She screams for her parents and runs into the hallway with the screen of her phone glaring. They refuse to let her drive to the hospital.
She goes back to her room with sobs tearing her apart. She lies in the darkness, surrounded by pillows and an impossible amount of fear.
SNAPSHOT: TWO
We’re on the roof. It’s flat, a balcony that they never added a railing to. A few feet away, Liz’s father is fixing a leak.
She is pulling the chalk across the freezing surface and singing. Her breath hangs in the air. She draws two little girls, as always. The first looks like her—a bundle girl today, boots and hat and puffy cloud coat. The second is never the same.
Today, I wear a pink sequined dress. I have the hair of her favorite doll and a pair of shoes she’s designing herself.
The wind invites the powder snow to dance, and the sun is everywhere. Soon, we will get bored and put the chalk away, but right now, we are happy. We draw. We sing.
She finishes the heel of my shoe. Her fingers are chapped.
It is the last picture I will ever be in.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Fifty-Eight Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
She was still in Meridian then, just turning onto the interstate. Her backpack was beside her in the passenger seat—exams started next Monday, so it held every single one of her textbooks. She had filled it out of habit, and now she wished she hadn’t. Textbooks were expensive.
Her grades were still mostly decent, if only because someone was sure to notice if they had nose-dived. She was glad her GPA was still intact. At least something was.
But, she supposed, none of that mattered anymore. She hadn’t finished the last physics project; her grade, which had been hovering precariously at a C minus, had surely dipped with that zero. She’d managed to keep an A until they started talking about Newton—whom Mr. Eliezer had introduced as a lifelong virgin, like, Let’s study this dude who was so obsessed with physics that he didn’t even want to have sex, isn’t he incredible?—and somewhere in the sudden flood of velocity and inertia and force, Liz had started falling behind.
She just didn’t get physics. So there were all these theories and laws, and they’d spend weeks picking them apart, and in the end, Mr. Eliezer would tell them that they had to factor in air resistance and friction and all this other crap, so most of them couldn’t even be applied. It seemed sketchy to her, a science dependent upon the uncertainties of life.
Still. It was nice, the idea that she would never have to stress about homework or grades or Newton the goddamn virgin ever again.
But she turned onto the on ramp too sharply, and her backpack kept moving in one direction while the car turned in another. It thudded to the floor of the car, and Liz starting thinking about moving objects and Newton’s First Law.
Objects at rest stay at rest, objects in motion stay in motion.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
One Day After Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car
Liz has always hated missing school. She hates making up work and wondering what happened without her. Did people talk about her? Did they call her slut and skank and worse things while she was gone? She always talks about people behind their backs, so she assumes that everyone else does too. Liz has gone to school with hangovers and migraines, bruises and sprains, colds and stomach flus, and once with a sore throat that started an epidemic of strep throughout the entire district.
But today, with a missing spleen and a broken leg and a shattered hand and a ruptured lung and too much internal bruising to document, it seems unlikely that Liz Emerson will attend school.
Julia too stays at the hospital with what must be her tenth can of Red Bull wobbling in her hands. Monica is there, of course, and Liam, who hadn’t intended to stay at the hospital, is still asleep against the window.
Everyone else is already at school. Within the walls of Meridian High School, there is a hush like smoke, like smog. Breathing it is like breathing January air—it stings with each inhale, freezes inside each lung. An hour away, Liz is dying in St. Bartholomew’s, but here, she is already dead. The rumors have made it very clear that there is little hope for Liz Emerson.
The worst place is the cafeteria, where most of the school congregates before the bell rings, copying homework and gossiping. I get a glimpse as I walk by, a glimpse of the shock and tears, and it’s so strange, the silence, the sniffling.
How Liz would have hated it.
She would have known that most of them aren’t crying for her. They’re crying for themselves, for fear of death, for the loss of faith in their own invincibility, because if Liz Emerson is mortal, they all are.