Fall to Pieces (2 page)

Here, I’m the crazy one. Here, in this supposedly historical barn that the people of Sherwood insist on keeping because it’s got “heritage value,” I’m the crazy one. No one else ever comes to the barn. Just us. The ground floor’s all creaky planks, hay, bird shit. But teenage Martha Stewarts that we are, we’ve attempted to spruce up the place.

There’s the dartboard that Amy stole from the principal’s office in the ninth grade to my left. Her old vinyls hang on the walls: Led Zeppelin, Hendrix, Queen, Radiohead. The wind plays deejay with them, and they spin, shrieking against the walls. Her scarves, gauzy and colorful, flutter from the railings on the third floor.

The third floor.

None of us has done a Pick Me Up from there. Yet.

Maybe today.

I look up, feet itching to climb those stairs.

Mark must see me looking because he calls, “Ella, it’s too dangerous. If you go up there, I’ll smash the gnome into a million pieces.”

I stay on the second floor. Poke my head over the edge. “You wouldn’t.”

“Oh,” he says, “but I would.”

I take a deep breath, look at the stairs. Tempting. So tempting. But I shake my head, shake the thought away. It’s not worth it. I can’t risk losing the gnome.

Because the gnome is the only one who saw Amy die.

She didn’t tell me her famous last words—and knowing Amy, they would have become an urban legend. She didn’t let me see her spiral to the ground. Didn’t give me a chance to stop her.

But she landed in a patch of weeds in front of my fucking garden gnome.

I’m ridiculously jealous of it.

But I’m also ridiculously attached to it. So attached that I had to hide it. The thought of my dad getting the mail every morning and sliding his eyes over its rosy cheeks and Santa hat made me feel sick. Not that Dad’s even around anymore.

“Have you guys set up the gnome already?”

I tap my foot on the edge of a plank, waiting. There’s a safety rail here, but it’s so low that I could easily trip and fall over the edge. It’s a nice feeling. Knowing that I’m so high up yet so close to the ground.

“Ella, seriously? Please let’s stop with this gnome thing—” There’s a note of panic in Mark’s voice now. He’s remembering, I can tell. He’s remembering the first time we played Pick Me Ups.

I insisted on the gnome being there. On the gnome watching.

“The gnome’s the only one who saw Amy,” I told him. “We need a referee or something.”

I sounded dumb. I am dumb. An inanimate referee?

But still.

“The gnome refs,” I whisper. “The gnome refs,” I call to Mark.

Petal pouts but pulls the gnome from her bag and places it on a bale of hay. “Happy?” she says.

They’re always like this about the gnome. They think my need to have the gnome watch is psychotic. But I keep hoping that maybe one day the gnome will show me. Show me Amy before she fell: what her face looked like, whether she was wearing the smell of alcohol like cologne, whether she screamed.

And maybe that
is
psychotic. I don’t really give a fuck.

Because this gnome plan is working. Because every
time I’ve jumped, tossed myself over the safety railing and screamed all the way down into the bales of hay, I’ve gotten back a piece of memory.

A tiny snippet of something that happened that night. Amy and I, fingers twisted through each other’s, golden beer slopping over our wrists. Cigarettes, bright orange flares lighting up dark rooms.

Answers.

I don’t know why Mark and Petal are so into Pick Me Ups, why they’re oh so desperate to weave their skins into a tapestry of bruises. But I do it because I have so many questions. Because I want all the answers.

Up. I’m climbing again. Onto the safety railing.

The rickety wood creaks beneath me, threatening to break.

I can see the bales of hay below. And Mark’s and Petal’s faces, suffused with blood, eyes glowing. This is exciting. The fall is always exciting.

It’s also fucking terrifying.

I look down. Nerves prickle up my arms, down my legs. All over my body.

“Go, Ella,” Petal calls. “Go, go, go!”

If I don’t do this now, I’ll chicken out. My body will overpower my brain, the need in my gut. The need to fall, to hit the ground. I’ll hop off the railing, walk away. Back down the stairs. To safety. To a world with no answers.

It’s the question marks that do it, the ones that circle above my head, the ones that haunt me. They nudge me off the edge.

And I’m falling, falling, falling. A scream rips its way out of my throat but gets lost in a rush of air. I wait for a snippet of memory to surface. I close my eyes, expecting one to play like a reel of film in my brain. It doesn’t come.

