Falling into Place Page 12

  Liz stood on the rickety bleachers, stomping and jumping and screaming, dressed in nothing but a sports bra and shorts and paint. To her right, Julia was the only one in the student section who was sitting, her arms crossed tightly over her chest because the rain was making her bra half-transparent. To her left, Kennie was gripping Liz’s arm with all her strength, because Jenna Erikson had fallen off the bleachers earlier and broken her leg. Kennie pressed herself into Liz’s side and whined that the rain would wash Riley Striver’s name off her stomach before he could see it. Liz didn’t care. The JAKE DERRICK on her stomach had long since turned to watercolor.

  But it was worse when the rain finally stopped. The fog was thick and it trapped the lights, and at halftime, after the band show ended, Liz shook Kennie off and made her way down the bleachers with the rest of the homecoming court, shoebox in hand. She held it carefully—Liam’s crown was inside.

  The freshman girls cheered for her as she crossed the track to the field. Liz could hear Kennie’s scream above them all.

  The boys were yelling too, but not for her, and they weren’t cheering.

  Liam was behind her. His falling-apart Converses squished in the mud, steps mirroring hers. And suddenly that was all that mattered—her feet and his feet and the distance between them. It was like a dance, and the music was made of the screams of their classmates: step, gay, step, pervert, step, faggot. It hurt her ears.

  She wanted to turn around. She wanted to take his hand and pull him . . . where? Where would she have led him?

  She glanced over her shoulder, and he looked away.

  They reached the center of the field and took their places in line with the other court members. At the front of the court lineup, Kate Dulmes laughed when she saw Liam and nudged Brandon Jason, and Brandon made an obscene hand gesture while the principal dug through his pockets for the list of their names.

  “Hey, Liam,” Brianna Vern, one of the sophomore representatives, said, leaning out of the lineup to smile at him. “Nice of you guys to join us. We were just talking about how much easier it is to be a boy than a girl. Like, you guys don’t have periods or anything. And, I mean, you love your body parts.”

  “Dude, she’s right,” said Matthew Derringer. He was the other sophomore representative, and one of Jake’s best friends. Liz wasn’t sure why, but she always had to fight down the urge to hug him when he was near. Lean in and wrap her arms around him and knee him in his unsuspecting balls. Hard. “I do love my body parts. I reward ’em. What about you, Liam? When was the last time you rewarded that flute of yours? Just now, on the bleachers? Thought I could feel them shaking.”

  The fog. How it magnified.

  The laughter. The screaming—gay pervert faggot gaypervertfaggot. The digging, Liz’s fingernails against palms, teeth, and lips. And the silence. Heavy heavy heavy silence.

  Somewhere in the fog, the principal announced Kate and Mike as king and queen.

  The crown Kate had made for Mike was heavy and elaborate and beautiful, and his for her was from Burger King. There was a pause and furious clicking as the parents took pictures. Someone complained that they should move the crowning back to the dance, when everyone was dressed up, though no one listened. The names continued. Junior representatives, sophomore.

  Liz’s eyes flickered to Liam.

  She wondered if he had watched the video—watched it all the way through.

  “Your freshman representatives: Liz Emerson and Liam Oliver!”

  Liz drew her crown from the shoebox. She had gone online and bought the cheapest, crappiest flute she could find. Jake had cut it to pieces in his metals class, and she had hot-glued it back together in a rough circle, and now she pulled it from its nest of tissue paper and offered it to Liam.

  His face.

  Why did you come? She wanted to scream it. Why the hell did you come? Idiot, you goddamn idiot. You knew this would happen. You knew what we would do. What I would do.

  You deserve this, she tried to think, but couldn’t. You brought this upon yourself.

  There was a lump in her throat, and she wasn’t sure why.

  He stared at the crown for a long time. He stared while fuzzy cheerleader shapes unfurled a big paper sign: MERIDIAN HOMECOMING, GO FIGHT WIN! He stared while Nick Braden tripped while running back onto the field and the rest of the team went down on top of him. He stared while the crowd booed. He stared while the football coach finally lost his temper and began to scream at the court to “Get your asses off the field!” and the team to “Get your asses together!”

  It was killing her, his silence. She took a breath to break it wide open, and then he finally looked up.

  Here Liz was supposed to say something, something horrible, and smile to show all of her teeth, but the only word she could remember was his name. She tried to say it. She couldn’t.

  After a moment, he took the crown from her hands, dropped his own shoebox at her feet, and walked off the field.

  Liz stared after him, her throat closed and her eyes strangely full, and then she looked down. The lid had fallen aside when the box hit the ground, and she could see the tip of a crown.

  It was beautiful, and suddenly, she knew. That’s why he came. To give her the crown.

  The mud splattered her knees as she dropped down beside the shoebox—it was cold, and the coldness spread. She reached for the crown, pushed the tissue paper aside. Wire and gold leaf and metallic spray paint, twisted and braided and looped. It looked impossible, and she touched the edges to make sure it wasn’t.

