Falling into Place Read online

  “She is,” Kennie whispers to herself.

  She is a lovely girl.

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  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Forty-Nine Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car

  The answer was breaking.

  Her childhood ended on the day she watched Melody’s feet dangle, and maybe she hadn’t realized it then, but what she decided was this: she would no longer be an object at rest. The only other option was to be what Mackenzie was. An object in motion that would stay in motion, even if it meant flattening everything in her path.

  And so she broke every promise she had ever made. And with the energy from so many shattered things, she pushed herself into motion.

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  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Twenty-Three Missed Calls Later

  “Mom? Yeah, I—okay, yeah, I’m sorry. I fell asleep—

  “No, I’m not drunk, Mom. I’m not high, either—yeah, sure, I’d be happy to bring home some of my pee in a coffee cup, if you don’t care if it spills. I’m driving your car. Seriously, I’m—

  “Mom. Mom. Mom.

  “Yeah, I know you called me twenty-three times. . . . I can see it on my phone—no, it died while I was asleep, I brought my charger—well, I couldn’t see it then, could I? I don’t sleep with my eyes open—okay, yeah, sorry, Mom. I—no, I don’t think aggression is a side effect of meth. Steroids, maybe—I’m not on steroids.

  “I’m at—no, I’m not interrupting you—do you want me to answer that? I’m at the hospital—

  “I’M FINE.

  “No, I have not overdosed.

  “No, I don’t have alcohol poisoning.

  “Mom, just listen—I’m here for a . . . classmate . . . no, you don’t know her—she’s not pregnant! I don’t have a girlfriend. No, I didn’t have sex last night—I wish—kidding, kidding. Chill. I’m fine.

  “She got into a car accident. I saw her car on my way to Costco—well, I didn’t move them, so I assume all of the groceries are still in the car, unless someone broke a window and stole everything—no one broke a window, Mom. Yeah, I’ll check later. Okay, I have to go—no, because people are starting to stare at me like I’m insane. Yeah, there are other kids from school here too—they’re all just getting here, school must have let out . . . no, I didn’t, I told you, I was asleep. I didn’t skip, Mom, I . . . overslept a bit. Yeah, pretty much. Until like, one thirty. I haven’t slept in ages, Mom. I was up until three the night before last night working on that stupid physics project. . . . Okay. Yeah, I’ll come home tonight. . . . Yeah, I know. I know. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah, okay. Love you too.”

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  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The On-Again Off Again

  Jake Derrick has not come to see Liz Emerson.

  Liam realizes this after he hangs up with his mother and looks around. The waiting room resembles the high school during lunch hour. The cafeteria has a distinctive seating arrangement: the center tables belong to the popular, the outer rings to the nerds and outcasts and dorks and freshmen. Here in the waiting room, the jockiest and the preppiest, the ones who knew Liz the best, have taken over the center area with an air of manifest destiny.

  Liam is still beside the window, undoubtedly the least popular person in the room.

  But from his position, it’s easy to see everyone who comes and goes, and Liam is certain that Liz’s boyfriend has yet to arrive. It takes him a moment to remember whether or not they are, in fact, still together. Jake and Liz had established their tumultuous relationship at the end of Liz’s freshman year, and Liam has paid attention without meaning to. He can’t help it. His crush on Liz Emerson began on the first day of fifth grade, and except for the year or so during which he had hated her guts, he has paid attention.

  No. Even then.

  But the truth is, everyone pays attention. That’s why they were all here last night; that’s they’re all here now. She is Liz Emerson. She matters.

  To everyone, it seems, except her boyfriend.

  It started when Jake kissed her under the stars in the movie theater parking lot. He was a grade ahead of her, had made the varsity football team in his freshman year, and was widely lusted after. That night, he literally swept her off her feet. According to popular opinion, it was the most romantic thing that had happened all year. According to Liz, it was the definition of cliché, and he had tasted of nacho cheese.

  Their most infamous breakup had taken place during sophomore year. It was the night of the homecoming game, and Liz dumped Jake right after he made the winning touchdown.

  On the way to some party—Liz hadn’t even been sure whose it was, but it had alcohol and pot and people, so it didn’t matter, they were going—she told Julia and Kennie, “God, he’s just one big cliché.”

  Jake Derrick is. He is decently hot but not nearly as hot as he thinks, and only about half as funny. He is not quite as stupid as everyone assumes, remains blissfully and utterly unaware of his own supreme arrogance, and will never, ever deserve Liz.

  And certainly Liam is jealous, but he dislikes Jake because Liam is one of the few people who have paid attention closely enough to know that Liz does not like Jake either.

  Liz and Jake’s favorite pastime is fighting. Jake is the kind of person who is absolutely assured of his own rightness, and Liz is the kind of person whose primary goal in life is to tear such people down. Their fights involved Jake calling Liz unmentionable things and Liz snapping back with comments that hurt where only she knew to hurt him.

