Fall to Pieces (23 page)

Because people, they hurt you. When you like them, when you admit to liking them, it’s like saying
game over
. It’s like giving them a gun and saying,
You now have the option of putting a bullet through my heart, okay? Cool
.

I don’t want to give Tristan that gun. Not now, not ever.

I can’t stand having Tristan so close to me anymore.
Can’t stand the warmth that I can feel between his jeans and mine. The almost-there touch of his loosely curled fingers.

I lean back against the car, sliding to the ground and kicking my legs out across the road.

“Ella, I know this isn’t a highway or anything, but I’m pretty sure people still use it.”

“And?”

“Do you want your limbs to get ripped off by a truck?”

“Maybe.”

He runs his fingers through his explosive hair. “Right. It’s you. I shouldn’t have asked that.”

Tristan refrains from giving me a lecture, although I’m pretty sure it’s killing him on the inside. He takes a few shaky steps and then collapses beside me.

He wriggles his right foot, and a sock-covered toe pops out of a hole in his faded brown sneaker.

“Gross.” But I laugh.

“If a car comes, race you back to the grass?”

There are fields, big wide expanses of grass edging the side of the road. The green just seems to roll on forever until it hits a few ant-sized houses in the distance. “Okay,” I say, trying to fight the feeling that this game is almost as bad as Pick Me Ups.

A car comes along ten minutes later. A big, black, thrumming machine made of speed and muscle and
power. Well, okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little. Maybe it’s just as much of a bomb as Tristan’s car.

But that doesn’t stop the adrenaline inside me from pumping, pushing, pulsing through my body. Falling into the cracks that spiderweb along the surface of the road, infusing the whole world with a roar of feeling that spurs me to get to my feet.

And then we’re sprinting. Tristan and I, getting off the road at the last possible moment. A blur of black whips by, and there’s the sound of a horn going off. Again and again and again and again. Shit, I think we freaked out the driver.

I slide my hand over my eyes and squint after the car, trying to make sure that its driver hasn’t spun off the road or something. More guilt is not what I need right now.

Fingernails, digging into palms. I feel the splinters that are still spiked through my skin from when I nearly broke Mark’s window frame.

I don’t feel guilt. I don’t feel sadness. I cannot fucking feel the tears crawling down my face.

I flop onto the grass, wipe the tears away with the flats of my hands before Tristan can see them. Before he lowers himself down beside me far more gracefully.

“How long do you think Petal’s going to be?” I ask.

“A while. Carrying a gallon of gas two miles is probably going to be hard for her.”

We’re quiet for a moment; and for the first time since I’ve known Tristan, the silence isn’t punctuated by coughs, shuffling, or fingers twisting in and out of each other. Instead, there’s the chirping of birds and the distant sounds of the highway.

The sun slants across my face, blisters my shoulders, and I am still. I am still, and I try to make my stomach stop writhing and be still with me. But it won’t go away. I’m becoming aware for about the hundred millionth time that Tristan doesn’t have to be here with me. He doesn’t have to be here at all.

I roped him into this, and I can’t help but break the peaceful silence to ask, “Tristan, why are you so hell-bent on helping me?”

And this is me asking the important questions. The ones I’ve always wanted to ask in the past but never had the guts to. Instead of asking “Why aren’t you eating?” I spent my time asking about the weather.

I’m not making the mistakes I made with Amy again.

I wait for Tristan to reply; and, god, I hope he doesn’t tell me that it’s because he just wants to get into my pants. Because I don’t buy that crappy excuse for being nice. Not for one second, not one little bit.

“Tristan?”

I’m tired of waiting for an answer. He can look gray all he likes, but he will speak.

A sigh whooshes from his lips. More silence. I begin a countdown. Sixty seconds from now I’ll say his name again; and if he doesn’t respond to that, I’ll repeat it in another thirty seconds and so on until he answers me.

For now I wait.

Talk, goddamnit. Why won’t he speak?

Sixty seconds. “Tristan.” My voice is sharp this time.

He seems to realize I won’t let this go, because he closes his eyes and says “You’re not going to like it” in a voice that bleeds like a raw wound.

“Hit me with your best shot.”

“You’re such a cliché,” he says, snorting.