  She spun around. “Liam!”

  There was no answer.

  “You,” the football coach roared, marching toward her. “You have three seconds to get your ass off the field, or I will carry it off.”

  Later, Meridian would lose the game 49-2, and Liz Emerson would slip away from Kennie and Julia to run all around the football field in search of Liam to say . . . something. She didn’t know. Anything. Everything.

  But while she was pushing people away and peeling them apart, she saw a ziplock bag sticking out of a stranger’s pocket, and she took it because she was too tired to keep looking.

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  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  The Effects

  Liam didn’t go to the dance, but it didn’t matter.

  Surely it was okay to laugh. It was funny. A nerd had been voted onto court and had gotten caught . . . practicing. And besides, no one really got hurt. Liz, Kennie, and Julia went to the dance and grinded on the sweat-slippery floor, and then they went to parties and got drunk and forgot all about it.

  On Monday, Liam quit band.

  When the teacher tried to change his mind, he threw his flute against the wall and walked away. Many people guessed that Liam cried when he watched the video.

  They were wrong.

  Liam watched with no emotion whatsoever.

  No one guessed that Liz cried when she watched it.

  After Liam quit band and left his dented and ruined flute behind, she watched the video again and again. She deleted it and cried because she couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t drag the video back from all people she had sent it to, or all the people they had sent it to. She couldn’t take it off the internet. She couldn’t put Liam’s flute back together. So she didn’t try.

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  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Thirty-Three Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car

  Liz thought about Liam Oliver in terms of Newton’s Second Law of Motion.

  Mass. Liz managed to gather an enormous audience. The video spread like a virus. Towns an hour away knew about Liam Oliver. Kids would stop him at Walmart and ask, smirking, about his flute.

  Acceleration.
There was no unit that could accurately measure the speed, the potential and kinetic energy, of gossip. It made sound look like a tortoise. It made light look like Kennie’s crippled grandma. There was a strange addiction in the act of spreading a rumor, relishing someone else’s pain. No one could resist.

  Force. Liz. She looked around and saw all of the broken things in her wake, and then she looked inside herself and saw the spidering cracks from the weight of all the things she had done. She hated what she was and didn’t know how to change, and half an hour before she drove her car off the road, she saw that despite all of that, she didn’t have enough force to stop the world from turning.

  But she had enough to stop her own.

  After Liam, there were others.

  There was Lauren Melbrook, who began dating Lucas Drake after he dumped Kennie. They were a cute couple and they made Kennie cry. So one morning that January, Liz, Julia, and Kennie woke up early to spray-paint SLUT across the snow on Lauren’s front lawn. They took pictures, uploaded them to Facebook, and tagged Lauren in all of them. Lucas Drake dumped her on the very same day.

  There was Sandra Garrison, who told Mrs. Schumacher, their Algebra II teacher, that Liz had copied off her test. Mrs. Schumacher believed her, but Sandra had no proof, so Mrs. Schumacher let it go, but Liz (because she had, in fact, cheated on the test) felt it necessary to spread a rumor that Sandra Garrison was pregnant. Being a stress eater, Sandra did indeed gain weight after the rumors made their rounds. Liz later spread a follow-up rumor that Sandra had aborted her baby, which marked the death of her already nosediving social status.

  There was Justin Strayes, who had made fun of Julia’s strained relationship with her father. Liz planted a small bag of pot in his locker on a day the drug dogs came. There was an enormous investigation, and Justin ended up missing quite a bit of school to appear in court. When he came back, no one would look him in the eye. It was okay to experiment. It was not okay to get caught. Justin had gotten caught, and now no one talked to him except the stoners.

  They all became numbers in Liz’s metaphorical body count.

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  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Twenty-Nine Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car

  Liz wondered why Lauren Melbrook had never spray-painted HYPOCRITE across her lawn.

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  CHAPTER FIFTY

  What Liz Didn’t Know

  Liam never actually quit playing the flute.

  He quit band. But band had always been stupid. He smashed his flute. But he had three others at home.

  There were days on which he was tempted to give up entirely. He never seriously considered suicide—in fact, he wasn’t quite sure how to do it; was dropping a toaster into your bathtub still a thing?—but it passed through his mind a few times.

  What the video really did was this: it made him see why so many people hated Liz Emerson, and he also saw why they all followed her. Liz Emerson got drunk too easily, and on just about anything: alcohol, power, expectations. She was never careful with her life or anyone else’s, and in her disregard was a coldness, a deep cruelty, a willingness to destroy anyone, everyone.

  He went on. He played his flute. He found that there were still beautiful things in the world, and nothing could ever change that.

  And one day, he decided to forgive Liz Emerson.

  It was near the beginning of sophomore year. It had been cloudy on and off that day. Liam had stayed after school to finish editing his piece for the literary magazine, and when he left the building, he realized that he was not alone.