  Three days before Liz crashed her car, they started arguing about Liz’s physics project on gravity. Liz was almost done, and Jake was trying to make her feel stupid by saying some shit about how acceleration is the third derivative of position and telling her to change everything, and it turned nasty very quickly.

  Eventually Jake called Liz a bitch and told her to fuck off and go to hell all in one breath, and Liz had laughed in his face and slammed the door behind him.

  Liam does not know about the fight. He has no access to the best gossip, and it always takes awhile for news to trickle down to his lowly position among the other nerds and rejects.

  It is true, however, that despite the fight, Liz and Jake never actually broke up. Technically. In the end, Liz simply did not want to waste any more time on Jake, even to dump him. She was searching for a reason to live, and he wasn’t helping.

  As much as Liam dislikes Jake Derrick, it disgusts him that he is not here. Jake and Liz have been a couple for nearly three years. He should be here, at least, pretending to be heartbroken.

  Or maybe Jake really would have been heartbroken. Liam doesn’t know. He doesn’t know Jake well and has no particular wish to remedy that situation, so he makes a halfhearted attempt to withhold judgment.

  But the truth is that Jake Derrick’s heart is a fickle and melodramatic thing. He has teared up over dead dogs and spectacular football games, and no doubt he will cry over Liz too. But in a month, two, he will be making out with another girl, someone with bigger boobs who will believe him when he lies. Liz will become no more than a pickup line.

  “I fell in love in high school. I know that’s cliché and stuff, but it’s true—Liz and I had something real. When she died, I just . . . I don’t know. I was so lost. Maybe I still am. I’m lost.”

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  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Scavenger

  Liz only stayed with Ja
ke for so long because he kept something inside her alive, some piece of her that still believed in love and yearned for romance. And he could be so sweet, so adorable in the things he did, sending her flowers with notes written on the petals, sneaking up behind her in the hallway to bury his face in her hair, telling her all the time that she was beautiful, that she took his breath away.

  Then there was homecoming during junior year, just a few months before. Liz was about to break up with him once and for all, and then he did something that made her wonder about love again.

  She opened her locker after her last class, and a flower fell out. There was a ribbon tied around the stem, and some sort of Shakespeare quote written on it in Jake’s scrawl, which should have turned her off right away. Julia liked Shakespeare. Liz liked the cynics—Orwell, Twain, Swift, Hemingway. But she had just come from the homecoming pep rally; the hallways were loud and her hair was messy from the wind and the flower and ribbon were so beautiful that in that moment, she felt beautiful too.

  IT IS THE EAST, AND LIZ IS THE SUN, the ribbon said (and truthfully, a part of Liz cringed because Jake was just so goddamn cliché). GO EAST, SUNSHINE, TO THE PLACE WHERE WE FIRST MET.

  So she did. She went to the middle school, about three hundred feet east of the high school. The first time she had ever talked to Jake had been sixth grade. They had arrived at the water fountain by the gym at the same time, and he had gallantly stepped back. For a moment, she thought it was incredibly sweet that he had remembered, but as she walked toward the middle school, a twinge of suspicion grew inside her. Jake was not the sentimental type—he could hardly remember what had happened last week, much less what had happened five years ago.

  She went into the building and stopped in front of the water fountain by the gym, read the waiting card. YOUR LIPS ON MINE, UNDER THE STARS. At the movie theater parking lot, she picked up the waiting teddy bear and took the note from its paws: WHERE WE HAD OUR FIRST DATE, A TEA PARTY WITH TEDDY BEARS. The hospital, where she had visited him after he had broken his collarbone playing football. She had brought him a mug of chai tea (which Jake had ignored in favor of his hospital-issued chili dog) and a get-well bear as a joke. They had ended up making out in the hospital bed until a nurse had come and asked Liz, none too politely, to leave.

  The scavenger hunt led her all over Meridian and wasted an entire tank of gas, and at the end, she found herself parked at the edge of the overgrown field by the elementary school. Jake was standing in the middle of it, holding a sign with the last clue written in black Sharpie.

  It said WILL YOU GO TO THE DANCE WITH ME?

  She said yes.

  Liz had a generally hard time believing in love, and she was not in love with Jake Derrick. She was in love with the things he did. Turned out, though, her suspicions were correct—the scavenger hunt was beyond the imagination of her self-involved boyfriend. Jake had known that Liz’s friends would do the majority of the work. Really, all he had to do was stand there.

  But that afternoon, in the abandoned field by the elementary school, Liz pretended that they were. In love. She lied to herself. Her world was almost beautiful. She didn’t care that it was false.

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  CHAPTER THIRTY

  After the Surgery

  There are three kinds of people after the surgery is pronounced successful.

  There are the ones who are breathless, shaking, crying in that crushing and desperate kind of relief—namely, Liz’s mother and Julia. When the doctor first told Monica that her daughter had not died on the operating table, she went to Julia and held her, because she couldn’t hold Liz.

  All team practices have been cancelled for the day, so the waiting room is clogged with the second kind of people, the ones who aren’t surprised at all. They shrug and say that they were never worried, never mind the fact that they had all abandoned their homework out of their professed concern. They sit around the low tables and say that they always knew Liz was strong enough to pull through.

