Fall to Pieces Read online

  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.

  Chapter Three

  I TEXT AMY 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.”

  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 b
est 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.