Falling into Place(52)

“Liz,” she said, trying to keep the tremor from her voice.

Liz ignored her. “We’ll get you an appointment as soon as possible. Before it’s too late. How long have you known?”

“Liz.”

“Damn it, Kennie. God, if you ran out of condoms, why didn’t you go buy some? You live a freaking mile from the gas station. It would have taken two seconds. Damn it all. You could have asked either of us. God, Kennie. I have birth control in my f*cking purse. God. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. We’ll get rid of it.”



CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR


Fourteen Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car


Liz got back onto the interstate after her single detour. She wiped her eyes and thought of Newton’s Third Law. Equal and opposite reactions. That was the one she had struggled with the most. Moving objects, not moving objects, force and mass and acceleration—she had been able puzzle those out, mostly. But for their unit on Newton’s Third Law, the law of action and reaction, Mr. Eliezer put hyperlinks and videos on his website and told them to just go for it. It was supposed to teach them critical thinking and twenty-first-century skills and time management and other useless crap.

Naturally, most of the class sat on the countertops and shot rubber bands at each other.

Liz liked being in control, and she had the necessary leadership—manipulation—skills, but she was also a bit lazy. She never did today what she could do tomorrow, and she always believed herself when she used eventually as an excuse.

This inevitably led to late-night cramming sessions, which was exactly where she found herself the night before the test on Newton’s third law. Unfortunately, Mr. Eliezer decided to surprise them with an essay test instead of multiple choice.

Liz’s conclusion had read: NEWTON WAS A SPECTACULAR MAN AND MR. ELIEZER, I’D REALLY, REALLY APPRECIATE A D ON THIS TEST.

He gave her a D minus and a warning to study for exams. Liz had promised that she would, because at the time, she’d had every intention of doing so, eventually. But soon after, things began to slip downhill very quickly, and Liz gave up. The week before exams was her last week ever; she knew exactly which day she would get out of bed and never return, and her promise to study Newton the virgin felt more distant than a dream.

She knew it was stupid to try to understand now, since there were an infinite number of things she would never understand, so why should Newton’s Third Law of Motion matter more than any of those? She, Liz Emerson, was going to cease to exist in mere minutes, and everything she knew would disappear. It didn’t matter at all, what she did or did not understand.

She started thinking about all of the things she had done, all of the horrible things she had set in motion, and she wondered why none of them seemed to have had equal and opposite reactions. She thought about Julia’s addiction and Kennie’s baby and Liam’s sadness and all of those other people she had kicked to pieces, and she thought about how she was never caught. Never. She was never punished for any of it. She had never gotten a suspension or an expulsion or a deportation, though she probably deserved all of them.

Liz Emerson had dished out a lot of sadness in her short and catastrophic life, and no one had ever done anything about it.


She did not realize that the equal and opposite reaction was this: every terrible, horrible, bitchy thing Liz had ever done had bounced back to her.



CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE


All These Impossible Things


Kennie had always been happy as a follower—a good thing, because she had always been a follower. She had grown so used to following that when the topic of abortion came up, Kennie almost agreed without considering what she wanted.

There was, of course, the fact that Liz was right. God, her parents would disown her. She would never go to college. All of Meridian—half of which went to her church and would think of her during every single sermon about fornication—would give her dirty looks for the rest of her miserable, collegeless, homeless, parentless, unequivocally suckish life.

After Liz dropped her off, Kennie went inside, cried so hard that she puked, and somehow made herself believe that it was morning sickness, never mind that she was only about six weeks in. She took a shower and then suddenly it was all very real to her, this pregnancy. When the purple positive sign first appeared on the test, her heart had fallen out of her chest, but she had told herself that it was a hoax and ignored it. When her period never came, she finally told Liz and Julia, and now, Kennie put her hands on her stomach and believed for the first time that there could be a person inside her.