“Whatever. Just speak before I kill you.”

He laughs. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.” Resolve. Hard as steel. He is no longer coming undone. “I want to—
help
you, first off because I’m incredibly selfish. I’m the new kid, and you were the most interesting person at Sherwood High. But also because I have this problem. I like to—save people.”

“Um. What?”

I’m so confused right now. I’m interesting? He likes to save people? He says it as if it’s a freaking hobby. I imagine him writing it down on his college apps:
On rainy afternoons what do you enjoy? I, Tristan Explosive Boy, enjoy
saving
people
.

It takes everything I have not to laugh.

A lady beetle settles on my knuckles, its light, ticklish movement unfurling my fist. As soon as I move, the beetle zooms off into the sunny day. I wish I could be as carefree as that beetle.

“Okay,” Tristan says, sitting up, burying his face in his hands, speaking from between his fingers. “It’s like this. You remember how I told you about my brother? About how he died?”

I nod. “Yeah.”

“Of an overdose. I was such a fucking coward. I could have saved him; I could have stopped him. But when he came to me, crying, and told me that his life was going down the toilet because of the cancer and the way his limbs wouldn’t obey him anymore and the crappiness of the chemo—when he told me all of that, I didn’t say, ‘Hey Ethan, let’s go and make your life fun. I’ll fight this with you.’

“I took the easy way out. I let him convince me—and god, it took a lot of convincing—to get him the pills.”

I can feel my eyes widening.

Tristan is crying now. He’s sobbing, and his face is still buried in his hands. Tears stream around his fingers. His voice sounds like he’s being strangled. “I didn’t...I didn’t just let my brother go when I could have hung on to him. I gave him the gun to shoot himself with. And,
yeah, I’ve spent the past two years in juvie paying for it. But it’s not enough; a lifetime’s worth of penance wouldn’t be enough.”

He shakes his head, and tufts of his explosive hair flutter into the sky. His ember hair seems too tired to even really burn. His shoulder blades spike up through his shirt and then fall and then spike up again. Earthquakes, sobs wrack his body.

For a second I’m frozen with horror at what he’s been through, what he’s done. It floods through my body like glue, sticking my lips together, stitching my muscles up. I gasp for breath. He reaches out a hand to stroke the side of my cheek but then drops it.

“So now you know why I like to save people. It’s because when it counted most, I couldn’t save the one person I loved more than anyone else in this entire world.” His eyes are still closed, but he opens them as he speaks his next words. “I loved my brother. They didn’t mention that in the headlines when they called me a murderer. When they said the judge was a bastard for giving me two years
only
.

“You can’t even look at me, can you, Ella?”

And then I force myself to unfreeze, let the sunlight thaw me and wash all the glue from my system. “I can look at you.” I twist my head, sharply, and meet his eyes. This
time he’s the one who turns away. “Look at me. Fuck you, look at me.”

Swearing always does the trick.

And there’s no time to think it over, so I do what I know in my bone marrow he was going to do ten seconds ago. I lean forward, brush my fingers against his cheek. We’re close, so close.

I can see the red that rims his eyes, the pink of his lips.
Kiss me
, they seem to shout. So I do.

And at first he tastes bitter. But then he opens his mouth a little, and I can taste the gunpowder mixed with some kind of musky cologne.

The kiss deepens.

He falls backward, topples onto the soft grass. I go down with him, head resting on his chest, sunshine resting on my back. I plant a kiss on his chin. God, I feel like an absolute idiot doing it. But I want to, and ever since Amy died I’ve been all about seizing moments.

I lift my head, meet Tristan’s eyes. “It wasn’t your fault,” I say. “It was not your goddamn fault. You were fourteen.”

He laughs softly, his fingers running through grass. “Fourteen is not that young.”

“You were trying to help him,” I whisper, surrendering
all my toughness to the summer day.

Amy’s question from that night rings in my mind:
Why are you a bitch, Ella?

Now I know why I couldn’t answer that question properly. It’s because I’m not. I’m not nice, but I’m not a bitch, either. I’m just fucking average. I’m just like everybody else.

“Tristan—” Sometimes there aren’t any words. Sometimes all you can do is say someone’s name, let it fall into the air between you.

