Fall to Pieces (3 page)

She looks up, choking for air, smashing her hands into her eyes to get rid of her tears. I decide not to embarrass her by asking about the tears, even though it’s dead obvious from the red-rimmed eyes what her favorite after-school activity is.

“I’m Ella,” I say. “I’m new here—can you show me the ropes?”

My new friend, Casey, knows next to nothing about the ropes. She takes me to the front desk and points at a wiry woman watering a potted plant.

Her back’s turned, and she holds the watering can with lazy fingers. It doesn’t seem as if she’s at all worried about the room stretching out behind her. About the children eating at the low, colorful tables a few feet away. About the others, red markers in hand, drawing on the blackboard that hangs on the back wall. About the boy with brown hair lingering by the backpacks who has unzipped way more of them than he can possibly own.

“She knows,” Casey says. “She’s in charge.”

How comforting.

“Thanks,” I say, smiling at Casey before attempting to get the woman’s attention. “Um, excuse me—”

She turns. The expression on her face makes me take a step back. It’s the same look my dad used to give me when I was younger and had walked into his study. Like she wants nothing more than to annihilate me.

“I’m—”

“I know who you are,” she says. The broken glass in her voice threatens to cut my skin.

“Casey,” she continues, “why don’t you go outside? Maybe play with the other children?”

“But—”

“They’re about to play a nice game of duck, duck, goose outside, dear. I’m sure you’ll love it.”

Wiry Woman’s voice is too sweet: condensed milk mixed with poison.

Casey moves away from us on uncertain feet, feet that trip and tumble over each other. She nearly slams into the floor, but grabs the door frame just in time.

Another kid who’s sitting at a tiny table eating a salad and messing with an Etch A Sketch throws a half-eaten cherry tomato at Casey. It pings off her stomach. The girl who threw it laughs and laughs and laughs as it rolls away over the blue carpet and gets lost in a dark corner.

Forgotten. Just like this incident will be, even though I can tell from her pursed lips that Wiry Woman saw exactly what went down.

Casey doesn’t say anything, either. She just pull, pull, pulls at the end of her pigtail and continues on. Out the door.

It’s becoming apparent to me why Casey’s favorite after-school activity is crying.

I glare at Wiry Woman, but she’s too busy playing with paperwork to notice. I clear my throat.

Flash. Gray-lightning eyes behind blue-rimmed spectacles. “Be patient,” she snaps at me. Then she dumps the mass of paper on my side of the desk. “This,” she says, “is for you to fill out.”

I don’t reply, because something about this woman pisses the hell out of me. I’m determined to give her nothing but silence.

I shuffle forward. Take a look at the paperwork. It’s pretty standard stuff. They want to know my name, my age, where I live, that kind of shit. I guess to make sure that I’m “suitable” to work here.

Probably should have done that before they told Mom they’d hire me.

I’m still carrying the soggy
Gazette
around, so I plunk it down on the tabletop and pull the sheaf of paperwork toward me. But now Wiry Woman’s staring at it, at the article about Amy.

“Your best friend, right? She’s dead.”

My head snaps up, but I’m too stunned to reply because her voice is blank. The kind of blank that people twist around anger, hatred. I can feel my skin getting warm and red. Tomato soup on the boil.

Eventually, I manage to nod. “Yeah,” I say.

“She was a horrible person.”

“What?”

I don’t know what I was expecting. Sympathy, maybe.
That typical, old-woman cluck of the tongue. Something about wasted youth, fragility, the preciousness of life. Not this. Anything but this.

“You heard me,” Wiry Woman says. “She was a horrible person.”

I take the time to read the name tag pinned to her floral blouse, because seriously, how many people who wear fucking floral blouses are this rude? It reads
HEATHER PATON
.

“It takes one to know one,” I tell the woman. “Didn’t anyone teach you not to speak ill of the fucking dead?”

Slam
. She thuds her hand against the desk. A page skids off it, onto the blue carpet. “Language. There are
children
here,” she says significantly, looking at a nearby cluster of tables where kids are eating.

I clench my fist, digging my fingernails into my palm.
Don’t punch her, don’t punch her, don’t punch her
.

