Falling into Place Read online
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Contents
Cover
Disclaimer
Title
Laws of Motion
Chapter One: Laws of Motion
Chapter Two: How to Save a Corpse
Chapter Three: The News
Chapter Four: Stay Alive
Chapter Five: Five Months Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Six: If She’s Determined
Chapter Seven: Pop Quiz
Chapter Eight: Not Yet
Chapter Nine: Voicemail
Chapter Ten: Popularity: An Analysis
Chapter Eleven: The Junior Class
Chapter Twelve: Three Weeks Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Thirteen: Midnight
Chapter Fourteen: Fifty-Eight Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Fifteen: One Day After Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Sixteen: Empty Seat
Chapter Seventeen: Before
Chapter Eighteen: Ziplock Bags
Chapter Nineteen: The Brown Couch, New Year’s Day
Chapter Twenty: Fifty-Five Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Twenty-One: Fifty Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Twenty-Two: Nevers and Forevers
Chapter Twenty-Three: Plans, New Years’ Day
Chapter Twenty-Four: Seven Days Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Twenty-Five: Driving Habits
Chapter Twenty-Six: Forty-Nine Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Twenty-Three Missed Calls Later
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The On-Again Off Again
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Scavenger
Chapter Thirty: After the Surgery
Chapter Thirty-One: The Art of Being Alive
Chapter Thirty-Two: Six Days Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Thirty-Three: Worlds Fall Apart
Chapter Thirty-Four: Forty-Four Minutes before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Thirty-Five: Five Days Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Thirty-Six: “Meridian Teen Injured in Car Crash”
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Four Days Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Forty-One Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Thoughts on the Road
Chapter Forty: This is What Liz Emerson’s Car Did
Chapter Forty-One: Gravity
Chapter Forty-Two: Thirty-Eight Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashe d her Car
Chapter Forty-Three: Glances
Chapter Forty-Four: Thirty-Five Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Forty-Five: Falling
Chapter Forty-Six: The Ruining of Liam Oliver
Chapter Forty-Seven: The Effects
Chapter Forty-Eight: Thirty-Three Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Forty-Nine: Twenty-Nine Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Fifty: What Liz Didn’t Know
Chapter Fifty-One: Three Days Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Fifty-Two: Hopes and Fears
Chapter Fifty-Three: Tact, Or Lack Thereof
Chapter Fifty-Four: Twenty-Four Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Fifty-Five: What Liz Also Didn’t Know
Chapter Fifty-Six: The First Visitor
Chapter Fifty-Seven: The Last Day of Liz Emerson’s Childhood
Chapter Fifty-Eight: Hickeys and Black Eyes
Chapter Fifty-Nine: The Second Visitor
Chapter Sixty: Two Days Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Sixty-One: World of Idiots
Chapter Sixty-Two: The Third Visitor
Chapter Sixty-Three: The Maternity Ward
Chapter Sixty-Four: Fourteen Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Sixty-Five: All These Impossible Things
Chapter Sixty-Six: Thirteen Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Sixty-Seven: The Abortion Clinic
Chapter Sixty-Eight: One Day Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Sixty-Nine: The Fourth Visitor
Chapter Seventy: One Step Forward
Chapter Seventy-One: The Night Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Seventy-Two: The Day Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Seventy-Three: Seven Minutes Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Seventy-Four: The Fifth Visitor
Chapter Seventy-Five: The Worst Part
Chapter Seventy-Six: And Then Things Fall Apart
Chapter Seventy-Seven: Two Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Chapter Seventy-Eight: Voices
Chapter Seventy-Nine: The Crash
Chapter Eighty: Silence
Chapter Eighty-One: Before Everything Fades
Chapter Eighty-Two: The Waiting Room Again
Epilogue
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
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February 2014
Dear Readers,
I read Amy Zhang’s novel Falling Into Place in one sitting, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. This is an extraordinary novel. The writing is literary and gorgeous and powerful; the voice surprising and original.
Liz Emerson has given up. She no longer thinks she belongs in the world—she’s convinced herself that she just isn’t good enough. And the evidence is compelling—Liz is sarcastic and mean and vengeful. She’s a bully. But she wasn’t always like that. She used to be the girl who reached for the sky. She used to be the girl everyone wanted to be friends with. She used to be full of promise and light.
