Falling into Place(35)

“Hello!” she said brightly, glancing up and down Liz’s body. “Are you here to apply?”

Liz looked after the girl, but she was already gone, the bell ringing cheerfully behind her. She looked at the woman and said, “Fuck you.”


Back outside, holding her coat, she closed her eyes. The wind clawed her arms raw, and the snow stung where it touched her—and she remembered, suddenly, the way they used to celebrate the first snowfall. It was their very own holiday. Did the snow hurt then? She couldn’t remember.

Then she got into her car, put her face in her coat, and screamed.

Had the world always been like this? Why had it seemed so much kinder when she was younger? Why had it ever seemed beautiful?

Liz Emerson looked around and saw that laws didn’t have to be followed if you could get away with breaking them. She saw that snow wasn’t always beautiful. She saw that the past was a dead thing and the future held no promises, and as she leaned her forehead on the steering wheel and closed her eyes, the tears came and it really hit her that she didn’t want to open her eyes ever again.

Funny things, aren’t they? People. They only believed in what they could see. Appearances were all that mattered, and no one would ever care what she was like on the inside. No one cared that she was breaking apart.

As the sky grew dimmer and the streetlights came on, Liz remembered that there was a party that night, so she did the only thing she could think of. She backed out of her parking spot, bumped into the car behind her, and drove off with the other car’s alarm blaring.

She drove past the turn and the hill and the tree, and she held her breath and didn’t dare look. She was afraid that if she turned her head and saw it all in the falling dark, she would go, right now.

Alas, she was on the wrong side of the interstate.

Instead, she texted Julia. They were going to a party that night. Julia was going to drive. Liz was going to get drunk.





SNAPSHOT: SNOW


It is snowing.

Liz’s mom is taking cookies out of the oven, and her father is setting up the record player by the fireplace. It is their own holiday, the first snowfall, a day in a snow globe, a day to turn off all the lights and pretend the world is being born.

Liz and I are outside, and this time we don’t run around like Tinker Bell caught in a storm of fairy dust, we don’t make wishes, we don’t make snow angels. Today, the snow is white and swirling, the sky is close, and the world is so big and beautiful and infinite that we don’t need to pretend. All we know is already perfect.



CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT


Forty-One Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car


Liz spent a minute trying to remember the exact wording of Newton’s Second Law of Motion—something about acceleration being directly related to the net force and inversely proportional to the mass—so there were only forty minutes left when she decided it didn’t matter. She knew the equation, anyway. Force equals mass times acceleration. F = ma.

The unit on Newton’s Second Law was more math oriented than the first or the third, so Liz had managed to get a decent score on that test. This, however, was more of a testament to her ability to push buttons on her calculator than any true understanding, and forty minutes before she crashed her car, she still didn’t fully appreciate the relationship between force, mass, and acceleration.

The textbook made the world black and white and drew a very uncompromising line between what was and what could never be, as though everything was already dictated and Liz’s only job was to keep breathing.

She wished they had talked more about how all of the equations were derived. She wanted to know how Galileo and Newton and Einstein discovered the things they discovered. She wanted to know how they could have lived in the exact same world as everyone else but see things that no one else did.

Forty minutes before she crashed her car, Liz began to think about Liam Oliver, who always seemed to see things that no one else did, and didn’t seem to care that it was strange.



CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE


Thoughts on the Road


When Liam first saw Liz’s car, he nearly crashed his own.

This was his favorite stretch of highway. Of course the only Costco was over an hour away, goddamn middle-of-nowhere Meridian—but he enjoyed the trip wholeheartedly because he was driving his mom’s car and using her gas. She’d had to take his sister to piano lessons, so he’d agreed to bag his homework and run her errands. He liked these long, lonely drives. They allowed him to sort out his thoughts, and he had a lot of thoughts to sort out today.