I smash into the hay on my hands and knees. The impact shatters me. I’m certain there are bits and pieces of me scattered everywhere. I feel my way through my body—
HeadNeckTorsoArmsPalmsHipsThighsCalvesFeetToes
—and bring myself back together again.

Pain is everywhere, and it steals the breath from my lungs. But I’m still whole.

I’m still whole.

Laughter spins from my mouth. Because I did this. I did this, and I didn’t break.

“Okay, Ella?” Mark offers me a hand, and I take it, let him pull me to my feet. Splinters of pain still burn throughout my body. The second I’m upright, all I want is to fall again. To collapse.

Petal’s grinning at me. “Now how does that make you feel?” she says, imitating the voice of our school counselor, Mrs. Andrews-but-call-me-Gladys.

I look down at my hands. The skin’s split apart in a
hundred different places, tiny cuts tangling together across my palms. I look down at my calves. The skin’s ripped like a laddered stocking.

Wrecked. I’m wrecked.

But there’s blood pounding in my ears. Air skyrockets through my lungs.

“Awesome,” I tell Petal. “Awesome.”

Pick Me Ups make the world go from a grainy seventies picture to a high-definition image in ten seconds flat. They bring you back from the fucking dead.

Worth it, despite the pain.

So far I’ve broken: finger. I’ve sprained: ankle. I have bruises: everywhere.

And how does that make me feel? Amazing. Amazing. Amazing.

“So,” Mark says. He grabs the gnome off the bale of hay Pet stood it up on, hands it to me. “What’s our ref say?”

Ceramic, cool glazed clay between my fingers. I don’t want to do this. Don’t want to meet the gnome’s eyes. The world’s already getting grainier, the high-definition picture fading along with my high. Because I know I’ve fucked up; I know that I didn’t get a memory, didn’t see Amy.

Still, I do it. I meet the gnome’s beetle-black eyes and read my verdict. Failure.

It’s as if I’ve been slammed into the hay all over again.
Only this time I don’t get the skyrocketing air, the sweet rush of dizziness. This time it just feels like I’ve hit a clump of bird shit; and it’s all over my face, all over my body, all over my soul.

I drop the gnome. It doesn’t break. Thank god, it doesn’t break.

And when I look up, it’s Mark that I see, because Petal’s already halfway up the stairs, running to her own fall. It’s Mark that I see, and I can’t help but think that this is all his fault. All his fucking fault.

“What happened?” The words tumble from my mouth. Fumbled, bungled. They sit between us in the hay. “What happened to Amy?”

He shakes his head, the ends of his blue scarf twitching. “You’ve asked me a million times,” he says. “I’ve already told you. I don’t know, Ella. I don’t.”

The questions, the questions that drive me, they’re loaded on the tip of my tongue now. I fire them off. Bullets. “But you must know where I was that night? Where she was? Why I can’t remember anything?”

His back tenses, as if there’s some kind of weight strung across his shoulders. “I don’t,” he says, sliding the words out the side of his mouth. “I wish I did, but I don’t.” He smiles. It’s supposed to be a sad smile, but his lips slide too far to the left.

Sideways smile. Sideways smile and sideways words.

It’s what I get every time I ask Mark what happened.

“Okay,” I say, even though I don’t believe him for a second.

Because Mark and Amy were so, so close.
AmyandMark. MarkandAmy
. She would have stayed near him the entire night. She thought all his shitty jokes were brilliant.

“Okay,” I say again. I’ve already fought with Mark about this. Once. Twice. Three times. I can’t go for round four; I’m too tired. And god, I’m also scared.

I don’t want to lose another best friend.

“Ella,” he says, “she never told any of us why. She was just in a bad place—”

“I have to go,” I say. I don’t want to hear this. I don’t.

He runs a hand through his hair. No sparkle in his eyes, no smile on his lips, for once. “Ella, don’t run away from the truth. Seriously, you can’t blame yourself—”

I force a smile. “No,” I say. “I really have to go. I have to be somewhere.”

“Where?”

It’s childish, but I don’t want to tell him about the volunteer work I’m doing. Not when he won’t tell me where I was that night, what happened, how the fuck Amy’s body wound up broken, curling through the weeds in front of my garden gnome.