Falling Into Place is a suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat read. It’s also a book to return to again and again, and to think about and talk about with friends and parents and teachers and librarians and co-workers. Certainly, we’ve been talking about it a lot here. What happened to Liz Emerson? Why did it happen? How could any of us have stopped it from happening? Is life more than cause and effect?
Debut author Amy Zhang is a high school student in Wisconsin. She writes about high school and being a teen with clear eyes and a full heart. But I think she’s also a very old soul with something to say to every one of us.
I hope you will fall in love with this book and share it with another reader in your life.
Best,
Susan Katz
President and Publisher
HarperCollins Children’s Books
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Laws of Motion
First Law
A body at rest will remain at rest, and a body in motion will remain in motion with a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force.
Second Law
Force is equal to the change in momentum (mV) per change in time. for a constant mass, force equals mass times acceleration (F = ma)
Third Law
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
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CHAPTER ONE
Laws of Motion
On the day Liz Emerson tries to die, they had reviewed Newton’s Laws of Motion in physics class. Then, after school, she put them into practice by running her Mercedes off the road.
As she lies on the grass with the shattered window tangled in her hair, her blood all around her, she looks up and sees the sky again. She begins to cry, because it’s so blue, the sky. So, so blue. It fills her with an odd sadness, because she had forgotten. She had forgotten how very blue it was, and now it is too late.
Inhaling is becoming an exceedingly difficult task. The rush of cars grows farther and farther away, the world blurs at the edges, and Liz is gripped by an inexplicable urge to get to her feet and chase the cars, redefine the world. In this moment, she realizes what death really means. It means that she will never catch them.
Wait, she thinks. Not yet.
She still doesn’t understand them, Newton’s Three Laws of Motion. Inertia and force and mass and gravity and equal and opposite reactions still do not quite fit together in her head, but she is ready to let go. She is ready for it all to end.
It is then, when she releases her need to understand, that everything falls into place.
Things just aren’t that simple.
And suddenly it’s very clear to her that every action is an interaction, and everything she has ever done has led to something else, and to another something else, and all of that is ending here, at the bottom of the hill by Highway 34, and she is dying.
In that moment, everything clicks.
And Liz Emerson closes her eyes.
SNAPSHOT: SKY
We lie on the red-checkered blanket with weeds and flowers all around us, caught in the fleece. Our breaths carry our dandelion wishes higher, higher, until they become the clouds we watch. Sometimes we looked for animals or ice-cream cones or angels, but today we only lie there with our palms together and our fingers tangled, and we dream. We wonder what lies beyond.
One day, she will grow up and imagine death as an angel that will lend her wings, so she can find out.
Death, unfortunately, is not in the business of lending wings.
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CHAPTER TWO
How to Save a Corpse
I watch the spinning lights close in, wrapping the scene in long lines of ambulances and yellow tape. Sirens wail and paramedics spill out, running and slipping down the great hill in their haste. They surround the Mercedes, crouch beside her, the glass crunching beneath their feet.
“No gag reflex. Get the tube ready, I need RSI intubation—”
“Can you start a line from there? Jaws of life . . . get the fire department!”
“—no, forget that, break the windshield—”
So they do. They remove the glass and carry her up the hill, and no one notices the boy standing near the mangled bits of her car, watching.
Her name is on his lips.
Then he is pushed back by a policeman, forced back to the crowd of people who have gotten out of their cars to catch a glimpse of the scene, the blood, the body. I look past the circle and see the traffic rapidly piling up in every direction, and right then, it’s very easy to imagine Liz somewhere in the long line of cars, sitting inside an intact Mercedes, her hand pressed to the horn, her swearing drowned out by the pounding bass of the radio.
It’s impossible. It’s impossible to imagine her as anything but alive.
The fact, however, is that the word alive no longer accurately describes Liz Emerson. She is being pushed into the back of an ambulance, and for her, the doors are closing.
“She’s tachycardic—and hypotensive, can you—”
“I need a splint, she’s got a complex fracture in the superior femur—”
“No, just get the blood stopped! She’s going into shock!”
