant to hear, “sometimes I forget that I’m alive.”


So, in the hospital, looking over an utterly different Liz, one who looks everything except peaceful, Julia leans forward and whispers two words to her, suddenly, fiercely.

“You’re alive.”



CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO


Six Days Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car


It was one of those quiet days, muted somehow, lit by a fuzzy sun behind thin clouds. Liz had finished all of her homework in study hall and the school had ordered Jimmy John’s for lunch, and—well, maybe she was too numb to be content, but six days before she crashed her car, Liz Emerson was no unhappier than usual.

Until she went home, and things began to go downhill.

Liz had just unlocked the door when Kennie called.

Liz answered the phone and Kennie’s voice screamed, “Oh my god, just leave me alone, Mom!” A door slammed, and Kennie said into the phone, “Hi. I can’t go shopping. My mom’s being a bitch. Surprise.”

“What did you do this time?” Liz’s voice bounced from wall to wall. Damn house, she thought, and promised herself that she would never buy a big house. And laughed, because here was a promise she could keep.

“It’s not funny,” Kennie snapped. “I didn’t do anything to her. I’m not done with that stupid physics project, and I keep telling my mom that it isn’t due until next Wednesday, but she says I need to stop procrastinating and get, like, an attitude adjustment. It’s not like it’s even my fault, ’cause f*cking Carly Blake won’t actually touch our project—What, Mom?”

The door slammed again. “Anyway. Yeah. Sorry.” When Liz didn’t say anything, Kennie said, “Ask Julia. Her dad doesn’t care where she is, does he?”

Which was unkind, especially coming from Kennie. They didn’t talk about Julia’s dad, just like they didn’t talk about Kennie’s mom or Liz’s pre-Meridian life. Liz didn’t comment, however, because she knew how much Kennie hated it when her mom nagged and nosed. She’d been like this since the abortion—snapping and cynical, and the personality fit her like a sweater that had shrunk in the wash. But then Liz thought she would be too, and then she thought, Don’t think, not that, not today, don’t think.

“Julia’s still at Zero,” she said.

That was what they called O’Hare University, the local college. University O, zero, and where most of them would end up after they graduated. Julia took analytic geometry (which was abbreviated on her transcripts as Anal. Geo., a fact that Kennie usually found endlessly funny) and health physics there, because Meridian High didn’t offer them and because Julia was a goddamn try-hard.

“Oh. Okay,” sighed Kennie. “I should go. Sorry. Maybe next week.”

Or not.

Liz hung up without saying anything, and now she was stuck with the silence. It magnified, the silence—Liz was annoyed after she hung up, but within minutes, she was truly and unapologetically pissed off at Kennie, at Kennie’s mother, and she threw in the rest of the world for the hell of it.

It took three seconds to decide that she couldn’t stay in the house for the rest of the day, so she shoved her feet into running shoes and went out the garage door. The winter was a wall that she smacked straight into, the air a living thing that crawled through her sweats and layers and settled against her skin.

Liz had always loved the cold. When she was younger, she loved breathing in and feeling her snot freeze, and she never grew out of it. She put her iPod on shuffle and slid it into her pocket, and she began to run.

Sometimes she ran just to take wrong turns and different routes, because she liked getting lost. But the truth was, Liz hated running. She did it to stay in shape for soccer or to get out of the house, but she would never play a soccer game again and the house would still be there when she got back.