Fall to Pieces (26 page)

I’ve told her that only I can put myself back together. She doesn’t believe me, but she’s giving me a trial period. No truanting, no bruises, no blood. But if I slip up—or rather, fall down—it’s off to Roger with me.

“Do you need a lift?”

“No, it’s okay. Tristan’s picking me up,” I say.

She purses her lips, because she doesn’t exactly approve
of Tristan. But she doesn’t say anything, just takes a sip of her orange juice. She’s giving me my space these days, not trying to barge her way in after ignoring me for years.

“Hey, Mom,” I say to the back of her head as I walk behind the couches to the foyer. “Thanks, you know, for making an effort with me lately.”

She’s trying harder than Dad, at the very least. He’s taken up a job in a different state. It’s been weeks since I’ve spoken to him, because to be honest, it’s too painful to hear the disappointment in his voice. The disappointment that, even from a state away, seems so endless. I don’t know if he’s disappointed in me or Mom or himself. Maybe all three. I guess I understand in some ways. How do you keep on going when you’ve watched so many of your dreams die?

Mom turns to face me. “I’m so glad to hear you say that,” she says. To someone who didn’t know her, her voice would still sound glossy, but I can tell that it’s lost a layer of its usual polish. “Have a nice day.”

“You, too.”

And then I’m out the front door.

I get into Tristan’s car, and the smell of gasoline and gunpowder envelopes me. Every time I get into this car, I remember the day I found out what Amy did. I remember banging my head against Tristan’s steering wheel, honking the horn, and willing my thoughts to stop, stop, stop.

And every day when I’ve remembered this, there’s this pinch of resentment in my chest. How could Amy do that to me?

Today, all I can think is that our friendship was always flawed. Our friendship was weathered wood at the beach, salt worming its way into the cracks. Everything eroding. It’s not like I didn’t know that before. And it’s not like she wasn’t drunk off her ass.

She didn’t know what she was doing. She just loved me like anything—and she didn’t want to be alone.

I will never forgive her for what she did to herself. But I will forgive her for what she did to me.

“I forgive her.”

“Who?” Tristan sounds confused.

“Amy.”

“Oh.” He eases his foot onto the accelerator and pulls out of my driveway.

Silence. Beneath us, wheels slice across the road. Above us, birds wheel across the sky. At the first traffic light, Tristan asks, “Do you think Ethan forgives me?”

I smile and nod. “He may even be thankful. It was his choice, Tristan, and it seems like he had good reason. He was going, anyway; he just picked his own terms is all.”

Tristan nods, but his eyes disappear into the landscape, into the trees in the distance that look like purple bruises against the mist-white sky. Sometimes I sit in on the wakes
he holds for Ethan. We just sit in Tristan’s room, arms around each other, watching smoke curl away from the incense sticks that his dead brother used to love.

Sometimes Tristan can’t hold back his tears, and the words flow out of him because he’s overflowing and can’t keep them in. Sometimes he’ll whisper, “My fault.”

Deep down, I think he knows it isn’t his fault. But he needs to think it is, because it’s easier to blame himself than it is to blame his brother. Because admitting he’s not at fault would mean admitting that his brother shouldn’t have put him in that position in the first place.

It’s hard to admit you’re guiltless sometimes, because it also means you’re not at all in control. I would know. Sometimes I still try to persuade myself that I killed Amy. I pushed her; she didn’t pull me. It was my fault. If only I hadn’t—

But there are so many
if only
s, and it never changes reality.

I want to do something for Amy. I want to say goodbye to her.

After all, we weren’t invited to the funeral. I wonder what would happen if the real story ever got out, if Mark played that video he still has.

No one’s watched the video yet except Mark, who saw the beginning and stopped it. And I realize that it’s the perfect way to say good-bye to Amy.

If we bury it, then we can say good-bye.

“I want to bury Amy,” I whisper, to no one in particular.

Tristan catches my words, of course. He’s too attentive sometimes, too interested in helping others for his own selfish reasons. A part of me loves him for it, but a larger part of me just wants to hit him until he realizes that this doesn’t have to be his penance.

An even larger part of me knows it won’t make a difference. Nothing will change the way he thinks.

“She’s already buried.”

