Falling into Place(54)

Liz couldn’t stand it. She leaned forward and hugged her tight, and tried to swallow the lump in her own throat. “Hey,” she said, but her voice was a plea. “It’ll be okay. Okay?”

Kennie nodded against her shoulder but said nothing. She got out of the car.

Liz sat in the parking lot alone. There it was, the silence again. It grew and pounded until at last she moved, savagely, jammed the keys into the ignition and backed up with a squeal. She drove down the street to the gas station, where she grabbed a pack of condoms, slapped it on the counter, and dared the cashier to comment.

She went back to the clinic, and when Kennie came out, Liz gave her the condoms. Kennie stared at them.

“I can’t,” she said. “Not for a month, at least. I’ll tell Kyle I’m on my period.”

For a month? Liz wanted to say. She didn’t. “Just in case.”

Kennie closed the condoms in her fist. She shoved them in her purse and didn’t look at Liz.

And only then, when it was too late, Liz wondered if she’d made a mistake. Here, she’d wanted to say. You still have Kyle. You have us.

Liz dropped Kennie off and watched her walk into the house, and she began to cry. She cried as she drove, and she didn’t care that she couldn’t see the road.

You still have me.


The worst part of being forgotten, I think, is watching.

I watched her cry. There had been silent tears and ones that barely leaked out. There were tears that heaved from her in great sobs. They all slipped through my fingers when I tried to catch them, they fell around her in oceans.

I watched her carve her mistakes in stone, and they arranged themselves around her,. They became a maze with walls that reached the sky. Because she learned from so few of them, she was lost. Because she didn’t have faith in anything, she didn’t try to find a way out.

I watched her try to face her fears alone, too proud to ask for help, too stubborn to admit she was afraid, too small to fight them, too tired to fly away.

I watched Liz grow up.

You still have me.



CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT


One Day Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car


After lunch, they had a Random Pep Assembly.

Their principal had established RPAs—because that was actually what they were called—last year to “boost student morale,” the lack of which became the official excuse as to why Meridian’s test scores had failed to meet state standards yet again. No one complained because it meant shorter classes and an afternoon of doing nothing.

Today, the teachers would have a free-throw competition, and the Future Farmers of America (a club that Liz often ridiculed) held a fund-raiser for their spring trip to the National Dairy Expo (seriously, they made it too easy), letting students buy votes to nominate a teacher to kiss a pig. They raised more than two thousand dollars.

Liz remembered why she used to like school. It was an escape from her enormous, silent house. School was always noisy, filled to the brim with different and irritating people. But between sophomore year and junior year, she began to want to escape school too, because now the hallways were filled with people she had torn apart.

On her way to the gym, she saw Lauren Melbrook. After she, Julia, and Kennie had spray-painted SLUT across her front lawn, Lauren had kind of faded. Liz knew that she used to be part of that Ralph Lauren sweater-set group, but of course they had pushed her away after the pictures made their way around Facebook. There were rumors that Lauren was now on heroin, and though Liz knew that she shouldn’t put too much faith in gossip, Lauren was indeed walking with a group of verifiable dealers.

Liz took her seat in the front with the other kids who went to the right parties and wore the right clothes and kissed the right people, but as she sat, she caught sight of Sandra Garrison’s round stomach. She had gotten pregnant about a year after the pregnancy and abortion rumors had made the rounds. Since everyone thought Sandra had already been pregnant once, she figured that she might as well live up to expectations. She was a senior now, but no way was she going to college. A pity—she had been on her way to being valedictorian.

And there was Justin Strayes, sitting alone at the edge of the bleachers. His GPA had nosedived after the drug dog incident, and now he was on the brink of failing every single one of his classes. And he had been voted Most Likely to Succeed at the end of eighth grade.

A cheer erupted from the gym floor—Mr. Eliezer had just won the free-throw contest. The girls around her were screaming their heads off, because Mr. Eliezer was the youngest teacher in the school, and hot.