Falling into Place(9)

Julia was strange. Julia asked for it. Julia brought it upon herself.

The final straw was this: before Julia had gotten pulled into a higher math class, she was the only one in pre-algebra to ever do her homework. When their teacher one day decided, without warning or precedence, to collect their homework, and Julia was the only one who turned it in, he gave them a pop quiz.

And since she didn’t know any of the answers, Liz took a piece of notebook paper and passed it around the class so that each person could write down one thing they thought of Julia.

They said things like “You’re not even that pretty” and “Go back to where you came from.” Some drew pictures and some drew diagrams, arrows linking words like weird and stuck-up and annoying. When the piece of paper made its way back to Liz, she folded it up and slid it across the table to Julia.

Julia’s expression hadn’t changed when she read it. She didn’t cry, not even a little bit, and heads had swiveled and faces had twisted in surprise, confusion, disbelief—but no one was more shocked than Liz. She could barely keep her jaw from dropping through the floor.

Their teacher gave them a ten-minute warning, and everyone snapped back to attention. Except Julia. Julia was done with her pop quiz, so she flipped the notebook paper over and wrote a single word across the back. Then she folded it into a neat square and passed it back to Liz.

It was the first time Liz had ever been called a bitch.

It was then, in pre-algebra, with a blank pop quiz before her, a wrinkled piece of notebook paper in her lap, and an ugly truth staring up at her, that Liz decided that she and Julia would be friends.

So they were.

Of course Julia took the opportunity. Sadness or popularity? It was not a difficult choice. She used Liz, as anyone else would have. For the first few months, they were not friends, but amid the melodrama, they became allies.

But one day, later that year, as Julia, Liz, and Kennie sat together during a mind-numbing assembly about internet safety, Liz leaned over and whispered to Julia that 34.42 percent of all assembly speakers carried fake boobs around in their briefcases, and when Liz pointed out the speaker’s briefcase, Julia had laughed so hard that she had snorted. About six teachers whipped around to shush them, but they had already dissolved into the kind of laughter that made them stupid and helpless, carefree. While the three of them were doubled over, stomachs aching and cheeks cramping, Julia looked over and realized that sometime between then and now, Liz had become her best friend.

And then she had laughed again, because there was something entirely wonderful about being best friends with Liz Emerson.



CHAPTER EIGHT


Not Yet


Monica Emerson loses her composure slowly as she walks toward the ICU. It flakes off and leaves a trail behind her, and I keep my eyes on her face. She’s still calm through the first hallway, the second, the third. But as they turn deeper into the hospital, she begins to crack.

She has not cried in public since her husband’s funeral. Now she does, knowing that she may soon have to plan her daughter’s.

They are small tears, silent, at first—then the doctor opens the doors to the ICU and she sees the rows and rows of beds and bodies, these barely human things stuffed full of oxygen and tubes and not yets.

She sees Liz among them.

Monica thinks of the maternity ward upstairs, and the tears come a little harder. How Liz had screamed—indignantly, as though they had kept her waiting for too long. She remembers her first moments of motherhood. She does not know how to prepare for her last.

She walks closer and sees Liz beneath a thin blanket, her shoulders wrapped in some hideous hospital thing. Her toes peek out. The nail polish is chipped. Blue, once. Glittery, maybe.

As Monica sits down and looks at the unnatural color of Liz’s face, her composure crumbles entirely. There is a very good chance that Liz will die here, two floors beneath where she was born. She will never go to prom, never take her SATs, never apply for college, never graduate, and it’s terrifying because Liz already looks dead. Liz looks like she could be packed in a coffin and shoved into the ground.

All Monica wants to do is put her arms around what remains of her daughter, as she hasn’t done in so long. But Liz is a tangle of needles and tubes, fragile as ice on an ocean.

So her mother only sits there.

The problem with Monica’s brief and imminently ending motherhood is that it was always her greatest fear, being a parent. She doesn’t know how to do it, especially not after she buried Liz’s father. She had been smothered as a child and she tried too hard to be perfect, and here lies the final proof of her failure.