Fall to Pieces Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Vahini Naidoo

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  Request for permission should be addressed to:

  Amazon Publishing

  Attn: Amazon Children’s Publishing

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89149

  www.amazon.com/amazonchildrenspublishing

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Naidoo, Vahini.

  Fall to pieces / by Vahini Naidoo. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Knowing that two friends are lying and keeping secrets about the night another friend killed herself, seventeen-year-old Ella searches for the truth.

  ISBN 978-0-7614-6217-0 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-7614-6219-4 (ebook)

  [1. Grief—Fiction. 2. Suicide—Fiction. 3. Secrets—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Youths’ writings.] I. Title.

  PZ7.N1387Fal 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011048166

  Book design by Alex Ferrari

  Editor: Marilyn Brigham

  First edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Suri, for teaching me to love stories

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter One

  PETAL’S GOT HER arm up a vending machine. Eyes fixed on this one can of soda. She strains to reach it, but her fingers just keep scrabbling at thin air. “Shit,” she says. She punches her arm around, moving the whole machine. “Get out,” she singsongs at the soda. “Get out, get out, get out already.”

  Mark tries to catch my gaze, but I’m determined not to look at him. We’re leaning against this blue railing, rusty metal flaking away between our fingers. Watching Petal. Watching, watching, watching.

  I can’t take it anymore. I turn toward the football field that runs away behind us, where silver rain kicks the grass. I’m seized by the sudden urge to make my skin slippery, to get closer to the wet earth.

  I step out from behind the railing.

  Mud licks my sneakers, and water licks my skin, curls its tongue over the yellow pages of the newspaper I’m holding. The Sherwood High Gazette. Like Petal, the Gazette is something I don’t want to think about, so I fold it over the blue railing. Step farther onto the field.

  Pause.

  Turn, turn, turn.

  Rivers of water rush over my skin, get lost beneath my clothes. The water is cold and clean, pure like the sky that it’s fallen from; but it does nothing to absolve me.

  I’m dirty and guilty as usual. Freezing my ass off, too.

  I run my hands up and down my arms, watching the field. Watching, watching, watching. As the sprayed white lines, the boundaries from last week’s game, wash away. As this guy with fire-engine red hair stands in the middle of the field, arms out. Head tilted up, up, up to the sky.

  He’s open, I think. Opened up to secrets whispered by the rain. Or to a lightning bolt in the chest. He stays like that for a second. Then, as if his body is weightless, ungoverned by the laws of gravity, he flops backward.

  Mud explodes around him.

  “Well,” I mutter, “at least there’s one person who’s crazier than Pet.”

  Behind me, Mark snorts. “If there is,” he says, “it’s not that guy. It’s you.”

  “Fuck you.” I spin and stare him down. “I’m sane. Totally sane.”

  After it happened, it wasn’t me with glassy eyes, lips that barely moved. It wasn’t me who whispered those words: “What if we could find out what it was like?”

  I didn’t invent Pick Me Ups.

  That little bit of crazy was all Mark.

  He doesn’t say anything. His lip’s curled ever so slightly, though. His eyes are narrowed.

  God. We’re supposed to be best friends. It’s not meant to be like this.

  Pet’s still attacking the damn vending machine. Shiny brow, polished like a coin. Sweating, she’s sweating. The most beautiful girl I know trying to steal from a vending machine.

  It’s not meant to be like this.

  It wasn’t, before.

  “Get out,” Petal whispers to the can of soda again. She smashes her face against the machine. Sprays of black Coke erupt inside it behind her face.

  “Okay,” Mark says. “I have to ask—what the hell are you doing, Pet?”

  Breaking cans of soda. Wishing they were bottles of beer, probably. Glass smashes so much more dramatically.

  Mark’s almost laughing. There’s amusement in his voice, on his face. He doesn’t see the need to cry over this like I do. But then Mark hardly ever sees the need to cry.

  Before, his world was an infinite number of laughs.

  “Imitating Robin Hood,” Petal says, her voice muffled by the machine.

  Clack-clack-clack. The cans rattle against one another. Pet strings swear words together, sings them beneath her breath.

  And god, I just want her to stop. I want her to stop, because whenever she does this it’s a reminder of what happened. A reminder made of sticks and stones, of razor blades and penknives.

  “Come on,” I say, walking out of the rain, back behind the railing. “You are far from poor, Robin. The comparison doesn’t make sense.”

  “So what. The accuracy of the comparison doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.”

  Nothing matters.

  I close my eyes. Against the splish-splash-splish of rain. Against the cold threatening to worm its way into my bones. Against those words.

  I’ve heard them before. So many times before. On someone else’s lips. Amy’s.

  I open my eyes. Remember why I texted them to get their asses out of class in the first place.