“Just somewhere.”

And then I’m outside. I’m outside, heading down the
path that leads from the barn back to town, toward the child care center.

I turn back every few steps to take in the barn. It’s built from this red cedar wood that glistens like dried blood in the sun. There’s no door. Its entrance is an empty space in the wood, a black hole.

My best friends are on the other side of that black hole.

I hear Petal call “Geronimo!” Hear her scream filled with fear and exhilaration.

And suddenly I want nothing more than to be back in that barn. Falling. Slamming into the ground so hard that I think my teeth might rattle out of my mouth.

Because sometimes when I fall, I don’t just remember. I forget.

I
TEXT
A
MY
as I head down a street lined with beautiful mansions.

Walking the mean streets of Sherwood.

Hit
SEND
. Even though I know that her number’s been disconnected for fifteen days now, that some automated message will arrive in a second telling me there’s been an error.

I hit
SEND
because this is one of those hundreds of moments each day when I just want to tell her something.

About how Brittany Evans is making up shit about Liz Wu hot-wiring a car last Saturday, which supports our theory that she’s a compulsive liar. About how in the morning on the way to school, Mark played that ridiculous song about being a fucking beach ball again. About how that weird boy was lying on the football field, arms windmilling through the mud.

And I want to tell
Amy
, not Mark or Petal or anybody else. I want to tell Amy, because no one ever laughs as hard as she did. No one is as quick to smile. No one else comes back with perfect, witty commentary like she used to.

I slip my phone back into my pocket and keep trudging up the road.

The houses that line it—brown brick with ivy creeping up, up, up their sides—cast long shadows over me. This is the older part of Sherwood. In summer when I was a kid, I used to love coming here because of the way the sun swung down through the oak trees.

I used to love the smell of damp earth, the clean sting of the breeze. The way the moss scampered over the houses, almost making them part of the landscape, one with the trees.

But they’ve ruined it, ruined the whole feeling of this place. With the child care center.

It’s at the end of the road—the used-car-salesman of buildings. Squat, ugly, and just a little bit greasy.

Sometimes I think parents, the world, the goddamn Man, wants children to grow up disenchanted; and that’s why they create places like this. That, or the deteriorating vision of the older generations really needs to be taken more seriously.

Either way, the child care center is a pockmark on the face of this town.

I keep walking, and soon enough, I’m standing in front of the pockmark.

Wind gusts through the recently planted saplings, rustling up sighs. I sigh along with them.

I have to come here at least three days a week after school. Mom’s insisting that I do it for six months.
Minimum
.

I know right now that’s never going to happen.

God, there are actual
real
,
live
children here.

They play hopscotch on the footpath outside the center, mark up the pavement with smoky blue chalk lines, and hop-skip-jump their way over obstacles. Occasionally, they shriek at each other. I’m not sure how a game of hopscotch can be heated, but these kids are pulling faces like it’s a matter of life and death.

My eyes wander up the steps. Oh, god. There’s a girl with brown pigtails and glasses, her back heaving. She’s crying.

I nearly turn and run.

I can’t deal with crying children.

No. Way.

But I’m here now.

And it’s this or therapy. That was Mom’s ultimatum. After years of pretty much ignoring me, she creaked down onto my bed one night last week and spewed her parental concern all over me.

She asked me how I was doing; and when I said fine, she didn’t budge. Spotted: the purple-yellow-blue bruise edging just beyond the reach of my T-shirt sleeve. Her eyes: Worried. Concerned. Anxious.

She sat up and spoke in a hard voice, a voice that hammered into me. She gave me the ultimatum. “See my shrink, Ella, or do something wholesome,” she said. “You need to pull yourself together.” And I couldn’t help but laugh, because for the past month all I’ve been trying to do is tear myself apart.

She gave me a stare that was cold. And then she told me that she knew how much I hated Roger—her shrink—so she’d organized some volunteer work at the local child care center for me and wasn’t that so, so wonderful.

Yeah. Fantastic. Whoop-de-doo.

Now I stare up at the center’s bland concrete facade. Take a deep breath.

Can’tdothis can’tdothis can’tdothis
. But I walk around the hopscotch game, tread up the stairs. My feet carry me to the girl with the glasses. I drop my hand onto her shoulder. “Hey.”