Fall to Pieces (11 page)

I nod. Once, twice, three times. “I can see that,” I say. “Will you wear a jumpsuit and have oil stains all over you?”

Casey shakes her head madly and kicks her legs against the bench. “No way! I’d like to change things up a
bit, you know?” She twists her lips to the side, an expression of intense concentration. “I’d like to be a mechanic who wears a lace dress, maybe. Yeah. A white lace dress.”

She lifts her head, and so do I. We watch the sky together.

I open my mouth, about to tell her how ridiculous that sounds, but then I remember what my own dream was when I was ten years old: to become an anthropologist who studied the nightlife in Sherwood. Because Sherwood is just teeming with nightlife.

So I allow for her subversive child’s dream. “Sounds good.”

And as soon as I say it, give her that green light, she’s off. Telling me about her million-and-one other plans. She sounds hungry. Hungry for someone to listen, hungry for someone to tell her that her dreams are not simply castles in the air and can come true. She likes science and music, Casey. She wants to understand the world and then write songs expressing its beauty.

All while fixing cars in a white lace dress.

When the center’s about to close, when all the other kids have left and E is walking over to us, Casey asks, “Do you really think I can do it?” Her voice cracks down the middle in doubt.

“Of course.”

“It’s just that my mom says—”

E reaches us before she finishes her sentence, but I can guess its ending. Casey looks at her shoelaces, bites her lip. She smiles at E and me. “Bye,” she says, and then she’s gone, before I can tell her that dreams, anyone’s dreams—however small or big or outlandish—are worth a damn. No matter what anyone’s mother says.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I bump into my mother in the kitchen.

We both move awkwardly from side to side trying to avoid the other. Eventually, I give up and stand stock-still, not allowing her to get past me.

“Shouldn’t you be at work?”

She’s dressed for it. Clean, crisp blue business suit with a pair of sheer stockings. But then this is my mother’s usual ensemble. I haven’t seen her wearing anything else in the past few years.

Sometimes I think she sleeps in her suits.

“My meeting got canceled,” she says. “Shouldn’t you be at school?” Her voice is knife-sharp.

“I’m running a little late,” I say.

And suddenly, I’m aware of my morning breath, the stink that hangs about my words. My brittle, breaking hair. The fact that I’m clad in a fucking pink nightie
with a suggestive comment about how good I am in bed scrawled across it.

There isn’t a hair out of place on my mother’s head.

I’m not exactly sure what my mother does. She’s never explained it properly because it’s apparently beyond my comprehension—all I know is that it’s some corporate shit in a bank. She probably spends her days shredding paper and stealing souls while looking the epitome of neat and tidy.

She pats down her already perfectly smooth hair. “Honey.” The word tastes sweet, too sweet. “I’ll give you a ride to school,” she says, just as the phone rings. She stalks into the living room, and I follow her, watching as she lifts the receiver to her ear.

“Amanda Logan speaking,” she says. “Oh, Jillian, how lovely to hear from you. You’re in the Bahamas, aren’t you?”

There’s a pause as Jillian, who is a complete stranger to me, says something.

Mom replies, “Yes, in our front garden,” and I know, instantly, that they’re talking about Amy. “It was a tragedy.” Jillian says something else, something that makes my mother glare at me. “No, we didn’t give her the alcohol—Michael and I were in DC when she threw the party,” she says, waving a hand as if to
dismiss the entire thing, even though Jillian can’t see her. She’s lying, too. I don’t know where Dad was, but he wasn’t in DC with Mom. “You know how these things go. She’s a brilliant girl, so talented; she’s just made a few youthful indiscretions.”

I lift my eyes to the ceiling. For the entire first week after Amy died, my mother had to defend me to people like this. Jillian must have missed the memo on my bad behavior because of her Bahamas trip. “That’s okay about the ride, Mom,” I say, calling her away from Jillian for a second. “Mark will probably swing by soon.”

Mark always swings by. He has ever since he got his license. But after Amy died, he only gives me lifts to school on certain days. Other days we go to the mall, Ghost Town, the local pool.

Once or twice we’ve gone to the barn.

“Listen, Jill. I’m so sorry, but I have to go. I’ve got something on the stove and it’s burning, but I look forward to seeing you when you get home!” She clicks the cordless phone back into its cradle and turns to me.

“You’re not waiting for Mark.” She glares at me for what seems like the millionth time this morning, as if she knows exactly what we’ve been up to. Her lips tighten into a toothpick-thin line. “I’m driving you to school.” She readjusts her suit, picks up her car keys.

Guess this business meeting’s over.

In the car, she insists on talking to me.

MOM: So how was the child care center yesterday?

ME: Sadistic.

MOM: Ella, I know it’s hard for you to see this right now, but I’m just trying to help. I’m not trying to be sadistic.

ME: I didn’t mean you. I meant that everyone there is a sadist, especially my boss. And the children are perverts.

MOM: I’m sure it’s not that bad.

ME: They’re either drawing some seriously fucked-up bananas or penises on that blackboard, Mom.

MOM: Watch your mouth.

Cue silence. It hums and thrums between us. Eventually, Mom departs from her usually perfect driving behavior: she takes her eyes off the road and trains them on me. They linger on my scabby knee.

Mom’s lip curls. This is not a face of concern. This is a face of Contempt and Shame.

She pulls into the school parking lot and reverse-parks expertly, settling the car securely between the white lines. She even manages to avoid the pothole at the back of this car space.

I swear, sometimes it’s as if my mother’s inhuman.

She stares straight ahead, through the windshield at
the boring brick wall of my school, and swallows. “Ella,” she says.

Is it possible that I scare this woman?

“Ella, are you—”

“I have to go or I’ll be late.”