  The newspaper.

  I stalk over to the railing, snatch the paper up, and throw it to the ground next to Petal. That gets her attention. She stops attacking the vending machine and glances over at the paper sitting by her feet, its yellow paper soggy.

  “Have you seen this? Have you guys seen this?” I ask.

  “Chill, Ella,” Mark says. “It’s just the school newspaper.” He pulls his sunglasses out of their resting place in his bird’s nest of brown curls—only Mark would wear sunglasses on a day this rainy—and toys with them, unconcerned.

  After all, the Gazette has never run anything more interesting than an article about how gross the cafeteria food is. It never has before, anyway.

>   “There’s an article,” I say. A lump crashes around in my throat. I swallow, swallow, swallow until it’s gone. “It’s about her. Amy.”

  “What?” Mark snatches up the newspaper.

  Petal stops splitting her attention between the newspaper and that can of soda she’s so in love with and looks up at me.

  “Camille Weston wrote this,” Mark says, turning the name over on his tongue. “Who is Camille Weston?”

  “No fucking idea,” I say.

  “Jesus.” And then he scans the meat of the article and starts laughing. Hard. Fast. Harder. Faster.

  He’s reading the article in Camille’s voice, a breathy falsetto. “‘Amy Johnson was a beautiful soul. She was the most sensitive girl I know, the quietest, and the cleverest. She always had soft, kind words for everybody.’”

  Wind whips Petal’s black hair around her face, Pocahontas-style. “I’m not sure whether I should puke or go find Camille Weston and rip her guts out.”

  “It’s such bullshit,” I say. Clenched jaw. Clenched fists. Clenched gut. I try to ease everything up, relax. I’m supposed to be the sane one. “They’re trying to make her sound like some nice little girl.”

  “I know,” Mark says. God, even he’s serious. He rubs a hand over his forehead, pushes up the stupid blue scarf he’s got tied around his head ninja-style.

  Amy loved those scarves. The scarves and the dimples, she told me once when I asked her. That’s why she fell for Mark.

  “I need a Pick Me Up,” Mark says. “You in?”

  And this is why he’s the crazy one.

  No. No, no, no. No way.

  That’s what I should say. I should stop this, stop doing this to myself. Because it’s wrong. Insane. Incredibly fucked up.

  Besides, I don’t have time to wreck myself today, much as I usually hate Mondays. Not this Monday. Not when I’m beginning my mother-mandated volunteer work at the local child care center. Can’t show up with bruises floating over my skin like landmasses across the ocean.

  I shouldn’t do this.

  But I’m nodding my head. “Yeah. I’m in.”

  Mark looks at Petal. She laughs. Icy wind rips through the sound, steals all of its melody. “Do you even need to ask?”

  And then she pirouettes down the path.

  Actually pirouettes.

  “Maybe she is crazier than him, after all,” Mark says, hooking a thumb over his shoulder at the guy who’s still lying on the field. Mud and sky all around him.

  Mark heads off the way Petal went. “Coming?” he calls to me.

  I stay for a second. The guy’s making snow angels in the mud, as if he wants nothing more than to feel it on his skin.

  Then I sigh and follow Mark because my body needs a Pick Me Up, no matter what my brain’s saying. I realize halfway to the parking lot that I’m still holding the Gazette.

  I want to throw it away. It’s such trash. But I can’t bring myself to do it because there was one line in the article. One line that will rumble around in my brain for the next few days.

  Amy Johnson was a beautiful soul.

  Chapter Two

  WHEN YOUR BEST friend dies, you’re supposed to go into mourning.

  You’re supposed to wear more black than usual. Smile wafer-thin smiles when people offer condolences. Stop going to school. Play your way through Radiohead’s Pablo Honey again-again-again, because it was her favorite album. Tear your hair out. Cry so hard that it feels more like a desperate prayer than sadness.

  I do it, all of it; I do.

  But.

  You’re not supposed to have no idea what the fuck happened the night of your best friend’s death. Not supposed to have downed a ton of alcohol, or maybe something worse, so that you remember nothing. Not supposed to hate yourself for throwing the party in the first place.

  You’re not supposed to blame your best friend, your shitty best friend, for leaving you all alone.

  But I did. I did forget everything that happened that night. And I do blame Amy and myself. Amy for jumping. Me for not being there to catch her. For not knowing why.

  Why.

  More than anything, I want answers. Need them. The need drives me here, to the barn. Drives me up the barn stairs. I climb them with pure abandon. Reckless. As if they’re a stairway to heaven.

  “The first Pick Me Up is mine!” I yell to Mark and Petal.

  They just look at me, still standing among the bales of hay on the bottom floor.

  “Sure, whatever,” Petal says.

  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 w
rists. 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.