“Thanks for that, Captain Obvious.”

He pulls into the school parking lot and slides into a spot next to Cherry Bomb. Last week Mark decided he was going to start living life by screwing up everyone’s expectations of him. He painted a frangipani on the side of his car like he’s always wanted to do.

It’s dumb, but a balloon of pride swelled up in my chest when he did it.

Tristan and I sit in the car, neither of us speaking. Our relationship is built around comfortable silences that neither of us feels a need to fill. After a while the right words come to me, so I say them. “I know she’s already been buried, but I don’t really think her spirit was in her body. We still have it, you know? It’s in that dartboard,
and it’s in those crazy posters, and it’s in that video Mark has.”

Tristan nods, because he gets it. I love that he gets it. That he gets it—me—makes me kind of crazy about him.

“I’m ready to say good-bye,” I tell him as his arms fold around me and he holds me so tight I think I’m going to break. “I want to say good-bye.”

After school we head to the barn. Mark, Petal, Tristan, and I. We find the space on the floor that is the least covered in bird shit and push away the hay with our feet.

“Now what?” Petal asks.

“Now we get dirty,” Mark says.

Like the nature boy he is, he drops to the ground and sinks his fingers into the earth. Damp and rich, it’s easily moved beneath his fingers.

“Are you three going to help, or am I going to have to throw dirt at you?” He smiles sweetly up at us. Mark’s words shoot straight these days. Always. The sideways words and sideways smiles floated away that day at the lake.

I drop to my knees, and Petal and Tristan follow. We all sink our fingers into the dirt. It goes on for a while, us digging through the sticky earth in the barn as if we’re little kids playing in a sandpit.

Slide in fingers. Grab a bunch of soil. Flick it into growing pile.

Rinse. Repeat.

But there’s no real rinsing; and by the time we’re done, the dirt has wandered up my fingers and over my forearms. Black smudges cover us as we prepare to bury Amy.

“Deep enough?” Petal asks. “Wide enough?”

“It’s grave-sized,” I return. “A bit shallower, but I think that’s okay.”

I stand up, brush some of the dirt away by swiping it on my jeans. It clings to my shoes, my socks. When I walk, my feet smear dirt through the yellow hay.

Permanent stains.

Amy’s death will be a permanent stain on my life. It’s not going away. But goddammit, I’m going to learn to live with, and love, this stain. This will help me to...I don’t know what. Be a better person? That’s an untrue cliché. It will help me to find myself. This will—has already—drawn out elements of me that I didn’t even know existed.

Apparently, I’m not half as bitchy as I thought.

“Ella?” Tristan shakes my shoulder. “You look a little spacey. Bad memories?” His lips tilt up at the edges.

Oh, right. We’re standing in front of Amy’s dartboard. Countless nights spent on her bed during the tenth grade when she first started smoking. I’d cough like anything to
let her know I thought the habit was disgusting and then we’d throw darts at this board.

Good times.

The bad memories are more recent.

Pick Me Ups. Tristan, face full of fear and me yelling at him to just throw the fucking dart at me.

“Right,” I say. “It’s time to bury the memories.”

Bad and good.

He helps me take down the dartboard and carry it over to the grave. Mark and Petal are standing by. Petal has the dress she borrowed from Amy the night of my seventeenth-birthday party and never got to give back. Mark has the records, wrapped up in crazy life-sized posters of Freddie Mercury and Cherie Currie.

He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “Should someone say something or something?”

“Or something,” I say. I suck in a deep breath, smell the lovely bird shit stench that pervades the barn. There’s something beautiful about how imperfect this is. “Let’s watch the video.”

Mark’s brought his camera, and the memory card’s in this time. We’re all jostling for a glimpse of the tiny screen. I slide my fingers through Tristan’s as Mark fiddles with his camera, trying to get the video to play.

Our hands fit perfectly and I draw comfort from his warmth, and Mark’s and Petal’s.

And then the video is on, and I get lost inside the fragmented images that roll across the screen.

Dark night. Silver stars.

Our bodies, heads cut off. The camera spins, topples onto the roof and then the world tilts on its axis. Blurry and terrifying and unknowable.