Fists uncurl. Nostrils flare. “I don’t care—”

“Well, you’d better,” she says, her sharp voice swiping across my words. “Because let me tell you, the only reason you’re here is because your mother called and begged me. She’s donating—well, she’s donating a lot for you to be here.”

Mom paid off this woman to
let
me do fucking volunteer work?

Typical.

“Listen,” I say, “you don’t even know me—”

“Ella Logan.”
Wiry Woman, Heather, spits out my name. “I know who you are,” she says. “I know
exactly
who you are. You’re the girl who bullied my son every day until he snapped. You and your best friend. Both of you are horrible people.”

Some of the flames burning inside me douse. I lick my cracked lips. “Who is your son?”

“Oh, god,” she says with a short laugh. “So many victims that you can’t even remember him? Peter. His name is Peter.”

Oh.

I do remember him. Clearly. He had a crush on Amy in ninth grade, right about when she started going out with Mark. Amy hated everything about him. From his leather boots to his shaggy, blond, shoulder-length hair to his nose ring. She hated the way he laughed and the way he spoke with his hands.

He didn’t seem like a bad guy. Not really. But Amy had to send him a message. She had to tell him to back off somehow.

So one day we started laughing every time he spoke in class. Laughing like someone had just said the funniest thing in the world. Laughing, clutching our stomachs like they were about to burst open. And it
was us, so almost everyone else started to laugh along, because they wanted—so badly wanted—to be in on our joke.

Peter fucking Paton.

I’m standing in front of Peter Paton’s mother.

“He left the school,” I begin tentatively. I’m not sure how to ask whether it was because of us.

She must be reading my mind, because she says, “Thanks to you.”

She can’t look at me anymore. “Listen,” she says. “I’d rather kill you than have you work here. And if you so much as say one bad word to any of these children, I swear I really will.”

My temper’s about as warm as Antarctica now. But I have to keep up appearances; I have to make sure that Wiry Woman knows that I’m not upset. Not. Upset. So I force my eyebrows to rise. “Do you reward all of your volunteers with death threats?”

She ignores my witty comment. Leans over and snatches the
Gazette
off the table. Reads the article. “Bullshit,” she says softly, echoing my earlier sentiment.

And her quiet venom makes me want the article to be true. It makes me want every word that Camille Weston wrote about my best friend to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

But she’s speaking again. She’s saying, “What a load of crap.” Her eyes are back on my face. Searching, searching, searching. “What I want to know is whether any of you ever felt a
moment’s
regret?”

She bites her lip. Breathes deeply. Waits for my answer as if it really matters.

I know what I should say.
Yes
. I should say that I’m sorry, that I regret it. That we all regret it. But then I think of Amy, Amy falling off my roof and spiraling into the soft damp earth of my garden. Snap. Broken neck. Departed soul.

Did she regret it before she fell?

“I—” I want to say yes, to give this woman a reason to like me, because I really don’t want to go to therapy. Mom was right; I hate Roger, so hell if I’m seeing him. But the words, they don’t—they won’t—come. “I don’t know,” I manage to choke out eventually.

Because what if Amy never regretted it before she fell?

“Go.” Heather tugs at the hem of her floral blouse and takes off her glasses. As if she prefers a blurry world to a sharply defined one, where you can see cruelty in all its candid, fucking glory.

“You disgust me,” she says.

I’m still standing there, still willing myself to tell her that yes, I regret it. So that she can put her glasses back on and see the world again.

But the words evade me. I leave the unfinished paperwork and head for the same doorway Casey passed through earlier.

I spot the half-eaten tomato on my way out. It sits beneath shadows and a finely woven spiderweb.

The boy from the football field is there, on the other side of the door. The boy who danced his arms through thick mud and opened himself up to a lightning bolt. I know it’s him because even though he’s not splattered in mud anymore—must have gone home to change or something—I recognize his hair, the fluttery flames that twist away from his head.

I’m almost surprised that trails of black-gray smoke don’t curl out from the ends of his hair. I’m almost surprised that he doesn’t blow up everything around him with all the tension I saw earlier today. He’s a bit of a bomb, this guy.

So why the fuck is Explosive Boy here? Why the fuck is he sitting in a circle with a bunch of kids surrounding him?