  And then there is Matthew Derringer, who is just the slightest bit disappointed, because he has already ordered flowers for the funeral.

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  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The Art of Being Alive

  Julia has always been the good girl, Sunday afternoon activities aside. So her heart is nearly falling out of her chest when she grabs a pair of scrubs from a passing cart, pulls them over her jeans, and walks into the ICU with all the nonchalance she can muster.

  It smells clean, clean like linens and antiseptics, like organized and monitored death. There are rows and rows of almost-corpses buried beneath white sheets. Julia has never shied away from blood or sickness, but this room makes her want to run and never look back. She doesn’t want to see Liz here.

  But she does. As always, Liz Emerson is hard to miss. This time, it’s because, of all the patients, Liz looks furthest from reanimation. She looks beyond hope.

  Julia’s legs are shaking as she walks over to Liz’s bed. She stops a good six feet away, afraid to go any closer, afraid that she will bump into one of the many machines and something will unhook and Liz will die and it will be her fault.

  There is a chair by Liz’s head, and Julia stares at it for a long while before she decides to sit down. She slides her backpack from her shoulder, takes out a pre-calc textbook, and opens it to the chapter the class is studying.

  She begins to read. I watch her lips move. They’re trembling too.

  “‘For any point on an ellipse, the sum value of the distances from any given point to each foci will be a fixed value.’ I remember this chapter. Don’t worry. The test is easier than the homework, and she’ll probably curve the quiz. You won’t miss much. Anyway. ‘In the case of a hyperbola, however, the difference between the distances will be . . .”

  Julia glances down at Liz’s face and begins to cry. She had tried to avoid it, looking, but it’s terribly difficult to not look at an almost-corpse, when the almost-corpse is your best friend.

  Liz’s face is gray like air pollution. Her hair is a mess, and parts of it have been chopped off so the doctors could stitch up her scalp. There are shadows beneath her eyes and bruises all over one cheek, and worst of all, her eyes are closed.

  Liz has always hated sleeping. Once, we read the story of Sleeping Beauty together—we didn’t understand much, because it was a harder version, and an unhappier one. Everyone was dead by the time the princess woke up, and maybe that was when Liz began to fear missing things.

  The makeup is gone and her face is as naked as Julia as ever seen it. She sees the sadness, the exhaustion, the fault lines beneath the surface, and suddenly Julia is furious. If Liz had slept more, maybe she would have been a more careful driver. Maybe she wouldn’t have been so reckless and ruthless and lost.

  A tear slides down Julia’s nose and falls onto Liz’s hand. Julia watches her face for a sign of life. For anything.

  But Liz is motionless, a girl of wax and shadows.

  “Damn you,” Julia whispers, her voice small. “We were supposed to go running tonight. Open gym for soccer starts next week.”

  They would have gone too—Liz liked running through snow. She would go now, were her leg not broken in three places.

  Well, maybe not.

  For soccer, Liz almost waited. The chances of Meridian’s girls’ varsity soccer team winning the state tournament have gone down dramatically. Without their junior captain and star forward, it will be a miracle if they even pass sectionals, and Liz hadn’t wanted to be responsible for that failure too.

  But she needed ice on the roads. She needed her accident to look as accidental as possible.

  And she just didn’t think she was capable of waiting an
other three months.

  Julia, however, knows none of this. She looks down at what remains of her best friend, and she thinks of all the times Liz was quiet and not really there. The times when she was the Liz everyone else knows, all snark and insanity, and the moments when she was the one that stared at invisible things and hadn’t truly smiled in a long time.

  “God, Liz,” Julia says, and she closes her eyes to force the tears back. They overflow anyway, pooling somewhere deep inside her. “I can’t run in the rain alone.”

  It was right before cross-country season, junior year. It was pouring outside, and Julia was curled on the window seat with a book and a cup of soup when someone began ringing her doorbell insistently. She opened the front door and found Liz standing on her porch in nothing but a pair of rain-soaked shorts and an obnoxiously green sports bra.

  “Come on,” said Liz. “Let’s go running.”

  Julia gaped. “What the hell are you—it’s raining!”

  “I’ve noticed,” Liz said impatiently. “Go change.” She looked at Julia’s chest critically. “You’ll start an earthquake if you let those things bounce.”

  “Liz, it’s wet.”

  “No shit, Sherlock. Now come on.”

  Julia closed the door in Liz’s face and waited to see if Liz would leave.

  She didn’t, of course, so Julia went upstairs to change into a sports bra and her Nikes.

  And they went running.

  The rain was warm and smelled of beginnings. Liz and Julia ran unevenly, their footsteps syncopated: right right foot, left left foot. After a few minutes, Julia fell back a bit, because her strides were longer than Liz’s—it was kind of awkward trying to run beside her, because she had to take a normal step, and then a smaller one so that Liz could match it—and she was already wheezing. Breathing in the contents of ziplock bags did nothing to improve her lung capacity.