Fall to Pieces (10 page)

“I know a lot about coming to terms with grief,” E answers.

Petal’s arm is raised, fingers curling toward the palm. Half fist. It quivers as if it’s not an extension of her body but something separate. Something with a mind of its own. Floundering, hovering above the hay.

Ready to strike.

E grins at her. “And you look like such a pretty girl—” I punch E on the shoulder. Not too hard, but hard enough for him to know that if he says that again we’ll lob him straight into the bales of hay below. And this time I won’t leap after him, won’t make sure he’s okay.

Petal’s lying to me, sure; but, hell, she’s still my friend. No one messes with my friends.
No one messes with us
. Amy used to make sure of it when she was alive. It feels like my job now, for some reason. Maybe because Amy, as much as she linked us together, was the odd one out.

Amy was the one who felt isolated the most—and she didn’t shut up about it, either. If there was one thing Amy wasn’t insecure about, it was her insecurity. And in some ways that made her a stronger person than I’ll ever be.

Outwardly, I don’t whine.

Outwardly, sticks and stones don’t break my bones.

Inwardly, I’m worse than Holden Caulfield.

I try to shake myself out of my thoughts and into the real world, but it’s like there’s a barrier between my body and my soul and the air. Detached, I’m so detached.

And I look at the hay, and I can’t help but think of straw floating up around me like a lazily blown kiss. The rush of the wind and the roar of my memories. I want to walk down this road. I want to retrieve another piece of my memory.

So I walk. I walk to the edge, and I meet the merry, beetle-black eyes of the gnome.

It’s high time one of us tried the third floor.

Only E’s face makes me pause. Horrified wrinkles have knitted themselves into the edges of his mouth where the laugh lines should be. Fingers, tangled and knotted through bonfire hair. He transforms into an exaggerated version of
The Scream
, roaring colors rushing by behind him. “Don’t—”

And the moment he says it, I do.

The air slides away beneath my feet.

And the greater the height, the greater the rush—it works.

Memories roar up to catch me. I bounce into their bittersweet embrace.

“Ella, Ella, Ella.”

She’s drunk. Amy’s wasted, and I’m beginning to wonder whether that brownie she ate was really all brownie. Because she’s acting so fucking weird
.

Under the table, Mark has Amy’s hand clasped in his. He’s singing a soft lullaby to her: “Hush little baby, don’t you cry...”

But Amy’s not a little kid anymore, and she’s not having any of it. She leaves her hand in Mark’s but lets the silence sit between them, lets it burn away the air in the room until we’re all suffocating
.

We’re still playing the game, still asking the questions in a circle, and it’s Amy’s turn. Amy’s turn again
.

She laughs and laughs and laughs for no reason. Then she turns straight to me and says, “Ella. When you said you wanted out last week in PE, what did you mean? I never bothered to ask you.” She knocks her head into her palms. “I should have asked you. I mean, you could have just meant you wanted out of PE—but, oh, god, I’m such a bad friend.”

I wonder
, How does she know?

I trace circles on the tabletop. No one should be able to get this close to me. I want to tell them all to fuck off, to get lost, because sometimes I say things and I don’t want my meaning to be demanded. But Amy’s looking at me with those eyes of hers, drunk. Red spider
lines from the alcohol. An eyelash drifting like snow onto her cheek. She regards me seriously, because, yeah, she’s drunk. But she still loves me
.

Alcohol can’t take away love
.

And I love her back
.

It wouldn’t hurt to say this now, would it? They’re too tipsy to remember anything
.

Fine. I’ll tell them the truth
.

“
I—No, I didn’t mean that I wanted out of PE. I meant”—I wave my hands around—“I meant I wanted out of it all. Everything, you know. The chaos. I just...I wanted a bit of peace and quiet. Silence.”

As I say the words, something breaks away in my chest. My feelings have found a place to rest. Atlas shrugs. The world falls off my shoulders into a bowl of punch
.

And Amy, eyes wide, brighter than the stars, she stares at me. The
doof-doof-doof
beat of the psychedelic music blares through her pause, filling up the silence. “You mean, like
, suicide
?”