Our words are high-pitched knives in the dark, arrows zinging through the silence as we shred one another to pieces. Mark tells Amy that he saw her kissing me.

In the here and now, Petal looks surprised—maybe she was too out of it to remember that detail. Or maybe she had chosen to forget some memories of her own.

And then there’s a cutoff image of Mark, his body only visible from the waist down. I watch the way his body language changes. Languid to fluid. Laid-back to intense. Rage, bitterness in the way his shoes bite into the tiles. His steps are so drawn into themselves that he barely makes a sound against the tiles of my rooftop. They don’t flake and clatter away beneath his feet like they did under mine.

I can’t see Amy or myself in any of the shots. But I can hear her laughing, laughing so wildly. And then I can hear the ceramic tiles falling away. That must have been when she spun around me like a ballerina, forcing me to dance with her and almost fall off the roof.

Her words, crackly but still so intense, come next. “I need Ella.”

And then the jump.

Mark’s bent down, his face swimming into the frame, yelling to Petal. Panic flickers, flames to life on his face. She stumbles into the frame and then she and Mark are both leaning down, and Petal’s foot collides with the camera.

It tumbles farther down the roof, and suddenly Amy and I are on-screen. I’m slipping. Amy’s already way over the edge, and I’m hanging on by just a few fingers.

Mark’s fingers close around my wrist, and he’s pulling and he’s pulling and he’s pulling. But right now, I’m not focused on him; I’m focused on the very edge of the camera screen. It’s a shot of our hands, mine and Amy’s, twined together.

At the very last second, when I’m yelling something incoherent and Mark’s pulling so hard, Amy’s fingers slip from mine.

I’m crying and crying and crying as I watch her fall off the screen.

Petal leans over the edge and makes a grab for her, but it’s useless.

Then there are a series of brief, unfocused images and then darkness.

And in the barn, there is nothing but the sound of us breathing.

“She’s gone,” I say. “She’s really gone.”

And I’m weeping from the realization and the relief.
Because Amy, she pulled me right down to the brink of death with her, but I got a second chance at life. I got a second chance. And I wish, wish, wish that she’d gotten a second chance, too.

No one else seems to know what to say to that. There’s silence for three heartbeats’ time, then Mark breaks the memory card in half. Like Humpty Dumpty, like Amy, it can’t be put back together again. He throws the halves into the grave. Tiny blue pieces of technology surrounded by huge walls of dirt.

It disappears into the hole we’ve dug, and Mark draws his sleeve across his eyes. I pat him on the back, and Petal puts her arms around his neck.

“It’s better this way,” she says. “It’s better to remember and move on.”

“Right,” I say. “That’s why we’re here.”

I lift the dartboard with both arms. “Good-bye,” I whisper as I toss it into the grave.

My body still sometimes craves the adrenaline, the high-definition picture of the world that comes after the fall, after a dart zings past your head. But this is the end of it. Pick Me Ups won’t be so hard to resist anymore. They’re finally getting buried.

Petal flings the dress over the dartboard. “I’ve wanted to give this back to you for a while,” she says as though Amy is there.

And who knows, maybe she is.

The records and posters, possibly the most important things in the world to Amy, go next. Then Mark reaches into his pocket and pulls out the purple scarf, the one that held all the photos.

“Nice breaking and entering, by the way,” he says. “My next-door neighbor got an eyeful of your ass. He’s a perv.”

I wonder whether you should be allowed to mention things like that when you are saying farewell to your best friend.

“This was Amy’s favorite scarf,” Mark says. He unfolds it, revealing the photos from that night and dumping them into the grave.

We’re all misty-eyed, but we don’t acknowledge that we’re crying. If no one speaks about it, we can always deny it later.

“We done?” Petal asks.

Tristan nods, as if to say
She was your friend; I don’t have anything to add
.

Mark nods. He’s done. Photos gone, posters gone, records breaking into the earth. Music for Amy’s grave.

They all turn to me. I clear my throat. “I’m not done.”

I pick up my backpack off the floor behind me and brush away the stray pieces of straw. I used to brush Amy’s
hair away from her face like that sometimes, when her bangs obscured her eyes.

Then I close my eyes and let myself feel the pain.

Because ignoring it isn’t going to make it go away, no matter how hard I try.