Fall to Pieces (8 page)

“That was a punch-worthy answer,” Pet declares
.

I scoop some punch into my cup and drink it all at once. It slides down my throat, a cool burn. “Right. Your turn, Ames. What did you think of me when you first met me?”

“A lot of things.” She shifts in her seat, looking uncomfortable. Drunk and uncomfortable. Oh, god, whatever her answer is, it’s going to be so good that it’s bad
.

“Like what?”

She sighs and buries her head in her hands. Dark strands of hair straggle into her cup of punch, floating in the barely-there light that filters in from the party. “Okay, so you have to know that I don’t think this anymore. I don’t, really. But back then I thought you were just that perfect girl. You know? The one everyone hates secretly but pretends to love. Because, come on, Ella, you have to admit that you look the part.”

I give her the finger. “Drink some punch. Or I’m going to punch you.”

Eight years, she’s been one of my best friends. By now she must have realized that I’m far from perfect
.

“Your turn, Marquis.” Amy’s been calling Mark that for the past couple of weeks. She’s developed a thing for French novels or something. “So, if you could change one thing about your life, what would it be?”

“I’d have a hippie van instead of my crappy car.”

“
Be serious.” She leans across the table, long limbs slightly lazy, slightly out of control. “Be serious,” she repeats
.

“Okay,” he says. “Um. I don’t know what I’d change, to be honest. I screw stuff up a lot; but to tell you the truth, I kinda like it that way.”

I just keep staring at my punch. I wanted Mark to say that he’d give up the drugs if he could have had it any other way. Because his using went far beyond recreational last year, and it was fucking scary
.

Something snaps, shattering glass, behind Amy’s eyes. She looks away
.

Petal laughs loud, because she’s too drunk to even notice the tension. “Me, too.”

“Your turn.” Mark grins at her. “Who was your first kiss?”

This is a traditional question for Pet. We ask it every time. Every fucking time, and it still doesn’t matter; the answer is still hilarious
.

Petal wrinkles her nose. “Andy Burgerman.”

“More like Booger Man,” I say. He was this fat kid, famous for picking his nose
.

We all shriek with laughter except Amy. She was a fat kid, too, all the way through middle school. People used to tease her. The words of school kids twined into the insults her parents were constantly throwing her way, and she fell apart
.

Her fat dropped away as we went through middle school, and so did her spirit. She’s gotten it back—her spirit—in the past couple of years. But she doesn’t get that I’d love her, we’d love her, either way. Fat or thin or green and blob shaped
.

It still hits her hard when we laugh at Booger Man. Because she imagines other kids, at some other kitchen table, putting their heads together and laughing about her
.

And that thought makes me sick about what I’ve just said. I notice Mark’s fingers curling around Amy’s shoulder
.

“I’m going to screw up the order,” Pet says. Amy’s quiet, staring at one of her black curls floating in the pink punch. She fishes it out and takes a sip. Punch spiked with vodka, and Essence of Amy
.

She shakes her head, flicks away the bad thought. A few drops of punch still linger in that lock of hair
.

“Back to you, Mark,” Petal says
.

He makes a face at her
.

“
What do you least want to admit to everyone at this table? Go around in order. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve thought about Ella, Ames, and me?”

He turns to me and says, “Ella, in the seventh grade I had this dream about you.”

“Stop right there! I don’t want to hear about your horny seventh-grade dreams.”

He laughs. “No, don’t worry; it wasn’t one of those dreams. You were riding a horse and singing ‘Thriller’ in a really high-pitched voice. And that’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever thought about you.”

“That’s not too bad,” I say. “But because you heard me singing ‘Thriller’ in your sleep; I think you need this.” I grab a glass of punch and fill it. “Drink up.”

He drinks and whoops, because he’s Mark and that’s what he does. “And you, Petal,” he says. “You. Well, there was that time I thought you were considering becoming a stripper. Do you remember that?”

She slaps him lightly. “I do. But you were high, so I forgive you, my favorite stoner.”

“Shut up. I’m not a stoner anymore.”

“
What about me?” Amy leans forward. Hair sliding into the pink punch again. Half submerged
.