As everyone moves and rushes around her, a musical of beeping machines and panic, I just watch her, her hands, her face. Her hair falling out of the hasty braid. The foundation across her cheeks, too thin to cover the graying skin.
When I look around, I can see her heart beating on three different monitors. I can see the steam her breath makes on the mask. But Liz Emerson is not alive.
So I lean forward. I place my lips beside her ear and whisper for her to stay, stay alive, over and over again. I whisper it as though she’ll hear me, like she used to. As though she’ll listen.
Stay alive.
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CHAPTER THREE
The News
Monica Emerson is on a plane when the hospital calls. Her phone is turned off, and the call goes straight to voicemail.
An hour later, she turns on her phone and listens to her voicemails as she makes her way to baggage claim. The first is from the marketing division of her company—something about her next trip to Bangkok. The second is from the dry cleaners. The third has no message.
The fourth begins just as she spots her suitcase on the carousel, so the words “Your daughter was in a car accident” don’t register right away.
She makes herself listen to the entire thing one more time, breathe, and when it ends and the nightmare doesn’t, she turns and runs.
The suitcase takes another turn on the carousel.
Julia is almost halfway through her calculus homework when the phone in the hall rings.
It makes her jump, because no one ever calls her house. She has a cell and her father has three, and Julia has never understood why they needed a landline too.
Regardless, she goes into the hall to answer, because conic parametric equations are giving her a headache.
“Hello?”
“Is this George De—”
“No,” she says. “This is Julia. His daughter?”
“Well, this is the emergency contact number we have for Elizabeth Emerson. Is it correct?”
“Liz?” She twirls the phone cord around her fingers and wishes, suddenly, that she had never let Liz put her dad down as an emergency contact. It wasn’t like he was ever around for emergencies. Stupid, she thought. “Yes, this is the right number. Is Liz—what’s going on?”
There’s a pause. “Is your father home?”
Julia pushes down her annoyance, chokes it, cinches the phone line tighter around her fingers and watches them turn purple. “No,” she says. “Is something wrong? Is Liz okay?”
“I’m not authorized to release the information to anyone except Mr. George Dev—”
“Did something happen to Liz?”
Another hesitation, and then a sigh. “Elizabeth was admitted to St. Bartholomew’s Memorial Hospital a little while ago. She was in a car accident—”
Julia drops the phone, grabs her car keys, and Googles directions to the hospital on the way to her car.
Kennie is on a bus with the rest of Meridian High’s dance team. At the moment the Mercedes flips over, she is leaning over the back of her seat, trying to grab Jenny Vickham’s bag of sour gummies while the bus driver yells at her to sit down. She is happy, because soon she’ll dance beneath spotlights as the only junior in the front row. Soon they’ll win the competition and come back laughing. Soon she’ll spin and leap and forget about the baby and the abortion and Kyle and Liz.
I’m happy, she tells herself. Be happy.
Both Monica Emerson and Julia are too busy unraveling to remember Kennie. They couldn’t have called anyway—Kennie has no phone service on the bus, and her phone is about to die. As Monica and Julia rush for the hospital, Kennie is traveling in the opposite direction, blissfully ignorant of the fact that her best friend is dying.
She probably won’t know for a while. No, she’ll come home after winning the competition, cheeks sore from smiling so much, stomach cramped from laughing the whole ride back. She will take a shower and exchange her sparkles and spandex for a worn pair of pajamas. She will sit in the darkness of her room, her wet hair piled atop her head, and scroll through her Facebook feed. She will find it clogged with a story told through statuses, and it will take her breath away.
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CHAPTER FOUR
Stay Alive
Liz had planned the crash with an uncharacteristic attention to detail, but not once did St. Bartholomew’s Memorial Hospital make an appearance in her plans, because she was supposed to die on impact.
She had been excessively careful in choosing the location, however. The highway, the hill, the icy turn, all nearly an hour from her house. She had even driven along the route once, swerved a little, chipped the paint on the Mercedes, for practice. But because she had chosen to crash her car so far away, no one is there to meet her when the ambulance pulls into St. Bartholomew’s. No one is there to hold her hand as the doctors wheel her to surgery.
Falling into Place