  Liz Emerson was waiting for a ride. Judging by the small ring of sweat on her T-shirt and the state of her hair, she had just finished cross-country practice. They ignored each other studiously. Liam stood in the shadows of the building, and Liz stood in the dull and uncertain light, her head bent over her phone, her shoulder pushed against the brickwork.

  Liam watched her in silence and remembered how he had felt when he first saw the video, and he never wanted to punch anyone as much as he wanted to punch Liz Emerson then.

  He saw it in his head: him, crossing the distance between them, his ratty Converses scraping against the gum-dotted cement; her, turning in surprise and then away again in disgust, his curled fist—

  Then he laughed to himself, because everyone knew that Liz Emerson could punch harder than he could.

  He was about to turn away when suddenly the clouds moved apart and a sliver of sky peeked through. When he looked again at Liz, her head was thrown back and she was staring at that slice of blue with her eyes wide.

  Then the clouds shifted and the blue was gone, and for a second, Liz’s face was so vulnerable and indignant that Liam almost expected her to fight her way up and push the clouds apart with her fingers.

  The gritting of tires against asphalt made Liam straighten and glance away, and when he looked back, Liz was getting into a car.

  As she drove off, he forgave her because he realized that Liz Emerson yearned for beautiful things too.

  SNAPSHOT: ABOVE

  It is her sixth birthday, and her father has made all of her wishes come true.

  Her nose is pressed against the small, round airplane window. Outside, the clouds are mountains upon waves, curving in great spirals that make her dizzy when she tries to follow them. Everywhere, everywhere is the sun and the sky, and the entire world is below her.

  When she comes home that night, Monica will ask her how the airplane ride was, and she’ll talk for hours about all that she saw. Then she’ll come to me and describe it all again, but she’ll be far away. I was very familiar with the way Liz’s eyes lit up when she spoke of flying, but I will not see the gleam.

  She takes my hands and I hold hers tightly, because I already know what she’ll realize very soon: she is human and bound by the same laws of nature—gravity, in particular—as everyone else.

  Try as she might, she will never grow wings.

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  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Three Days Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car

  Liz had not wanted company that day. She was nursing a massive, massive hangover, and her mouth still tasted like puke. She hadn’t finished her physics project—she was trying, but she was still so vastly confused about Liam that she couldn’t concentrate. The fact that Jake was here pissed her off, because they both knew that the only reason he was here was because her TV was bigger than his and she had surround sound, so the noise of his machine gun on Call of Duty was “fucking awesome.” Liz was sitting on the couch with her physics binder spilling across the cushions and writing GRAVITY IS GRAVITY IS ALWAYS GRAVITY over and over again, and Jake was telling her to put it in terms of derivatives in between curses at the screen—and all of a sudden she was just very tired of him, so she put down her pencil and finally accused him of cheating on her.

  She had known about it since almost the beginning. Hell, the first time he kissed her, he was still dating Hannah Carstens.

  Three weeks after they had started dating, she, Julia, and Kennie were walking across the parking lot to Kennie’s brother’s car. They came around the corner of the school and fell silent, because right in front of them, Jake Derrick was making out with a girl who was decidedly not Liz Emerson.

  Julia and Kennie both spun around to look at Liz, and Liz had honestly been too stunned to be hurt. She had stared for a moment, and then she turned on her heel and walked away, with Julia and Kennie close behind.

  That night, she texted Jake.

  Hey. It’s not working. We’re done, okay? Bye.

/>   Over the weekend, he texted her sixty-seven times, going back and forth between what the fuck did I do? and Liz, I’m so sorry, please give me a second chance, I won’t do it again. I’m so sorry, babe and why the hell won’t you just text me back?s

  She didn’t respond.

  They stayed broken up for exactly one week. The next Friday, Liz was walking through the hall with Kennie when Jake caught her wrist, spun her around, and kissed her.

  “Liz,” he whispered against her lips. His fingers were tangled in her hair and on her waist, his forehead brushing hers. He was everywhere. “Liz, I’m sorry, okay? I am. Listen to me—god, Liz. Just don’t tell me it’s over.”

  With the entire hallway watching and Kennie going “Awwww!” behind her, Liz couldn’t.

  She knew that Jake didn’t mean anything he said. He didn’t even know what he was supposedly sorry for. She knew that he was still hoping that she hadn’t found out about him and whichever girl it had been that time—Sarah Hannigan?

  Still, she convinced herself that he wouldn’t do it again.

  She was wrong, of course.

  Jake cheated on her again, and again, and again. He did it so often that he convinced himself that Liz was too stupid and too in love with him to notice—besides, the others were just flings, just for fun. Liz was the one who mattered to him. Or at least, he wanted it to look that way.

  But on that day, three days before she drove her car into a tree, in the middle of a quickly intensifying argument, Liz simply did not want to deal with him anymore.

  “What the f— ? No, damn it!” Jake almost fell over as he tried to shoot a terrorist on the screen. He glanced around at where she lay sprawled across the white couch. “What the fuck is your problem? Why are you just bitching at everything I say?”