“You.” Mark’s voice drops. His words are a whisper in the dark, splashing into the punch. “I—I used to think that I liked you better when you were fat.”

The hair slides farther into the punch. Three-quarters gone
.

S
OMEONE
’
S POUNDING THEIR
fist against my chest. Bitch. Water rockets up through me, and I make sure to spurt it all into Petal’s face.

I turn on my side and cough and splutter and choke the river water out onto the grass.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

My skin is wet. My clothes are wet. My throat is on fire. The wind whips through the sun-speckled grass and I
feel it
.

I’m alive.

The rush, the high from before I passed out, still lingers in my body. It will take a long time to go, fade out slowly, evaporate with the water that drips from my clothes.

And I got a memory back, too. I can feel myself smiling, my wet skin stretching as far as it can go.

I got a memory back. And finally, it’s about us. Me, Mark, Pet, Amy.

My smile fades as I think about the conversation. I look for Mark, find his blue-green eyes. “You liked Amy better when she was fat,” I manage to wheeze out.

It’s understandable. I mean, her methods of losing weight were questionable. Yo-yo dieting. Bulimia. Sometimes I hated Thin Amy, too. I hated her for what she was doing to herself. I hated her for making me watch.

And I hate my memory for taking me back to
that
, because it’s not something I want to think about. Because it forces me to admit that Amy wasn’t just a beautiful, reckless hurricane of a girl.

That when she laughed her head off and convinced us to break into a supermarket at midnight so that we could do cart wheelies, her arms were as skinny as sticks. Brittle, breakable bone.

Her mind was breaking. Her heart, too.

And I never did anything.

We. Never. Did. Anything.

And I’m thinking about this, and my head’s getting all dizzy, and Mark’s still looking down at me. Looking as if he’s seen a ghost.

The color drains from his face. “What?” he says. “What are you talking about?”

Oh yeah, Mark’s hiding something. If he wasn’t, he’d have laughed it off. Or he’d have cried and attempted to
explain what he’d meant. Avoiding the subject: Usually only done when there’s something to cover up.

My eyelids are still heavy with water, so I can’t narrow my eyes.

Petal’s hand finds mine. She pulls me to my feet with strength that a five-foot-two girl shouldn’t have. “I have the gnome,” she says, pressing it into my hand.

I love that it’s no longer a big deal when one of us nearly dies. I love that Pet knew to bring the gnome for me, even though she hates my obsession with it. I love that this last piece of memory I retrieved was longer than all the other snippets, all the other flashes of that night.

I hate that I know they’re lying for sure now. I hate that they’re lying at all.

I close my eyes. Breaths tear through my chest. Ragged, broken sounds that spill into the water and flow away downstream.
The gnome refs
. I open my eyes, meet the gnome’s. So how’d I do?

The answer: not so well. Because, guess what? I just realized that I’ve been lying, too. To myself, is what’s worse.

I’ve been pretending that Amy was perfectly fine. That everything was A-OK before she died, and it’s her death that’s fucked everything up.

Truth: Amy was screwed up before that night.

Truth: everyone was drifting before that night.

Truth: I was not, am not, the good friend I’m pretending to be in my head.

My heart is still hammering in my rib cage. Erratic, wild, rock ’n’ roll drumbeat. I’m horribly conscious of how loud my breathing is.

And oh, my god, I’m crazy, because I can almost see the gnome nodding along with me.

I hug the gnome to my chest. Cry for Amy. Silent tears that no one sees, because my face is wet and a few more drops of salt water don’t really make a difference.

“Let’s get out of here,” Mark says, his voice firm, decisive.

Petal pulls me to my feet. Mark’s already walking off, loping through the weeds with the rangy grace of a mountain lion. I’m about to follow him when Explosive Boy says, “Wait.” He runs after Mark, grabs him, spins him around.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

Mark raises his eyebrows. “Away from you.”

Explosive Boy laughs, shakes his head. God. I swear I can see steam rolling from the ends of his hair. “No way,” he says. “No way are you walking away from me after you pushed me off a fucking bridge. No way.”

E’s whole body is trembling. He always looks as if he’s about to turn into a bonfire, but this is the first time I’ve really seen him ablaze. His fists curl and uncurl.