Facedown in the straw. Did I pass out? My name is ringing in my ears.

E, Mark, Pet. Faces floating above me, islands of cloud.

“Ella, unless you sit up in the next ten seconds, E’s going to pull a Prince Charming and kiss you out of your sleep.”

“She—” I begin. “I—it was my fault.”

My limbs feel as if someone’s poured tar over them.
They refuse to move at the speed of my thoughts. I sludge my way into an upright position.

Mark grins. “I see my threat worked.”

“I’m not that bad a kisser, you know.”

“Shut up,” I choke. I remember. I’ve just remembered. “It wasn’t Amy. It wasn’t—It was me. I put the idea into her head.”

The words flop from my mouth and circle around my neck. A noose made of vocabulary, thought, memory.

The neck of my soul snaps.

Just like Amy’s.

Because, shit, is it really all my fault?

“What do you mean, it was your idea?” Petal asks.

“I wanted to commit suicide first,” I say. “It was me and my stupid big mouth.”

Fuck the stupid spiked punch. Fuck it for unhinging my mouth so that it swung wide-open, allowing Amy to see into my soul. For allowing Amy to see herself reflected in me.

But I’d thought they’d be too drunk to remember what I’d said.

“What?” Mark says, his head swinging from side to side. “No-o-o,” he says slowly, as if trying to drive a stake through my mind with that word.

“What do you mean, no?” My breath blows hay out of my hair. Did my words blow Amy off my rooftop?

“He means, Ella, that you wanting to die was kind of old news.” Petal’s fingers, decorated with metal rings, slip beneath my shoulders, and she picks me up. Hauls me to my feet, for the second time this week.

“We knew,” she says. “Even though you never said it.” Pause. She looks at Mark. “Right?”

His eyes are focused on the hay; and when he looks up, he’s got this ridiculously big smile pasted on his face.

Mark has an inability to be serious for longer than ten seconds. It makes him awkward-awkward-awkward in situations like this. He sighs, shrugs. All with the ridiculous smile in place. Then he opens his mouth.

For a second I think he’s going to say “Wheee!” but he doesn’t. Guess even Mark knows that some moments are beyond childhood, beyond the Peter Pan games he likes to play with himself.

“Yeah, I knew,” he says. “I knew about you before you said it, Ella. And Amy, too. I figured it was why you guys were always so close, you know?”

I do.

Even though I loved Mark and Pet with all my heart, it was always Amy who could get me to do anything.

One word from Amy, and I’d be up at five in the morning to get a coffee, have a picnic, fuck up some kid’s morning with barbed-wire words.

I can’t believe I’m only realizing this now. Amy always
claimed that she was on the outside, and I thought so, too. But she wasn’t. We were together, the two of us.

I stare at him. At Petal. How can you just
know
something like that? I mean, yeah, we’re good friends; but this goes beyond friendship. This is like psychic ability. It’s creepy, in the same way it would be creepy if a ten-year-old told you he understood everything about calculus.

“It’s kind of obvious, though,” E murmurs softly. “With you, Ella. I mean, it was the first thing I thought when I saw you.” He’s standing off to the side, slants of shadow filtering into the barn with the sunshine, obscuring his features.

“What, exactly, did you think?”

“I thought,” he says, “I thought—”And he comes closer and closer until his shoulder knocks against mine and I can hear the rasp of his breaths, feel their warmth.

A bullet of a boy is whispering in my ear. And what he’s saying is far from sweet nothings. “I thought your eyes were dead. I thought, ‘How long can she keep up this way?’”

E
BREAKS OUR
silence to ask me that same damn question as we walk to the child care center. “Seriously, Ella, how long can you last like this?”

I tell him what I tell myself after each fall. What I tell myself when the pain has faded to a dull ache, a drumbeat that
thud, thud, thuds
through my body. “Forever, probably. It’s not too bad.”

He eyes my bloodied knee and bruised left arm, and I get it; I do. My body is telling him a different story. My body is saying that it cannot do this forever because this is fucking unhealthy. But so is chocolate, and I’m not giving that up any time soon.

“Cut it out, okay, E? You just look like you’re perving on me.”