I’m heading toward the bench in the corner because I don’t want to talk to anyone right now. I want to slump onto the rusty old bench with its peeling green paint and run my hands over my face and find stray eyelashes and blow them off the pads of my fingers, wishing with all my
heart that Amy will come back to life and reply to the text messages I’ve sent.

But Casey sees me before I can hide away. She waves at me, small hand swaying back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. “Ella!”

And her face is brighter than the fog lights on Mark’s car, Cherry Bomb. And the other kids, they look like sharks from this distance. To them, her brightness must taste like blood. To them, she must be a meal waiting to happen.

And maybe I really am sorry about Peter. Maybe that’s why something about Casey’s face makes me move. I wave back and walk over.

The new kid, Explosive Boy with his firebrand hair, is teaching them origami. Using long pianist’s fingers to twist a blue scrap of paper into a crane. The kids are fascinated. They give him their undivided attention.

So now he’s Explosive Boy the Kid Whisperer.

What the fuck?

“Tristan, Tristan!” one little boy says, drumming a chubby hand against the elbow of Explosive Boy’s beaten leather jacket.

“Yes?”

“Can we play duck, duck, goose?”

“Man,” Explosive Boy says. He’s got just the right amount of air in his voice to sound casual, approachable.
Just the right amount of flame to sound warm. “Heath, I haven’t played that game in over ten years—”

He looks up at me. I look down at him.

His eyebrows snap together for a second. Then he gets to his feet and smiles at me. A maple syrup smile. I back up, because Explosive Boy isn’t meant to have a smile like that. But he extends a hand and catches mine, stops me from backing up any farther. Up and down, he moves our knotted hands in some kind of screwed-up handshake.

He smells of gunpowder. Maybe he’s an arsonist. Probably my kind of guy.

“I’m Tristan,” he says. “I’m volunteering here. Guess you are, too. What’s your name?” He’s smiling at me.

He probably thinks I’m going to be his new best friend or something.

“Ella. And you look more like an E to me,” I say. E for Explosive Boy. E because I like having the power to rename him whatever I want to.

Something shifts behind his eyes. He drops my hand faster than my mother drives. He drops my hand at 180 mph.

The warmth’s gone from his hazel eyes. And then he’s running his hand through his hair; and I see fingernails chewed down to the quick, and I think
This is more like it
. This is more like the Explosive Boy I was expecting.

He gives me a frost-burn look before turning around.
“Okay, guys. Heath’s going to get his wish. Let’s split into two groups and play duck, duck, goose. Ella,”—he jerks a thumb at me as if I’m as noteworthy as a carton of milk—“will lead one, and I’ll lead the other.”

The little boy with the brown hair, Heath, jumps up and down and punches his tiny fists through the air. “Yessss,” he says. It’s so cute it hurts to watch.

E’s taken a few steps away from me, his back purposefully turned. An ocean of kids already swims around him.

I’m a lonely island. There are three kids in my group, and they’ve placed a healthy distance between themselves and me. My bitch-face must make me relatively childproof. Halle-fucking-lujah.

Casey’s stepping toward me now, but she hesitates inches from where E’s standing.

“What’s up?” he asks her with that maple syrup smile.

She’s silent, but her dark eyes are looking at me. Looking at me and then looking back at Tristan. Is she going to sidle into the space beside him and join the dark side? For a moment I’m so sure that she will, but then she says “Nothing” to him and bounds over to my side.

“Hey,” I say, somehow relieved, even though she’s the child here.
She’s
supposed to be relieved to have
me
.

“Are you going to be a duck or a goose?” It’s such a casual question, or at least it should be. But her tone is probing, ponderous. As if she’s just asked me whether I’m
going to win or lose, do or see, be or cease.

“Duck.” Because it’s easier to sit by and do nothing than it is to chase after something.

I sit next to Casey, cross-legged like I’m back in the fucking third grade. Gravel presses into my jeans, presses against my skin.

“So,” I say. “Who’s going to be the first goose?”

The other three kids elect a girl named Maddy, but Casey doesn’t speak. She draws invisible images in the gravel with the tip of her index finger, not daring to lift her eyes.