His eyes close. His arm comes up, slides around my back, and he practically crushes me in a one-armed hug. “Yeah, but it was just so goddamn stupid.”

He’s warm. Warmer than the sunlight even. It’s nice, because I’ve been cold for so long. I’m hyperaware of the fact that we’re touching practically everywhere. My hip rocks into his. Our knees knock together.

I make conversation to distract myself. “I’m jealous of you,” I tell him in that hushed-whisper voice people use when they’re making confessions.

“Seriously? Why? I’m such a fuckup.”

I squeeze the hem of his shirt between my fingers. Twist, twist, twist. “Because you’re so...yourself, you know?”

“Who else am I supposed to be?” He laughs, puts on a pirate accent as he says, “Captain Jack Sparrow?”

Explosive Boy
, I want to tell him. That’s who he’s supposed to be. Someone who’s far more James Dean than he really is. But I guess I’m supposed to be a lot bitchier than I am, too.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I feel like I don’t ever...I developed this mask when I was a freshman, and it’s like I wore it for so long that I forgot to take it off. And now I don’t know what’s underneath it.”

“I can’t believe you just said that,” he says.

“Why?”

“Because it’s
you
. Expressing emotional insecurity. Quick—duck and take cover; the apocalypse is about to begin!”

“Very funny,” I say, tracing circles on the back of his shirt. Biting my lip.

He catches my hand. “Stop freaking out about it, Ella.”

“About what?”

“Who you are.”

“But don’t you think that we have to figure it out so that we can be, I don’t know, happy?”

I blush. Admitting that I want, need to be happy feels somehow shameful. He’s right. I’m shit, shit, shit at reaching out to people.

He shakes his head. “You can’t define yourself as any one thing. You’ll change over time, you know?” He smiles.
“‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.’ It’s Whitman,” he says. “I’m not that smart.”

So on top of everything else, he quotes Whitman in conversation. “I didn’t take you for an English nerd.” But then I didn’t take him for anything else, either. I didn’t acknowledge that he could contain multitudes—that he could be leather jackets and red hair and gunpowder cologne and twenty-first-century chivalry and a Kid Whisperer and a selfish saver of people.

What contradictions will emerge in me once I let go of my need to define everything about myself? Once I learn to just
be
.

“Give me another quote,” I say.

But before he can reply, something clatters to the ground behind us. A throat is cleared and then cleared again, and then there’s a loud cough. A foot tap, tap, tapping against the asphalt.

I know it’s Petal, but I don’t want to move because this moment is so peaceful. It’s like a piece of quiet I can fold away into my soul.

Petal can’t take the sight of us—limbs tangled through each other’s, lying in the grass—any longer. “So, um, clearly, I’m interrupting something!”

I get up quickly, in one fluid movement. “Oh, Pet. You should have said you were here,” I say sweetly.

She takes one look at the expression on my face. “Well, while you two are hooking up, Mark is—” She doesn’t want to say what Mark’s doing. Because she doesn’t know, and she’d rather not speculate. Me, too.

“Get up,” I tell Tristan. “There’s still someone you can save.”

Petal and I get in the car, while Tristan tries to pour the gas into the tank. It looks hard, without one of those funnel thingies.

His eyes are redder than hell in the rearview mirror, and Petal’s pretending not to notice. But she keeps glancing at him every ten seconds, so it’s not like she’s convincing anyone. The thing that surprises me is what I see in her eyes when they take him in.

Concern.

I’d forgotten that she was—is—the most caring person I know. Despite the bitchiness, when anyone truly needs her, Petal’s there.

And suddenly, I need to know that he’s okay, too. “I’ll be right back,” I tell Petal.

The ground is still warm, and the grass waves in a gentle breeze. Gas sloshes and slips over Tristan’s fingers as he tips the container into the gas tank. Some of it drip, drip, drips onto the black surface of the road. The sun turns it into a shimmering rainbow patch.

It’s odd how appearances can change so quickly. Just minutes ago I thought Tristan was trying to save me, rescue me. But now I know that he’s really trying to save himself.

I tear up as I watch him crying. Pouring gas into the tank.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” he says, throwing my own placebo at me.