“What did you think I was doing?” he asks, winking; but he looks away immediately, and his concern is so freaking obvious, it slays me.

I feel the need to say something, so I go with, “I’m fine.”

He laughs at me and pulls out his iPod again. “If you’re just going to lie to me...” He makes to put his earbuds on, but I stop him by playfully punching him on the arm.

“Okay,” I say, “I’ll revise that to I
will
be fine. Better?”

He puts his iPod away but says nothing. Just examines me with heavy, lidded eyes as if he doesn’t know whether to believe me or not. And I run my hand down my rib cage, my battered rib cage, and look away. Because I don’t know whether or not to believe me, either.

I thought I’d killed E’s annoying concern on the walk over here, but it rears its monstrous head again once we’ve finished signing in at the child care center. “Look,” he says. “I can handle everything today. You just avoid the screaming children and go sit down, okay?”

He’s not getting rid of me that easily. No way am I accepting more pity from Explosive Boy. “Oh, but screaming children are my favorite.” I follow him to where the children are standing, ignoring the pain that shoots through my legs and E’s irritated expression.

“I told you to sit down,” he says to me quietly.

“And I said I like screaming children.”

“Well, do you like to be the reason
why
they’re screaming?”

Oh. Point taken. My skin is a tangle of bruises and blood.

Explosive Boy reaches out and smooths a hand over my hair, tucks some of it behind my ears. His fingers ghost dangerously close to my skin. “You look like crap right now,” he says.

“Don’t you just know how to make a girl feel special?”

“It’s a family talent.” He flashes me his maple syrup smile. “Seriously, though. Sit down before they freak out. They’re already staring at you.”

And so they are. Beady children’s eyes cling to every part of my body, taking in my bloodied knees and torn T-shirt. My bruised arms and the cuts crosshatched over my hands.

“Right,” I say. “Probably for the best.”

I make my way to the green bench in the corner of the yard. The same one I sat on last time I was here, before Casey called me out to play duck, duck, goose with the others. The building casts a long shadow over half of it, and I make sure to fold myself into that darkness, hoping that no one will see me. Hoping that no one will hear the tightness of my breathing.

It’s a hollow hope.

E follows me over to the bench as soon as the kids are settled.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

I can’t help but laugh. I’m the one who helped him get pushed off a bridge just yesterday.

“Are
you
? After what we did—”

His expression changes immediately.

The silence is a loaded gun. Its barrel swings back and forth, back and forth, between E and I. Finally, he says, “I’m A-OK. Crazy people push me off bridges every fucking day. No sweat, really.”

The anger in his voice wraps itself around the gun. Lock and load, baby. Pull the trigger.

Boom
.

The silence blows my head right off.

Pieces of my mind skid across the concrete. I try to piece them back together again, but it’s hard with Explosive Boy roasting me alive with his stare.

“Are you ever going to apologize?” he asks me.

My mind’s only half recollected, but still words wobble out my mouth. “For what? For saving your life?”

He shakes his head, sprays of red hair torching the air around him, and laughs. “You just don’t get it,” he says, and then he’s walking back to the children; and god, I’m just relieved that he doesn’t pity me anymore.

For a minute I enjoy nothing but silence, pain, and a dirty stare from Heather when she pops out to check on things. But then Casey crawls onto the bench.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hey.”

I resist the urge to bury my head in my hands.

She looks me and up and down. “What happened to you?”

“I fell down,” I say truthfully.

“Are you all right?” She’s found a twig and is busy clacking it against the bench over and over and over again.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say. She doesn’t reply, just keeps on going with that goddamn twig; and it’s giving me a headache, so I snap, “Do you have a career as a drummer in mind or what?”

She stops playing with the twig and looks at me with those big, brown eyes of hers. “Nope,” she says. “Wanna know what I’d actually like to be?” She uses the twig to scrape some of the peeling green paint off the bench. The paint flakes into a million pieces, and she blows it off the bench like other little girls blow away dandelion seeds.

“Sure,” I say. Pain stabs through my knee, and I cover it with my hand. Sharp sting. I savor the pain but will it to go away at the same time.

“I want to be a mechanic,” Casey says, smiling.