Mark notices and gives him a mocking smile. He does a few uppercuts and hops from foot to foot. “I may be a hippie, but I like my boxing classes, too.”

Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. Whatever Mark knows about boxing he learned from watching the initial scenes of
Billy Elliot
. And even then, the ballet’s more his forte.

Explosive Boy seems to have called Mark’s bluff, because he takes a step toward him. Mark steps back, but he doesn’t look worried. “Come on, E,” Mark says. “You can’t seriously have thought Pick Me Ups were going to be a tea party.”

“You,” E says, stepping through a clump of weeds, “are a dickhead.”

Mark says something in reply, but I don’t hear him because I’m still caught in the moment where E stepped through the weeds.

Amy died in a patch of weeds.

Suddenly, all my brain can think is that Amy’s face is under E’s foot. Her soft lips kissing the damp earth. I feel the ground on my own lips, my own face. Dirt, leaves, and a rubber sole pressing against my skin. Sealing off my mouth.

I hate my imagination.

My breaths sputter all over the place. Petal puts a hand on my back. “Okay,” she says. “You’re okay.”

“Don’t have a panic attack on us now, Ella,” Mark says.

And when he turns to look at me, to make sure I’m all right, Explosive Boy arcs his fist through the air. There’s no time for Mark to dodge out of the way.
Crunch
. E’s knuckles find Mark’s left cheekbone, and I can’t help myself any longer, can’t keep pretending to be okay when I can almost taste the dirt inside my mouth. I lean forward and hurl. Salt water and this morning’s toast hit the ground.

Acid burns in my throat. Tears burn at the backs of my eyes.

I keep my head down. Let it knock against my knees. But I can still hear Mark yelling at Explosive Boy. “You little shit. I can’t believe you actually hit me! Look what you’ve done to Ella.”

“Me? You don’t think it could have anything to do with the fact that you pushed me off a fucking bridge, and she had to jump in after me? You’re the one who nearly drowned both of us.”

My knees tremble, fold like soggy cardboard. I wind up kneeling in the dirt, desperately hoping that this doesn’t turn into a panic attack. I vomit again. I just want to curl into a ball and shiver until my body warms up again.

But Petal wraps her arms around my waist, anchors me to the real world. “Don’t you dare,” she says, as if she
somehow knows exactly what I’m thinking. “Don’t you fucking dare, Ella Logan.”

Her voice is so abrasive and bitchy and demanding. So familiar. It snaps me back into my body. And then she’s whispering, “We’re okay, we’re okay, we’re okay,” like she needs to believe it’s true.

My body trembles. Breaths gust in and out of me like gale force winds, blowing up my chest and then deflating it. “I’m okay,” I wheeze. “I’m fine.”

They all force smiles, but Explosive Boy can’t even look at me. It’s obvious that they don’t believe what I’ve just said. Hard to do when vomit’s decorating the ground in front of me. I take a step back, away from it. Close my eyes. God, I’m so disgusting.

“You asshole,” Mark growls. I open my eyes because I don’t think I’ve ever heard Mark this angry before. He’s got a stripe on his left cheek where E hit him. It almost looks like war paint and matches the snarl threatening to rip his face apart.

There’s a moment when I think hippie-pacifist Mark is actually going to hit someone—Mark may push people off bridges as a part of a Pick Me Ups initiation ritual; but actual violence, real violence, is something he hates.

In the end, though, he just sucks in a few deep breaths. Flashes his sideways smile. Goes back to being cool as a cucumber. I breathe a sigh of relief, because this is the
Mark I know. The Mark who doesn’t get into fights unless they involve lollipop-swords.

“El, Pet. Shall we get out of here?”

“Yeah,” Pet says. “Let’s go.”

She pulls me to her so that half my weight is on her shoulder. Slips a hand under my elbow and tugs. I dig my heels in, but she lasers me with her eyes. “Move it,” she says. And I do, because at least if I go with her, I won’t be alone. For now, anyway.

But when I reach E and Mark, Explosive Boy puts out a hand to stop me. “Where are we going?”

“We?” Mark laughs. “You’re not coming anywhere with us.”

“The initiation’s over, E,” Petal says, her voice weary. “Shoo.”