I open the door, kick my legs out of the car and onto the pavement. I turn back to my mother, a good-bye ready on my lips. But she’s opening her mouth again, and I’m sure something hideous is about to crawl out.

I slam the door shut before I can hear what it is. Her words pummel the window instead of me.

Meeting. Fucking. Adjourned.

But I know what she was going to say.
I know
. Her words stalk me across the parking lot. They ring in my ears, loud and clear.

I’m sorry, honey, so sorry; but this situation really is of your own making
...

She’s said it before. She keeps on saying it. Every time she bothers to talk to me. Which is usually whenever I look too sad. Whenever I stop being fine, fine, fine.

It kills me, because I know she’s right. Despite what the school counselor told me in that one session we had right after Amy died.
It’s not your fault. You should never think it’s your fault
.

But who threw the party?

Who let wine and whiskey and beer and vodka-spiked punch into the place?

Who drank so much that she can’t remember shit about the party?

Me. Me. Me, again.

I’m a fucked-up daughter because I threw the stupid, stereotypical, suburban-idiot party. I’m a fucked-up friend because I didn’t look out for Amy.

Where the fuck was I when she fell?

What happened that night?
It’s a question that’s always on my mind. It’s a question that I’m willing to sacrifice anything to finally answer.

Because I don’t think I can live with myself if I don’t know.

Still, I wish Mom wouldn’t constantly remind me of my failure. It’s not as if I tell her every time I see her that the situation with Dad is
all of your own making, honey
.

And that’s true, too.

T
HURSDAY PASSES LIKE
any other school day: slowly. I attend half my classes and spend the other half sitting next to Amy’s old locker, fiddling with the combination lock. They’ve reset her password and given it to some other student already. A girl named Justine. I heard one of her friends calling to her this morning when she was standing beside Amy’s locker. Watched the swish of her blond hair as she turned to answer with a smile.

She seemed totally unaware that her locker used to belong to someone else. That her locker used to belong to the dead girl.

After school I make one last visit to that corridor. I take in the dust motes floating in the colorful light streaming through the stained glass windows—the space already feels somehow different. Somehow lesser.

And it’s a fear, a fear that makes itself heard above the constant ache from my bruises. The world will move
on. The world will move on without Amy, and I’ll be left there standing still in a river of time. My hands splashing desperately through the waters around me, trying to catch the truth, trying to catch something, and always finding nothing.

I avoid Mark and Petal in the parking lot. Don’t even dare to look over at Cherry Bomb as I walk on by. Because my body may crave a Pick Me Up. But today my mind is too wrecked to play their games. To deal with Mark’s sideways smile, Petal’s extended silences.

I go straight home instead.

I go straight home; and in my bedroom, with so many useless, desperate thoughts to avoid and nothing better to distract me from them, I devour my homework as if it’s a Family fucking Feast.

I speed through my calc questions, English notes on Act 1 of
Hamlet
, science and history. When it’s all gone, when the notes for each subject are taken and lying in piles on my desk with colorful, annotated tabs sticking out the sides, I’m winded.

As if I’ve run a marathon.

I choke and wheeze among piles of homework. Because when there’s nothing else, no homework to distract me, no lying friends to puzzle the truth out of, I feel myself starting to lose it.

My fingers are shaking. My hands are shaking. I clamp
down on the desk to try and stop the tremors passing through me, but that doesn’t work. The table just rattles along with me. Fuck. This. Shit.

Anxiety attacks are, apparently, normal when you don’t like the fact that your best friend threw herself off your roof. And landed in front of your garden gnome.

I get up, take a few deep breaths. It feels as if I’m running over jelly instead of carpet when I cross the room, open the door, and zip through the hall. Slide out the front door.

Run and run and run and run. I’m still barefoot. Grass slips between my toes. Sun-warmed pavement smashes into my blisters, burning me. I wince but keep running, and the ground starts to fall away beneath me. Starts to feel slippery like jelly, all too easy to sink into.

I’ve had panic attacks before—before Amy died, that is. I used to have them on game days for basketball, when I was all keyed up and so terrified of passing the ball to the wrong person.

That’s why I gave up basketball. Because I was scared of making mistakes.

I wonder whether I gave up on Amy for the same reason. Because I was afraid I’d screw up things.

I keep blaming it on myself. And I know I shouldn’t,
because it’s whiny and because the school counselor’s a professional, an expert; and she told me that it wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t my fault.

But what if it is?

I brought it up. I almost suggested it to Amy, didn’t I? But maybe it was like Mark and Pet said before, how you can tell stuff about a person sometimes. Apparently, I’m an open book full of blank pages, but even E can read my cover.

How long can she keep up this way?
he wondered.

“Forever,” I wheeze. “Forever,” I spit defiantly at the brilliant blue sky, at the pavement, at the grass that I step onto. It tickles my feet as if greeting my defiance with laughter.

And the grass is right to laugh because, crap, I’m not a machine. My panting breaths hit the grass; my hands hit my knees.

On the upside, when blood roars through my head like this, when my breath comes in short, sharp gasps, the world solidifies. The sensation of running through jelly and sinking into quicksand disappears.

I’m in someone else’s yard, and I reach out and wrap my arm around a low-hanging tree branch to steady myself. And before I know what I’m doing, I’m swinging my legs up, too. Arms circling the branch, feet crossed over the wood. My body hangs, suspended. Wind rushes
through the crevice between my stomach, my knees, and the branch.

Blood rushes to my head because of the almost upside-down position I’m in.

I swing, swing, swing myself upright.

My teeth chatter as I stretch out my hands to catch the next branch. I’m swinging again, twisting myself up and over. In eighth-grade gym class, my teachers said I showed some promise on the bars—flips, back rolls, hanging positions, they were all easy for me—but I was never this good.